Confrontation

Hearing voices, mid-afternoon, I go outside and encounter two good-old-boys with rifles. Squirrel hunters. They said that they didn't know anyone lived up here. I mentioned that a well used driveway and a mailbox indicated otherwise. They said the driveway was a piece of shit, with which I agreed, and not wanting things to escalate to a killing, I asked them if they wanted a beer. They leaned their guns against the porch steps and tailed me inside. I was a little anxious. Four steps inside the back door they both stopped dead, you can see most of the downstairs from there, and after a pause, one of them, Sam (the other was Ollie), said that, Jesus, man, this was a cool place. What I had for beer was not Bud Light, but a six-pack of Red Stripe, and they found that odd. They had never, they said, ever seen so many books, and, of course, had I read them all? Ollie thought the staircase was "the shits", a positive phrase meaning 'very nice', that I'd only ever heard in Erie, Pennsylvania, but then I don't get out much. He allowed that he could make 15 gun stocks from the treads and stringer. I told them The Froggy story, about getting the Black Walnut cheap, and they both knew Froggy. After the second beer, they admitted that they knew someone lived here, a weirdo, and they were just checking me out. I knew that. Hillbilly diplomacy. They brought me a squirrel, on their way back through, and watched while I skinned it out (like taking off a glove) and gutted it, saving the liver and heart. I'm fairly dexterous at this, I'd probably be toward the head of my class. A guy who can skin rabbits and squirrels. A dubious title, but hey, I'll take what I can get. Period, space, is probably what I wanted, commas are so bothersome, but it's nice, sometimes, to string things along. They asked how I was going to cook the squirrel, and I told them about Aunt Pearl's dumplings. It's true, what Joel said, that I could talk myself into or out of anything. Study Cicero, at a time when rhetoric was everything. Recovering the language was a primary focus of the humanists. Latin, of course, fixed, as it was, but as literacy increased, what becomes the language of the day? Claxon had his work carved out for him The first things ever printed are indulgences. You can buy your way out of this. I never bought that. Slavery is always simply slavery.