Harvesting Stones
Hank stepped cautiously on a weatherworn front porch that leaned uncannily against the slope of the hill it stood on. A bitter wind rushed down the sides of his ball cap and bit his ears. He had no mind to pay to the cold. His thoughts were fixed on the nerves that wrestled inside of him, making his stomach burn. How strange it seemed that the years had done so little to steel him against adolescent fears, strange that distance in time would paradoxically galvanize the illogical trepidations of youth. These are the thoughts that dull the mind and warm the stomach.
He was a man now. He drove up here in a 2002, one-ton, Chevy dump truck, a truck he owned outright. At just thirty he bought his own trailer and dropped it on a 15-acre piece of old maple forest. All of it acquired from nothing more than hard work and the Good Lord’s blessings. Some folks had more but none had started with less. A man like that, a man that’d made so much with his back and hands, shouldn’t be nervous talking to some woman.
His hand reached for a doorbell and found none. The outstretched, index finger drew back in to make a fist that thumped out a rhythm on the trailer door. Hearing shifts when a door is knocked. The wind fell away, replaced by the sound of small steps approaching the door
A little girl popped open the door, the wind sending it the rest of the way, crashing wildly. Her look of shock as the door slammed against the wall was mirrored in the large man before her. Hank could see the resemblance immediately. She carried the magic in her.
“Hi.”
“Hey…uh…is your daddy around?”
“My dad did a bad thing. He’s gone away. He loves me though. Momma says he won’t be back for a long time. Probably not till I’m old like my momma.”
“Can I talk to your momma then?”
“Haley! What did I tell you about open’n the door to strangers?” That voice. How could it have been so well preserved, isolated as it had been? The seasons change. Yes. They do change, but what was green in the spring is green again the following year. This woman’s voice must follow such cycles.
“Heya Jen.” Without a thought Hank took off his ball cap. Something he’d never done before.
“Henry Caskey! How you doin’ hon?” She’d changed a bit through the years, not a lot but enough to make it tough to see the teenager Hank fawned over in high school.
She’d never tried too hard to fit in with a crowd back then. She wasn’t on a team or club or anything like that. Not that there were so many to pick from. She was a bit of a rabble-rouser some might say. No matter what folks said back then there weren’t many that would say that Jen Simpson wasn’t a beautiful girl and not a one that didn’t think that the girl had been blessed with an unnaturally powerful voice. Without his permission, Hank’s mind went back to the first time he heard Jen sing. Wasn’t right to tempt man with something so otherworldly. Many were better off, the ones that never heard her sing.
“Good Jen. Thanks for askin’.” She was beaming just a little. Probably thinking back to when Hank helped change a flat tire for her after school. He’d always been pretty handy, even helpful at times.
“What brings you out to our neck of the woods? Ya’ aren’t here to take me out dancing are ya’?” Her eyebrow raised with the latter question. He recognized it. A neat little arch that asked, “am I teasing you?”
“Nah, Jen. Naaah.” Hank put his hat back on and looked down at his feet for just a second. “I seen that you got an old bluestone farm wall down there at the foot of the hill. I just wondered if I could walk it, see what the stone looks like, maybe I could offer you somethin’ for it.”
“Sure Hank. Take what you want. I trust you. You want to come in and talk about it? It’s cold as the devil out there.” She pulled at the sides of her flannel robe and wrapped her arms around her waist.
“Lemme check it out first. The wall. I’ll come back in and let ya’ know what I think.”
Hank spent the afternoon walking the stonewall that outlined her property, and fighting the cold. Going in, having coffee, that was easy. But then, what might come next. She might wield that siren’s song; swing it at him as she had done when they were in school. He knew there wasn’t much of anything to protect him from it.
Hank took a pack of Marlboros from his jacket and sat down hoping to smoke the shiver out from his bones. The large stone that he sat on had waited for him for a very long time. Long before Hank had been born, before the birth of his father, before it had been given the name “rock”, it had anticipated the young man who sat upon it. In the spring of 1922 the stone had been cleared from the middle of a farmer’s field to fill a large section of the low wall surrounding the ground. Frost heave had pushed it up from the ground, the stone resting just below the surface. The spring plough made a pass, reached deep into the earth, and jostled as it displaced the stone; forcing it to show itself. Pickaxe, mattocks, and shovel. The sweat of the brow, the bend of their back, any rock can be pulled. Three men to balance it on the sled, one horse to pull it to the wall. The horse was agitated; she knew a little about the stone, a section of its history, frontwards and back. The men paid no mind but the horse could return to the soothing work of the day only after it had absolved itself from the stone’s purpose.
