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1.
Wendell Lyons hated his neighbors, which was unsettling to a man of faith. He had, to the best of his recollection, never managed to hate anyone before, except his second wife Roxanne, who had revealed her true nature by running off with a Baldwin piano salesman and half of Wendell’s Virginia Fireball Lottery winnings. In one fell swoop she’d sabotaged his entire forty years of Christian charity, prudence and restraint, all of which had managed to survive, though severely tested, even the rocky year between their wedding vows and her nocturnal and surreptitious departure. Not even his habit of woodsmithing in the shop—the beveling of edges, sanding for patina or shaving a tenon to wed its mortise exactly—could prevent him from feeling that cold heat of rancor in his bowels.
Over those tempestuous months of wedlock, not even Roxanne’s chronic laziness, her outbursts of china flinging and money-draining schemes to take the greeting card market by storm had succeeded in decimating Wendell’s habit of hoping for a harmonious future. Hope supplemented by his routine morning prayer: “Oh Lord, give me the strength and understanding to seek the good." After all, hadn’t he met her at church?
Despite her snit fits on the week-long Cancun honeymoon and the endless ordeals of the ensuing seasons, Wendell had been certain that patience and tolerance would prevail, as the Gospels promised. But when he discovered she had loaded her suitcases into the trunk of her new Volvo and slipped away while he slept, Wendell simply snapped. By the time he discovered that she had emptied their substantial checking account, he was already too furious for words.
The one redeeming thing about hate, he found, was that it was easy to get the hang of; even a beginner could excel. Roxanne had been gone seven months now, and he steadily simmered and fumed, even when he dreamed. He often awoke in night sweats and sensed her scowl suspended in the dark air before him, as if it were branded in his mind. His breathing was labored and his mind grid-locked. On such occasions, his fingers clenched the coverlet as tight as Jacob’s wrestling grip.
By the time the latest neighbors arrived, his newfound talent for enmity had become a steady, unsettling presence always glowing at the back of his awareness like a pilot light. Dorothy, his first wife, would not have approved, and she would have found a way to soothe him, to bring him back to his better self. But Dorothy was at rest, and her absence just amplified his exasperation.
The Wingers—Sally and Dean—had bought the house next door, a chalet affair and the only home in Wendell’s view shed, just after Valentine’s Day, but he had no extensive contact with them till spring, when he discovered, or believed he discovered, that they must be newlyweds themselves, lovebirds. Mostly, the pair came and went unobtrusively to and from their jobs co-managing the health store down town, as he had learned from the postman, but as the breezes of April sparked the forsythia to a frenzy, the neighbors began to leave their windows open, broadcasting their funky music into the air to drown out the songbirds. They had a young beagle who could be heard baying from the basement when they were at work, and they even left the sashes up when they were at their frequent and clamorous lovemaking.
Sally Winger was inclined to shout non sequiturs during coitus and take the name of the Lord in vain, which Wendell could not bear, and the couple of them laughed like hyenas and moaned, while Dean was actually given to caterwauling, “Yippee," like some TV buckaroo. In a more populated area they would have been a scandal, he thought. In the Old Testament, they would have been stoned. Hard as he tried, Wendell could not find a way to ignore or forgive their noise.
One afternoon when Dean Winger was clearing away brush with a parrot-beaked bill hook which looked capable of ripping through armor, Wendell gathered his resolve and strolled over, smiling and careful to keep a friendly pep in his walk. In Levis, a Good News T-shirt and gum boots, he was certain he looked welcoming and introduced himself with his Men’s Fellowship smile. They occupied ten minutes with the obligatory pleasantries—the weather, the tourist industry, the prospect of retirement bungalows on their wooded road, the small forest fire that had blackened a section of Jump Mountain. The Wingers were Democrats, Unitarians and pacifists; they’d moved from Pennsylvania to escape what Dean called “the corporate wilderness." They were themselves strict vegetarians, Dean added, but found the coyotes howling from Atlas Mountain to be enchanting.
