The Stories of Frederick Busch Read online

  The heavy man walked up, carrying a brown leather bag with two straps, rolling a little sideways when he walked.

  Brenda said, “Ian, is that what your dad looks like?”

  THEY WALKED UP the access road, following the rich brown mounds of horse droppings, going along the stone fences, and then through the rocky fields where there were no fences and the road took them high enough to look down steep grazing grounds with teeth of gray rock coming through the grass, and then, on their left, the hills going higher, green and gray, and then the moors beginning, ferny and darker with moss, wet, and beyond them the blueness of mountains, grainy and clear in the bright late afternoon. His father held his hand and he stopped them near a tiny fall of water which came over rocks into a small pool that drained beneath the road and ran on the other side down to the sheep below. His father said, “Are you tired?”

  Ian said, “I came up here plenty of times.”

  His father nodded. He pulled a thick-bladed weed up, peeled it back, wetted it, put the end in his mouth, and blew. Nothing came out. He said, “It used to make a whistle when I was a kid.”

  Ian said, “It’s probably a different kind of plant in America.”

  “Everything’s different here, huh?”

  “And they call them different things. They don’t say boots, they say Wellingtons. Grampa got me these in Ulverston. We go shopping there. Will you get boots, Daddy?”

  “You think I should?”

  “If you stay here, yes. Do you have enough money?”

  “Yes, love, thank you.”

  “Because Grampa gave me some English money if you need it.”

  “Thank you, love.”

  “If you want to stay here and go for a hike or something.”

  “Hey, I missed you a lot, Ian.”

  “They have all these swamps here. Brenda calls them boggy.”

  “Ian, I was really missing you. And Stu, and Mommy.”

  Ian walked ahead of his father, past the waterfall. The boy said, “Come on, Daddy. Only next time you have to wear boots. Wellingtons. All right?”

  THE GRANDFATHER SAT at the desk, writing with a black fountain pen on long white paper. The dust fell onto him and disappeared into his shadow, into the words that he wrote. Ian stood at the door, his hand on the knob, watching. The grandfather didn’t look up. He said, “Come here.”

  Inside, where the books stood in all their shelves and the newspapers were curled on the table near the wide red-cushioned chair, Ian stood beside the desk and watched the dark hairs on his grandfather’s hands as they moved in the shadows. He said, “Hi.”

  “Can you read what I’m writing?”

  “I’m not old enough to read that kind. The letters are too scribbly.”

  “I’m writing a book. What do you think of that?”

  “Is it a good book?”

  His grandfather looked over the heavy tweed on his arm at Ian’s face. He said, “Is that a good question?”

  Ian looked up at him. He said, “That’s all I could think of.”

  His grandfather stood up from his chair. Ian moved back. His grandfather waved his hand inside his sport-coat pocket and took out a puddle of coins. He held the palm up to his face, poked through it, pinched a big copper two-pence piece, and held it out for Ian to take. He said, “Damned good question. It’s all I could think of too.” He sat down, pushed himself closer to the desk, looked at the page, and then at the papers beside it. He said, “Say thank you and disappear.”

  “Thank you, Grampa. Should I say disappear?”

  The grandfather hugged himself and ducked his head and shook, and the sneeze belched out. He panted, then rubbed his arm over the page, making some of the words run. He wiped his mouth and hugged his chest for the next one.

  AT DINNER IN the big house, they could hear Stuart crying in his room in the cottage. The grandfather brought the pork roast in from the kitchen. He said, “Anna, do you want to see to Stuart?”

  Ian’s mother said, “No, dear. You ask me that nearly every night, and I tell you that he’s all right. That’s how he goes to sleep.”

  The grandfather said, “Do you remember that ruckus, Harry?”

  Ian’s father said, “It hasn’t been that long.”

  Brenda smoked a cigarette and said, “Did you pick the wine?”

  The grandfather said, “Absolutely. And with care.”

  “It’s too dry.”

  Carving, his grandfather looked up, raised his gray eyebrows, smiled. He said, “You’ve got the taste of a Yorkshire pig-farmer.”

  Brenda said, “I’m the daughter of a Yorkshire pig-farmer.”