Communion
On summer Sundays, Hank took his coffee on the deck behind his trailer. The thick green foliage of maple-fed mountain sloped sharply from his back yard. It was holy ground; a place where a man could sit and, after coffee, have a cigarette while the sun rose and light permeated the dense forest. Grey squirrels came out to feed in the morning when the owl and fox were fast asleep. A tuned ear, an ear that had a memory for the forest at every hour, could hear those squirrels scavenging beneath the beechnut trees.
“Hank?” He focused on the coffee.
“Hank!”
“Damn it Jen! What the hell do you want? I’m havin’ my coffee!”
“Where’d you put the truck keys? Haley needs picked up from her grandmas.” Three years had passed since Hank picked the last stone from Jen’s property. Three years since he got to sit through an entire Sunday morning on his back porch. Three years without a coffee communion.
“They’re on the hook near the door…damn woman I put’em there every time.”
She made her way out to the back porch. “Hank, what’s wrong with you?”
“Huh?”
“Don’t you think I wouldn’t be askin’ you if the keys were hanging where they’re supposed to be?”
“Well then check the pants in the laundry.” He picked up his cup. “Wouldn’t hurt you to run a load while you’re at it.”
Jen found the keys in the laundry basket next to their waterbed. She stood upright, thought about doing a load of wash, and headed out the front door. Tears were beginning to well up in the corners of her eyelids; her hand shook the key into the ignition. Hank’s was another kind of mean than Haley’s father. Hank didn’t hit, didn’t call names, but he could make people feel like shit. All the time.
The half-ton red dodge pick-up burned down the dirt road toward route 151. At the highway she stopped at the sign and threw the truck into “park”. Her hands still shaking she brought them up to her eyes and allowed herself to open up and bawl like a child. She had never, would never, let Hank see her like this but she found that allowing herself the indulgence steeled her resolve to do whatever was best for Haley and for herself.
Jen thought of the days she spent on the road with Travis. The motorcycles, cookouts, booze, and the drugs. A clean ribbon of hardtop road reeled out behind them, a timeline marked in states and years. Then one day Haley forgot her mother. Forgot her face when she came to get her from grandma. Had she been away for so long or had Haley forgotten on purpose? She stopped running and Travis stopped calling home, until he went to prison.
Her courtship with Hank had been too quick. He clearly did not love her anymore, if he ever had. He needed someone to do his laundry. To clean his filthy trailer. He needed a woman and Jen fit the bill. And now she was inconvenient. She had been fine on her own. “Son of a bitch!” Her palms slammed against the steering wheel of the pickup. “Son of a bitch!”
Jen ripped the transmission into drive and laid six feet of hot black rubber on 151.
Pink Lady Slippers
The winter cold came early that year. A few weeks of rain were followed by progressively falling temperatures. Hank spent most of his time checking and replacing the hydraulic lines on his old Cat D3C bulldozer and cold-calling local farms for loose stone prospects. A hard frost had set in making it impossible for him to pick from one of the long-term quarry sites that he depended on when there was no new business to be had. He hadn’t picked on a new wall in months and the funds were running low.
Hank was running diagnostic checks on some new lines when Jen came out to the garage. She was wearing a skin-tight black dress, flannel shirt, and moon boots. The expression on her face was less hurt than it was genuine confusion.
“Hey.”
“Hey babe. What’s with the getup?” She was silly in a sexy way.
“Seriously, Hank?”
He could see that she was upset and for some reason that made him angry. “Seriously what? Can’t ya see I’m busy?”
“It’s Valentines Hank. Ain’t you gonna take me out?”
His head fell and he ran a greasy hand over the back of his neck. “Shit, I’m sorry babe. Where you wanna go?”
“How bout the D.I.?” His stomach turned. The Delaware Inn was a honky-tonk about forty-five minutes west of their place. Not somewhere Hank had ever been, or ever had a cause to visit. It was a rough place stocked with people who had little care beyond feeding a weekly habit, a place where a man could lose himself. What was worse, it was a place where, he knew, Jen had spent much of her time in the past.
He searched for a way out. “What about Haley?”
“We can drop her at my mother’s. She’s gonna spend the night with grandma.” She left him with a wink and sauntered back to the trailer.
The D.I. sat just off the main road in a three-acre open field. Dented rusty pickups and sport utility vehicles filled the lot, representing an equal ratio of workers to outside investment. Hank pulled into an empty spot near the door and parked.
“Just for a little while okay, Jen?”
“Oh, Hank. It’s been so long since we’ve done anything together. Just try to relax alright?”
“You know I don’t get on with these people.”
“You don’t get on with people at all Hank. It’s not enough just to know yourself.”
Hank held the collar of her jacket in the tiny foyer and as soon as she had her arms free Jen was gone. He hung their coats in a small closet, closed the door, and paused to listen. The spaces between roaring laughter, clinking glasses, and crashing pool balls was softly filled with song from a jukebox. The tune was an old bluegrass staple:
“Down an old deer run,
through a blue spruce grove,
dark marshy corner
nestled in the cloves.
