Jed Gudger

By Alan Greiner

Nebraska, 1936

She had been at the kitchen window, looking out into the white storm. There was no darkness outside, just window light on thick, flying snow blown almost horizontally by a wind she could feel as weight against the house. Absently she dried her hands by the sink, shivered with draft, turned from the window toward the kitchen table, the towel trailing from one hand. ‘I can’t get the boy off my mind.’

‘Matt Gudger’s boy again?’ He didn’t look up from the day’s store account ledger. He licked the pencil point, bent to his figures under the wheel of light.

‘Yes. Jed’s twelve now and still behind a grade, or more. I have to pass him on at the end of this year.’

‘Have to?’

‘Yes. I must. He can’t stay back again, not at his age.’ She hung the towel by the wood-stove. ‘Already he doesn’t have friends.’

He set down the pencil, looked up. ‘What are you gonna do?’

‘I don’t know.’ She untied her apron, held it, turned back to the window. ‘That’s why I worry.’

‘Well, you shouldn’t,’ he said, and leaned back in his chair. ‘It makes no matter much. He’s a good kid I guess. Alma Mertz was in the store just last week for suet to set out for the birds. She was saying as how he helps her sometimes, stops by goin’ from school though she’s off his way a bit. She likes him well enough, makes cocoa to warm him. Guess he’s willing’ to do things, like he helped clear the chicken house door so she could get ‘em in when the storm come.’

‘Last week he wasn’t at school until noon one day. I guess he stopped at Alma’s place first.’

‘I guess, maybe.’ He stood, stretched, pulled his shirt down over his belly and moved to the stove where he rubbed his hands, warming them. ‘Anyways, he’s a good kid. Just quiet is all I guess.’

She joined him at the stove, turned her back to its warmth, talking to the floor. ‘He’s too quiet, Frank. He doesn’t answer, doesn’t talk to other children. He isn’t up to where he should be in reading and he almost doesn’t write. He sits there and scribbles, or draws mazes, or he makes pictures of birds, and trees.’ She looked up at him. ‘He’s usually filthy dirty, dressed so poorly. Maybe he didn’t get enough to eat when he was little, Frank.’

‘I don’t doubt that.’

‘He just isn’t present. He isn’t there.’

‘Stop fretting, Lisa. Maybe he’ll be an artist with that drawing of his.’

‘Not if he can’t read or write better he won’t, because he’ll never get off that patch-farm they live on.’

‘Yeah. Gudger.’ He turned his back to the stove, beside her. ‘Ya know, Matt Gudger ain’t been at the store since maybe October? When he does come, everybody goes silent like somebody just died. He comes in, shuffles around some, goes on out.’ He walked to the table, picked up his ledger, leafed through it. ‘Well, you’ll not need to worry about him next year anyways. They’ll be gone, likely. Gudger can’t make it on that place another year, way things is goin’. Bert come in the store for a snow shovel, broke his old one prisin’ up a rock. Said he felt mighty stupid.’ He laughed, then looked up at her. ‘Says Gudger’s place would be for sale cheap, soon he thinks. Wants to add them fields to his, pull down the old place, if Gudger can’t hold on.’

In the silence then he gathered his papers. She watched him. There was wind, and the fire in the stove.

‘He beats the boy,’ she said. ‘Did I tell you?’

‘Yeah. You told me.’ He slapped the ledger book hard against his palm.

‘I don’t know what to do, Frank. I’ve tried. I’ve tried to reach his mother, and I didn’t. And I don’t reach Jed.’

‘Let it go, Lisa.’

‘No,’ she said. She moved across to the window. ‘I can’t, I guess.’ She leaned heavily against the sink counter with both hands, watching the snow.

/ /

As he pushed out into the blizzard, the wind wrenched the board door from the boy’s hands. It slammed behind him, and he was gone.

Matt Gudger was suddenly on his feet, two strides and a curse to the door-latch. Blown snow lay melting on the floor.

‘He’s lazy, just hog-lazy,’ he said and went back to the stool by the stove, to his morning coffee.

‘You can’t say that,’ the boy’s mother said. ‘Put in another stick. The cold got in.’

‘I can say it and I do. Not sayin’ don’t make it go away.’

