Wigford Rememberies. Kyp Harness

      There is a stumbling and a clambering at the back door as Daddy Jack, Bud, Harley, my brother and I come in from the barn stamping our big black barn boots at the door, all caked with mud and shit. Daddy Jack’s gravelly voice rumbles on about the axle on the grain wagon: “Gotta go to town to get the axle on the grain wagon fixed since Bud didn’t git it done yesserday.”

      “Ah shit, I said I’d take it in tomorrow!” grumbles Bud but Daddy Jack says he wants to git ’er done today, and he’ll need Harley and Bud to hoist it in and out of the pickup—the Ole Clunker they call it, an ol’ truck from 1957.

      “There goes my fuckin’ day,” moans Harley.

      “Stop yer bitchin’,” Daddy Jack snaps and grunts as he strains upon a chair changing from his barn boots into his town boots.

      “Oh,” Momma Simpson says, “I gotta go into town to take a casserole to the Henderson’s funeral.”

      “Well hurry the hell up!” mutters Daddy Jack as he changes his hat. My brother and I are excited because we’re all going into TOWN and Momma Simpson pulls the pan from the fridge and Harley and Bud go out to get the axle and we all stamp out to the Ole Clunker.

      Daddy Jack leaps in the front and fires up a smoke, Bud and Harley come struggling across the yard with the axle (“Slow the fuck down!” shouts Harley, “Keep yer fuckin’ end up!” yells Bud) and Daddy Jack guns the engine which comes clanking, quivering, revving, shaking, grinding, turning over with a chugging sound and then with a blast like the world splitting in half, the Ole Clunker starts pounding and vibrating, voluminous clouds of exhaust in the back.

      Daddy Jack reaches under the seat and pulls out a bottle with a mouthful of warm beer left in the bottom which he sucks back with a smacking sound then pitches it out the window. Momma Simpson jogs out with her casserole covered over in cellophane, her whole body flapping and flopping, going on about something about the Henderson’s funeral, but Daddy Jack just yells out with a sharp shake of his head, “Git in the truck, woman. Jesus ye give a dog’s ass a heartburn!” and guns the truck again as Bud and Harley hoist the axle into the back and then jump in after it.

      Momma Simpson crawls in the front with us, and all is a big thrill and a calamity and a commotion because we’re all going into town, and though nobody even smiles there is a special thing about going into town but only if you have a reason to do so, and as we do in this particular case then everything is all set, this is a special day, and with a roar the Ole Clunker backs across the grass and vrooms down the driveway, clouds of exhaust and dust and gravel crackling and flying up everywhere.

      We swerve out onto the highway, Daddy Jack’s tiny eyes watching the road expressionlessly as he taps his cigarette at the window, Momma Simpson going on about the funeral: “Never sick a day in his life till the cancer, started out a bump on his back, dumb doctor didn’t know nothin’.” But there’d be a good lunch at the reception.

      The hydro lines bob and jiggle at each side, barns, houses, horses, forests, farms and fields, swelling and shrinking, Johnson’s Variety, Pepsi-Cola and sky all up above, the yellow-rimmed clouds and the sun going higher, the white line of the highway and in the back Harley and Bud smoke crouched on the floor watching everything disappear.

      Harley kneels and shoves his face out into the cold wind, sees Happy Henry the Bible Freak up ahead, hobbling along the highway shoulder in his long black overcoat, his long thin legs slicing as he strides like he’s a walking pair of scissors, his tiny head bobbing forth and back as if he’s counting each step he takes in his head, both arms rigid and loaded down with heavy suitcases containing pamphlets and bibles.

      “Bud!” shouts Harley and Bud looks as they come abreast of Happy Henry and Harley horks out a truly incredibly large membrane of green-grey mucous which slides out as if in slow motion, hovers and flaps in the air for a moment till caught by the wind, then is sent splatting and wrapping itself around the head of Happy Henry, whose suitcases go thudding to the earth as his hands fly to his face and Harley and Bud howl with brotherly delight as Henry’s frantic figure goes shrinking into the distance.

      And in the front Momma Simpson still goes on about the bump and the cancer and Daddy Jack just sighs from time to time, squinting into the sun’s bright glare sending a white fuzz shooting into our eyes despite the visor flap, but you get the idea Daddy Jack doesn’t even hear Momma Simpson anymore just by the way he smokes his cigarette, and in a minute he starts talking in the middle of one of her sentences in a quiet, thinking kind of way.

      “Ya see that bird on that sign up there?”—the sign says TRAILERS FOR RENT—“Well my dad coulda not only seen that bird, he coulda tol’ ye what kind of a bird it was, not only from the distance we just were, but from a good half-mile back more ’n that,” he mutters.

      And now Momma Simpson is silent, like he isn’t interrupting what she was saying, like she can’t even remember talking in the first place. She watches the bird as Daddy Jack blows out a big cloud of cigarette smoke and stubs his cigarette in the ashtray.

      “When he was seventy-nine he could see things even more farther away than I ever could, way out to hell and back. ‘Jack,’ he’d say, ‘can you see the colour a that pickup goin’ down the fifth line?’ Well, I’ll be goddamned if I could…” Daddy Jack says, more like he’s talking to himself, or to somebody else who isn’t even here. “Seventy-nine, never wore glasses a day in his life. Now that was a man who really could see.”