This story comes from my Stephen King era. It’s about trying to get the balance of magic right. It comes about after hearing comments about balancing things to make the world right. It also has a bit of local humor. You’ll find out what go suck a pine tree means. It’s an innocent phrase it has nothing to do with magic.
Balancing the Magic
“Let’s go suck a pine tree.”
“Too early. Besides we got to go see Miss Lacy,” Ralph Jensen rubbed the left side of his face with the back of his hand. His new growing winter beard was just beginning to itch.
“She got more work for us? It’s sure time to get the balance right again.” Lyle Elson pulled his coat down over the small of his back. He tucked the corner of a square tear into its own opening and looked up at the flat gray northern Minnesota late fall sky.
“Don’t know. Sue said she called and asked me to stop and see her after she was done at the school,” Ralph looked up at the sky, “You’re right. It does look like snow, but its too warm and the ground ain’t froze yet.”
Lyle searched the cold gray sky for something, “It’s about that time. Ain’t it?”
“Ya, let’s take my pickup and go see if we can figure the balance out. Hope she’s got work for us. She pays good. That would help too,” Ralph nodded in agreement with his judgment. The late Minnesota fall afternoon coldness wormed its way through the jacket covering the down vest and past green flannel shirt and made Ralph shiver, “Damn it’s cold today.”
“It’s the dampness. Wait to we get some good dry forty below then we’ll be warm.” Lyle started toward a fifteen-year-old badly rusted pickup setting in the yard. He had helped Ralph put a new sheet metal floor in it last July. Watching the road go by under his feet for another winter had made even Ralph shiver enough to get the sheet metal to put the new floor in the pickup
Miss Lacy was home and invited them in for coffee. Lyle sat straight up in the wooden kitchen chair trying to balance the coffee cup on its saucer and wishing Miss Lacy would serve her coffee in mugs like everyone else in Poplar. Ralph put his cup and saucer on the kitchen table and leaned back as much as the chair would permit with all four legs on the floor. He smiled at Miss Lacy, “What did you want with us?”
Miss Lacy smiled, “Pleasure before business, Mr. Jensen. I stopped at Anderson’s Bakery and picked up some of their fine sugar cookies. You and Mr. Elson must have some.”
They watched as Miss Lacy used her height to take a plate bright with sunflowers out of the top shelf of the cupboard and fill it with cookies from a white bag on the counter. Lyle always felt uncomfortable in Miss Lacy’s kitchen because it was so neat and clean and white and cold. It never had the stove going with a pot of stew or the oven full of bread and the kitchen never had people eating, playing cribbage, or shooting the bull. Like Miss Lacy her kitchen seemed cold and uncaring, but she wasn’t like him so Lyle just hung on when they worked for her. She held out the plate first to Ralph and then Lyle. As she had taught them in grade school, they took only one cookie and thanked her.
“I would like you to cut my wood for next year into fireplace length and split it then I would like you to move the wood from last year that is dry up to the shed by the house so I could use it,” Miss Lacy sat down carefully and smoothed her gray wool skirt as she spoke.
Ralph started haggling about the price. Miss Lacy was a smart lady and he knew she would pay a fair price, but Ralph also knew the importance of the ritual of haggling. Lyle afraid to dunk his sugar cookie nibbled at the edges of it with the few good teeth he had on the left side and watched Miss Lacy. She was no different than she had been when she had taught him in grade school many years before. She was still tall, thin, with very fine light brown hair mixing with gray. Her eyes were like the afternoon sky, a cold almost gray color. She was as neat and clean as her kitchen. He shivered. Lyle could find no warmth in her. The coffee was still too hot to do anymore than sip.
“Okay, we’ll do it for that price. When is Marvin dropping off the two cord?” Ralph asked
“The wood is already here.”
“I didn’t notice it when we drove up,” Ralph tried to be polite and asked, “How is everything else going?” He dunked his cookie and Lyle smiled at Miss Lacy trying to hide his embarrassment.
“I do have one problem but the sheriff says he will handle it.”
This was news. Both Ralph and Lyle leaned forwarded. It was Lyle that asked, “What is it?”
“Someone has been bothering me. Coming around and saying strange things. He has even shown up at the school,” Miss Lacy said.
“Who is it?” Ralph asked.
