The leather folder held seventeen recipes, and after the last one Amos told the whole household to flop the book shut and go eat. But the folder was never the whole of the man, and tucked flat against the back cover, held in by an old boot lace, was a sheaf of loose pages that didn’t hold a single recipe. They’re dated, one line apiece at the top, the way a man writes when he’s too tired for decoration. Diary pages. Amos kept no ledger and owed nobody an account of himself, so these little entries are about as close as he ever came to writing his own history down.
This one is dated Tuesday, August 4, 1903, and it’s the smell that gives the day away before you read a word. Amos wrote it standing, by the looks of the letters, and the pencil bit clean through the paper at the top where he pressed too hard.
Tuesday, August 4, 1903
Hot enough to blister a skillet just left out in the yard, and waked before first light by a stink come rollin up through the floor of the porch like somethin died and then died again. I went out with the lantern held low and found the flour sack Martha sets over the crocks had a hole wore in it, and there set underneath, big as a coal bucket, the fattest skunk I ever laid eyes on, stripe down his back like he was proud of it. He’d got in through the lattice a hog had busted loose back in the summer and there he’d made himself to home.
Amos’s note in the margin, pencil dull from the heat: “a skunk under a man’s porch aint a varmint so much as a lesson. he’ll leave when he’s ready and not a minute fore, and if you hurry him he’ll teach you why you shouldnt.”
Martha wouldnt let me fetch the gun to him on account of the porch bein under the bedroom, and she said the Lord gave a skunk no enemies and one warning, and the warning is the stripe. I told her the stripe dont help a man that sets his foot down in the dark. She told me to go round the long way and let the thing walk off. So I spent the whole of the morning puttin a fresh board on the far side of the porch and openin the lattice wide, and me and the boys set the chairs up in the yard and waited, sweatin, while that skunk strolled out around noon like he owned the county and was out to inspect it. He did not hurry. Never once has a skunk hurried.
Amos, later, close to the bottom of the page: “the boy wanted me to shoot him and I told him a man dont shoot a thing for bein where it belongs. the skunk was here fore the porch was and he’ll be here after. you live around a thing long enough you learn to walk wide of it.”
By dusk the smell had mostly gone out of the house with the windows throwed open, and Martha put out the supper on the long table like nothin at all, as if a whole day of a man’s life hadnt been spent courtin a striped critter out from under his own boards. The boys laughed about it at the table and I let them. A man can lose a whole day to a skunk and the only thing he’s got to show for it is a porch a man can set on without watchin where he steps.