Then Wendell pivoted on this notion of acoustics across the ridge and said, “You know, I hate to mention this. It’s a little awkward, but I thought you should know that voices and other noises people make will carry out here just as clearly as animal sounds."
“What do you mean?"
“Well, it’s just that when you and your wife are being amorous, especially in the quiet of a morning, it’s pretty easy to hear from anywhere on my property. I’m often on the deck reading my daily lesson when it happens, and it can be, well, you know, a bit disturbing. I’m no prude, mind you, but it’s not exactly the kind of wildlife I moved out here to observe." He broadened his smile and gave the “what-can-you-do?" shrug with uplifted palms.
“Do tell," Dean said, smiling back. “What kind of lesson?"
“My Bible lesson." He pointed to his shirt. “I was an assistant chaplain in the navy, and I’ve always kept up my study of the Good Book. I used to hold prayer meetings for the sawyers, stackers and drivers down at the Bremer and Bremer Sawmill when I was yard foreman. The Good News, you know?" he pointed to the letters printed across his chest.
The younger man’s face was crossed by a look of puzzlement that settled into what Wendell thought was bordering on a sneer.
“Get all the way through the New Testament yet, chaplain?"
“Yes. Many times. Why?"
“I just assumed there would be some advice in there about judging others, you know, about tolerating them and not interfering. Charity and all. I mean, maybe you could just turn a deaf ear. Sal and I don’t set out to invade or disturb anybody, but we do feel a good deal of healthy passion for each other, and we don’t really aspire to smother it. Besides, we can’t exactly seal ourselves in—we don’t have central air. Look, I’m truly sorry if our affection troubles you, but like I said, a deaf ear."
“Your dog’s barking bothers me, too." He had not planned to say this, but his frustration had built up faster than the situation merited, and he knew immediately that implying any connection between these two disturbances was probably a tactical error.
“Hey, this is the country, you know, as in not town. Cows and coyotes, tree frogs and crows and sometimes the two-stroke internal combustion engine. Bobcats, even, and all sorts of dogs. I’m sorry for you Chaplain Lion, but it appears you’ve developed a sensitivity beyond your means. You’re not exactly running a silent Zen temple yourself, you know, and you might just count your blessings that you didn’t get new neighbors who beat each other up or throw furnishings around until blood is spilled. Strong passion is a good thing, positively. You should give it a try. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got brush that needs cutting back to get ready for our bean rows."
Sensing something ominous in the man’s manner of gripping the garden implement, Wendell backed off a step.
“And by the way, Mr. Lion, I have to use the weed-whacker when I’m done with this thing. Expect several decibels. I trust you won’t find it embarrassing."
As Dean Winger cocked the hook back like a five iron and lit into a locust sapling, Wendell could see the shift and clench of his lean muscles and the menacing tension in the cords of his neck. He might have been the Assyrian falling upon the fold. That was when Wendell realized he had found a new target for his recently acquired capacity for disdain.
Then a voice from the A-frame floated out. “Dean sweetie, come in here and fix this hung-up computer for me."
In her tone Wendell heard sequins and incense, dove notes and the clink of finger cymbals he had always associated with the counter culture. Turning back toward his own house, he mouthed, “Harlot, probably. Jezebel." Somehow, finding the appropriate labels consoled him.
2.
Wendell’s grandson Little Jake ran in the door shouting, “He’s killing her. He’s killing her," and his father Big Jake looked up from Braves baseball with a puzzled expression.
“What’s he talking about, Dad?"
“Probably the next door neighbor, Jake," said Wendell, who was at the counter squinching the juice from a bowl of lemons. “He and his wife have pretty rowdy marital congress more often than you could imagine, sometimes on Saturday afternoons. And I don’t think this is about being fruitful. They don’t seem to keep their appetites in a proper perspective, if you know what I mean. Or their voices. I was afraid it would come to something like this."
“Like what?"
“He’s killing her. Do something." The boy was jumping about in the flailing calisthenics of a TV chimpanzee.
After the Jakes were gone, the boy only slightly mollified by explanations involving a noisy but harmless “game" adults play, Wendell punched the phone buttons and waited until Dean Winger’s voice answered. Wendell knew his tone was scalding, but he was sure this qualified as righteous anger.
