Mudman, Ejercicios de Idioma Inglés

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Mudman PINCKNEY BENEDICT Some people say a man ts made out of mud, A poor mans made out of muscle and blood. Muscle and blood and skin and bone A mínd that's weak and a back thats strong. —Merle Travis, “Sixteen Tons” 1 ON ANOTHER DAY, Tom Snedegar would have smashed the dirt dauber “Y without a thought, but on this day--an overcast Sunday when thin greenish mist fluttered like cobwebs in the gullies and sinkholes of Snedegar's place—on this day, Snedegar just watched it come. “Youd bite me if you was to get the chance, wouldn't you?” he asked the wasp. lt buzzed its wings. It was only maybe a foot from the steel- capped toes of his boots on the cold concrete floor of the milking par- lor. Snedegar decided that he liked the wasp, liked it for its truculence, liked it for its solitary ways. “Bite hell out of me,” he said. He rummaged briefly in the cabinet on the wall until he came up with the measuring cup that he sometimes dipped into the cooling tank, to sample the sweet raw milk. He had used the same cup since he was a boy. The glass of the measuring cup was thick and slightly yellow. He upended the cup and bent to put it down over the wasp, but the Wasp was gone. Snedegar looked over the milking parlor. He had just finished hos- ing it down after the morning milking, and it looked clean and pleasing to him, with its ranked feed bunks and its overhead hetwork of pipes and its solid concrete block walls. He checked the floor again, the mea- suring cup dangling by its handle from his fingers. No wasp. lipped me.” he said, and the wasp buzzed in response, lt had found Mudman [ 35 its way onto the leg of his coveralls, its abdomen bobbing dangerously. Snedegar brushed at it with the back of his hand and it fell to the floor. Snedegar plopped the measuring cup over it. The wasp's wings blurred, their whirring muted. He got on his hands and knees to look at the trapped wasp. He squinted his weak left eye so that he could focus more sharply with the right and put his face close to the measuring cup. The wasp reared up on its hind legs and returned his gaze between the faded seven-eighths and the full-cup markings. lt was a great, glossy dauber, and it had extraordinarily long wings. Snedegar took a minute to admire the gorgeous black-pearl curve of its thorax, which was the size of his pinkie finger's first joint. He exam- ined the neat articulation of the wasp's small body, its oily limbs and agile antennac, the deftness of its armor. Its depthless eyes, He tapped the glass, and the wasp droned. lt seemed content to wait. Snedegar wanted a mudman. He needed it to help him out around the farm. He worked the operation alone: two milkings a day feeding, chopping the corn, maintaining the buildings and the equipment. The list of things to be done was endless, but money was always short, and it was almost impossible to hire anybody to do the sort of work that Snedegar did. “Pll never get to Heaven,” Snedegar said to himself as he dug. He was getting the mud to make the mudman. Sundays were the Sabbath, but Snedegar worked anyway. The cows didn't know what day of the week it was. They had to be milked, they had to be fed. When he had a mudman to help him, he could begin keeping the day holy He could accompany his wife to the church she attended in the county seat, and on the rounds of pleasant errands and visits she always undertook afterward. She was doing those errands right then, and he couldn't tell when she might be back. Snedegar's thoughts wandered briefly to the trapped wasp. A wasp didn't get tired. A wasp needed nothing. A wasp never wasted time mooning about what to do. He had watched this particular one for weeks as it built its nest under the eaves of the dairy barn, rolling up little pills of mud at the edges of puddles and then hauling them aloft. 36 | Pinckney Benedict Stinging fat spiders and taking them away, too, to feed its babies, the spiders” long spindly legs dangling as the dauber bore them upward. Time to get back to dígging. Snedegar put the shovel blade into the dirt of the field again. A couple of his Holstein heifers watched him with mild eyes as he burrowed. Snedegar's wife was town-bred and not made for farm life. She was young and pretty. Sensible shoes, tidy bosom. She worked part-time at a travel agency in the county seat. She worked for a man named Carl- son, the youthful guy who owned the travel agency. Snedegar chopped at a stray root that blocked his digging, sank the sharp blade of the shovel deep into the loam, and added another wet spade-load to the growing pile. The dirt was rich with fat nightcrawlers. Without the mudman, Snedegar would never get to Heaven, because he worked on the Sabbath. He did pretty well on the other Commandments, if he said so himself. No strange gods, no cursing, honored his father and mother, both dead for years. Had no reasons to lie, no one to lie to. No murder, and he wanted no woman other than his wife—hc wanted her so fiercely that he thought sometimes he would go blind or die with the wanting. Coveted nothing, needed nothing other than this place, these acres that were his and-is