Free Men in the Making by Bruce Machart Page B

kennel. Grandpa hollered, "Easy, Allie," then he took me tight by the back of the neck. "Listen, boy. You hear it?"
    "The dog?" I asked, wondering if maybe the old man had gone deaf the way he'd gone bald—all in an instant.
    "Not the
dog,
boy. What the dog
hears.
Bobwhite quail, way out in the pasture, bobwhitin' their little feathered asses off."
    I turned my ear to the south, but all I could hear was the dog howling and the buzz of mosquitoes and the almost liquid hiss of the wind swirling in the scrub grass, rattling the crippled-looking branches of the mesquite tree by the barn. I looked up at Grandpa, who still had me firm by the neck, and shook my head.
    "You can't hear 'em?" he asked. "Not even a little?"
    "No, sir," I said, the way my mother had taught me.
    "Well," he said, smiling, "me neither. Can't hear shit, matter of fact, but that dog can. You better believe that dog can."
    I laughed and took another sip of beer and Grandpa gave me a playful shake before turning me loose. "You know what, boy? It's a damn shame we didn't get that soil up there in time. You might have made an okay Texan."
    I finished my beer and Grandpa pulled me another from the ice. Hard as he was to understand, and callous as he could be sometimes, I couldn't bring myself to feel much of anything but respect for him—not, anyway, with him finally smiling and giving me beer and acting like he might, somewhere in the deep-down insides of him, love me like the son he'd lost, so I asked him—I said, "That would have counted? If the soil would've been under the bed?"
    The sun was going down, and Grandpa looked out west over his field of August cotton to where the sky was blistered with clouds. "Hell, boy, I ain't gonna lie to you—probably not. Probably wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference." He swiped his fingers over his bald head like he expected to find his hair grown suddenly back into place. "But I don't reckon it could have hurt."
    Â 
    There always were, in Grandpa's way of speaking, lessons to be learned about the way Texans did things, or didn't do them, and to me, they began that summer to sound like his way of talking about my father without speaking of him directly. The morning after I'd arrived in Texas, three weeks before Grandpa gave me my first beer, after a nighttime storm that threw hail hard against the roof and softened the soil with rain, he took me out to the dog kennel where his pointer, Alamo, was curled up in the shade. He scratched the dog on the neck and took a long look inside his floppy ears and filled the food and water bowls, all the while whispering, "That's right, Allie. Just a few more weeks and we'll put you on the birds."
    Out back of the chicken shed, he reached into a burlap sack and threw feed around on the ground the way Stan dealt cards when he and my mother played gin after dinner most nights. Then Grandpa took hold of me by a belt loop and pulled me out to the pasture. "There you go," he said, spitting down to direct my attention toward a glistening pile of cow flop in the grass. "Looks like a good one to me, kiddo. Reckon you can give her a good stomp?"
    I looked up at him, at the tight smile of his lips, at the thin thread of spit that still swung from the stubble on his chin. "Go on," he said. "Texans don't ever mind a little shit on their boots."
    After I'd stomped around awhile, playing a crude game of hopscotch from cow patty to cow patty, Grandpa looked at my boots and laughed and said he thought that would probably do for starters. "We're going to have to teach you to use the boot jack," he said. "If she ain't haunting the place already, you better believe your grandma will be rattling chains tonight if you track that stuff through her house. She never could abide that." Grandpa pulled the neck of his T-shirt down and scratched at the skin beneath all the wiry white hairs he had growing there, his lips still working all the while, like he'd lost his voice but not the will to