“Oh, Charlie told you about that?” Allen grimaced and shook his head. “That’s how he said it went?”
“He leave something out?” Miles braced himself against a sudden cold gust of wind and leaned against the truck cab. Allen huddled in his coat and stood next to him rolling a cigarette. Miles marveled at the dexterity of the man’s fingers in the cold with such a small and fussy thing. The sunlight under which they’d gathered for their afternoon smoke had been wiped out by fast-moving clouds.
“How’d he say it went?”
“Long and the short of it is that he knocked a wasp nest down and smashed them all with his bare hands, and that’s why you won’t talk to him no more because you think he’s a showoff.”
Allen licked the paper and smoothed the flap over. He passed it to Miles. It was tightly-rolled, flawless. Miles thought that if he threw it it would stick in a wall like a dart. Allen produced another from his coat pocket, struck a match in his cupped hand, and lit both cigarettes with it.
“So last Summer, in July, me and Selena drive out there with the kids. He’d just finally cleared all that junk out of the barn that the old man had left in there. Had Verritt’s haul off most of it. So we pull up, and Selena and Jean go in the kitchen and start making lunch and me and Charlie take all the kids with us. We’re walking around the barn. He’s telling me what he’s gonna do with it. Part of it’s gonna be a shop. Put more chickens in part of it. It’s real important to him that he’s a farmer all of a sudden. Keeps calling himself a farmer. I said, ‘Sure, he has a farm now.’”
“You thought he was joking, or what?”
“Yeah, maybe it was a joke. I thought it was strange, a little. Where’d this come from? ‘I’m a farmer this, farmer that…’ Anyway, we round the corner of the barn and there under one of the eaves we all see this giant wasp nest. Brown, papery, the size of a basketball. And some of them are out. It’s the middle of the day, it’s dry and hot as hell that day. ‘Damn, look at that thing!’ I say, and quick as lightning Charlie is under that thing and he’s got a two-by-four and he whacks the thing down!”
“What?”
“Whacks it down! The kids are right there! My Michael needs those epi shots if he gets hit. He had the good sense to just start running, thank God. Those wasps pour out of that nest and they go after everyone. I gather the kids together and shuffle them around the corner of the barn and tell them to run to the house.”
“They get stung?”
“Yeah, they’re hollering and crying but they saw Michael running and they followed him. I got hit a half dozen times but I went back see how Charlie was. You know what he was doing?”
“This is the part he was telling us, that he was just smashing them with his hands,” Miles said. “He really did that?”
“Yeah, that part's true enough. Slapping them on his neck, his arms. On the barn boards. He’s covered in welts. ‘Get the hell out of there,’ I yell at him, ‘Go get some spray.’ He’s just laughing. ‘I don’t need spray! This don’t bother me!’ And he just keeps slapping them and smashing them with his hands. Well, then Jean comes out, she yells at me, ‘Did someone just knock a wasp nest down on the boys? They came in screaming! What’s going on out here?’” Allen dragged the cigarette down to a nub and flicked it over the truck.
“So here’s what he says to me. ‘Tell her there wasn’t any spray. That this had to be done. That the kids were gonna be fine. Tell her not to worry about it.’ I’m just… amazed at this guy. Still am! ’You want me to cover for you? What is this?’ And he looks at me and he says, ‘Just cover for me. She can’t think I don’t know what I’m doing.’ Now, I was in no mood to cover for him, but I thought, well, maybe there’s something here I don’t know about between them, so I just think real fast and tell Jean, ‘No, he was just dealing with a big bad nest and the kids got stung’ and I asked after the kids and told them we’d be in for lunch soon.”
Another gust of wind shuddered over the truck cab and against their coats. Miles watched it ripple a puddle in the asphalt. “You covered for him?”
“Yeah. Never been so mad at myself. He does something like that, he should’ve owned up. But I ain’t even done.”
“So we go in for lunch and the kids have calmed down but they’re still a little weepy and whiny and I don’t blame them. And in my mind I’m thinking about Charlie and these wasps, you know. ‘What the hell, wait till dusk. Get them with a can of spray. Hell, just wait till I can get the kids out of there. Lemme get Michael out of there. There’s a smart way to do this that doesn’t get a bunch of kids stung by yellow jackets.’ Well he’s walking around that afternoon, dusting off his hands like after a job well done. He tells the kids, ‘That’s what it’s like living on a farm. You gotta get used to that out here in the country. Don’t be so weak.’ I take him aside and tell him what’s on my mind. I’m pretty bent out of shape at this point. ‘You’re some goddamn hero,’ I say. And he tells me, ‘I’m no hero, I’m just a farmer. That’s what farmers do. What, are you on the rag like Jean?’”
Miles shifted. "That was part of what he said, too."
Allen folded his arms and shook his head. “And this is the thing that I really didn’t understand. He says, ‘Wait till I tell the guys. They’re gonna think this is hilarious.’”
A rattling sound approached from behind like a wall. Corn snow suddenly pelted them and gathered in the corners of their beards and the folds of their coats. The two men looked up and laughed at it. Miles said, “It’ll be sunny in a minute.”
Allen spat and it disappeared into the corn snow. His lower lip was moving like it was cut and he was tasting the blood on his tongue. “‘The guys are gonna love this!’ That’s the thing I don’t get. So little consideration of any of the rest of us. The kids. The women who had to deal with the crying kids. Me, I don’t need to get stung. But he ain’t bothered by stings, so it ain’t nothing to him. All so he can have a story to tell the guys! Some kind of goddamned half-assed self-promotion! Of himself as some kind of hard-as-nails farmer!”
He fell into a brooding silence. After a minute Miles nodded and started to thank Allen for the cigarette, but Allen suddenly burst forth again. “What kind of farmer thinks it’s all about fighting wasps? What kind of man?”