“I warned you about this. I knew somebody would be embarrassed before long if you didn’t learn to respect others enough to shut your windows. Now you’ve upset my grandson. What am I supposed to tell a child?"
What he heard back was a rapid-fire rant.
“Mr. Lion, did it ever occur to you to go back inside for a few minutes, to take your holy writ and your puritan attitude back into the sacred safety of your own castle for just a spell? Maybe even crack a brew? You love to run-run-run your tiller at the first hint of dawn, and your saws and drill rattle on into the night with what I’d call an ungodly racket. You don’t seem to be bothered by your own air conditioner in the afternoon or your precious nightly ballgames, which I can hear from my yard, play by insipid play. Isn’t there a “do-unto-others clause" in your translation? Listen, you might as well learn to tolerate other people’s idea of a good time and their rights of expression, or you’re a man bound for radical unhappiness. That’s my last word on the matter."
When the vegetarian hung up, Wendell tried to comfort himself with the old stoic motto, “This too will pass," but it wasn’t working. Like poor Dorothy’s wasting illness and then Roxanne’s misbehavior, some things wouldn’t just wash over and away. That night he dreamed of Dorothy propped up in a foggy hospital room with all the helpless hi-tech devices whirring and blinking. The room seemed to have no ceiling, and she was trying to warn him about something, as always. Sweet Dorothy. But her voice was too frail, like a dying sparrow, and when he sat bolt upright, completely awake, his cheeks wet with tears.
Outside, he could hear the coyotes on the ridge above MacCrowell’s farm mourning some loss of their own, and he imagined their howls rippling the hardwood leaves like a force moving through water. At a lower pitch, one of Mac’s Charolais was complaining, “Moon, moon, moon."
3.
What Wendell yearned for was a righteous public solution, but everyone from the gum-smacking dispatcher at the sheriff’s office to his own lawyer told him their hands were tied. They understood his frustration and certainly sympathized, they said, but an uncooperative neighbor stood just beyond the bailiwick of local authority.
“Try to reason with him," said Fenster. “He’s likely a rebellious sort who doesn’t enjoy taking suggestions from somebody he probably considers a geezer. Believe me, you’ve got your best chance of getting that window shut if you treat him like a reasonable man."
“But isn’t it . . . ?"
“No noise ordinance, no real case of public disturbance here. There’s no Screw Police, Wendell, and I can’t really make a civil suit out of it. Smile at him. Charm him. Adopt a policy of live and let; he’ll come around. Meanwhile, you’ll save yourself from over-paying me to file some useless paperwork that will just make him madder. But keep me posted. If he does anything violent, we can move."
That evening, just at sunset, they were at it again. It had been the year’s worst scorcher so far, and Wendell had just collapsed into his porch rocker with a glass of lemonade. He was ready to enjoy the new moon’s lip rising under Venus, but when he heard her shouting for Jesus over and over, he couldn’t imagine how even a couple of over-sexed unbelievers could bear thrashing around in such heat. Maybe it was all the tofu and wheat germ. Shaking his head, he thought of Dorothy’s quiet pleasure when they were young, and then, sourly, of Roxanne’s unconcealed indifference.
When Sally Winger whinnied like a mare, something inside him turned a corner. He felt a shiver of revulsion and, fighting the temptation to picture what was going on or wonder if it involved equestrian tack, he resolved—since divine intervention was too slow in coming—to take matters into his own hands, to teach them a lesson, as he had done when he moved Roxanne’s belongings, piano and all, into the yard and added kerosene and one blossoming blue-tip match. But the question was, how?
As he rose and headed back inside, he could still hear Sally Winger cooing and twittering like a nesting bird.
4.