alone. Couldn't imagine needing anything else. Except the mudman. Carlson the travel agent would get to Heaven because he took Sundays off from the office. Carlson was well scrubbed and he dressed handsomely. Snedegar had no one to work with him, but Carlson had Snedegar's wife. Sncdegar laughed to himself thinking of his orderly wife working alongside him as he grubbed in the dirt of the field. He was sweating heavily. He had enough dirt piled up to make his mudman; he had plenty, but he kept on going. The hard ground yielded up valueless detritus: a sharp flintspear point, a scattering ofhog' teeth, shards of glazed crockery, a length of greasy chain, a glistening rib. Sne- degar's shoulders and arms and back bent eagerly to the task of excava- tion, as they always had to difficult physical labor, and the dirt flew. At last, the edge of the shovel's blade scraped against bedrock, send- ingup a flurry of short-lived sparks. Snedegar paused. He was standing in the hole that he had made, and he felt mildly shocked to find how deep itwas, only his head rising above the lip. The dark shape ofa hawk rode the thermals overhead, cruising, looking to dine on the mice that Mudman 37 throve in the dairy barn, or to hook one of the portly groundhogs that populated the farm, that tunneled endlessly through the dirt of the fields. Snedegar hated the groundhogs because they made their dens in his fields, made craters that were a danger to his livestock and that threat- ened to damage and destroy his machinery He killed them whenever he was able, and hung their limp, furry bodies on his fence posts for the crows to pick at. He silently wished the hawk good hunting. Up to his neck in dirt, Snedegar realized that he had pretty much a groundhog/s view of things. Stones loomed like mountains. The hori- zon was inches away from his nose. He felt like prey A cruciform shadow swept over him, and he glanced upward. The hawk cupped its broad wings, stroking its way upward into the flat, colorless sky, and Snedegar closed his left eye so that he could focus his right on it. He saw then, as it flared and circled toward open ground, that it wasn't a hawk at all. Itwas a horned owl, its curved beak slightly open, its feathers rumpled and dirty looking. One of its legs was crip- pled, the claw drawn up and withered. lt gave Snedegar the creeps, to see a night bird outin the middle of the day. The owl disappeared over the ridgepole of the dairy barn. Snedegar bent to his shovel again, but the impulse to dig had left him. He felt tired. He felt so tired suddenly that he thought he might just fall asleep, leaning on his shovel handle. It occurred to him to lie down in the foot of the hole. He could just forget about the mudman, forget about the Sabbath and the wasp in the milking parlor and his wife. He could simply lie down and stare upward. Maybe the hawk— no, the owl, the daylight owl —would return to sail over him, to relieve the monotony of the lowering sky the deck of clouds that promised more rain to come. Mudmen had once done a lot of the labor in amongst the hills where Snedegar had his dairy When hardwood was king, a hundred ycars and more ago. They had worked the clear-cuts, snaking the giant sawlogs out of the woods, dense white oak trees fourteen feet in diameter, logs that could acquire a coltish life of their own when a man chained them and skidded them down the hillsides, into the bottoms where the 40 ! Pinckney Benedict jerked her blouse open, laugh as he ignored ber protests, frightened of him now, laugh as he rucked her dermure skirt above her waist, as he tumbled her to the floor. There had been mudwomen too, at the logging camps and up in the hardwood forests. It was inevitable, so few women in the region, which was a wilderness then, and so many randy, uncouth men. That was what had ended it, finally, the mudwomen. They awakened something that had not previously exhibited itself in the stolid, silent mudmen, who were made exclusively for work, a sort of sympathy. Sympathy that quickly bloomed into what could only be called love. The unanswerable love of the mudmen, the unrelenting sexual desire of the timber apes: mayhem ensued, deadly violence that spread swiftly and terribly and ineluctably from one teeming sawmill town to the next, swept through the hollers and down the creeks and racéd along the ridges. Axes and splitting mauls and whirling band-saw blades and rotgutliquor and pistols and fire. When itwas over, a dozen of the timber apes lay in shallow graves in the stony bottoms, their arms and legs and spines fractured by the awesome, impassive strength of the mudmen, their ears and noses and mouths stopped up with silt, their lungs filled with the suffocating stuff; and the mudmen had been utterly purged from the face of the earth. se Snedegar finished cobbling together the form for the mudman out of two-by-fours. He hauled the earth up into the loft bucket by bucket, dumped itinto the mold, added water until it achieved what seemed to him an appropriate viscosity, tamped it down, shaped it with his hands. He was covered in it. He had made the mold large. There wasn't much to it, really —two arms, two legs, heavy body, blocky