As I Walked Out One Evening by Donald Wetzel

Author:Donald Wetzel
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

Chapter 16

So the old man and I started back out Garden street in an almost palpable ambiance of mutual resignation …

… and in a more than ambiance more than palpable stench an over mastering cloud as it were of the by now familiar to me stink given off by the old man, an all encompassing mingled stench—as best I could read it guess at it unwillingly imagine it—the commingled stench of decrepitude and unwashed body parts of booze and sweat of failed digestion, fermentation spoilage and rankest rot in the large intestine of some vile and bubbling brew composed of alcohol and decomposing meats and who knows what?—of eye of newt, and toe of frog for all I knew—within the old man’s ancient bag of guts …

… from which a monstrous gaseous plume breathed out with every breath …

(I have got carried away somewhat it would seem by the force of the memory; or by virtue of some simple animal good spirits some passing exuberance perhaps based on nothing more than that I am this morning well and freshly showered and with no bones broken no grievous damage done by my recent tumble down a mountain side.)

And for which in any event I ask your indulgence.

… but Jesus God the old man stunk.

I breathed shallow as a bird.

And soon as I say we were out of town with the old man quiet and the road running straight on a section line—a section line being one of the four straight-line boundaries of a land area generally accepted as covering one square mile; put a number of these section line boundaries end to end and you have a country road that driving down it can become an absolute dullsville in no time at all—anyhow we were soon enough out of town with nothing much to either side but local election signs strung out along the right-of-way like so much trash and endless acres of bean fields carpeting the earth the plants sprawled brown and broken in the sun the beans left drying a seeming desolation not least of all in the vastness of it as of something vanquished some victory had at any price just bean fields no barns no stock nothing the way I once knew it when there was here and there a farm and barns—the barn usually larger than the house—with out-buildings scattered seemingly at random about the place variously in disrepair and here and there tractors and animals and of course people moving about doing this and that things various enough—poor as the people may have been as I remember them—to make it interesting a unique and human enterprise of sorts—each single farm I mean—even here along this mind-numbing dullness of a country road laid out on section lines.

This is not farming I thought it is manufacturing.

Nobody is even watching it.

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