Further Joy by John Brandon Page A

melt. They’re fashioned of a dull-colored metal. I step closer and see that they all have little holes punched into them, companies of tiny sharp punctures gathered around the tops. The moons, or the tears or whatever, are hollow. I put my hand on one and it moves easily, so I pick it up to assess it in my palms.
    There’s a candle underneath. Now I see. There’s a candle under each one. I put the one I’m holding back where it was and look around for matches, which I find handy on an otherwise empty shelf. Big camping matches.
    I get the candles burning, one and then the next and then the next. I pull the cord for the light, and when I come back around the corner I see, there on a screen my father has tacked to the ceiling, a host of wide-open eyes staring down at me, incurious and knowing at once.
    If you look under one of the tarps you’ll see that the roof of the house is gone—not caved in or blown over or burned to ashes, just gone. The big appliances are left, and some compact heavy objects like cans of beans or abowling ball in a leather bag. The buildings look at once frozen and scorched. The walls are blackened as if by heat, the floors cracked as if by cold.
    It’s dark still, and I’m in the mason’s pickup. We’re going hunting. It’s a Huck Finn day, and this is a little field trip of sorts—my mom’s idea. The radio plays music like I’ve never heard.
    He has a place set up, he tells me, not far into the brush—a hideout. You’re supposed to ramble around the live oaks lugging a pop-up blind, he says, but today we’re going to let the gobblers come to us. “And if they don’t,” he says, “it’s just not our day.” He pulls halfway off the dirt road and stops. It doesn’t seem like there’s enough room for another car to pass. He grabs a shotgun off the rack and I carry the pack. The mason has unevenly cropped hair and he’s wearing a tracksuit that does not look new.
    We round a thicket at the base of a beech tree and there’s the hideout. The mason pulls aside a flap and we crouch in and get settled. You can see a lot from the mason’s hideout and nothing can see you. It’s roofless, and roomier inside than it looked from the outside. “Thing about shooting a turkey is then you have to clean a turkey and cook a turkey,” he says. He turns his head and coughs. “I don’t have much energy for chores lately, or much appetite.”
    He handles the gun and shows me how it works, and I’m impressed. There’s nothing extra to the gun. It’s beautiful, a little monument to its own function. The mason says we probably won’t have much luck with the turkeys, but he’ll let me practice on some targets later with a different gun. He likes to shoot at textbooks with that one, he tells me. He takes out a little wooden device that reminds me of the pitch pipe I use when I sing at church and he makes turkey noises with it, just a soft clucking for a while, then a series of shrill yelps. I listen hard for a response, for a garbling out in the bracken and the briars, but the mason seems more interested in his instrument than in any quarry it might draw. In the pickup I’d been waiting for the sun, and now somehow I miss it rise. There it is off to the left, an overripe grapefruit pulling clear of the scrub.
    The mason keeps sipping off his thermos but his eyes look sharp. Maybe he’s not going to say anything about what’s been going on—the chosen, the incidents—and he doesn’t have to. It’s in the air we’re breathing. We’re due, everyone knows. We’re close to due.
    The mason plunges his hand into the sack of shotgun shells and absently kneads them, like he’s petting a dog. He’s ready to talk, ready to lecture. He tells me the history of his pickup truck, which he bought off a man who used to collect debts up in Georgia.