“Hold on, Bub,” she says. “No need to head for the barn first thing. Let’s get you settled in the house first and then there’ll be a plenty of work for you.”
I do a double take and see that the big, clean, expensive building is the barn. The little, cheap, rundown place is the house. I say to myself: “Tough Tony, you’re gonna pray tonight that Mr. Marino don’t forget to tell the judge you’re a personal friend of his and get you out of this,”
But that night I do not pray. I am too tired. After throwing sacks of scratch feed and laying mash around, I run the baling machine and I turn the oats in the loft and I pump water until my back is aching jello and then I go hiking out to the woodlot and chop down trees and cut them up with a chain saw. It is surprising how fast I learn and how willing I am when I remember what Mrs. Parry did to Dud Wingle.
I barely get to sleep it seems like when Mrs. Parry is yanking the covers off me laughing and I see through the window that the sky is getting a little light. “Time to rise, Bub,” she bawls. “Breakfast on the table.” She strides to the window and flexes her muscles, breathing deep. “It’s going to be a fine day. I can tell when an animal’s sick to death, and I can tell when it’s going to be fine all day. Rise and shine, Bub. We have a lot of work ahead. I was
kind of easy on you yesterday seeing you was new here, so we got a bit behindhand.”
I eye the bulging muscles and say “Yes, ma’am.”
She serves a good breakfast, I have to admit. Usually I just have some coffee around eleven when I wake up and maybe a meatball sandwich around four, but the country air gives you an appetite like I always heard. Maybe I didn’t tell you there was just the two of us. Her husband kicked off a couple years ago. She gave one of her boys half the farm because she says she don’t believe in letting them hang around without a chance to make some money and get married until you die. The other boy, nineteen, got drafted two months ago and since then she is running the place on her own hook because for some reason or other it is hard to get people to work on a farm. She says she does not understand this and I do not enlighten her.
First thing after breakfast she tells me to make four crates from lumber in the toolshed, go to the duckpond and put the four Muscovy ducks in the crates so she can take them to town and sell them. She has been meaning to sell the Muscovy ducks for some time since the word has been getting around that she was pro-communist for having such a breed of ducks when there were plenty of good American ducks she could of raised. “Though,” she says, “in my opinion the Walterses ought to sell off their Peking ducks too because the Chinese are just as bad as the Roossians.”
I make the crates which is easy and I go to the duck-pool. There are four ducks there but they are not swimming; they have sunk. I go and tell Mrs. Parry and she looks at me like I was crazy.
“Yeah,” I tell her. “Sunk. Down at the bottom of the pond, drownded. I guess maybe during the night they forgot to keep treading water or something.”
She didn’t say a word. She just strides down the path to the duckpond and looks into it and sees the four ducks. They are big, horrible things with kind of red Jimmy Valentine masks over their eyes, and they are lying at the bottom of the pond. She wades in, still without a word,
I
and fishes them out. She gets a big shiv out of her apron pocket, slits the ducks open, yanks out their lungs and slits them open. Water dribbles out.
“Drownded,” she mutters. “If there was snapping turtles to drag them under . . . but there ain’t.”