squared-off head. He was no artist. He had lugged, all told, probably four hundred, maybe five hundred pounds of earth to fill the mold, but he figured that the mudman would weigh a good bit less when it had dried out some. He knelt down beside the head of the mold, extended his index finger, poised it over the great flat face. A poke for the left, a poke for Mudman | 41 the right, and a pair of dark, beady eyes stared up at him. He stood back from the mold so that he could observe his handiwork. The mudman's slashed his forefinger across the face, a hand's span bencath the eyes. A lopsided, unsmiling > TE Snedegar balanced precariously atop his ladder, jabbing at the deli- cate panpipes of the dirt dauber nest with a paint spatula, He worked * the thin edge of the spatula under the nest where it adhered to the unpaínted wall of the dairy barn, just beneath the eaves of the sharply sloping roof. He wanted the nest, with its slecpily murmuring cargo of baby wasps, to serve as the mudman's heart. The nest began to pull loose, and Snedegar moved too quickly with the spatula. Bits of the brittle nest broke free and spiraled to the ground thirty feet below, and Snedegar imagined that the muttering within increased in volume and intensity The dried bodies of garden spiders, the wasps” larder, sifted out like shell corn. He had watched the dauber build the nestand fill it with dauber eggs and paralyzed spiders. The eggs hatched, and —Snedegar's mind did not like to go to what happened next, what happened to the spiders there in the muddy dark. He was no great fan of spiders, but some things did not bear much thinking about. “Hush now,” Snedegar told the babies, and he crooned a brief lul- laby to them. It was a song that he recalled his mother singing, but the memory was a distant one and it contained no words, so he could only hum the tune as well as he remembered it and hope for the best. He sang in time to the monotonous banging that rose once again from + Caesar's Ghost, and Snedegar believed that the wasp babies inside could hear him, that they knew he meant them no harm, that he was -. going to put them to a good use. He believed that they were humming ¿along with him. From up near the barn roof, he could see out over the breadth of his operation, with its little clusters of silos and outbuildings, the pole barn and the granary and the machine shop. Along the eastern fence line, a couple of crows did noisy battle over the week-old carcass of a groundhog, spiked to a leaning post. Their screeches floated to him like the voices of bickering children, Vo sond a Cta gaze seemed to follow him. Snedegar grinned, Leaning down, he 4 mie obes y" WEY PE 42 | Pinckney Benedict The wet soil of the field looked softas a featherbed. It seemed invit- ing, as though it wanted him simply to loose his hold on the ladder, to spread his arms, and drop down sprawling onto it. The hole that he had made looked bottomless to him, filled with moving shadows, He glanced around for the cruising owl, thinking that it might be drawn by the squabbling of the crows, but it was nowhere in sight. There were other wasps' nests under the roofline, dozens of them, decades” worth, but they had been broken open over the years and emptied by the ravenous beaks of barn swifts. This one, the last whole one, would have to suffice. He slowed his breathing and steadied the hand with the spatula, working with the concentration of a surgeon, lle. The tadder wobbled beneath him and he stopped scraping at the wall for a moment to brace himself and to get a new grip on the ladder. He had a gallon-size freezer bag with him, into which he planned to drop the nest when he had freed it. He thought that the nest and the baby wasps and the freezer bag all together would make a most satisfactory heart. Growing, Feeding. Tireless A swift landed on the edge of the tin roof, fluttering its wings momentarily for balance, its claws clattering like light rain against the slick metal. lt turned a bright eye on him. He thought that it looked bungry “Get your own,” he said to the bird, which flicked its head so that it could look at him with its other eye. “These ones are mine.” He went back to work. The dauber nest gave slightly, and the spatula slipped another half inch beneath it, a full inch, two. Snedegar put his hand on the crum- bling surface of the nest, and he could feel the young daubers waking within, ceasing to batten on the still-living spiders, hauling themselves reluctantly over one another's compact bodies there in the trembling dark. In the warm enclosure ofits stall, Caesars Ghost ceased to bear its head against the wooden walls, and the silence was a blessing. The nest released its hold on the wall with shocking suddenness, and Snedegar went after it as it slipped away from him. The exten- sion ladder rocked and threatened to telescope itself, taking Snedegar down with it. His fingertips recalled the rough terracotta exterior of the nest, recalled it so keenly that he felt he could almost will it back nto his grasp, but the glatter of the frail mud pipes against the hard Y 4 ground below told him/thar the nest was gone Pots 7 NN To Aza _T é Mudman | “The birds came. They swooped