Pink lady so pretty,
bath’n in the sun’s rays.
If you touch her slipper,
the petals fall away.
Pink lady slippers,
momma used to say,
If you touch those slippers
the petals fall away.
There was an old woman,
collector with a knack.
She could carry her slipper
in an old knapsack.
The old woman cackles.
What did she say?
The new ones grow,
the old fall away.”
Hank took an anxious step around the corner so he could see into the bar.
Where the Petals Go
A seething rabble of drunks; bellied to the bar and draped over pool tables. Jen had already begun mingling with the locals. Hank found an empty seat at the bar, took his place, and laid a twenty-dollar bill in front of him. The bartender, a large hairy man in a denim jacket, filled the time between pouring drinks by exchanging offenses with his patrons.
“Mark! Hey Mark!” A woman sitting next to Hank barked at the bartender. She wore a plaid work shirt supported with layers of thermal underwear. Her collar displayed a ridiculous, pinned pink carnation. “Bring your fatass over here and get this fella a whiskey. Didn’t your momma teach you nothin’?”
He sauntered over, his eyes rolled against an insult he had heard on more than one occasion. “Yeah, Cat. She taught me somethin’. Like how to toss a noisy old barfly out on her ass.” He smiled to himself as he poured out a double of Jack Daniels and dropped it carelessly in front of Hank.
Hank turned to the woman beside him, “Thanks.”
“What do you do son?”
Hank stared over the edge of his drink and pushed a twenty across the counter to the waiting bartender.
“Fer work boy. What is it you do?”
“Stone picker.” He took a sip of whiskey.
“Ha, ha! I knew it soon’d I laid eyes on ya’.” Cat slapped a hand on his shoulder. “Funny how things change, in’nit? When I was jus’ a girl there were always too many stones. No sooner we’d get one off to the wall, the plow’d turn up another.”
Hank felt like he knew this woman from somewhere. He was pretty sure they’d talked before but, as odd as she was, Hank couldn’t seem to place her. Sometimes you remembered people for what they did or what they looked like but Hank got that feeling you get when you run into someone you’ve told a secret. That feeling of shameful obedience.
“Yes ma’am. There isn’t much stone left to be picked to tell you the truth. And those farmers that still have it know that it’s worth something. Hanging on to it for a rainy day I suppose.”
“What is it you hang on’ta son? Whadda you got on a rainy day?”
“I got a little place up on Tucker mountain. It ain’t much but it’s just about all mine.”
“That’ll get ya’ out of the rain Hank, but..” she looked right into his eyes, “it won’ get ya’ through it. Ya’ know what I mean doncha’ son?”
Hank leaned back, his hand let go of the drink and gripped the lip of the bar. “Just who in the hell are you?”
“Folks call me Catty Kins. You see that little flower you got over there.” She passed her hand in front of him and pointed into the corner. The sleeve of her coat smelled sweet and sticky, like rotten fruit.
Hank turned and looked to where Cat was pointing. Jen was sitting on a stool in the corner of the bar, gleefully chatting with some young kid with slick hair and wearing a t-shirt two sizes small for him. She cradled a drink on the table and stooped over in a way that slightly exposed her chest. “I see somethin’.”
“That you should boy! That you should.” Her arm drew back, her hand sweeping, with gravity through matted grey hair. “I wonder though if you understand how things change, if you can see that they change, and if you can change with them.”
“You don’t change things into somethin’ they aren’t. You can’t make coal from diamonds.” Jen was sitting alone now. The kid sitting with her had stood to take a turn on the pool table. Her eyes searched nervously, defensively, looking for someone to attach to. A grain of pollen catches the end of an upward draft; it spins and floats against gravity.
“No son. No you can’t. That much you got right.” Jen’s gaze passed across Hank and then came back to him. Her eyebrows raised a little, a gush of pink rose in her cheeks. “But it is up to you to see. To see what a thing is and then witness what it becomes. To be thankful that you were around to see it.”
Jen smiled at Hank and he smiled back.
Brief Summary:
The interactions with the stone in the beginning (weight of discovery) and with Cat in the end (path to rebirth) are conversations Hank has with his subconscious mind. He starts with a Uranian memory of Jen but after they move in together he can only see the Chthonic. She serves no other purpose, it seems, than to interrupt his thoughts. Cat brings him back with this flower image. A catkin is a flower without petals. There is little in Jung to explore the meaning of flowers although their representation in mandalas is detailed. For me, and for this story, the flower resembles the rejuvenation and rebirth of the Uranian image of Jen in the subconscious mind of Hank.
