Zbornik Mednarodnega literarnega srečanja Vilenica 2004 - Ljudmila

Sydney Lea
Yoked Together
The warden, cop, and vet all told me on the phone the coon must be destroyed,
provided, like them, I possessed the means to do it, as for better or worse
I did.
He’d come up out of our woods and onto the porch and simply would not
scare.
He had stuff running out of his eyes, and skinny, tatterdemalion hair
and he probably had, therefore, rabies. Or maybe distemper. In any event,
surely something was wrong, and according to the doctor, my good friend,
something abnormal enough it likely posed a not inconsiderable health
threat
to our family, our dogs, our property, and to other families and to other
pet,
and also to what he called »the wildlife community.« By the time I got
done
searching for keys for the gun cabinet, he stood out there in the winter
garden,
where now and then he pawed at the wilted greens of a buried carrot,
pausing
now and then as well to lift one foot, and next the other, and looking
more than anything bewildered. He reminded me of poor gone Arthur,
the idiot from one town away: he and I used to split wood together,
and he’d sort of do the same thing with his legs, and his eyes were also
ringed
with black. (He smoked a filthy corncob pipe, through which everything
must pass: milkweed, leaves of grass, cigars, cigarettes, chew—you name
it.)
I suppose I thought of him because he too was above all else bewildered.
He’d squint and scratch his head, as if he never completely understood
—no more, really, come to think of it after all these years, than I could—
why I’d show up at his shack every late August with the saw rig and the
maul
to help him fill his woodshed, which was no more than an empty ponystall.
237