All week Wendell kept gazing through the trees at the Winger house, as if he were on a stakeout. He knew the woman came and went, but she never seemed to appear when he was on surveillance. She was either gone before he woke up or, evidently, cloistered in the house till after dark, but he desperately needed an image to fix on. As the frustration built, he decided he had half a mind to drive over to the coop, which he’d never actually entered before, and catch a glimpse, see what the trollop looked like. But no, he thought; you start stalking people, and you are not operating with true faith. Roxanne had been like that, compulsively secretive, coming and going like a ghost, but prying into every aspect of his past, right down to asking a pharmacist the purpose of each of Wendell’s medications. No, he would bide his time and wait for Providence, or luck, to offer a view.
5.
Wendell hadn’t previously known what it meant—“trebuchet." French, evidently, but that Wednesday night he was arrested by a History Channel show all about a kind of catapult which the commentator claimed was superior to any common ballista or onager. In steady use as a siege engine for a thousand years, the trebuchet had dominated anti-castle warfare even a century after the introduction of gun powder, perhaps because it could be built with materials at hand and employed the resources of a wooded landscape against any stronghold intended to protect the locals.
“Algorithmically elegant," the balding physicist had said, as he pointed to a chart and explained the operation. “It’s a gravity-powered energy conversion machine, as simple as any projectile device ever conceived. This one we’ve constructed is full-sized, a real monster."
Then they showed the trebuchet flinging a beer keg into an old Dodge van parked a football field away. The sun in the smashed windows and on the crumpled chrome looked for a moment like a bursting star.
“Unfortunately, they are cumbersome to transport. Had this device been more mobile, or even easier to break down and then reassemble, the Crusades might have turned out differently. Unfortunately for the Christian knights, not every desert fortress was surrounded by convenient timber."
A dozen tanned men in sand-colored clothes and wide-brimmed hats laughed heartily. Then the skinny one pulled the trigger ring, and they all sprang back as the engine’s hanging counterweight dropped to launch another missile, this time a rusting round-bellied woodstove, which struck with a deafening clangor and collapsed the blue metal junker downrange.
“Bull’s-eye," the crew shouted as they danced about like school boys, and one white-bearded warrior with a swishy accent fairly sang, “I do love Isaac Newton." Then the scene gave way to a commercial offering pastel laptop computers with a mail-in rebate.
It was the word “Crusades" that echoed pleasingly in Wendell’s head. “Christian knights," as well. Perhaps he, too, had been called upon to reclaim his sacred territory from an infidel, to restore quiet order to Timber Ridge. He had all the tools he needed, and his eight acres were covered with promising hardwoods. Desperate times, desperate measures: why not heed the call? He could drop something on them like word from on high. He could smite them.
6.
Goggled and masked, his ears clamped in the protectors that made him hear a surf echo, Wendell resembled a spaceman as he worked till all hours of the night measuring and marking the treated deck timbers from Lowe’s. He didn’t actually get to the assembly, but he enjoyed the ceremony of wearing his protective gear like a paladin of old. As he moved about the shop, he swayed to an interior music.
Earlier that evening, he had seen a flock of starlings swooping around amid the ceiling beams in the discount supply store, and he believed that to be a positive omen from above telling him to leave his own oaks and hickories in place and opt for more precision-milled pieces. He wished he could have just called Roy at the shop and asked for seconds, but the resentful taunts and the tangible jealousy about his lottery win were still too fresh in his mind. Sixteen years of comradeship demolished by his windfall. Wendell didn’t understand how it had happened, but Dorothy had suggested that sheer covetousness and the meager nature of his coworkers’ lives were enough to explain the change. He still didn’t like to think about it.
The next morning he drilled and sanded the mail-order hobby model he had ordered for experimentation. He wanted to get the fine points right in miniature before he started constructing the heavy version, as the three-quarter-scale medieval siege engine of his ultimate plan was not something to throw together lightly. While the privacy fence and a stand of rhododendron screened his activity from the road, his two-story house stood between the work yard and the Wingers’, so he was confident that no one could observe his preparations. It was also satisfying to imagine that the tomcat yowl of his power tools was driving his neighbors to distraction. When his circular saw struck a knot and squealed, his mouth formed an exaggerated grin, and when he realized that he hadn’t been forced to hear their inconsiderate frolics since he began scheming and building, he knew his plan was already tranquilizing him. Besides, the rhythm of the work was a delight in itself.
