Weeds in Bloom Read online

  It was almost as if someone had neglected Rin Tin Tin or Lassie.

  A local veterinarian, however, stemmed a tidal wave of hysteria by conducting a complete examination of Veronica and concluding that (like people) some mules are chunky. Others are rails. And there was absolutely no justification for either a citizen’s arrest or a search and seizure.

  Mr. Diskin’s next-door neighbor, Miss Elspeth Hardigan, testified that for years she had observed her friend Barney tending and grooming and curry-combing his mule. No animal since the elephants of Hannibal had received such devoted benevolence, according to Miss Hardigan’s deposition.

  The local S.P.C.A. then disbanded. Two of its three members had passed away. Their sudden demise wasn’t at all due to Mr. Diskin’s innocence, but rather to the unexpected levy of membership dues.

  Veronica, the town decided, just happened to be a skinny mule, one of the eccentricities of nature, an accepted phenomenon.

  Through it all, Veronica, though she had been the nucleus of attention, remained impervious to the publicity and maintained her usual I-don’t-give-a-haw nonchalance, in which she had established more than a modicum of equity.

  Soup Vinson (his righteous name was Luther Wesley Vinson; he was over a year my senior and also my next-farm neighbor) and I called regularly at Mr. Diskin’s place.

  Our calls were not social.

  They were business.

  Hearing from several of the more mature entrepreneurs —those in the sixth grade—that a kid could collect tinfoil and sell it, we became instant collectors.

  And bankers.

  Our bank was burglarproof, consisting of a rusty tomato can, a cylindrical vault that had earlier been used for fishing worms. Without as much as a wash or rinse, Soup and I completed its conversion from a holder of warm bait to one of cold cash.

  After several false starts (the most useless being when we mistook lead foil for tinfoil), our shining ball began slowly to grow, nourished mainly by inner sleeves of chewing gum.

  Then we hit the jackpot.

  Dolores Baginski’s Beauty Salon.

  Braving its odor, a fragrance far worse than the dump’s or that of the alley behind Filput’s Fish, we rummaged through the trash cans at the beauty parlor in search of that treasure of all treasures, a discarded Kinky-Perm curler wrap. This prize, our expertise informed us, wasn’t lead. This shiny stuff was what Mr. Diskin would buy—the real McCoy, a metallic mother lode.

  Tin.

  At three o’clock after school each day, Soup Vinson and I made a frontal attack on Mrs. Baginski’s rear. We found, collected, and finally sold.

  For cash.

  Business was a boom.

  At almost any given time our tomato-can bank, buried beneath old Mr. Dilworth Cooperston’s outhouse, held a trove of anywhere between eight cents all the way up to a staggering total of twenty-two.

  At first, the spheres of tinfoil that we hauled to the junk dealer, usual at a full gallop, boasted a diameter of one inch.

  Even though Mr. Diskin sighed or smiled, he coughed up a penny. He pointed at our foil ball, slightly larger than a prayer bead, and shook his head. Then, pointing to a ball of tinfoil bigger than a prize county-fair cabbage, he nodded. Mr. Diskin never spoke. He wasn’t one to waste words, even when Soup and I were wasting his time, and ours.

  From that day forward, however, we only presented our tinfoil to Mr. Diskin on Saturday. For good reason. Saturday afternoon, for kids who could afford a ten-cent ticket, was movie day. A matinee double feature starring that fabulous world adventurer, Fearless Ferguson, plus a western with big-name singing cowboys such as Hoot Holler or Buffalo Trill.

  On Saturday mornings, Mr. Diskin made sure that every youngster got ten cents because he knew why it was necessary. I remember all those shiny new dimes, always ready for deposit into our movie-anticipating hands.

  “Papa,” I asked my father, “how come old Mr. Diskin doesn’t ever say anything? Can’t he talk at all? Seems to me Mr. Diskin ought to dicker with us, you know, on the price of what we’re bringing to him. But, so help me, that old geezer wouldn’t say mud if’n he had a mouthful. Can you explain to me why Mr. Diskin’s so silent?”

  Papa never answered a question fast. With luck, I might get a reply in the same week.

  “Some folks,” Papa later said, staring me straight with those farmer blue eyes of his that were fiercer than an eagle’s, “say a ample lot more’n their prayers.”

  That was his answer.

