DARK FICTION
MARCH 2018
THE ONE BEFORE WOODSTOCK
NANCY BREWKA-CLARK
THE ONE BEFORE WOODSTOCK
NANCY BREWKA-CLARK
“Lord knows how many trucks and vans and what-all they’ve got out there.” Reba squinted out the window. “Them ruts must be a good foot deep.”
Jacob yawned. “Ain’t nothing a good plowing can’t fix come spring.”
Rage burned in her flat chest like gas. “Tractor’s broke.” Old goat would never farm the land again, but he wouldn’t sell it either. Guess he figured the two of them would just molder here until one died, and then the other, just like his folks and their folks before them.
“That’ll get fixed, too. Got us some money, didn’t I?” He reached down and clicked the lever, sprawling back so his belly stuck out, his stockinged feet splayed. “So just let things be.”
She jerked her head toward the window. “You can’t tell me them crazy boys came all the way out here to the back of beyond to put on some kind of music show.”
Jacob settled even deeper into the battered old recliner. “What are you getting all worked up for? ” A smile flitted across his face, round as a baby’s beneath a fringe of white hair. Reba had trimmed it just yesterday, carefully negotiating the scissors with her arthritic fingers so as not to jab his wattle. “Got me a deposit, didn’t I? Hard cash.”
“Be lucky if we see another nickel.” She pulled the faded blue curtain back another two inches. “Maybe we should call the sheriff.”
“You ain’t calling nobody.” He shut his eyes. “They ain’t breaking any laws.”
A wail like the ghost of the old Chicago-Rock Island & Pacific freight train passing by set the brass overhead light vibrating. For a moment the burned-out bulbs flared blood red. The screech intensified. “Hear that?” Reba shouted.
“I ain’t deaf.” As Jacob fumbled to get himself upright, a Martian slash of greenish light whirled through the parlor. “What’s that, fireworks?”
“Course not.” Reba turned to him in spiteful triumph. “That’s them savages whooping it up on their guitars and drums and such. Magnified it enough to wake the dead.” She pointed out the window. “Got four generators. Sounds like one of them flying saucers is about to land.”
Jacob limped to the window. “Holy Toledo, I ain’t never seen diesel jennies that big.” He scratched his ear. “Guess they’re expecting a crowd all right.”
The green glow switched to a slash of poisonous purple, turning Reba’s face into a Mardi Gras mask. “I told you if you took the Devil’s money you’d deliver us unto eternal hellfire and damnation.”
Sweat broke out on the old man’s forehead. “They said it was a music concert. Music,” he repeated, staring dazedly out at the makeshift stage where a dozen silhouettes rushed back and forth with huge curls of cord and wires. “Why, that ain’t music.” He turned to Reba, his face alight with hope. “That ain’t music. We got ‘em there, Reba.”
“A contract’s a contract. You can’t break it all that easy. Don’t need a city slicker to tell you that.” She pointed a finger at his chest. “You go out there and tell ‘em to pipe down.”
“That’s what they come here for,” he whined. “They ain’t going to listen to me.”
“They’d better,” Reba said in such a cold, raw voice it was like another person altogether was speaking. She watched with narrowed eyes as her husband pulled on his old duckbill hat with the feed-store logo, yanked up his pants by their suspenders and thrust his feet into his laceless old work boots. “Ain’t you forgetting something?”
“Whoo-ey.” Instead of taking the rifle from her, he ran his trembling hand across his forehead. “Help me, Jesus.”
“Go on, take it.” For a moment she seemed to be more pointing it at him than handing it to him. “It ain’t loaded, for pity’s sake.”
“Them wild men running around out there won’t know that.” Jacob grabbed hold of it reluctantly. “Don’t want to scare them to death.”
“That type don’t scare easy. Hippies, they call ‘em. All hopped up on dope.” Reba bared teeth the same shape and hue as kernels of butter and sugar corn. “I’d just as soon shoot the lot of ‘em.”