  Ian said, “Brenda says she saw a pig eat a chicken once.”

  “A pig will take a chunk from a fair-sized man,” Brenda said.

  The grandfather passed a plate to Ian’s father. He said, “Let’s see a man take a bit of a pig, then, Harry.”

  Ian’s mother said, “You have such elegance, Daddy.”

  “Yes I do, don’t I? Sort of careless elegance. It’s what the landed gentry are supposed to show. But I wish I had a little more land and a little less gentry.”

  Ian’s father said, “Should I cut your meat, Ian?”

  Ian said, “Yes, please.”

  Ian’s mother said, “I’ll do it. Pass my your plate.”

  “Can Daddy do it?”

  His father put his hands in his trouser pockets and sat lower in his chair.

  Brenda said, “I wonder if anyone would like a cigarette?”

  Ian passed his plate. His grandfather bowed low, sat up straighter, crossed his chest with arms, and sneezed onto the roast.

  Ian’s mother said, “I think you’ve got a little less gentry, Daddy. God. I won’t want second helpings, thank you.”

  Brenda held the cigarette with her lips and said, “I think the old boy’s allergic to horses.”

  IN THE STONE BARN, half of its roof burned away and never replaced, hay stacked in the covered part, Ian, in the cool darkness, while sun ran like water into the open side, swam in the bales, jumped from one layer to another, wriggled between them, hid. Yellow seed popped into the air as he played, and each time he buried himself he came back up with more long stalks on his short-sleeved shirt and his arms. He chanted to himself, “Don-ta-don,” rolling and sidling, pulling hay away with his hands, then heaping it back over himself, “Don-ta-don.” He said, “Don-ta-don,” and was a diving thing, a creature of animal strength and warlike thrusts which hid and then revealed itself; fearless, it nevertheless sought the lower bales and the spaces between them nearest to the floor. And when the smell of strong cigarettes came up the dirt path behind the barn on the hillside, and when Brenda’s voice came, singing hoarsely and low, the creature went to ground.

  She pulled a bale out by its strings and laid it along her right shoulderblade and flank. Bursting up from cover, the hiding thing called, “Yah-hah!” Brenda straightened, took the cigarette from her mouth as she eased the bale back down, said quietly, “Ian, I have asked you not to muck about in the hay. Now you come down off of there and help me scatter this to the rubbishy creatures, will you?”

  She stooped under the bale, got it up again and, the cigarette in her mouth, walked away behind the barn. Ian followed her, his arms against his sides, shedding his camouflage, leaving a trail.

  IN THEIR COTTAGE, Ian’s father arranged his sticks on the wide slate fireplace around the circular brazier. He had tiny twigs on the right, against the plaster wall, then larger twigs that were thin, then small branch pieces, then pieces of sapling that he and Ian had dragged down from the hillside forest behind the houses, then round rough pieces of rotten tree that were almost dry and might burn. He had a bucket of coal chunks, and wrinkled pages of The Times. Around some paper, he laid the littlest sticks. Stuart put a piece of sapling on while Ian’s mother sat on the wide old couch and drank whiskey from a teacup. Ian sat next to his mother, his knees a little together, his eyes on his father, but his mouth a bit open, a
s if he thought of something else.

  Ian’s father said, “No, Stuart!”

  Ian’s mother said, “Come here, Stu.”

  Stuart pushed another piece of wood into the tepee shape and his father said, “Stuart!”

  Ian’s mother said, “Come here Stu.”

  Ian’s father said, “Would you mind getting him, Anna? If you want me to make this damned thing.”

  She said, “I didn’t ask for the fire, Harry. If it’s too much of a mess with Stuart around, let’s skip it. I don’t care.”

  Ian said, “Can I match the fire, Mommy? Can I light the match?”

  His mother said, “Ask your father. He handles the hearth and home.”

  His father stood up, looked at her, then at Ian, squatted down again in front of the slate shelf and said, “Come on, Ian, before the monster strikes again.” Ian stood beside his father, held the yellow box of Swan Vestas, then opened it and took one, started to scratch it alight, then stood again, his hands at his sides, as his father took the box, closed it, handed him the single match and the box, and said, “Okay, my friend, light us up.”