“I don’t know,” Miss Lacy took a small bite of her cookie.
Ralph and Lyle looked at each other. Lyle wondered what it would be like to have teeth like Miss Lacy’s. But both were wondering how could anyone not know everyone in Poplar? Ralph asked, “What does he look like?”
“I gave the sheriff his description. He is about six feet tall, thin, long hair graying at the temples, old clothing not too clean, and shoes with no socks. He must be in his thirties or early forties and he talked about Debbie, but it did not make sense to me.”
At the last item Ralph and Lyle looked at each other. Ralph shook his head no and Lyle nibbled at the edge of his cookie again to cover his surprise at what Miss Lacy had said.. Miss Lacy had turned back toward the cupboard missing the exchange. She said, “Mr. Jensen, I believe you have children. Why don’t you take this bag of cookies home to them. If I keep them, I will get heavy or they will get stale.” She put the white bakery bag in front of Ralph’s coffee cup.
“Thank you. Did the sheriff say who this guy might be?” Ralph asked.
“No, he wasn’t sure but he was going to ask my neighbors if they had seen him and knew who he was.”
Lyle, startled once more, coughed as a cookie crumb tried to go down the wrong way.
“Are you okay Mr. Elson?” Miss Lacy stood and taking a glass from the cupboard filled it with water, “Here drink this. It should help. Your coffee must still be too warm.”
Lyle drank the whole glass and then waited to see if the cough would return. When it didn’t, he said, “Thank you, Miss Lacy.”
Ralph stood, “We should get going. I promised Sue I would be home early for supper.”
“Say hello to your wife for me, Mr. Jensen. When do you plan to start my work?” Miss Lacy asked.
Ralph thought a moment then said, “This is Thursday. We have one other thing to finish. I guess it will be Monday or Tuesday of next week.”
“I will expect you then,” Miss Lacy started leading the way to the outside door.
Lyle looked at the almost full cup of coffee, but it was still too hot to drink. He shoved his almost whole cookie into his coat pocket and followed Ralph to the door. Outside Lyle asked, “Why didn’t you tell her it was Crazy Joe that’s been bugging her?”
“What good would it do?”
“The sheriff could stop it then,” Lyle climbed into the passenger side of the pickup and retrieved the cookie from his pocket and tried to take a big bite.
Ralph got in and just sat behind the steering wheel for a minute before answering, “I gotta think about it besides I don’t think it would work. Do you remember Crazy Joe wanted Ed Swenson’s dog? He got it even after the sheriff had him locked up for a month or more.”
“How come the sheriff didn’t tell Miss Lacy it was Crazy Joe?” Lyle had succeeded in getting good sized bite off the cookie. He held it to show Ralph.
“Those are the hardest cookies in the world. I couldn’t be polite. I dunked mine,” Ralph started the truck and backed out of Miss Lacy’s driveway neatly lined by now empty flower beds. He answered Lyle as they started down Maple Street, “The sheriff knows he can’t do nothin’. It’s easier to pretend not to know Crazy Joe than to fail.”
“How come Miss Lacy didn’t remember Crazy Joe? She taught him.”
“Sort of the same reason. She failed teaching him, so she doesn’t remember him,” Ralph leaned forward and looking up pointed, “Look at them honkers. We gotta get us some birds this weekend.” Leaning back, he shifted his weight to one side trying to ease the pain on his left side.
Lyle noticed, “That accident sure left you bunged up. Sure, you want to sit in blind this weekend?”
“Why not? It hurts not matter what I do,” Ralph pointed toward out Lyle’s window, “I see Don bought that guy’s boat from up there at Deer Lake.”
Lyle nodded and using his fingers broke off a second piece off the cookie. They were almost out of town when Lyle asked, “Want suck a pine tree?”
“Yah! I been thinking about Crazy Joe and Miss Lacy. There’s something bugging me about it.”
A few minutes later they walked into the municipal liquor store and bar.
Lyle order a beer and a pine tree, a shot of gin. Ralph got two pine trees. The locals had started downing a shot of gin and chasing it with beer just to gross out the tourists. Now it was becoming Popular’s favorite drink. Ralph and Lyle made their way to the corner booth. They were the only ones in the bar.
Ralph sipped one of his shots and then said, “We got to help Miss Lacy with Crazy Joe.”