She watched from the window as he limped right up to the stage. Instead of climbing on it, he stood to the side, his mouth agape as the crew above him jerked and pulled coils of cords. “Got to do everything myself,” she muttered, and yanked open the door. Storming down the sagging steps, she pulled her tattered sweater about her shouting, “Now listen here, you fellers.”
When she thought of it later, she always saw his face turn toward her with the exact same expression as the full moon, aghast and exasperated. Then the black cable clipped the side of his head and he went down out of her sight. “Jacob!”
By the time she reached him, a little crowd was trying to help him to his feet, all of them young men who hadn’t shaved in a year, or cut their hair since Hector was a pup. “Jacob?” She knelt by him, her heart fluttering with the same queer lack of regular tempo as his twitching lips and eyelids. “You okay? You okay?”
Silently, the old man sat up.
The young men stepped back instinctively.
Rubbing the side of his head, Jacob said, “It hurts.” He looked at Reba. “I want to go home.”
A whole group of them got him onto his feet. Then, propelling his limp arms and legs, they got him back into the house. Somebody said to call a doctor, but Reba just told the hairy young critters to put him in his chair and get out.
***
She’d put the kettle on and was stirring up the big, black iron stove with a poker when the field outside the window went still and dark. “Jacob?” she called, heading for the parlor. “Jacob? You hear that?” When he remained silent, she laughed. “Right. Ain’t nothing to hear. Even them hippies have to get their beauty sleep. Specially them.”
He was sitting up in the recliner, his feet still in their dirty old boots. His white face lolled toward the door, eyes staring, mouth sagging. Was he dead? Reba’s heart leaped with hope. Then he farted, grunted, and farted again.
The sharp retorts reminded her—“The gun.”
Someone had left it on the porch. Standing there holding it with both hands, Reba stared into the darkness. Small red and green lights pulsed from various heights on the stage like it was Christmas. The hairy young men had gone back to their vans, parked way at the other end of the field. A tiny orange light flared up through a distant windshield, and then another. “Smoking,” she muttered. “Satan’s weed.”
They were probably drinking beer out there, too, casually planning to piss it out into the night through the doors of their crazily painted vehicles. That made her wonder, what would happen if an audience actually came and some of them were females? “Outhouse can’t keep up with a flow like that,” she told herself. Her lips settled in a grim smile. Yup, something had to be done, and fast. Just fix it all, and be done with it.
Back in the kitchen, she stood the shotgun in the corner by the icebox. It was a big, old square thing made of oak and lined with lead with a slot beneath to hold a slab of ice. The new refrigerator, a Kelvinator from the 50s, had replaced it long ago. It was useful, sure, for keeping things cold, but the icebox was just fine for storage. Inside were several boxes of cartridges. She didn’t use Remington much now, but there’d been a time when she could pick off a fox skulking around the hen house with a single bullet.
“Mother?”
Reba cocked her head, holding her breath.
“Mother?”
He’d never called her that, not even when the kids were little, not the way a lot of men did. She wouldn’t have minded because then at least the old fool would have called her something aside from “Hey,” or just nothing at all. He’d never raised a hand to her, but that wasn’t the only thing that could break a woman’s heart.
Stumping into the parlor, Reba barked, “What is it?”
His eyes were rheumy, vague, empty. “Milk?” he wheezed.
“Milk.” Reba repeated the word with such scorn it sizzled in the air between them. “What kind of a thing is that to ask for?”
His lower lip trembled. “I want to go home.”
Reba turned her back. She moved slowly, thinking fast. What if he was going to be like this from now on? She’d have a two-hundred-pound infant on her hands with no hope of any help from outside. She looked back over her shoulder. “That’s okay, Jacob. You just wait.”
The poker felt curiously light in her hand. She’d wrung the necks of chicken since she was a little girl, and sent every kind of livestock off to slaughter even if she’d bottle-fed it first. Not a single one of her boys had taken to the farming life, and though they never said why, she figured they’d turned out soft like Jacob. Sentimentality and farming didn’t go together, nor should they, or nobody’d ever survive.
“Mother?”
