Spring Lime

     Barth Cairns cursed again and flung his fried eggs into the sink. "Dammit, Ivy, over light means over light. So's I can sop 'em up with your fusty concrete biscuits." He had her bawling. No need to go on. He spun his plate as he set it down. It smashed into the other breakfast dishes on the counter and sent a juice glass crashing to the floor. Two strides and he plucked his denim jacket from the pegboard--tall, gaunt, mean for no apparent reason--and turned the knob on the kitchen door.

     Outside on the kitchen stoop, he slammed the door exactly hard enough to rattle the glass without causing it to shatter. He breathed a deep draught of fresh spring air, coughed, spat, lit a cigarette from a crumpled pack, and cinched in his big black leather belt one notch. As he did so, he tipped the king-sized brass buckle up to admire the careful artistry of an inlaid copper fox pursued by a pack of sterling-silver hounds. He polished the scene on the long sleeve of his red and black flannel shirt and strode towards the barn.

     Barth Cairns's bottomland lay just east of the house and barn. Along Cairns Road (his north line) the field flooded almost every March and raised a crop of tadpoles that made frogs in a wet spring. In a year like that, Barth had bass bait for Ivy to sell from the stall out by the mailbox at the end of the drive. Ivy was afraid of the frogs. She hated their slippery skins and ugly croaks. They were hard to count out for a customer from the deep tub in which Barth brought them to her from the cool cellar beneath the house where he kept them. She was not quick and lithe like Barth. If a frog slipped from her thick fist, it was impossible for her to chase and catch it. Sometimes a customer, noting her frustration, would help her with the count or fetch a frog that had escaped. After each sale, Ivy would wipe the frog-slime carefully from each fat finger onto the tall jewelweed that grew in the ditch beside the stall and return to her needlepoint until the next customer arrived.
     From Cairns Road, Barth's cornfield sloped gradually uphill to the south nearly a quarter mile as a giant rectangle bisected by Cairns Branch. Add enough lime, and the three acres closest to the road grew fine sweet corn in a good year. The other nine, reaching to the north fence at the road, raised fair-to-poor field corn for the pigs.
     In the barn, Barth attached the drive shaft of the high-wheeled lime spreader to the tractor's power takeoff. He kicked aside straw, mashed the half-smoked butt into the damp clay of the barn floor, and fetched the first of two dozen bags of pelleted lime. Confound it! He could at least have finished his coffee before upbraiding Ivy. A half-dozen coonhounds, locked in a tack room to his left, set up a howl as the pellets cascaded down the steel sides of the hopper.
     The roar of the big diesel drowned out the hounds. Black soot and the oily stench of fossil fuel fouled the air beneath the loft. The tractor rammed open the unlatched, hinged doors, towing the lime spreader into the sunlight. He lit another smoke. Blame stupid! He should have brought along another pack. He forced the transmission to a higher gear, prodded the reluctant machine across a shallow section of Cairns Branch, and angled the front wheels towards the northeast corner of the field.

     Two hours and two loads later, on the steep last lap close to the south fence, three giant tulip poplars shaded a portion of the field and raspberry and sumac suckers encroached on last year's furrows, the rotor in the hopper jammed. He cursed again, shifted the transmission and power takeoff to neutral, chose a length of threaded steel rod from the toolbox, quick-stepped gracefully along the three-point-hitch and drive shaft, and peered over the edge into the hopper. Damn piece of lime bag. He snagged it with the rod, shut the hopper pores, returned to the tractor seat, and engaged the power takeoff. Then, taking great care to avoid the spinning driveshaft, again he moved to the hopper to check the action of the rotor. Good as new.

     As he started to lower himself to the ground his left foot slipped. Hanging by his hands from the top edge of the hopper, he pivoted and brought his right leg up to seek a foothold. As he did so, the right pant cuff snagged a grease fitting on the spinning shaft. He roared with terror and pain as a searing, crackling, helix of cloth peeled away in a thick, accelerating ribbon that advanced from the cuff to his groin; sucking in strips of underwear, shirt, and denim jacket as it built a ragged burl of cloth on the spinning shaft.

     At his back, near his spine, a thousand threads of tough cotton snagged the big black belt. "Holy Jeezzus!" he cried, as the full fury of four diesel cylinders spun him around like a roped calf and slammed his skull against the steel of the hopper wall just as the tough leather belt snapped and flung him free.

     He had no conscious way of estimating how long he lay in the tall weeds listening to the sputtering diesel and the odd, metallic, discordant clatter from the lime spreader. He had no conscious way of reasoning that the clatter was caused by the brass buckle striking the spreader with each turn of the shaft.
     A voice asked if he was breathing. He said yes. Another voice said no.

     "Can you get a heart beat?" a third voice asked.

     "No," the second said.

     The clatter and the sound of the engine stopped.

     "Hold this here shiny buckle up to his nose and see if it fogs," the first voice suggested. "Best use the part with them silver hounds."

     I'm not dead, he said with all the force he could muster.

     "Don't see none," the second said. "Where's Clyde gone to?"

     "Went to fetch his truck," the first answered.

     "Won't do no good. 'Fraid he's passed on," the second said.

     The hell I have, he yelled. Listen to me. I got something to say.

     "Took every stitch," the first observed. "Left the shoes; took the socks."

     "Naked as a jaybird. Cripes, the bruises. Must of hurt like fire," the second added.

     "Head stove in like a beer can," the first said.

     You're wrong, he said. I'm okay.

     "Leather belt . . . did him in, I bet. Look here where it come apart," the second said.

     He imagined that he was back at the house, that as he left the kitchen he took a second pack of cigarettes from the kitchen drawer and stuffed a biscuit in his shirt pocket for later in the morning. On his way to the door he heard himself say, Ivy, it don't really matter that much about the eggs