Pulling the hand saw across the miter box, Wendell chuckled, remembering how the educational program’s host joked that a treb should not be attempted without adult supervision. It was always adults who made war, he thought, but something of the boyish had to remain for anyone to get his dander roused to the point of action. And it was always adults who knowingly defied the Lord, as well. But why? Children were probably too spontaneous, too innocent; Big Jake had been. Wendell almost couldn’t wait to call his son and tell him how he would bring the neighbors around to reason, but he knew Big Jake’s wife Lucy was prone to excessive worry, so he decided to keep it to himself until the deed was done. Working faster, fueled by satisfaction, he began to invent a trebuchet dance.
Instead of his morning lessons, Wendell worked on a pad calculating beam length and sling tension, release points and trajectories. This was the Warwolf design used in Scotland, and all he’d had to do was scale up from the twenty-dollar model and figure out how to torque the cables and lash the struts together on a grander scale. The larger version was a little trickier, as it had to absorb the shock of its own strength, but he was certain he had the figures right.
Amid the flurry of sawdust and the curled slivers, each component was becoming a thing of beauty, and he was certain it would perform, as the miniature trial piece had consistently flung lemons clear across his Great Room in a sweet and memorable arc. Once, he had a flashback of Roxanne throwing Dorothy’s willowware against the hearthstones, but he erased the image with a wave of his gloved hand.
He knew the completed weapon might be able to hurl anything from meteor-like fireballs to animal carcasses. Way back when, an invading army might be starving out an enemy town whose walls were too thick to be breached, but it always hastened the inevitable if you could lob diseased meat into the commons, especially if you could luck or pray it into a water source. A sack of bricks might make an emphatic statement. Or a pink-swirled bowling ball like the one Roxanne had left in the hall closet. Some millionaire in England, the TV program had said, built a weapon monstrous enough to heave pianos, but Wendell was sure none of this ammunition was suited to his less brutal purpose. He wanted symbolism, just a touch of shock and awe. Dead meat seemed right. And he’d had enough of pianos.
7.
Ten days after his telephone conversation with Dean Winger, Wendell looked upon his creation with pride and amazement. The beams and levers were all sanded, the axles rasped for traction, and the timbers gave off a fresh and reminiscent smell in the morning air. The whole device was solid but sleek, and he felt its original design must have been divinely inspired. It was June now, and he planned to test his contraption with various-sized sacks of fill dirt from the garden center. He had not yet decided exactly what payload was appropriate to aim into the Wingers’ open window when they recommenced their sacrilege, but he wanted to learn how to adjust for elevation and windage.
Wendell, for all his anger, still had no intention of causing actual bodily harm, and he was more interested in a warning than architectural damage. What he wanted was surprise. Wit, maybe. Huge as the trebuchet was under its veil of army surplus camouflaging, he needed it to act as a precision instrument of protest. “Close" and “almost" were fine for horseshoes and hand grenades, but retribution demanded an exact eye and a calibrated heart. As he pictured Winger’s angry neck muscles when he swung that brush hook, Wendell was sure of his own heart’s proper adjustment. All he needed was to get the machine’s ratios in delicate harmony and to learn the weapon the way a hunter learns his bow.
8.
Rounding an aisle at the Kroger, he hit on it: fryers. He could buy a dozen of similar weight and practice his aim. When the Wingers were at work he’d sneaked over and stepped off the distance from the slide gate of his fence to their dingy cedar shake wall, and he figured it was another thirty feet up to the wide bedroom window. Sine, tangent: trigonometry was a wonderful thing.
And he couldn’t imagine a more appropriate missile than a pink chicken, plucked and gutted but still skin-clad and slick. If they were so immersed in the carnal, the stripped and unembellished, a little carnivorous fuel would be in order, a good old naked hen. Free range, of course. They could add that item to their frou-frou trendy diet. If they preferred life raw, stripped of decency and discretion, he would be happy to oblige. Harpo Marx couldn’t have hatched a more appropriate plan.
9.