  Ian struck toward himself. His father held his hand and showed him to strike away. Ian tried it three times, and on the fourth the match lit. He dropped the yellow box, stepped backward, then moved himself to the paper and twigs, bent down, singed his fingers, dropped the match into the metal grate, and closed his eyes. His father held the finger inside the circle of his fist, then kissed the finger, picked up the yellow box and handed it back. Ian took out a match, closed the box, struck, struck, struck, lit the match, stooped to the fireplace, singed his finger, dropped the lighted match onto the paper, which caught, and then he stood again to be held by his father’s fist while the paper roared, burnt the small sticks up, and everything went out.

  His mother said, “It almost did it.”

  Ian said, “I lit all right, didn’t I?”

  His father said, “You did fine. I built it wrong.”

  His mother said, “I love you.”

  Ian turned. He said, “Who?”

  IN HIS WHITE jockey shorts and undershirt, his long feet bare, Ian moved in the house while swallows called outside and the morning warmed. He opened the door from the stairs to the main room and watched his father, under heavy gray wool blankets on the couch, rolling slowly in his sleep as if his sleep were sea.

  His father’s mouth was open, and Ian moved closer to look inside. Then he went back to the door and upstairs silently, and he stood at Stuart’s cot. The quilt was off, and Stuart’s bottom stuck into the air above his gathered knees, mouth closed, face wholly still. Ian went on his toes to the double bed his mother slept in, her mouth open, her brows bunched into lines. He waited, and then he went on his toes again down the stairs and silently to the little refrigerator for apples and the table loaf and the long sharp knife. He heard his father say, “Ian?”

  Ian said, “I’m making breakfast for everyone, Daddy. I’m making enough.”

  ON THE TREKKING path through the moors they crisscrossed with sheep tracks, going over one, then another, then descending later to the first, the horses walking around great gray lumps of wrinkled granite and cliffs of slate and later on, delicate hooves under rolling round bodies, slowly dancing over a fast beck that ran in a deep narrow valley for a mile. On the sheep track over the valley, and with the sheep above and below them, shaggy, turd-smeared, expressionless, terrified in place but hungry enough not to move, they rode: Brenda first, her small silver earrings pitching light, then the grandfather, then Ian’s father behind him, then Ian, holding the edge of the saddle and leaning onto the pony’s neck. Behind him were the long stretches of swamp and thick green grass, the little bolls of fell cotton where the water was murkiest on the surface, and the distances back to the cottage where his mother and Stuart were alone.

  Ian’s grandfather rode high and straight-backed, his toes pushing in his black pointed boots back against his horse’s motion. Ian’s father bobbed like a toy rider on a toy horse. Ian held on. Brenda rode ahead, then waited near a cluster of junipers, gray-brown and tense on the sky. When the other riders reached her, Brenda let her horse move out ahead again a little quickly, and Ian’s grandfather’s horse went too, more quickly than the others. Ian’s father pulled on the reins and slowed, and Ian and his father went one behind the other, slowly, over the ridge of junipers, until they caught up to the others at the wide clear tarn where Brenda’s white and gray horse was drinking, and where the grandfather looked toward them and then turned his back. As they came up, Brenda said to Ian, “There’s tadpoles in there. You want to have a look before we go—if your father thinks it’s all right. Walk in shallow and mind you don’t slip.”

  Ian’s father smiled, and Brenda helped Ian down, and he waded in, slipping on the wet stones and slimy vegetation. Brenda drove the horses back away from the water and tied them away from the yews, which she said they could die from eating. She gave Ian’s father a cigarette and she lit it for him. Ian, in the water to his ankles, teetering, watched.

  Brenda said, “Will you all be going home, then, Harry?”

  She blew smoke out. Ian heard it over her teeth.

  His father said, “Anna’s the one who knows that.”

  Ian stood in the cold mountain lake and watched a black bird hanging in the wind, not moving much.

  The grandfather said, “I think you’ve got some ground to cover yet, Harry.”

