Free A Piece of My Heart by Richard Ford

The old man reached down and jerked his white sock up and plowed at his nose. “He took five bone sawyers from New Orleans back in there on two, forgot to light the jet after he’d turned it on. The bone sawyers got there drunk, and they all sat down to wait for shooting time, and every one of them went to sleep and didn’t wake up. They found Mr. Buck’s cadaver on the bed with a doughnut in his hand. He musta eat that doughnut and went to sleep, and all the rest of them just sat out there at the table and put their heads down. They didn’t even get a doughnut.” The old man pawed his face and gawked as if it had been a great inconvenience.
    â€œWhen did that happen?” he said, trying to envision Buck’s old face, and unable to work it back out.
    â€œDecember, six years ago,” he said quickly. “I didn’t see the bastard for two or three days. He didn’t come to get my instructions. So I figured he was drunk, and went out to his house and there they all six of ’em was, and the place smelled like hell. There wasn’t no way to get it out of the boards. So I went out, after they had carried them all off, with a gallon of gasoline and put a matchto the son-of-a-bitch, and burnt it down and plowed it under.” He smiled. “So there ain’t no more house. I put soybeans in there right where you lived.”
    â€œWhat do you do with the hunters?” he said, still trying to fathom up Buck’s face.
    â€œPut ’em in Minor’s house. He’s got sense to keep a fire lit. I don’t employ no more drunks.” The old man’s tiny blue eyes seemed to hold tears in them.
    â€œBuck said he wouldn’ta drunk so much if you hadn’t brought him the whiskey,” he said.
    â€œHe’s a goddamn liar,” the old man shouted, rising out of his chair, his eyes snapping. He grabbed the backing on the chair and squeezed it until the cane cracked. “Buck was on the goddamned hooch the first day I seen the bastard, and it was hooch that killed him by muddying his goddamned mind so he couldn’t even remember to light a goddamned pilot.”
    â€œHe figured you give it to him so he couldn’t do anything else and so you wouldn’t have to pay him nothing. He couldn’t do nothin about it, Mr. Rudolph, but he knew it.”
    â€œBuck went to California—you know that, don’t you?”
    He watched the old man’s face twist out of one angry expression into another one.
    â€œHe went out there and learned how to be a soak and come back here and tried to turn it into a skilled trade,” the old man said.
    â€œSome people ain’t lucky,” he said, watching the old man grow madder and madder, and feeling better.
    â€œSome people don’t know when they’re good off.” His eyes flashed. “They have to fuck it up. What’re you doing here, Hewes—trying to fuck up something?”
    â€œI wanted to look at you.”
    â€œWhat the hell for?” The old man was hunched up underneath the bulb, glaring.
    â€œIf I had a good idea, I might just think about twistin your head off.”
    The old man smiled instantly. “Old Buck might not of knownvery much, but he knew how to kill hisself good enough. You don’t even know how to do that, Hewes.” Rudolph’s smile broadened until he could see dark splotches on his gums.
    He looked at the old man in the cone of scaly light, leering out at him, until he felt the urge to go away and come back in the night and burn the house down and everything with it.
    He went back out through the kitchen all the way to the truck without stopping. But when he got in, he tried to think about Buck killing himself, waking up in the cold little house and looking out and seeing nothing at all, knowing that in an hour or a half hour the doctors would be there, and there was nothing to look forward to beyond sitting there with the old man