Vernon, Bill

Tiger

Bill Vernon

(February, 2014)

I didn't worry about Tiger. He'd always come back before, though sometimes bloodied and scratched. He thought of himself as king of our house and our neighborhood. He went where he wanted and was indignant when we interfered with his movements. He even hated to be picked up or petted. My mother knew that, but every meal after the storm she asked me and my brothers if we'd seen our yellow and white tabby. She was worried.

Not me. I'd settled in until warmer air returned. I mean I delivered my afternoon newspapers myself, using a sled to pull them, but after seven inches of snow and temperatures around zero, that was my lone daily sojourn outside. I preferred a cozy spot near the fireplace where I read what I'd wisely checked out of the library upon first predictions of bad weather: a pile of novels about Indian fighters and frontiersmen. Plus six months' issues of Fur, Fish and Game, a magazine whose articles I reread and whose ads had convinced me to buy a knife in a leather sheath, three steel traps, and a hat of rabbit fur.

Daily came questions about Tiger's whereabouts, and slowly the temperatures rose, settling in finally, after a night of rain, at just under 32 degrees with the sun shining. In my insulated boots, coat, and fur hat, with the new knife on my belt, carrying my over-and-under .410/.22, I was anxious to check my three traps, which I'd set along the creek in the pasture across the road from our house. What might I find: a fox? a mink? a muskrat? I left the house as Davy Crockett venturing into the wilds.

Tiger was in the first trap, stiff and frozen, not a half-mile from home. He must have followed me setting the traps just before the bad weather arrived. He'd probably been there ever since: five or six days dead now. It hadn't occurred to me to check my traps during the cold spell, but the owner should do that, I saw now, to stop an animal's suffering as quickly as possible. I imagined what Tiger had felt with a leg caught in a trap, unable to move, without shelter, wet, covered with snow, shivering, chilled throughout, slowly freezing.

What an outdoorsman I was, trapping my own pet cat. Of course my other two traps were empty. They had to be. How and where to set traps had been subjects beyond the scope of my study. I took all three traps back to the house and hung them with their chains from a nail on the wall, never to be used again. Tiger? I buried Tiger, you might say, right where he died. I shoved his carcass into a groundhog hole and put a rock from the creek over the hole.

At supper, Mom asked if anyone had seen Tiger, and I shook my head like an animal with a steel trap clamped around his neck.

Recess

Bill Vernon

(December 2013)

After prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance, after endless hours of repeating ourselves, of having our hands slapped, of being clacked at for every infraction, a click to sit up straight, a click to pay attention, a click to stop talking, after hours of glancing out the windows at trees and the sky, invisible chains disappear from our desks, the double doors gape open, and before the Notre Dame sisters can stop us, we boys race outside in shirt sleeves to watch our skin prickle. We rub snow on our cheeks until they redden. The girls screaming, "Don't do it!" encourages us.

But we do check the old nun on duty. She's walking around in a circle, her black skirt sweeping a dim trail, leaving a white wake of flurries behind her. She seems blind and deaf to the present, staring off at something that none of us sees, something maybe inside her, her hands tied to her rosary.

That leaves us free, so we run to the ball field and slide on the iced-over puddles on stiff legs. The rough edges stop us, of course, throwing us down on all fours, and the frozen ground smarts, but we kneel there only because we're chilled into place by the sound of the church bells. Their ringing may signal the end of our play. But no, that's only the wind flinging them.

So there's still time to wet our hair at the fountains, to comb our hair in wild patterns, to watch in low windows and see how they freeze. Our creations surprise us, the patches of spikes, Mohican brushes, the horns and the tails. We laugh at these visions, but stand there and stare, feeling alone in our oddness, sensing our future, seeing ourselves grown old and ugly, glimpsing some of the things that our play helped us flee.

In This Doing

Bill Vernon

(July, 2013)

We go barefoot because we like the feel of the dew and the grass on our feet, plus bare is more quiet than shoes. Still, the first wet kiss on our toes is a shock that wakes us more fully. I set the alarm to get us up at 1:00 A.M., so here we are, in our pajamas, in the front yard, bent over, tin can in one hand, flashlight in the other, staring for signs where the beam of light reaches the ground.

A screech owl is in, I think, Torino's walnut tree on the corner, calling eerily. A dog barks up the hill somewhere and another answers a few houses from us. An occasional car zips by on Cincinnati Avenue two blocks away. Otherwise, the night is ours.

""Got one,"" John sort of whispers. He's kneeling down now, on the other side of the sidewalk dividing our lawn, a silhouette with the distant street lamp behind him. I'm kneeling too, my knees and shins already wet, crawling forward.

The trick is to trap them against the ground first, then slowly extract them from the grass so they don't break in half. If they're partly in a hole, I hold them until they relax and pull free. Then they go in the can. My best success occurs watching the light beam's periphery and trapping them there. Worms can be fast, escaping down into the earth, backing off into the shadows, and full exposure to light can trigger their flight instinct. I take a dozen from my side of the yard, then go up the drive into the backyard and start searching there.

It's like hunting and catching your prey with skill. You have to be fast and willing to get some of their oozy goop on your fingers, the slime that grosses out girls. I've tried other ways, like crushing green walnut shells into a bucket of water and spreading the mess over the ground. That brought only a few worms up, and some of them died from the mixture. Of course after a rain you can sometimes pick up hundreds. The worms come to the surface and collect on sidewalks and roads. But that's not much fun. Too easy or something.

And this seems so secret. Even our parents don't know we're out here. The backyard is darker than the front, caught between the backs of two lines of houses, and I'm sneaking through the grass just like the worms are, down on their level, in tune with their lives and the way Nature works. Another kind of nightcrawler.

Two or three dozen worms will do me. Tomorrow I'll have a can full of bait to use in the lake or the creek where I'll catch something bigger, something to put on the table, something to show for my efforts. To be honest though, the most pleasure comes in this doing.

Bill Vernon served in the United States Marine Corps, studied literature in Ohio universities, then taught it. He is still recovering from those experiences. Writing is his therapy, along with exercising outdoors and doing international folk dances. His poems, stories and nonfiction have appeared in a variety of magazines and anthologies, and Five Star Mysteries published his novel OLD TOWN in 2005.