Reba smiled back into his moon face. “Here I am.” She bent to click the chair upright. With her free hand she tilted him forward. One swift blow on the back of his neck and his head hung down shyly. Another, and he toppled at her feet like a toddler attempting a somersault. “Good boy.”
It took a bit of doing, but she finally got the corpse to the top of the cellar stairs. There was no blood, which was a mercy. His body went down five steps before something caught in the railing. Sighing, she jerked out the hand, set the body straight and pushed it again. Down it went, like a child pretending to ride a toboggan, and banged headfirst into the cement wall. She brought the poker down with her, jerking the string of the twenty-watt bulb to get a better look, before heading outside.
“Anybody in there?” Reba knocked hard on the sliding door of the battered VW van, trying not to look at the swirling patterns of flowers entwined with snakes crawling all over the cursed thing. Raising her face to the moon, she yelled, “Help!”
***
The two hippies stared at Jacob like they’d never seen death before. Finally the taller one sank to one knee. First he pressed one side of Jacob’s neck and then the other before picking up his limp wrist. When he dropped it, the shorter one moaned.
Reba looked from one boy to the other. “You know, that knock on the head out there, it did something queer to him. He started acting real strange. He was calling to me, something about how he couldn’t see. When I went into the parlor, he wasn’t in his chair. Figured he’d gone to the toilet.” She cleared her throat. “Then I heard the thumps. Bump-bump-bump—and just like that—” she shook her head— “he’s dead.”
“It was an accident,” the shorter one said, gasping like a fish out of water.
“Guess the lawyers’ll have to work that one out,” Reba said. “After the funeral.”
“Funeral,” the taller one said.
“Hope it don’t ruin your fun,” Reba said.
It took most of the night to get things straightened out, but she was in no state of mind to sleep. Watching all the gear, the machines, the generators, the cords, even the stage, vanishing into the vans and trucks, Reba laughed to herself. For once in his life, Jacob got something right. That old worn-out pasture turned out to be pay dirt after all.
Jacob yawned. “Ain’t nothing a good plowing can’t fix come spring.”
Rage burned in her flat chest like gas. “Tractor’s broke.” Old goat would never farm the land again, but he wouldn’t sell it either. Guess he figured the two of them would just molder here until one died, and then the other, just like his folks and their folks before them.
“That’ll get fixed, too. Got us some money, didn’t I?” He reached down and clicked the lever, sprawling back so his belly stuck out, his stockinged feet splayed. “So just let things be.”
She jerked her head toward the window. “You can’t tell me them crazy boys came all the way out here to the back of beyond to put on some kind of music show.”
Jacob settled even deeper into the battered old recliner. “What are you getting all worked up for? ” A smile flitted across his face, round as a baby’s beneath a fringe of white hair. Reba had trimmed it just yesterday, carefully negotiating the scissors with her arthritic fingers so as not to jab his wattle. “Got me a deposit, didn’t I? Hard cash.”
“Be lucky if we see another nickel.” She pulled the faded blue curtain back another two inches. “Maybe we should call the sheriff.”
“You ain’t calling nobody.” He shut his eyes. “They ain’t breaking any laws.”
A wail like the ghost of the old Chicago-Rock Island & Pacific freight train passing by set the brass overhead light vibrating. For a moment the burned-out bulbs flared blood red. The screech intensified. “Hear that?” Reba shouted.
“I ain’t deaf.” As Jacob fumbled to get himself upright, a Martian slash of greenish light whirled through the parlor. “What’s that, fireworks?”
“Course not.” Reba turned to him in spiteful triumph. “That’s them savages whooping it up on their guitars and drums and such. Magnified it enough to wake the dead.” She pointed out the window. “Got four generators. Sounds like one of them flying saucers is about to land.”
Jacob limped to the window. “Holy Toledo, I ain’t never seen diesel jennies that big.” He scratched his ear. “Guess they’re expecting a crowd all right.”
The green glow switched to a slash of poisonous purple, turning Reba’s face into a Mardi Gras mask. “I told you if you took the Devil’s money you’d deliver us unto eternal hellfire and damnation.”
