Miracle Boy and Other Stories by Benedict Pinckney

Author:Benedict, Pinckney [Benedict, Pinckney]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781844714032
Publisher: Salt Publishing
Published: 2010-06-04T18:00:00+00:00

The Angel’s Trumpet

Treat Yourself To The Best.

That’s what it said, in letters eighteen inches high, on the wall of the dairy at our place, at the Goins place. Chew Mail Pouch Tobacco. You’ve seen the Mail Pouch signs on the warped walls of old barns that stand tipsily along the roadside out in the country. You’ve maybe even stopped your car, pulled over to the side of the road, crowded your vehicle against the ditch that’s full of trash and weeds and scrubby little trees, in order to take photographs of some tilting granary and its picturesque sign. You likely used a clever little camera no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, thinking to yourself as you did so, “How quaint.”

None of us chewed tobacco. But there it was all the same, the sign (there must have been money involved, back when it was first painted; or my father, a worldly man, would never have allowed such a thing), bigger and bolder and more brightly tinted than anything else on the place, the paint just beginning to flake off here and there toward the end of our time; but the slogan continued, declamatory, hanging over our heads as we worked, as we saw to the cattle, repaired the machinery, pumped out the manure, planted the corn and harvested it, cut and raked (those long golden fragrant windrows!) and bailed the hay on our sloping, rocky fields: Treat Yourself To The Best.

We didn’t smoke either, we Goins men. We didn’t drink. We didn’t use hard language. We were clean-living people. Right up until we died.

It was the manure pit that killed us. It didn’t kill quite all of us, to be honest. Killed all of us but me. The shear pin on the impeller in the pit gave way, was the origin of the tragedy (as the newspapers all called it, tragedy, to a one). That’s what shear pins are made to do, to snap cleanly when the strain is too great, when something must give way. The shear pin’s a sacrificial part, the element of the machine that breaks by design. Every machine must have a weak point, as perhaps you are aware, and you wantto be something inexpensive and easy to replace. In the particular case of a manure storage tank pumping system like ours, you want it to be a cheap metal rod that you slip easily through hub and axle right behind the impeller, rather than a complex and expensive drive train or motor.

The shear pin that secured the pump’s impeller gave way when we were nearly finished pumping out the manure tank — some chunk of hard matter in the viscous stuff caught in the spinning blades, most likely — and to fix it my big brother Albertus climbed down into the manure pit located under the floor of the barn; the barn that said so plainly on its broad wall (there were days it seemed to shout at me, that slogan) Treat Yourself To The Best.

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