!Woodsmen
 ---
by Anna @ 2016 | edit 2/29/24
 ---
Chapter 1: Once lost
 ---
The day after I took off for Memphis Mike shot a
pregnant doe, gutted the fetal fawn out and left it
damp and pink and translucent, blind eyes on the
cold leaves in the woods. He froze half the venison
steaks, took the other half to Floyd Chester's place
on the river.

You see the game? Floyd asked.

Katharine took my truck, Mike answered.

Your truck that didn't run?

Yeah, Mike said. It runs now.

I'd surprised Mike, my sudden changes in the last
year. Tanned legs and denim cutoffs, grieving woman,
girl who fixes things, thief. He didn't know if he
wanted me back. He didn't know what he'd get.

Your wife stole that Jeep you got you'd let her go
or what? Mike asked.

Let her go. She's my wife. If she won't come back I
don't want her. But she'd be back. We're married,
not living in sin like the two you. Marriage has
teeth.

Mike got a fifth of whiskey and a tumbler and laid
into it. The more he drank, the more upset he got.

What is a woman? distraught, drunk Mike asked Floyd.
It didn't look like Floyd heard but it was a dumb
question. The song on the radio was good, so Mike
listened. Floyd got up to help a customer. Mike took
another drink.

Almost a half-hour later Floyd came back, sat down,
looked at Mike's glass.

Never enough, Floyd said.

Oh I got more, Mike said, leaning for the bottle.
What you want some?

No asshole, Floyd said. A woman is never enough.

Bootlegging a dry county's as different from how
Prohibition rum-running was as shoeing horses is to
changing tires. Floyd's uncle or papaw ran shine
when it broke federal law. Floyd's generation
inherited the sense to not want that trouble in
their vicinity, ever.

Most of what you could drink or carry from Floyd's
houseboat was bought legally a county over in
Richmond or Lexington. His houseboat was posted and
chartered as a private club to keep the state liquor
board off his back. What's the difference between
Floyd's place and a guy sharing beers with friends
on a fishing trip? Not enough to particularly excite
federal or state government.

What excited the government was drugs and guns.
Taskforces descended on country towns like it was
Vietnam when they heard tell of weed, cocaine, or
illegal small arms trafficking. One part of the
government imported into Miami, another surrounded
your semi on the interstate, kicked in your family
house doors, yelled at you from helicopters. Sons of
Floyd's generation were tempted to play Scarface.
Floyd's generation wouldn't stand for it.

It didn't just bring the feds. One of Floyd's sons'
friends, Ricky, drove truck for a roofing company.
He hauled hot tar from Florida up to Pennsylvania,
up the interstate through Kentucky. When some Iron
Horses pulled him from the truck in Tennessee and 
executed him, there was an eighth of a ton of
cocaine submerged in the 500 degree asphalt he'd
been hauling. Feds descended like vultures,
compounded Ricky's loss by getting in everybody's
business for half a year.

Mike hadn't smoked a crack rock in a year. He was
fucked up by me leaving, how punked he felt, how
little sense it made. When people paid Floyd in 
Tylox or Quaalude pills or white powder drugs, Floyd
passed the drugs as much as three times a week in
small quantities to a crooked Lexington city cop who
got them very far out of Estill county.

Mike knew where Floyd stashed the drugs. He came to
the houseboat open to the impulse to do it. He
bought a stem and chore boy at the gas station in
Irvine on the way over. He left cash for the crack
rock he found. He stepped outside the houseboat,
found the chair on the riverbank.

You know you can smoke inside, Floyd hollered out.

Yeah, Mike said, his voice tight. Just wanted to get
some air. He coughed, looked up at the two-lane
bridge and the ridge beyond it, down at the river,
at the pipe in his hands. Lit, pulled, and felt
right.

He was a horse gambler, winning the big pot. He was
a stockbroker, yelling to buy before the closing 
bell and raking it in. He was a stallion fucking a
filly til his dick broke. He was a dragline ripping 
the guts out of the ridge. He was time, making 
mountains. He was good.

Just then Floyd found the ten-dollar bill in the 
drawer with the drugs, walked across the gangway to
the riverbank, and methodically beat Mike til he was
nothing at all.

When Mike was discharged from the hospital he found
himself in Shirley Chester's guest room with its
twin bed, simple dresser, and fan quilt. He didn't
meet her til he regained consciousness in the
hospital. No one he knew visited him. She came an
hour each day to sit at his bedside in denim skirt,
no earrings, hair in a severe bun, judging him
while she did the Lord's work with dutifulness but
no pleasure.

Three ribs were broken and his ulna, he had a small
skull fracture and a brain bleed, his mandible was
fractured. He'd lost some blood from a liver
fracture, his hip was sprained, shoulder was torn,
and he'd lost two teeth.

It wasn't long before Shirley had him in church on
Wednesday nights and Sundays. Mike sat quiet in the
pew. Shirley Chester clapped and shouted. Pastor's
voice raised and trembled.

Yes, a spirit of power corrupted, a spirit of the 
devil and his angels walks upon this earth, pastor
thundered.

Yes, Jesus, Shirley Chester responded.

Oh, he walks, he walks the roads, he walks the
highways, he walks right up on your porch to tarry
with the lost and the damned---

Yes, Lord---

The piano reinforced pastor's words, congregation
whipped up. A man stood laughing, jumped up and
down. Shouts raised. The kingdom of God drew near.
Mike sulked.