He had never really seen her features before. The Winger woman had been more of an idea, a sprightly silhouette swirled in pagan-colored skirts and blouses between her porch and car port, but through his bird glasses Wendell could now tell that she was a frail-seeming, heron-like woman with short reddish hair and pale complexion, someone who should probably avoid extreme weathers and labor. She was leaning back in the Adirondack chair shielding her eyes from the sun. She didn’t resemble Dorothy or even Roxanne, but her sunning outfit reminded Wendell of his Cancun honeymoon, his young bride ignoring him to “work on her tan," all the service women festive and fetching in their flowery dresses, his own study Bible too familiar and displaced in the exotic setting. “Was that it?" he wondered. Had he become a creation of envy and venom because his new wife had been as fish-cold and evasive as she was flaky? “Sweet Jesus," he thought, “what is happening to me?"
The whole time Wendell observed the woman through his binoculars, she had not lifted the book from her lap nor opened it. Suddenly, a cloud unveiled the sun, and light shafted through the trees like the spikes of a thistle. Then some kind of nimbus seemed to take form about her face, which was inexplicably radiant, the face of a child-like angel, and he felt his sweat run cool, his knees tremble. Suddenly, as if summoned to it, she turned her shaded eyes in his direction and, staring right through the corridor of leaves, raised her arm and waved. Disconcerted as he was, he held her in the lenses long enough to gauge her wide and animated smile as human and kind, as if she had forgiven all or, perhaps, knew nothing to forgive. This was something new and strange to him, a kind of secular benediction on a par with the well-worn words of the gospel, and Wendell lowered his glasses.
Try as he might now to focus on the husband’s sassy voice or his threatening eyes as he swung the billhook, Wendell could only summon a dim image of his own face, downcast and ashamed. Her wave had held up a mirror, and what he saw was sullied and profane.
Ten minutes later, Wendell finished swiveling the trebuchet downhill, now pointing harmlessly toward Trickle Creek, and adjusted it for full power. He had added as much stoneweight as he felt the contraption could manage, and as he carried out the box of cold hens, he wondered if Sally Winger were as guileless and delicate as she seemed. He felt petty and ashamed for backsliding into the ways of the mean-spirited world. He stood amid the scrub laurels and ragweed, looking to the sky for an answer. Then, at last, a feeling of release washed over him, and he knew he had just stepped back from the threshold of a serious, even fatal, transgression.
Lifting the first thawed pink fryer up to the sling, he cradled it in, almost wishing it could be a lump of gold, all his winnings from the Fireball, that he could just jettison the last four years of his life, the windfall and all the dominoes that had fallen after it. Foolish as it might seem to others, he half wished he could be free of any remnant of the lucky but soiled money that had paid Dorothy’s medical bills and attracted Roxanne to him to begin with. But, he thought, folly is no reason to be stupid. Dorothy would have said that, once upon a time. Leaving the siege weapon with its poultry payload aimed toward the moss-rimmed creek and away from the Wingers’, he rotated the cocking cog until the trigger catch clicked and set.
“Bombs away."
Thanking God for showing him the righteous path before it was too late, Wendell took a deep breath, snatched the trigger ring and launched the first chicken, which gave off an eerie whistle as it left the sling. High into the blue sky and above the wind-shivered summer trees it sailed, and suspended against the heavens it was a peculiar and beautiful thing—damp and soft, a symbol of something he needed but had no way to name, unless it was simply the Good News, and he said it aloud: “The Good News."
As the chicken disappeared in a feint thrash of underbrush, he understood it was as close to an angel as he deserved, maybe as close as he could stand. “As we forgive those who trespass against us," he whispered, as he reached for the next projectile, hoping the coyotes would find them all as soon as the sun went down and scatter the bones across the lonesome hills.
R.T. Smith was raised and educated in Georgia and North Carolina, served as writer-in-residence at Auburn for a decade and a half, and now edits Shenandoah. His newest book is Brightwood: Poems (LSU 2004), and his stories have recently appeared in New Stories from the South (2002 & 2004), Best American Short Stories, Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He currently holds a fiction
writing fellowship from the Virginia Commission for the Arts and is teaching a course in the American short story.
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