True Cross - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

T. R. Pearson is the author of eight novels, including the classic A Short History of a Small Place.

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As housecoats go, it was comely and well crafted. The thing had piping and placket pockets, a stylish drape and a scalloped hem. The collar of it was sufficiently stiff to stand up against a chill, and the belt ran through three loops and had been whipstitched into place. The fabric was fleecy and gray with scarlet laurel blossoms in the weave along with a manner of foliage Elvin identified as burdock, though I was doubtful that even a shabby robe would come festooned with a weed.

Through Elvin?s office window, we could see Erlene out in the cow lot where she served as a housecoat model while she flung corn to her hens. Once Elvin had cataloged for me the sundry virtues of her robe, he brought to my notice a trundle bed in the corner by his sheet stove, had me to know that Erlene sometimes popped inside and loved him up and thereby blunted and salved for Elvin the grinding strain of cattle keeping.

Elvin rose from his chair to show me how Erlene would shuck her robe, lay it back anyway on her shoulders and present herself for congress without having to guard against the stray migration of her belt which, Elvin took pains to remind me, had been whipstitched into place. Then he sat back down and plundered through the shoe box on his desk until he?d found the receipt for that bathrobe and the ticket for the gas he?d required to carry him down and back from Roanoke where he?d bought it.

As was my custom, I refrained from a pronouncement straightaway and occupied myself instead with study of Elvin?s documentation. I saw on the register tape that Erlene?s robe had cost upwards of forty dollars, had been purchased in August at half past noon with cash and for exact change while Elvin hadn?t bought his Roanoke gas until December which I hardly felt cause to trouble him to give an accounting about.

Instead I favored Elvin with the slight and colicky smile I?m prone to and shook my head to convey that Erlene?s robe was not a deductible item which, naturally, served to render the cost of the gas a personal expense too.

For his part, Elvin shot from his chair and raged about his office. He paused before the lone window and mounted a profane bid to raise the sash, but it was stuck in the slides and resolutely humidified into place. So Elvin put his face to the three-inch slot between the bottom rail and the sill and acquainted Erlene with the news that godless craven sons of bitches had up and taken this nation over and were running it anymore.

By way of response, Erlene flung a fistful of corn in Elvin?s direction, and he retired from the sill as the kernels clattered like shot against the panes.

Elvin stalked over to his trundle bed and gave the frame a kick. Then he toured the entire office while he sputtered and he swore which, truth be told, was not so terribly much of an excursion since Elvin had framed and built that office where a cow stall used to be. The room was only four strides deep and maybe three strides wide, so Elvin invariably met a wall just as he?d hit prime stalking speed.

I sat and waited him out, occupied myself with perusal of Elvin?s decor which was firmly in the local upland workspace tradition?a fair dose, that is to say, of grimy indiscriminate clutter leavened with gaudy religious artifacts and soft-core pornography. The place was littered with ear tags for cows and sacks of galvanized fence staples, half-empty jugs of fly balm and greasy cast- off coveralls. The walls were hung with a decoupaged Bible verse on a slab of varnished cedar, a porcelain likeness of Our Savior with a clock where his sternum should be, a glossy picture of a brunette selling pouch chew with her cleavage and a calendar photo of a leggy bronze thing in a macramé bikini posed before a clump of sea oats with a reciprocating saw.

?Got a good mind not to file. Let the bastards come and get me.?

That was pretty much Elvin?s quarterly refrain, so I just sat and waited for Elvin to spend sufficient of his ire to see his way clear to drop into his desk chair once again. He was a while, however, in winding down, had a talent for tirades and lurched about for a bit while unfreighting himself of seditious commentary.

I had a handful of clients given to Elvin?s strain of indignation, and, like him, they none of them paid any taxes to speak of, earned only enough to qualify for exclusions and subsidies. While his stint as a cattle keeper may have seemed a career to Elvin, year in and year out he was usually on the hairy edge of a hobby. So Elvin didn?t really need to deduct a fleecy robe with a whipstitched belt but could have stood instead to have shown a bit more in the way of a going concern.

A cow came to hand as Elvin passed his open office doorway. His herd had to go through the barn to get from the pasture to the springhead, and a heifer paused to look in and discover, I guess, what the storming around was about. Elvin took the opportunity to deride and blaspheme cattle as a species, and, since she was handy for it, he smacked that heifer on the snout, snatched off his cap and popped her which she tolerated well. She rubbed the side of her head on the door frame and indulged in a rumbling bovine necknoise before laying her ropy tongue on the floor and swabbing clean a plank.

Elvin finally wandered over and dropped back into his chair, the one he?d salvaged from the landfill and had proposed to depreciate. It was held together with angle irons and sixteen-penny nails, rode on four scrounged lawn-mower wheels instead of castors. As was his custom, Elvin groaned the way that Atlas probably would were he to ever know occasion to shift the world off of his shoulders, to unkink his achy lumbar and to smoke.

?I don?t know,? Elvin told me. ?I just don?t know.?

Then he dredged a little phlegm in a fashion that, for Elvin, was reliably punctuational, indicated he was prepared to stray entirely off of taxes and touch, for variety?s sake, upon some topic otherwise.

?How?s old Stoney?? Elvin asked me.

Now I was acquainted at that time with a couple of Stoneys and had to pause to settle on which one Elvin might be asking after. Professionally, I knew a Stoney who was an exotic dancer in Raphine. She had part interest in a lounge off the interstate that catered to truckers chiefly. She operated a triple-X Web site, sold sex aids through the mail and owned outright a slummy little apartment house in Stuarts Draft.

That Stoney had authentic income and legitimate business expenses, hair about the color of blush wine and surgically cantilevered breasts. She wore around her neck a filigreed locket she?d opened for me once to reveal a tiny photograph of young Sal Mineo sweaty and stripped to the waist.

I decided she was hardly the sort who Elvin was likely to know?a racy female, that is to say, in the 36 percent tax bracket?so I fixed on my fallback Stoney, a neighbor of mine across the road. I was living in a rental on maybe forty acres that cozied up to the national forest, and those evenings I?d stand on the porch to take my Dickel with mountain air, I could sometimes see that Stoney down the swale beyond my drive where he was usually shifting tools out of his van or mucking around in his yard.

As he was a quarter mile or more away, I?d just hear him on occasion, most particularly when one of his cats had made of Stoney sporting use, had sprung out at him and plunged its claws clean through his trouser leg when Stoney would yelp and Stoney would reach to disengage that feline, when Stoney would visit upon it a few choice words of scalding abuse as prelude to flinging that creature overhand across the yard when I?d often meet with occasion to hear the cat a little as well.

I?d made Stoney?s acquaintance the day I moved in. He?d dropped by with his mattock in hand both to tell me, ?Hey here,? and seek my permission to hack at a stump in my yard. Stoney had decided somehow that stump was the...