The devil has designed the destruction of the homo-
sexuals! The divorced! The drinkers, you know who
you are! The abortionists and weak women! He has
designed your death, my death! He reaches with his
lying fingers and promises you heaven, ha-ha. But I
say in the name of Jesus! In the name of Jesus! The
devil is a liar!

Congregation and pastor together hollered, And the
truth is not in him!

When the altar call came, Mike hoisted up on his 
crutches and propelled himself down the aisle, piano
and shouting and holy dancing, then quiet. Pastor
and elders laid hands on the three who came forward.

Pastor prayed for Mike and the old woman with a
weeping sore on her leg and the man in checked shirt
and earnest expression. Their baptisms were
scheduled. Mike propelled himself back to his seat. 
Shirley Chester welcomed him laughing, not a trace
of her dourness, holy in her ecstasy. She had saved
his soul.

Before long, Mike could dress himself and gimp to
the porch. While I worked and worried in Memphis,
Mike watched the road.

He smelled Shirley Chester's baking, saw a little 
Geo Metro driving toward town, thought about Kuwait
where it was hotter than he'd ever been, and drier.
Where he'd never know it was war except for booming
jets overhead, discipline on the base, distant
bombing of what Shirley Chester might call heathern
Communists.

Saddam was a jackass, but what business did we have,
he thought. Why did we care about babies being taken
out of incubators and left to die over there when we
allowed abortionists to kill American babies over
here?

The sky past the porch was white and blue, earth
cold and muddy and gray. Just a little sliver of
sky. Mike could see his breath, flame, exhalations
of cigarette smoke.

Shirley Chester emerged through the door in plain
dress and bun. Mike could smell her freshly baked
bread. She sat on the other rocker. Mike observed
that it was hot.

Everything grows fast when it's hot like this,
Shirley Chester said. Her husband's Chevy could be
heard before it was seen.

Mike told me before I left him he'd rather be
delivered up to the savages in the Middle East and
be devoured alive than fall into the merciless claws
of the priests.

They had cities, I said at the time.

They don't now, he had said.

On Shirley Chester's porch he pushed up on his
crutches, propelled himself toward the Chevy to be
delivered up to bible study whether he liked it or
not.

Settled in the back of the Chevy, Mike said to Mr.
Chester, who didn't live with his wife, You ever
went to war, man?

Germany, Mr. Chester said. We sat and waited for
one. Only war we fought was with temptation.

Sit and wait's what you do in a war with Communists,
Mike said.

Where'd you serve? Mr. Chester asked.

Kuwait, Mike said.

What was your MOS?

Humvee mechanic, Mike said. Only, we never used the
blessed things. I wonder what the government wants
with that poor desert. It seemed like they didn't
put up much of a fight.

We used those Bradleys, Mr. Chester said. Didn't 
stop them from burning every oil well on their way
out, Mr. Chester said.

They did, Mike said. But that was about all.

It was another twenty minutes to the church. Inside,
second Corinthians, five and seventeen. Shirley
Chester and the old woman with the weeping sore on
her leg and the man with earnest expression and 
checked shirt and Mike looked at it while pastor
read. They looked up and pastor lectured on it. He
said,

If a man is a Christian, he is a brand new creation.
The old guy is gone: look, a new man has appeared.
This is God's doing all the way through. It is he
who, through Christ, bridged the gap between himself
and us and who has given us the job of also bridging
the gap.

God was in Christ, hugging the world to himself. He
no longer keeps track of man's sins, and has planted
in us his concern for getting together. So now we
represent Christ and it is as though God were
pleading through us.

In the name of Jesus we urge you to open up to God.
For our sakes God put a man who was a stranger to 
sin into a sinful situation so that in him we might
know what God's goodness really is.

Mr. Chester was waiting outside when bible study was
over. Shirley's weird adult son lurked in the the
truck bed. The boy lives with me, Mr. Chester said.

Mike had left his crutches in the truck. Next day,
his casts were cut off. Doctor said he should go for
more physical therapy. Monday Mike was back at work,
back living at his own place, explaining things to
the landlord each month, then explaining things to
whoever would listen.

Landlord doesn't care I got beat up, Mike said to
Don Hansen while they ate their sandwiches at the
plant. Light bill doesn't care. Phone bill doesn't
care.

Shut the fuck up Mike, Don said. I don't care
neither.

Jim who worked on the wire-rope spooling machine
walked in the break room, took off his eye and 
hearing protection. You all got coffee fixed? Jim
asked.

You want to pay Mike's rent? Don asked. Cause he
sure as hell don't.

Jim took the old filter out of the percolator,
dropped it in the trash, spooned in new grounds.
Well hell I don't want to pay my rent neither, Jim
said. But I don't want to see my ex-wife, and I
don't want to come to work, and I don't want
Mexicans to take my job, and hell if I can do any-
thing about any of it.

Mike's feeling sorry for himself because he got beat
up and his leg hurts, Don said.

Good thing you're on the forklift, man, Jim said.
Wish I could sit down on the job. You missed a lot 
of work didn't you.

Yeah a month and a half, Mike said. But the landlord
doesn't care.

Talk to me after work, Jim said. You're off
weekends? The coffee percolated loudly. It filled
the break room with its warm, dark, bitter scent.
After mountains of snow dumped mid-March by the
storm of the century melted, Mike started
moonlighting with Jim's guys on his days off,
transplanting weed in the National Forest in
Jackson County. He didn't go back to Shirley
Chester's church to get baptized.