“That don’t make no sense. Why would we do that?” Lyle frowned at Ralph and open his coat to get a cigarette out of flannel shirt pocket.
Ralph didn’t answer for second. He sat and stared out the window at the flashing off/on sale liquor sign, “Did you ever want do to better? Have a real job and nice house?”
“Yah sure.”
“It didn’t ever happen, did it?” Ralph looked at across the table at Lyle who shook his head no, “And it never will. Did you ever notice that people like Miss Lacy don’t have bad things happen to them.”
“Her father died,” Lyle butted in.
“Yah, but when’s the last time she got busted up in an accident or had a kid die?”
“She ain’t married.”
“You know what I mean. Her life just goes along real easy. If that changes, we in big trouble. It’s the magic balance,” Ralph looked hard at Lyle and then downed the rest of his first pine tree in a single swallow.
“How so? How we in trouble?” Lyle drew a line through the ring of water formed where his beer bottle had been.
“Didn’t you ever notice how there are people like Miss Lacy and then there are people like us?”
Lyle just shrugged.
“No, I mean it. There are people who go at it easy in life and then there are those like us us who have to get shit on. You know what else there is to this magic? It has to be balanced. Do you remember how when Doc White got in trouble over that baby that died? Did you notice all the things that happened to people like us. Dave got killed when his pickup rolled over. Ted Anderson’s wife had that crippled kid. You busted your arm. I had that kidney stone. Didn’t you ever think about? I mean, what if Crazy Joe keeps bothering Miss Lacy? What’s going to happen to us?”
“Yah, you right. I remember my ma saying the same sort of thing. She used to call it keepin’ things right. When times got bad for them, it gets really screwed up for us. But what we gonna do? How we gonna keep Miss Lacy’s life easy? You know some spell or something?” Lyle took a sip of his tree, sip of beer, and looked at Ralph.
“Nothin’” like that. Do you remember how Phil over at the lumber yard stopped Crazy Joe from sleeping there?”
“Yah, Phil cold cocked him one morning and Crazy Joe never came back. Is that what we’re going to do?”
Ralph leaned back in the booth and nodded, “Sorta, we’ll find him and beat him up, but we’ll let him know it ‘cause he’s been bothering Miss Lacy.”
“Won’t Joe go after Miss Lacy for telling on him. He’s always been a mean one about getting even.”
“No,” Ralph shook his head and leaned forward and motioned Lyle to lean forward too, “We’ll tell him that his screwing around with Miss Lacy might get her to leave and cost us some of our work and we’re mad at him. He’s a little crazy around the edges, but he’ll understand about us getting an eye for a tooth if he causes Miss Lacy to move.”
Lyle thought a moment and then asked, “How bad we going to beat him up?”
“Not too bad. I don’t want my hands all bunged up for Miss Lacy’s work.”
“Besides being crazy, he’s a child bred in the ditch so he ain’t got no family. Nobody gonna stick up for him,” he smiled. Lyle liked action.
“Ain’t his mother still living over by Mildred?”
“I don’t know, but she was from that traveling sky pilot, Lars Pearson’s, family. Most of the the family face up under the ground or gone to the Cities.”
“We’ll do it then. Agreed?”
Lyle showed his few good teeth in a board smile and held up his beer. They drank a toast of pine and beer to restoring the balance.
Ralph spent the morning of the next day looking for Crazy Joe. He finally found Crazy Joe living in a one time chicken house on the old Johnson’s place on the east edge of Poplar. He wasn’t home, but Ralph searched the rickety old structure and left sure Crazy Joe would return. He went and got Lyle.
They got a carton a cigarettes, a thermos of coffee, and a deck of cards then drove out to the Johnson place. The house had burned years before and the cellar had been filled in with pieces of the old sidewalk that had run from First to Fifth Street to keep kids from getting hurt. There was an old sway back barn Bill Johnson used to store his collection of old horse drawn farm equipment and the several other old out buildings besides the chicken coop.
Lyle walked around one of the old sheds with Ralph, “How we going to do this? Do you think it’s going to be enough?”
“If shit starts happening, we’ll nail him. I figured we talk to him and make sure he knew why we were beating him up and then you could hold him while I did the hard work. It shouldn’t take long. How much of this old junk do you suppose Bill has collected?” Ralph ran his hand over the seat of an old sickle bar mower.