She went over to their bed behind him, under the picture in the corner, and sat on the edge. ‘Teacher says he’s slow is all. Quiet.’

‘Maybe he is slow, but he ain’t stupid.’

‘He’s a year slow, she says.’

He turned quickly to face her. ‘But he ain’t stupid, hear that! He can’t be, or he’ll be no better’n us!’

‘No, Jed ain’t stupid. I can see that. But he ain’t lazy either. And beating him don’t help him none.’

‘I know that.’ He faced back to the stove, leaned elbows on bony knees. ‘Don’t think I don’t know that.’ He looked over his shoulder at her, there on the bed. ‘So why do you yell at him all the time?’

‘He don’t listen, is why. Just like I yell at you.’

‘So it don’t help for me, either.’

‘You’re right there.’ She reached for her brown scarf. The wind shook at the house, pummeled it with cold.

He drank coffee. ‘I don’t want to beat him,’ he said after a while. ‘Jed’s all I got, except you.’ He drank again, emptying the mug, stared at the stove firebox, the flame-glow at the door.

Suddenly he was on his feet, then at the window. ‘I’m goin’ crazy, that’s what! Another goddamn winter that won’t give up, just gets worse. I can’t do a damn thing! I’m trapped in this here damn shack!’

‘So go on out. Go down to the store, talk to somebody. You just sit here inside yourself.’

He wheeled, looked at her, jerked his thumb at the window. ‘Out in that? Go freeze out in a blizzard that don’t stop?’ He turned back to the window, said nothing. Then: ‘I got nothing to do at the store, or here.’

She leaned back on the pillow she pushed up against the wall, pulled the blanket over her legs. ‘You make him go out there.’

Two strides took him to the bed, his voice loud, hard. ‘He’s got a job! He’s got something to do that he’s gotta do! Schooling! He’s damn lucky, something to do, and he don’t know it! Me? What’m I supposed to do, go plant corn in the damn snow?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘And when I put in corn it ain’t worth the work, just like last year when we damn near couldn’t buy seed-corn for what they give us for the whole crop! So what’s the damn why of it?’

‘I know. I know. It’s what we got, though.’

‘We got nothin!’ he shouted. ‘He’s got to learn!’ He sat heavily on the bed. ‘Look. He ain’t stupid.’ She looked away. He took a breath, leaned a hand beside her, his voice quieter. ‘He’s got to learn, is all. He’s out there now, out of this shack, and he’s got to get out for good. Schooling’s his only out, don’t you see that?’

‘I know it. Don’t think I don’t know it.’ She pulled down the pillow and lay back. ‘Feed that fire will you, Matt? At least we got some wood.’

She shut her eyes, pulled the blanket higher as he wrestled with the fire-door handle, then, cursing, beat it unstuck with a piece of stovewood.

/ / /

The drifting snow was deep. The boy pushed through the unbroken track between farmhouse and the frozen road to school against driving wind, ice stinging his face, biting at nose and cheeks. He stumbled, one foot plunging suddenly almost to his knee and, small as he was, and thin, he could barely wrench free. He fell forward, nearly burying himself in the drift, but he heaved back and lurched upright, white with snow, panting, hands numb inside his worn mittens. He struggled forward then, reaching the lee of the one tree by the fence-line, and there he stopped to escape the knifing wind. Hunching his back against the trunk, he pulled up the scarf to cover his nose again and tugged his cap lower.

There was almost no warmth within him. He felt he couldn’t move, not through such a storm and, almost worse, toward school. Being at school always felt like being without breakfast, empty, without warmth.

He looked up, trying to see the road, but it was lost in flying clouds of snow. He couldn’t warm his feet by stomping or rubbing his shoes together, and he saw that one shoe was untied, but there was nothing he could do about that either. He hugged himself against the wind. His emptiness inside felt like frozen stones.

A fury of wind screamed, blinding him with whiteness. He was barely able to breathe. Snow and air were one element, alive and smothering, the cold inescapable, frightening. But he knew without thinking that he would not go back to the house where nothing he did was right, and where his father’s sour rage would explode into beatings.

The boy hunched there, trapped. When he could see again he moved, struggling onto the track, pushing toward the icy white road that led to the schoolhouse. He would get there if he could, and he would sweat again in fear of questions that had no answers, his cheeks hot with shame.