Sweat broke out on the old man’s forehead. “They said it was a music concert. Music,” he repeated, staring dazedly out at the makeshift stage where a dozen silhouettes rushed back and forth with huge curls of cord and wires. “Why, that ain’t music.” He turned to Reba, his face alight with hope. “That ain’t music. We got ‘em there, Reba.”
“A contract’s a contract. You can’t break it all that easy. Don’t need a city slicker to tell you that.” She pointed a finger at his chest. “You go out there and tell ‘em to pipe down.”
“That’s what they come here for,” he whined. “They ain’t going to listen to me.”
“They’d better,” Reba said in such a cold, raw voice it was like another person altogether was speaking. She watched with narrowed eyes as her husband pulled on his old duckbill hat with the feed-store logo, yanked up his pants by their suspenders and thrust his feet into his laceless old work boots. “Ain’t you forgetting something?”
“Whoo-ey.” Instead of taking the rifle from her, he ran his trembling hand across his forehead. “Help me, Jesus.”
“Go on, take it.” For a moment she seemed to be more pointing it at him than handing it to him. “It ain’t loaded, for pity’s sake.”
“Them wild men running around out there won’t know that.” Jacob grabbed hold of it reluctantly. “Don’t want to scare them to death.”
“That type don’t scare easy. Hippies, they call ‘em. All hopped up on dope.” Reba bared teeth the same shape and hue as kernels of butter and sugar corn. “I’d just as soon shoot the lot of ‘em.”
She watched from the window as he limped right up to the stage. Instead of climbing on it, he stood to the side, his mouth agape as the crew above him jerked and pulled coils of cords. “Got to do everything myself,” she muttered, and yanked open the door. Storming down the sagging steps, she pulled her tattered sweater about her shouting, “Now listen here, you fellers.”
When she thought of it later, she always saw his face turn toward her with the exact same expression as the full moon, aghast and exasperated. Then the black cable clipped the side of his head and he went down out of her sight. “Jacob!”
By the time she reached him, a little crowd was trying to help him to his feet, all of them young men who hadn’t shaved in a year, or cut their hair since Hector was a pup. “Jacob?” She knelt by him, her heart fluttering with the same queer lack of regular tempo as his twitching lips and eyelids. “You okay? You okay?”
Silently, the old man sat up.
The young men stepped back instinctively.
Rubbing the side of his head, Jacob said, “It hurts.” He looked at Reba. “I want to go home.”
A whole group of them got him onto his feet. Then, propelling his limp arms and legs, they got him back into the house. Somebody said to call a doctor, but Reba just told the hairy young critters to put him in his chair and get out.
***
She’d put the kettle on and was stirring up the big, black iron stove with a poker when the field outside the window went still and dark. “Jacob?” she called, heading for the parlor. “Jacob? You hear that?” When he remained silent, she laughed. “Right. Ain’t nothing to hear. Even them hippies have to get their beauty sleep. Specially them.”
He was sitting up in the recliner, his feet still in their dirty old boots. His white face lolled toward the door, eyes staring, mouth sagging. Was he dead? Reba’s heart leaped with hope. Then he farted, grunted, and farted again.
The sharp retorts reminded her—“The gun.”
Someone had left it on the porch. Standing there holding it with both hands, Reba stared into the darkness. Small red and green lights pulsed from various heights on the stage like it was Christmas. The hairy young men had gone back to their vans, parked way at the other end of the field. A tiny orange light flared up through a distant windshield, and then another. “Smoking,” she muttered. “Satan’s weed.”
They were probably drinking beer out there, too, casually planning to piss it out into the night through the doors of their crazily painted vehicles. That made her wonder, what would happen if an audience actually came and some of them were females? “Outhouse can’t keep up with a flow like that,” she told herself. Her lips settled in a grim smile. Yup, something had to be done, and fast. Just fix it all, and be done with it.