“I sure hope he’s not in one of his crazy moods or we’ll never get through to him. What happens if he complains about us?”
Ralph sat down on the old mower seat bouncing to test the spring in it, “I won’t hit him where it shows and nobody will listen to him anyway. They’ll just think it’s another one of his strange stories. We best tell everyone that we talked to him about Miss Lacy. That way they think he just getting things mixed up again like he always does.”
“Do you think it’s true what they say about Crazy Joe being his mama’s daddy’s kid and that’s why he ain’t right?”
“Who knows,” Ralph got off the mower and walked over to the chicken coop, opened the door, and looked in, “I don’t think he’s been back since I was here earlier. Lets sit in the truck and play some cribbage.”
It was late afternoon and the thin northern sun light was making milky shadows across the old farmstead when Crazy Joe came through the thin line of mixed dark Jackpine and barren poplars alone the north edge of the yard. Ralph got out of the truck, “Joe, over here.”
Joe ran over with all the eagerness of a two month old puppy, “Hi, you came to see me?” He was dressed in an old Air Force topcoat, a purple and gold stocking cap cover his long stringy hair, and his shoes so worn that newspapers were sticking out the holes in the sides of the shoes when Crazy Joe had tried to repair them.
Lyle got out of the truck and moved to Crazy Joe’s side as Ralph answered, “Yah, how you been Joe?”
“Good, lots of people giving me things,” He open the plastic feed sack he was carrying to reveal some squash, potatoes, and carrots. He was shorter than both Lyle and Ralph so they could easily look down into the sack.
Ralph moved closer and looked in the bag again and then up at Joe, “Have you been bothering Miss Lacy?”
“She not give me anything to eat when I ask,” Joe said.
Ralph tried to make his voice sound like all the tough guys he heard on TV, “Do you know how Lyle and I eat?”
Crazy Joe sensing something was wrong tried to backup, but Lyle stepped behind him and pinned his arms.
Ralph continued, “We eat because we work for Miss Lacy sometimes. If you keep scaring her and she moves, we won’t eat. Do you understand?” Ralph moved until his nose was less than a inch from Joe’s.
Crazy Joe’s eyes widen white like a frightened calf’s and he tried to move away, “Yes, Joe understand.”
“You can’t bother Miss Lacy. You have been bad,” Ralph continued as Joe’s eyes search for an escape, “I am going to have to punish you,” and he hit Joe hard in the stomach.
The blow gave Crazy Joe extra strength and he pulled away from Lyle. Lyle grabbed one arm, “Help get him again,” Lyle yelled.
Ralph grabbed the same arm Lyle had and planted his feet to stop Crazy Joe’s retreat. They was a snapping sound and Joe’s arm went limp. Both Lyle and Ralph released their hold, and Joe’s forearm flopped down at angle no arm should ever make. Joe stared at his arm. Ralph and Lyle stared too. In another minute a thin trickle of blood ran down Crazy Joe’s hand and dripped off his finger tips. The blood was the result of the broken bone pushing up through the flesh of his forearm. There was no sound for what seemed a long time to Lyle then Crazy Joe screamed like a woman and ran back through the tree towards town. His screams rapidly became fainter.
“What should we do?” Lyle asked.
“Let him go. He’s running towards town. Somebody will notice him arm and get him to the hospital. Seems like the pain took a long time to make it to his head,” Ralph reached down and picked up the sack of vegetables Crazy Joe had been carrying, “We better put this into the chicken coop. Things gotta look right here.”
Lyle stared as Ralph opened the door and carefully put the back inside, “Aren’t you worried about what just happened?”
“No, it seems it went about right.”
“What?”
Ralph smiled and put his arm around Lyle. They started back toward the battered old red the pickup, “We were trying to make sure the magic balance get right, right?”
“Yah.”
“Some bad shit just happened. We didn’t mean to break his arm, so something real bad so ain’t gonna happen to our side. It means we got some of the balance fixed on our side. It seems right too, since it was him who got things off balance,” Ralph said.
Lyle smiled. It made sense.
“I’ll bet he doesn’t bother Miss Lacy anymore too. Let’s get a pine tree or two to celebrate.” Ralph said as they reached the pickup
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