through the air like little fighter planes, the swifts, and they plucked up the struggling young wasps and ate them, They ate the shrunken, quivering spiders, too. In their greed, «they grabbed up bits of the mud nest and flung them down again. Sne- degar beat at the birds, and they twittered furiously as they circled his “head, avoiding his swatting palms without difficulty. They pecked at the plastic bag, they gobbled wasps, they jabbed ar Snedegar's hands, beat their wings against his brow, clung to his back, their tiny claws pricking his flesh through the fabric of the coveralls. Snedegar crawled on the packed earth, racing against the birds, sweeping the baby wasps and the shattered pipes of the nest and the “spiders into the baggie. Sometimes he slipped and his hands or his knees crushed this or that wasp, and the wasps stung him as he saved them. He wanted to cry out but he didr't, swifts caught in his clothes, swifts trapped in the tangle of his hair. ' Snedegar tapped at the upturned bottom of the measuring cup. “Pl never getto Heaven,” he told the trapped wasp. He wondered what his face looked like to it as he gazed in through the distorting lens of the glass. Vast and cratered as the moon. He knew that a wasp's eyes saw in differently from a man's. He wondered if maybe the wasp thought that he was God. What it would be like if he were under the measuring cup. A dirt dauber god leaning over him, poison-filled stinger the size of a man, wings like the sails of a windmill. The notion filled him with horror. Wasp god. 1£ God actually was a wasp, then he, Snedegar, was going to be in terrible trouble, Every now and again, a bird would throw itself against the milking parlor window with a bone-cranching thump. They wanted more of the wasp larvac. The sound of their bodies smashinginto the glass made Snedegar wince. Stunned or dead, they lay on their backs near the barn's Gundation, their wings outspread, their dainty claws upthrust. The wasp turned its back to Snedegar. “Don't you want to bite me?” Snedegar asked it. He held up the baggie, hal£ filled with baby 46 Pinckney Benedict “Will you come up>” he called to her. His voice sounded exhausted and weak in his own ears. “After a while” she replied, her voice light and singsong. ret up this mud you tracked in. You go on to bed. Go on to sleep. He closed his left eye and brought his face close to the photographs, one after another. He wished for a jeweler's loupe. The tones of the photos were muted, and the timber apes swam in his vision, indeci- pherable blotches of light and dark. They faded even as he peered at them. The trees were vast, the hillsides steep. The men were small. The mudmen ... Where were the mudmen> He hauled himself into his bedroom. The wasp was there, motionless beneath the measuring cup on his bedside table beside the clock, which he wound and set to wake him for the morning milking. The mudmen were a lie. There would be no mudman for Snedegar. The knowledge grieved him because of the time he had wasted this day. Grieved him, too, because he could no longer imagine how he was going to be able to keep the Sabbath holy, and so he would never get into Heaven. The wasp waved its antennae at him, and he leaned over to it. “Nighty-night” he told it, and the moisture in his breath fogged the glass “Tve got to sitting Snedegar dreamed of the vacuum canister. In the dream, he cárefully unscrewed the top of the tank and set it, just as carefully, to one side. The LN2 was precious stuff and not to be wasted. Wisps of vapor rose from the darkness within, along with a kind of hissing, A buzzing, Put- ting his ear to the tank, he thought that he could make out the voice of the mudman. The voice spoke to him with the droning of insects' wings. He could make out individual words, longer phrases, their meaning. This was an old language, the language of wasps, meant for human ears, and it filled him with terror. He stood over the mudman's form, the canister in his hands. The metal of the tank was cold, and he could feel himself beginning to freeze. Freezing was a relief He welcomed the numbness, but he knew that it could prevent him from doing what he must. From doing his work. He braced himself to resist the creeping cold and raised the canister, tipped it so that the liquid nitrogen ran out in a heavy stream, but not not Mudman 47 as it struck the warm earth of the mudman's body, Praia ng as Snedegar laved it over the mudmar's limbs, the dirt E ing and crystallizing, fracturing under the cascading stuff. DN Wasps, grown now to Iaturity, two inches longand more, began ca Pi from the mudman's flesh; they pushed their way blindly out- ward mo the buried heart to the surface. They knew that the end was coming, decp within the mudmar's chest the; i i ke > y felt it coming on like winter. Snedegar deluged them, and the; ' win Ñ ; h Te was an astonishing pleasure , a it, to see a gleaming Wasp, pulling itself free, turn in an instant to ue smoldering glass, the perfect simulacrum ofa was, and shattcred and crambled ¿ ' shrieking imprecations in th mouth never moved. seething smoking before it burst into dust. The mudman was screaming, e voice of the wasp god, but its crude a