  It took decades, but I final decoded it.

  And smiled. He’d meant me.

  Then along came a certain Saturday. It was a dark, rainy November day that threatened a long winter. Soup and I, even though we didn’t care to admit it, hadn’t been too ambitious all week. Not at our farming chores, or in school, or in collecting enough tinfoil. We had two balls of it. Neither worth a dime.

  “We need twenty cents,” said Soup.

  “Or,” I said, “we don’t have enough for two tickets. Maybe we just won’t go.”

  We were on our way downroad, headed into town. The time was a minute or two beyond twelve noon.

  “Rob,” said Soup, “we can’t miss seeing Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t guess we can.”

  “Maybe,” said Soup, “we could combine our two balls of foil into one. To look bigger. Like more.”

  We did.

  But it didn’t work too well. Our one ball of tinfoil looked pretty puny. Bending over, Soup picked up one of the many pebbles along the dirt roadway. In Vermont there’s no shortage of rocks, large or small.

  He tossed it into the air, and caught it.

  “Rob,” he said, “I just got a peachy idea.”

  “What is it?”

  “All we do,” he said, “is hide a tiny little pebble, this one here, inside our tinfoil. It’ll look a mite bigger, weigh more, and now we won’t have to worry about whether or not we’ll get twenty cents for two movie tickets.”

  “It’s cheating,” I told Soup.

  Soup stopped. “Don’t you get it? Old man Diskin is a Jew. The other day I overheard a guy say that it’s okay to cheat a Jew because the Jews cheat everybody else!”

  “I never heard that before,” I said.

  “Well, that’s all I heard. So maybe it’ll be okay to cheat old Diskin.”

  I shook my head. “You know as well as I do that he’s always been nice to us.”

  “We can’t miss Laurel and Hardy. It’s about a gorilla and a piano, somebody said.”

  Well, I didn’t want to cheat Mr. Diskin, nor did I want to miss out seeing Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, who were my very favorite comedians.

  “Okay,” I said. “Just one time. Even if we get away with it, I don’t guess I’ll ever want to try it again.”

  We tried it. At the junkyard, Mr. Diskin tied a white hanky over his eyes as he sat behind a rusty set of scales. It was his only joke, pretending to be Justice, the blindfolded lady. My entire body was itching so bad that I could have sneezed down the shack. It was all I could do to keep myself from bolting out of there and running away.

  Soup handed him our ball.

  Mr. Diskin looked suddenly surprised. He wasn’t wearing the hanky over his eyes when he disappeared into the back room, came back, and placed three tiny items on his counter.

  Two dimes and a stone.

  Our pebble.

  I saw his mouth trembling, yet he still said nothing. His eyes were shiny wet, like tinfoil, and his face appeared very sad.

  Soup and I looked at each other.

  Then we ran.

  I remember that awful Saturday like it happened only yesterday. We couldn’t go to the movies. Nor did we want to. Instead, the two of us just walked and walked, saying nothing. Soup, I figured, was feeling as shameful as I felt, for being so dishonest to old Mr. Barney Diskin, who’d always been so kind.

  I’m glad we didn’t take his dimes.

  Early Pardee
r />   MR. EARL PARDEE WAS A FRIEND OF MY FATHER, HAVEN Peck, and neighborly with my Uncle Charles and Uncle Edward.

  No one called him Earl.

  Instead, he got Early. I’d guess anybody in our part of Vermont could rightful recall how such a logical diminutive got spawned. We all remember, more or less, how Early was perpetuated.

  Earl Pardee’s trade was shoeing horses.

  When called, he’d obligingly say, “All right, I’ll come around to your place in the morning.”

  The horse owner would still be abed in the pitch of night and hear a sudden knock at the door. Opening it, he’d see Mr. Earl Pardee, smiling in the moonlight. “Do you know what time it is?” was the habitual question that so often greeted the caller. Without waiting for Earl’s answer, the unwilling host continued by muttering something like “It’s only four o’clock.”

  “Yes,” agreed Earl, “but that’s morning to me, and it also be morning to your horse.”

  He was right. You don’t have to be a genius to realize that a horse that’s requiring hoofs cut and shoes reset is in a sooner-the-better mood. Even the city people know that much. However, you can’t expect too many folks to wax intelligent at four bongs past midnight.

