Better Off_ Flipping the Switch on Technology - Eric Brende [83]
Low sorghum sales all day and now this—a biblical exhortation to get me to help finish the farrowing house. I don’t know why I was so reluctant to do so. I simply wanted to get my money and get going. Maybe I’d spent too much time lately behind the sales table, listening to the sound of jangling coins. The price Sylvan quoted was a ridiculous twenty dollars a dozen (I was getting forty-four selling it myself), but that was better than nothing.
But before I even had a chance to clear my throat, Sylvan’s brother cracked, “Does that mean you’re gonna feed him dinner like you did us?”
With the snickers that ensued, I worried if I was being pegged. Although my ilk stopped burning them at the stake quite some time earlier, some of them still couldn’t quit reminding me. Consoling myself with the thought that they were nearly finished anyway and that, given my inexperience, I would probably not have been good for my wage, I skulked back to my car, feeling like the Stranger I was.
Sometimes I will admit a stray joke or sidelong glance hit me the wrong way, with a force that was almost palpable. I suppose my feelings of injury revealed the development of an underlying allegiance. Could it be that for the first time in my life, I had begun to feel as if I really belonged? To have this suddenly pulled out from under me, or even to hint at its being pulled away, made me disconsolate.
The silences of Jed, one of Mr. Miller’s older sons, had become unnerving. To receive one of his recriminating looks was to be indicted by a single-member grand jury. He thought I was a freeloader. Was he tired of helping me out as one of his dad’s cheerful assistants? He made very sure that I didn’t take too much kerosene for my money (impossible to do since the two-and-half-gallon capacity of the jug was the amount I paid for).
Admittedly there was some evidence for his case. Two days in a row I had made him wait when he came to help me, and I found him sullenly lugging stalks of sorghum and leading the horse by himself. And before that, when he and his brothers were trying to locate the buried pipe from the spring to our house, Amos had had to rouse me from my afternoon nap. I arrived without jumping in to dig because it took some time to come out of the fog. Sleep makes me dropsical. After thirty seconds one of the brothers turned and, pointedly, put a shovel in my hand.
Didn’t they understand the sacredness of naptime?
Even Mary, now and then, seemed to lose faith in me. I left a plastic bag containing ten pounds of frozen venison an “English” neighbor had given us out on the stoop overnight to keep it cold, as I had done on several other occasions. The next morning she asked me, “Where did you put the deer meat?”
“By the back door.”
“I don’t see it.”
“It’s right there. Right on that cement block. Don’t you see it?”
“There’s nothing there.”
I looked again. There was nothing there. Not a trace of the package. Not a drop of blood. Not a shred of plastic. No paw prints. No lingering dog breath. Nothing.
Worse than the loss of food was the loss of face. I thought I was invincible. I set up conditions for the perfect crime—and it occurred. (The assailant, I knew, lived beyond the long arm of the law, and was now probably dining in luxury in his canine pad next door.)
Mary looked at me with a pout of unrequited hunger.
“I’m sorry,” I pleaded. “I’ll never do that again. But it worked the other times.”
“I told you that it was dripping on the outside.”
“You did? I knew you were saying something but I wasn’t really listening.” Oops. Shouldn’t have said that.
Back to the stored chicken meat.
Our canned chicken, however, could easily be confused with our canned pig. This was because we slaughtered and preserved our chickens and pigs on successive days and the 150-odd jars in which we placed the meat