I trusted the man. I knew he was really a good man, the man with the rattlesnake hatband. He wasn’t so bad, even if my mother got all worried just like any other of that certain group of people. Well, my mother was wrong, and I, being young still, had the sincerity to get it right.
Everyone has their faults and special sins, and maybe this man kept a poor house, but that would be nothing so unusual. So he met us outside, my mother, my brother and I, because he knew enough to know it’s better to welcome people out in the nice oak shade than to invite them to an untidy home. Even as a child, I agreed.
My mother ended up asking about the missing beagle (my brother’s, I think) because when my brother and I tried, she couldn’t understand. Of course, the man knew right away (the man with the rattlesnake hatband) because he just always had this ability to grasp what people meant right out of the air. He spent so little time around people, mostly getting along with all his worthless dogs and pretty much everything around him that people didn’t have to even say much. There comes a point where people talking only confuses it all.
But the man hadn’t seen the beagle. That’s how he answered the question. It was a good answer. Answers, everyone knows, close things up. Two and two wander about all lost unless you package them up in four. You can’t put them in five because they will still roam, and they won’t fit in three. It’s not just two and two, you can do this with any numbers. Two, for example, holds one and one. I’ve tried to come up with the number that will corral all the others without getting roped in somehow to still another number. I suspect that the man living there under the oaks with those dogs has figured it out even though my mother, who isn’t much younger, probably’s never even thought about that sort of problem. Even if that man hasn’t figured it out, maybe I will. I’m still so young, and I’m sort of a thoughtful type like this man. I also know that you can’t answer, “what’s two and two?” by saying “three and one,” or “less than thirty and four,” even if they’re both true.
Whether he’d seen the beagle or not wouldn’t change one single thing about the beagle. Anyway, he hadn’t.
My brother and I never, I’m pretty sure, went back down to the creek after that. Maybe it was because the man with the rattlesnake hatband and all those lazy hounddogs, but also it just wasn’t safe down there. It’s full of water moccasins. When we did go there, before, we’d go carefully, slowly. It would take a while for us to adjust to the darkness of the oaks or to get up our courage. We’d just stand there. But then we would scramble over the pile of sandstone slabs by the little creek, rapidly getting more excited but always staying so quiet. Just two boys climbing and leaping in the splotches of sunlight that made it through those heavy oak leaves.
Away from the creek pretty much nothing lived well. For most of my life, the drought forced all the living things down to the creek, not that it has much water to go around. There are plenty of raccoons down here, even bobcats and a deer or two that hasn’t gotten shot. That man living out there hunts raccoons in the creek with his dogs and a .22 pistol. Lately, those mutts are about as useless as himself, but he still knows how to do it. Not many people do anymore, so it’s worth respecting him for. If my mother would let me, I’d ask him to teach me how because even if he doesn’t have all the education he’d like, he knows the things he knows better than most others know anything. My brother and I try to teach ourselves, that’s one of the reasons we would go to the creek. We’re young enough to still understand there’s more to read than books and faces. But we don’t know where to look, we don’t know where our shadows fall or what sounds carry, when to step quick or where to move slower than seconds. You don’t get a rattlesnake hatband the way that man did (he grabbed it and sliced off his head with that very knife he showed my brother and I before it even managed to rattle) without taking time to really study that place down there. I’m glad he showed my brother and I that hatband because we won’t forget that story, and as long as we remember it, we’ll remember that that man had gotten grasp of something that my mother and colonel Hodnet with his pecan orchard and doublewide hadn’t.
We’d (my brother and I) still go down to the bottom pasture, mostly to hack away at the scraggly mesquite along the irrigation ditch with a hatchet we’d take turns misusing. We would shoot at meadowlarks and doves with bb guns. We still couldn’t make out the words on the pages we were turning. With no one to teach us, it’s no wonder we didn’t understand. Like when you say a bad word before you know it’s bad. We did that all the time.
As time went by, we didn’t even get close to the creek anymore. We hardly went down to the bottom pasture. Just like most everyone we went from young and ignorant to being outright stupid. A few more members for that certain group of people known to be fools, that particular number that never gets full, the number of fools.
Even though idiots in our own right, we weren’t so cruel and dumbminded to call out the sheriff about those dogs. Probably Hodnet, my mother, the irrigation district, or just that ass-thinking sheriff. The man down there, living basically on useless land for most uses, not calling for anything other than what he’d earned rightly doing what he’d been asked to do despite it being a fool’s order for a devil’s deed, he, for one, didn’t do any animal cruelty. His dogs were chained up so they wouldn’t get run over or shot or just get out on some trail and wind up not getting food and water which they couldn’t get just anywhere but that the man pretty much every day put out for each one of them because hunting dogs like them have to get their own or they’ll end up fighting without someone looking after them.
The sheriff already had all the questions and their answers laid out so that that man down there, who was really quite a good person, had to keep arranging truths in funny ways just so that they’d fit the packages the sheriff had brought along for them. He kept himself, though, even though he didn’t need to. He had a rattlesnake hatband, he had answers that didn’t satisfy their questions, he had fours that held more than two twos, and he hadn’t seen a beagle, something altogether different had occurred between himself and something nothing like a beagle.
Now that I’m older, I understand why that man went along with the sheriff. You can’t convince a four that two and one can fill it or that six and seven will fit nice inside it. So, he has taught me something, it’s just that I hadn’t known it until I got to understand it. Answer to answer, question to question, that’s how you have to go down there. With no solutions, no demands, just reflection and movement, like the tree’s shadow leads its leaves.
discotejas/discotexas 