"Carter Swart - Uncle John" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swart Carter)

UNCLE JOHN
By
Carter Swart

While waiting for the wife and grand kids to return from the store, I was rummaging through some stuff in the garage this morning when I accidentally knocked over a box of tools. Included in the cacophony of metal on concrete was the high-pitched squeak of something mortally wounded. I gingerly righted the box and found beneath it a small roof rat, its back broken. A crimson smear of blood framed the stricken body.

"Damn." Reaching down to stroke the rat's sleek hide, I recalled my Uncle John's advice when faced with such a circumstance. Slipping the paralyzed rat's neck between my thumb and forefinger, I promptly snapped it, thereby putting the poor creature out of its misery. The incident prompted a host of grim memories from the deepest corridors of my mind, a tangle of morbid recollections of barbarity, sexual exploitation, and life-long guilt.

Once more my genie had escaped it's bottle.

Years ago, before WWII, I lived with my family in southern California. One morning my father dropped me off at school with a shiny new quarter and a cheerful wave. An hour later he was dead. For some arcane reason he'd driven his old Ford into a speeding freight train. The police listed it as a suicide. My mother disagreed vehemently. I guess we'll never know. Regrettably the life insurance company found it convenient to believe the official version and denied my mother's claim, citing their two-year suicide clause. And so it wasn't long before the money ran out. There was no "safety net" available in those days; one worked or the family didn't eat. And so my mother, Ruth, took a job packing glazed fruit for a dollar-an-hour. Claire, my thirteen-year-old sister, was too young to work, and I was just eight-years-old. And soon we lost the house to the bank, as well as the replacement car. Friends tried to help but nobody in our neighborhood drove a Mercedes. My mother slowly lost weight and hope, taking on the desperate patina of a Chinese war refugee.

But one day my Aunt Trudy wrote in answer to my mother's last-ditch appeal for help. She invited us to come live with her and my Uncle John in Hunterville, a small mountain community in North Carolina. She also sent the train fare. Naturally my mother's relief was palpable. We sold the furniture, packed our bags, and left California two weeks later.

Hunterville is a sleepy village located in the rugged oak, hickory, and loblolly pine forests of Appalachia. Back then the town consisted of a grocery store, drugstore, garage/gas station, three taverns, a city hall, three restaurants, two veneer mills, ten churches and a combination grammar/high school. Dad always said one could measure the character of a town by comparing the ratio of taverns to churches, the more churches, the better the town. By his reckoning this was a good place to live.

Aunt Trudy was a slim pale woman who welcomed us cordially, as did Uncle John. She soon found a part-time job for my mother at the mill where she worked. It was back-breaking labor and both women were exhausted by day's end. I felt sorry for them. But we had wholesome meals there and slept in warm beds. Uncle John worked at the garage and was a part-time trapper. Many's the night we ate succulent squirrel stew or opossum pie, the result of my uncle's string of traps and snares. He kept a large garden as well. But the enervating humid heat of the southern summer and those hard hours at the mill took the starch out of my mom.

Uncle John worked all week at the garage and harvested his trap and trot lines on the weekends and at night. What we didn't consume he sold in town. He was a large man, heavy in the gut, but powerful. Loud, forceful, and energetic he had a commanding presence and strutted around my aunt's 460-acre wooded property like the head rooster. The property, including a private lake, had been inherited from her first husband. She'd also inherited his large mortgage, something that John brooded about a lot. "Ain't we never gonna get ahead," was his continual lament.

At first things were tolerable, though my uncle would ofttimes playfully embrace mom and flirt with her, being a gruff, gregarious sort of person. And if my mom found his borderline attentions unwelcome, she never said so. My aunt was likewise mute on the subject. But it was evident that John thought himself quite the ladies man. He wasn't exactly handsome, but he had large brown eyes, a shock of black wavy hair, and an engaging, if vainglorious, persona. Now and then, though, I'd catch him eyeing my little sister with a vague sort of speculation. At the time I didn't understand its significance, in fact I'd have done anything for him. He was jolly and attentive to me, completely unlike my late father, a man of quiet habits and introspection. But while I was basking in the glow of Uncle John's considerable charm, the women were treated as though they were living under the rules of a Periclean despot. If I heard, "hurry up woman," once, I heard it a thousand times.

Out on the forest trails, though, he was a different person, relaxed and very much the generous mentor. I learned a lot from him. One thing he drilled into me was that animals have feelings and that they should be treated in a humane way. It seems oxymoronic for a trapper to speak in those terms, but that's the way he felt. He respected his prey, able to separate gathering meat for the table from the cruelty of his traps. Often he'd poke me in the chest with a blunt finger and say, "Bruce, I trap critters to feed us. It don't give me no pleasure to kill anything. In fact when I find me a sick animal you watch how quick I put it out of its misery." I saw him do it a hundred times. There was no cruelty in my uncle -- at least not then, not until he lost his job.

Sadly, though, he did have a darker side. Mom began to suspect it a few months after we moved in. I assume my aunt had her suspicions as well. And later, when it came to full flower, it was terrible.

His "problem" developed from a third enterprise -- the cooking of moonshine. He and another man worked a small still back in the hollow, selling corn to a select group of regulars. Unfortunately, after he lost his job at the garage, he began drinking up the profits. My aunt once opined that booze could turn a pretty good man into a pretty bad one; she didn't know the half. Sitting around all day with his ne'er-do-well friends drinking and cussing, my uncle quit his trap line and lay around all day complaining about his bad luck. He got very short with the women. At night he'd go to town and bring back his barfly buddies, their jalopies often parked on the unmowed lawn until dawn. The deep summer evenings got more and more raucous and bawdy, and Uncle John continued his unwanted attentions toward my mother. Accordingly her life became a living hell.

One wild night she ran into the house and hustled Claire and me upstairs. She didn't explain, but she was breathing real hard. Her breath smelled of liquor, and there was a haunted look in her eye. I could tell she'd been crying. Her dress was pulled down off her shoulders and her lipstick was smeared. She ordered us to lock our bedroom doors. Later that night I heard cries of female protest and rough laughter from the men.

The next morning mom had bruises on her face and arms. She and Trudy would not look at my uncle. He wandered around sheepishly, ignored them, and left for town in the afternoon. From then on mom locked Claire in the attic whenever the men began their late-night weekend drinking. Of course I was unaware of what all this meant, my child's naivete securing me in my ignorance. But something so degrading and criminal must eventually find the light, even to an eight-year-old boy.

I went outside one morning to help Trudy with the milking. Approaching the barn I heard muffled voices. Something about the lift and urgency of the give-and-take caused me to slip quietly inside and hide in an empty stall.

"Ruthie," cried my aunt with venom. "How could he do that to you? I should never have invited you and the kids. I'm so sorry. But I've never seen him like this. I could just kill the bastard."

"Shush. It's not your fault. But now he wants Claire. She's only thirteen!"

"Yes. He's sick. Losin' that job done something to him."

"So what can we do, Trudy? It can't go on like this."

There was a pause. "I could leave the swine. We could march right out of here."

"Sure. And go where?"

"I know. He keeps the checkbook; he handles the money. How could I have been so stupid to have given him such total control?"

"You didn't know."