  Early would crack a smile, parade in the front door as though invited, and ask, “What’s for breakfast?”

  At an hour before milking, Mr. Pardee did such at our place. Still rubbing his eyes, my father opened the door to darkness, and there stood good old Early, his face featuring both a grin and an appetite.

  “Rob,” said Mama, her hair down and her body up, “hustle out to the henhouse and fetch eggs.” I started to leave. “Rag ’em off before you dare to enter the kitchen. Not after.”

  I hurried, aware of what my mother meant. Chickens never lay clean. A fresh egg, first off, is warm and wet. When it dries, it’s speckled with dirt flecks that beg to be wiped tidy. I’d guess that people who think that eggs actual come from grocery-store cartons presume different. So, following Mama’s instructions, I went hastening to our chicken coop, entered, and then had to apologize to the local residents, who, unlike Early Pardee, didn’t quite agree that it was already morning.

  “Easy,” I said. “I’m sorry, ladies, so please excuse me.”

  They didn’t. Mistaking me for a stoat, our Plymouth Rock matrons tuned up a chorus of hysteria that was intended to discourage my stay. I wasn’t overfond of our chickens. For years they had known who I was: the youngest Peck, assigned to egg gathering and chicken manure disposal. A hen with only half an eye could ascertain that I was neither a ferret nor a fox.

  “It’s not my fault,” I explained to an irate hen, “because Mr. Pardee got here early. That’s just his way. And he expects a breakfast.”

  Romulus then disagreed. He was our Rhode Island Red rooster, who, at the moment, hadn’t even considered hopping up to his favorite fence post to emit a crow that usual cracked open a morning like you’d break an egg.

  “Romulus,” I said, “it’s Mr. Pardee. Not me. He’s come to attend the mare, so it’s no bother of yours, you hear?”

  In the past, Romulus and I had never established what you might describe as a binding friendship. Up until age five, I was afraid of him. At six, wary. At seven years, cautious enough to avoid any personal contact with those yellow spurs and beak, all three of which appeared to be able to puncture a little kid into an immediate state of total deflation.

  Quickly, I grabbed the eggs, my hand darting beneath gray feathery abdomens in semi-repose at the laying boxes, feeling for fruit.

  “Here’s the eggs,” I said to Mama, bursting into a lamplit kitchen where my mother was stoking a six-hundred-pound, coal-black Acme American cookstove into predawn performance.

  Mr. Early Pardee, I noticed, was already occupying one of the eight chairs that surrounded our circular kitchen table. In his right hand, he held a fork. His left, an eager knife that was honed for hospitality.

  “Ah,” he said, eyeing the eggs.

  Bacon, I smelled and heard, was already sizzling in a black iron spider—or, if you prefer, a skillet. With little ceremony, my mother split open egg after egg, whacked on the frypan’s rim, then dropped into a destiny of bubbling bacon grease.

  “I favor breakfast,” said Early.

  Mama responded, “So do I, but only in the morning.”

  Aunt Carrie was up too. Following her instruction, I began to peel a dozen potatoes, my paring knife flashing, reducing each brown giant into a white midget ready for frying.

  “My,” said Mama, noticing my undressed vegetation, “the potatoes were certain puny last summer.” Each potato, however, was reduced even further to home-fry slices, which were cooked in the hot bacon grease.

  She raised two dozen hot biscuits, which she served in a homemade wicker basket. Also a jar of home-dripped blackberry preserve and a dish of rhubarb conserve, topped off with a gallon of black and boiling coffee. Mama clamped a lid on breakfast with generous slabs of mincemeat pie. And home cheese.

  Nobody left lighter or leaner from my mother’s table.

  Not even Early.

  “A breakfast ain’t a breakfast, Lucy,” he told Mama, “without a piece of pie.” He spread a wider grin. “Or maybe a extra helping.”

  To tell you the honest straight of it, there wasn’t a Peck in all Vermont who’d deny a man like Mr. Early Pardee his justified eats. He was a good blacksmith. Horses trusted Earl. So did his customers. His work was prompt and perfect, so nobody had a cause to complain. Or a horse to limp.

  After breakfast, and right following milking, Mr. Pardee allowed me to observe his ritual.

  Winter or summer, Early Pardee would always shoe hot. One time he explained why. “A horse is like a woman, Robert. A horse wants to slide a hoof into a warm slipper, not to a curve of cold iron.”