Back in the kitchen, she stood the shotgun in the corner by the icebox. It was a big, old square thing made of oak and lined with lead with a slot beneath to hold a slab of ice. The new refrigerator, a Kelvinator from the 50s, had replaced it long ago. It was useful, sure, for keeping things cold, but the icebox was just fine for storage. Inside were several boxes of cartridges. She didn’t use Remington much now, but there’d been a time when she could pick off a fox skulking around the hen house with a single bullet.
“Mother?”
Reba cocked her head, holding her breath.
“Mother?”
He’d never called her that, not even when the kids were little, not the way a lot of men did. She wouldn’t have minded because then at least the old fool would have called her something aside from “Hey,” or just nothing at all. He’d never raised a hand to her, but that wasn’t the only thing that could break a woman’s heart.
Stumping into the parlor, Reba barked, “What is it?”
His eyes were rheumy, vague, empty. “Milk?” he wheezed.
“Milk.” Reba repeated the word with such scorn it sizzled in the air between them. “What kind of a thing is that to ask for?”
His lower lip trembled. “I want to go home.”
Reba turned her back. She moved slowly, thinking fast. What if he was going to be like this from now on? She’d have a two-hundred-pound infant on her hands with no hope of any help from outside. She looked back over her shoulder. “That’s okay, Jacob. You just wait.”
The poker felt curiously light in her hand. She’d wrung the necks of chicken since she was a little girl, and sent every kind of livestock off to slaughter even if she’d bottle-fed it first. Not a single one of her boys had taken to the farming life, and though they never said why, she figured they’d turned out soft like Jacob. Sentimentality and farming didn’t go together, nor should they, or nobody’d ever survive.
“Mother?”
Reba smiled back into his moon face. “Here I am.” She bent to click the chair upright. With her free hand she tilted him forward. One swift blow on the back of his neck and his head hung down shyly. Another, and he toppled at her feet like a toddler attempting a somersault. “Good boy.”
It took a bit of doing, but she finally got the corpse to the top of the cellar stairs. There was no blood, which was a mercy. His body went down five steps before something caught in the railing. Sighing, she jerked out the hand, set the body straight and pushed it again. Down it went, like a child pretending to ride a toboggan, and banged headfirst into the cement wall. She brought the poker down with her, jerking the string of the twenty-watt bulb to get a better look, before heading outside.
“Anybody in there?” Reba knocked hard on the sliding door of the battered VW van, trying not to look at the swirling patterns of flowers entwined with snakes crawling all over the cursed thing. Raising her face to the moon, she yelled, “Help!”
***
The two hippies stared at Jacob like they’d never seen death before. Finally the taller one sank to one knee. First he pressed one side of Jacob’s neck and then the other before picking up his limp wrist. When he dropped it, the shorter one moaned.
Reba looked from one boy to the other. “You know, that knock on the head out there, it did something queer to him. He started acting real strange. He was calling to me, something about how he couldn’t see. When I went into the parlor, he wasn’t in his chair. Figured he’d gone to the toilet.” She cleared her throat. “Then I heard the thumps. Bump-bump-bump—and just like that—” she shook her head— “he’s dead.”
“It was an accident,” the shorter one said, gasping like a fish out of water.
“Guess the lawyers’ll have to work that one out,” Reba said. “After the funeral.”
“Funeral,” the taller one said.
“Hope it don’t ruin your fun,” Reba said.
It took most of the night to get things straightened out, but she was in no state of mind to sleep. Watching all the gear, the machines, the generators, the cords, even the stage, vanishing into the vans and trucks, Reba laughed to herself. For once in his life, Jacob got something right. That old worn-out pasture turned out to be pay dirt after all.
Nancy Brewka-Clark began her writing career as features editor for a daily newspaper chain on Boston's North Shore. Her poems, short stories, and nonfiction have appeared in anthologies published by Adams Media, Three Rivers Press, the University of Iowa Press, and The Harvard Bookstore’s premier short story collection Microchondria #1, as well as periodicals including The Merton Seasonal, The North American Review and The Boston Globe Magazine among others. Her plays and monologues have been produced here and abroad and have been published by Smith and Kraus, YouthPLAYS of Los Angeles, and Routledge U.K. March 2018, Dark Fiction
