spot if he had had his gun with him. Instead, he had brought along only a heavy rope. He slipped it around the bull’s neck and, on horseback, tolled the animal back to the tree in the front yard. There he tied it with a chain. Now the bull raged. It lowered its head, flared its nostrils, and pawed the ground in front of it. If John had not stepped briskly back, the bull would surely have gored him to death. All night long the bull alternately roared and moaned his discontent. The child Johnny tossed in his bed with compassion for the chained animal.
At home John warned his family about the vicious bull. The next morning he left for a distant orchard early, promising to return by noon to repair the corral. Noon came and went. Shortly before three o’clock the air became heavy. A storm was building up again. Nervously, the bull pawed the ground in front of it and made deep, anxious noises.
Watching from a front window, John, Jr. suddenly left his perch and ran out the front door. He clambered down off the damaged porch. The bull watched him suspiciously with red eyes. The boy moved closer, talking in soothing tones to the animal. It stood quite still and seemed to be listening. John, Jr. approached closer. He confidently reached out his hand to pet the enormous creature’s head. At that moment, the mother, coming out the front door, emitted a scream so loud it shook the heavens. Startled, the bull lowered its head and plunged forward. Its horns caught the boy full in the belly, impaling him horribly and catapulting his body beyond the circumference of the tether.
The mother ran from the house to her son. She gathered the battered, bloody child in her arms and ran with him to the old Buick parked next to the house. Laying the boy carefully on the seat next to her, she started the car—no one ever removed the keys. She tore out of the farm and down the highway the two miles to the little hospital in Fort Valley. When she handed over her son to the doctor in the emergency room, she was hysterical. Another doctor administered an injection to her. He went into the examining room. In a few minutes he returned. “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, “but your child is dead.”
The hospital notified the owner of the bull, who raced to the Meadowses’ place. Having gotten the animal in the truck, he drove it to the slaughterhouse for destruction. The sheriff, dispatched to search for John, Sr., found him about to leave his peach orchard. Out of fear for what the shock might do to him, the sheriff transported John to the hospital. “There’s been an accident,” he explained, without giving any details and without disclosing the outcome.
When John learned of the terrible happening, he poured vile curses upon his wife for her carelessness. Normally, he never gave way to profanity and forbade it of everyone in his presence. She, for her part, utterly distraught, inveighed against him for getting a dangerous bull and for his cruelty to the animal.
All this went through the man’s mind, scene for scene, as he and the dog progressed down the tractor road. They were halfway through the piney woods to the other side and the open fields when John, Sr. came to an abrupt halt. He threw his head back and emitted a cry of great volume. His knees buckled. He dropped in a heap on the ground. He sobbed. His ululations stung the forest, but they did not escape beyond. They penetrated the stark, dry Georgia pines; they scraped the rocks; they entered the red clay; they left the soul of the man and touched the dog. Through the shower of his tears the man gazed into the eyes of his dog and heard him whine. For a split second both were touched; for one moment nature was in harmony.
Then the magic broke asunder. The dog bounded away. The man rose slowly from his sorrowful wallowing. Once again he trudged in the direction of the hunting fields.
The sky was getting darker. With the pine baldachin above him it was hard to tell how close the storm was. Most afternoons when the weather was hot a thunderstorm erupted. But sometimes it passed by to come crashing down ten or twenty miles away. What did it matter anyway? he thought. He’d been wet many times before.
At the edge of the forest, before stepping out into the field, he surveyed the sky. It looked worse than he had imagined. Maybe he should turn back. But why? What was left at home now? The events of recent days passed through his mind again. This time they were not strung out; they were rolled into a hard knot, a cannonball lodged in his skull. He had to void it, but he knew he couldn’t.
All at once Duke plunged into the field a hundred feet ahead of him. A rabbit shot up out of the grass directly in front of the dog. In a flash the dog leaped upon the flushed animal and grabbed it by the neck. Twisting, turning, the dog finished off the twitching rabbit and then stood over it for a moment. Then it seized the carcass in its mouth and trotting back to its master, Duke dropped it at John’s feet.
The fuse was lit: John’s blood pressure rose, his face colored, and his head ached. His eyes clouded, his mouth went dry, and his arms and legs tingled. His insides exploded. He picked up a rock and slammed it against the dog’s skull again and again. Duke staggered. Eyes wide, it stared at its master. Then it was dead.
There came a monstrous clap of thunder, but John never heard it. He was on his back, his eyes staring glassily heavenward, questioningly, a burn-rip in his suit from shoulder to ankle. Then the rain came, cascades of purifying water. It fell on the man and his dog. It covered the rabbit. It bathed the man’s house. It penetrated the forest and washed away the cries of anguish and regret. It leaked through the roof of the slaughterhouse. It soaked into Johnny’s fresh grave. It lashed into the face of John’s weeping wife as she shut the front door against the rising wind.
By morning it had reached North Carolina.
(From Psychograms of Sickness and Death: A Partial Autobiography, by Donald D. Hook, Unlimited Publishing, 2002 and Contradictions: Short Stories and Psychograms, by Donald D. Hook, Wildwechsel Books, 2008.)
Four
Pank
Back in the old days the gang at Fauber’s Mortuary, like the boys down at the firehouse, would sit outside on a Saturday evening and wait for ambulance or death calls. They would sit on the sidewalk next to the side door, within earshot of the telephone, on chapel chairs, those squishy-bottomed metal things without arms usually kept stacked in two long, narrow closets at either end of the front of the so-called chapel, actually a multipurpose room more configured as an auditorium than a place of worshipful acts. An observer might well discern some apparent contradictions: the somberness of a funeral parlor, the sacrilegious tilt of chapel chairs against the wall; the black of the ties, shoes, and pants, and the white of the shirts; the grim subject matter of the men’s conversation—literally blood and guts—and the roll of their laughter. Louis Pank, one of several harmless thrill seekers everybody had learned to tolerate, was himself a contradiction. He hated the sight of blood, had a debilitating fear of death, but loved to ride along on emergency calls.
Today most funeral homes are different. Except for a few in the outback of America, none make ambulance runs anymore. That task or pleasure, as the case may be, has been given over to ambulance services operating as private businesses or as rescue units of a hospital or the police. The cycle has been broken No longer do mortuaries create a portion of their own business, as it were, but must rely on other agencies or individuals to send them customers. The emphasis is on that staid side of the enterprise: Prepare the body and send it grandly on its way. As Louis Pank would surely say if he were alive today: “They have taken the very life out of the death business.”
The company did not give its official approval to Louis’s volunteer services. He had had no training in ambulance work and besides, what if he should get hurt or killed? Everybody shuddered to think of the lawsuit that might result. Trouble was, the company president himself could not say no to Louis every time and sneaked him aboard. Who were the attendants not to follow the example of their leader?
If the gang had included women, probably Louis would never have had a ride, for there was no way in this world that Louis Pank could have ingratiated himself with the opposite sex. There was, in fact, only one woman in his life—his mother, with whom he lived, and had lived alone for almost all his 30-odd years. With sagging jowls, too prominent nose, and severely receding hairline, Louis’s face epitomized that hackneyed expression: “A face only a mother could love.”
The rest of him was little better. From a distance, his whole shape