  It was a pleasure to watch Early work. Never would he rush at a horse, but instead befriend the animal. From a pocket, he pulled out a long carrot. It looked more orange than usual because of the glow of his fire coals. Busting the carrot into three pieces, he fed our mare, himself, and me.

  It tasted good.

  Betsy, our mare, eyed him close, because Mr. Pardee wasn’t one of the Peck family.

  Bending over, he hefted up a hoof. “Robert, you always want to lift a front hoof first, even though it’s maybe a rear shoe that got throwed. Here, up front, Betsy can watch me handle her some, feel how I do it, smell my smell, then decide if I’m to be trusted.”

  Walking to the tailgate of his wagon, Early hooked his arms under the anvil’s points, then toted it to a stack of flat boards he’d previously prepared.

  “A anvil,” he told me, “ought to be the exact correct height. Not too high or too low down.”

  “How do you measure it?”

  “Fetch me my hammer. I’ll show you.”

  I brung it.

  “Here’s how.” Standing at his anvil, he hung his right arm down to extend the hammer forward, on a level. “See? That’s how a smith settles the proper height of his anvil table, so’s it’ll let his arm straighten full at the moment he strikes a blow. If the anvil’s too high or too low, my arm’ll tire out quick.” He smiled at me. “Make sense?”

  I nodded.

  “Soft now, Betsy,” he said. “A hour from now your hoofs are going to feel a lot more comforted.”

  As he worked, Early sang a little waltz. It was called “A Four-Footed Friend.” I don’t guess I can remember all of the words to it, but it ended “a four-footed, one-two-three-four-footed friend.” Nobody could ever accuse Mr. Early Pardee of being a sweet singer. His voice sounded like maybe he gargled with gravel. Yet, when he sang “A Four-Footed Friend,” it was somehow velvety as a mare’s nose.

  Working gentle, he scraped away some scurf grit off Betsy’s hoof rim, wiping the hard, pulpy frog with a rag. Using pincers, he pried off the shoe, then pared the horn shorter. He tossed me a half-circle clipping of hoof and watched me catch it.

  “Feel how wet and ne
ar-to-soft a hoof really is?” he asked me.

  He was right.

  “Believe it or not, Robert, I bet there’s people in this world who never bent up a horse’s leg to examine what the underside of a hoof is really like. To me, hoofs favor folks. No two of ’em are twins. I never seen two hoofs alike.”

  Thinking about what Early Pardee had told me, I figured it held a smack of truth.

  “Never,” he said, “purchase a hard-hoofed horse. If you do, chances are his nature’ll be equal steely. A brain like barbed wire.”

  He made one more smooth cut around the entire rim of Betsy’s hoof.

  Edging in closer to cop a look, I asked, “How much do you know to shave off?”

  Without glancing up, he answered. “Just enough to allow her frog to hop, to take the shock off her legs. The frog’ll bounce her gait so she don’t drag-trot. Horses are same as people. When your feet hurt, ya ache all over.”

  Early burned a shoe red in his fire; then, holding it with tongs, he clanged it on the anvil with his hammer.

  Before his asking me to do it, I fetched him a bucket full of water. Well, not really full up, but mostly. As he dunked in the red iron, a hiss popped up to match the steam.

  “There,” he said. “That’s a warm slipper, Betsy.”

  Fitting the hot shoe to her filed foot, he pounded in all the nails. When her foot was flat rested on the ground, I could see the sharp nail points poking up through the top of her hoof, until Earl twisted off each one with a pair of shorter tongs. Now all I saw was a neat silvery row.

  “They look like little stars,” I said.

  To my surprise, Early stared at me, saying nary a thing, just looking. At last, he finally spoke. “That’s what my wife said to me once. Just as you done. Like the twisted-off nails were stars.”

  “I’m sorry Mrs. Pardee died,” I said. Because he’d lost his wife a year before.

  Early wiped his wet face. “Yeah, me too. Some days I ponder what’s keeping me alive. Why I go on living alone, and lonesome.” He patted Betsy. “Funny thing, I don’t usual talk about Martha May to nobody.” He sighed. “At home, I still keep her slippers under our bed. They’re so little and pink. Yet I keep ’em there with me, hoping she’ll come back again.”