Snedegar stepped back from the bed, in awe of what she had A Begome, What he had made her. Her body was a perfect glimmeri jow: of a blue so pure it Pained his eyes to look at ir. e He shook the canister, and it continued full. Which meant that work was not done yet, lt was heavy, and the muscles of his arms 48 | Pinckney Benedict were tired, but he raised the yawning mouth of the tank, touched its He prodded th - uncarthly cold to his blistered lips, and began eagerly to drink ¿Pudgy out-thrustbellyofthe first groundhog with a £ . : bis and the animal twitched and snapped its jaws at him, rolled a A A alive. Pinned through the body to the ocre or [are-headed iron nail, a handmad. il drawn by brute force from the timbers of 'he dany or a Snedegar woke in the night, thinking that it must be time for the morning milking, but the clock told him that it was not. That was hours off yet. His wife slept heavily beside him. He held his breath, lis- tening for the sound that had brought him out of his dreams. The rain muffled everything. He could hear the settling of the farmhouse on its stone foundation and the ticking of his bedside clock and the slow creeping of the wasp bencath the measuring cup. Round and round the perirneter it went. Then, distantly, the metronomic rapping that he The mudman. knew to be Great Caesar's Ghost. Snedegar kept track of the strokes ¡He came near to laughir Thi until he reached thirteen, and then he left off counting. aras such a thing. Ho e ma Sanda e na work. There > » rad made it. He thought of down the row of groundhogs and 'm--not all, but many—were alive ly at the air. Snedegar marveled at The wasp god. When his alarm clock rang, Snedegar flung out an arm to shut it off. His fingers connected with the measuring cup, and it flew from the tabletop and thumped to the hooked rug that covered the floor. The wasp sat still for a moment, as though unsure of what to do with its newfound freedom, and Snedegar almost got a hand over it before it spread its impressive wings and darted away. The room was dark and he quickly lost sight of it, but he could still hear it bumbling around up near the ceiling. Snedegar patted his wife on her warm hip. “You watch out now,” he told her as he rose. “There's a wasp loose in the room.” He. trotted down the lane, sloshing his way through the puddles w places. He tried not to look at the strug- ¡SSumIs, Crows, a feral dog, wi with the withered claw. rol pe queasy numbering in his mind the fence posts that ss ” ma Dozens. How many fence posts on the entire place? eds. Lhousands, all set by the hands of the Snedegar men. Every fence post along the short lane between the dairy barn and:; the house bore the body of a groundhog, pinioned like a butterfly i a kid's collection. Crucified, their buck-toothed mouths comical! agape, rodent eyes startled and bugging. The sight of them lining th road—ten, fifteen, more and more of them as Snedegar played the: beam of his flashlight along the fence—staggered him. lt was dark ou time for milking, and the rain was still falling, pattering off his cap an the shoulders of the slicker that he wore, catching like bright beads. the shaggy coats of the groundhogs. 52 | Pinckney Benedict not going to get into Heaven, and his wife was not going to get into Heaven. That much was sure. And one other thing as well: when the time came, the mudman was going to rise and set about his work. Zoanthropy DAVID BENIOFF HENEVER A LION was spotted prowling the avenues, the authorities itacted my father. He had a strange genius for tracking predators; he ade a lifelong. study of their habits; he never missed an open shot. 'here is a statue of him in Carl Schurz Park, a hulking bronze. He tands, rifle shung casually over his shoulder, one booted foot atop a lead lior's haunches. A simple inscription is carved on the marble edestal: MaAcGREGOR/DEFENDER OF THE CITY. The stat- s:proportions are too heroic—no Bonner ever had forearms like t—but the sculptor caught the precise angle of my father's jawline, flat bridge of his nose, the peacemaking eyes of a man who never sed an open shot. In:the old days, the media cooperated with the authorities—nobody 'átited to spark a panic by publishing news of big cats in the streets. 'hat attitude is long gone, of course. Every photographer in the country iembers the New York Post's famous shot of the dead lion sprawled actos the double yellow lines on Twenty-third Street, eyes rolled white, blood leaking from his open jaws, surrounded by grinning policemen, elow the banner headline: BAGGED! My father was the triggerman; grinning policemen were there to keep the crowds away o its sacrilege to admit, but 1 always rooted for the cats escape. A reasonous confession, like a matador's son Pulling for the bull, and 1 dor't know what soured me on my father's business. A reverence for ed: kings, 1 suppose, for the fallen mighty. 1 wanted the lions to have iance. I wanted them to live. 'All good stories start on Monday, my father liked to say, a line he rited from hís father, a Glasgow-born minister who served as a lain for the British troops in North Africa and later moved to odesia, where my father was born. For my grandfather, the only