  Ian watched. He saw Brenda blow smoke out through her teeth and throw the cigarette into the water. He saw the grandfather watch it float.

  IN THE PARKING LOT behind the Church Inn, near the small iron tables, Ian, in his shorts and Wellingtons, squatted at a mound of gravel in front of his grandfather’s Morris Minor estate wagon. With the edges of his hands, Ian channeled and heaped the stones. His father drank from a pint of bitter and his mother drank whiskey. Ian put a stick in the center of the mound, then made a double line of little rocks which led toward the center. He ran a little green steel Land Rover back and forth on his road. His parents stood and talked, and closer to the whitewashed walls of the inn Brenda and the grandfather sat at a table.

  Ian’s mother said, “Dad’s going to get in trouble. He really doesn’t know.”

  Ian’s father said, “Oh. I thought they were already—you know.”

  His mother said, “No, she has a room there, in a sort of a separate wing upstairs. It opens into the hallways of the cottage. She lives there and mostly cooks for herself. Sometimes she eats with him, but that’s all.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Poor Daddy. He’s sixty-five, going on twenty-five, and it won’t work for him.”

  “She’s quite a girl.”

  “You noticed.”

  Ian pushed a large rock with the Land Rover and it fell onto the fence he’d made for his road. He pushed the pebbles back with the edges of his hands, then started again to move the stone. A waitress came out with red terrycloth table mats to hang on the washline nearby, and Ian’s parents smiled to her. Ian kept working. He heard his father say, “I noticed you. You and the kids. That’s what I came over here for.”

  At the tables behind the public room the grandfather sneezed. He choked one, and then two fast shouts came after, like shots. Ian stood up to look past the clothesline and over low hedges. The grandfather was talking to Brenda, rubbing the sleeve of his brown tweed coat.

  AFTER BRENDA HAD shoveled and swept, had stacked the push broom and shovel and rake, and had put the wheelbarrow away, Ian went into the stone stable and closed the double doors behind him. The walls were whitewashed halfway around, and the opposite doors, leading into the field with its small stream, were open, so that cool winds and the white clean stones of the walls made everything smell good. The gelding, the oldest and largest of the horses, dark brown and dull in the shadows of his wooden stall, ate and blew out; the noise of his feeding was a river sound. Ian smelled the ammonia and the hay of the horses, and he breathed deepl
y. He heard the horses in the field, and he heard his mother.

  She said, “Ian?”

  Ian said, “Hello.”

  “Hello.”

  Ian said, “Are we going home to America?”

  “Where’s that?”

  BRENDA LIT IAN’S father’s cigarette and threw the wooden match onto the cobbles in front of the cottage. Ian sat inside on the wooden windowseat and watched, and his mother, on the sofa between him and the room, facing in, sat with a heavy book that Ian’s grandfather had given her. She read while Stuart played with coal from the scuttle. The rain was heavy, and Brenda wore her duffel coat with the hood up, but Ian’s father wore only his sweater with the reindeer on it as they shoveled and swept inside the stables, then loaded the muck and wheeled it out to the lower stable where they sometimes kept foals.

  Stuart spat out a small piece of coal, and Ian’s mother lit a cigarette, holding it in her mouth with one hand, working the match back and forth with the other. Beyond her was Ian, who looked at her and then out at the rain beating into the cobbles, and his father helping Brenda with her work, and then the fence and five slow horses wheeling silently from pile of hay to pile, in their dance.

  Ian watched everything. He saw his grandfather go down the walk from the house, come around past where the cars were parked, then walk on the cobbles in his leather shoes that clicked, the collar of his brown tweed jacket up against the rain, his gray hair soaking onto his head, showing only pink there by the time he’d knocked on their door and walked in.

  The grandfather said, “That child is eating coal.” He shut the door, turned his collar down, opened his buttons, rebuttoned them, shook his arms in place at his sides, walked into the middle of the small room to stop where he looked at Ian’s mother and, behind her, at Ian, who turned around and pulled his knees up and held them in place with his hands. “Is it good for him? Large pieces like that?” Stuart held the coal up to the grandfather, who was looking at Ian’s mother.