In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

/ 129 sound effects There’s the intermittent wail of a truck horn—oogah, oogah—followed by a pause in which the sound almost dies, hesitates, then wails again, filling the valley, bouncing like a body on a trampoline off the surface of the creek up to the neighbors’ doors across the valley. If those doors happen to be open, the sound barrels right in, a nosy neighbor, an uninvited guest. The neighbors used to wonder if cows were somehow being herded to this repetitive, arrhythmic beat, but one day a night shift worker, trying to get his sleep, went over there in anger. He was confronted by the unemployed father who informed him that his son was “retarded.” Now the neighbors know the sound comes from the sixteen-year-old boy, a twin caught too long in the birth canal, who will never walk upright or speak an intelligible word. All day, to quell his boredom, he sits in the wrecked pickup and methodically honks the horn. The father’s motorcycle revs but never leaves the shed. Every Sunday morning the roar erupts like a demon chained in a dungeon, sputters and 130 / cathryn hankla rages within the uncertain confines of its ramshackle hell. The shed’s pocked roof is held up by the muttered prayers of rotten and uneven boards through which the light of day, like kudzu, creeps. For a while neighbors complain of constant hammering when the father loses his job again, but nothing ever appears to have been altered or repaired, and the asbestos siding wears thin as onion skin. There’s the pounding bass of the healthy twin sister’s heavy metal like a meat saw punctuated by the hacking of heavy hands cleaving raw slabs, tenderloin from the sinew of the hindquarters, roast from the rump. There’s the crunch of gravel beneath her boyfriend’s pickup tires and the slamming of doors leading up to the porch where the peeling front door opens and she runs out to meet him. Her mother and older sister are still at work, and her father’s out felling any stand of trees he can find to burn in the wood stove. Squeals of delight or fear are followed or preceded by certain unidentifiable whacks. Sometimes it seems that one can hear the padding of small feet on the beaten down earth, the frozen mud of their yard, which no longer supports a single living shoot of green. It is as though one can hear a splinter piercing the not yet toughened hide of the youngest grandchild’s feet. Steaming carcasses of hogs have swayed from giant hooks behind their house, under a cold, glint of sun, like a stab in the eye. There’s a single, woman’s boot in the road, size seven, stolen by a dog off their rotten porch and torn asunder, left like a hapless animal for cars to run over and crush flat. Endless rounds of barking dogs overshadow the moaning of coyotes and shatter the comforting country blackness with their sirens during dark phases of the moon.These dogs that roam the woods, predators that can bring down a deer in its tracks, howl when pained by brief separations from the snarling wild tract around them. They have rent their chains and sunk their teeth into passersby, been banished by the courts but afterwards replaced by equally cursed curs. Like grief, the wave of these strays is perpetual. There’s another screaming mouth, when the boyfriend vanishes, leaving the youngest daughter, the sound twin, in the same way as the oldest daughter. Children hang off the precarious porch railings, skinning the cat, and fall into sound effects / 131 the road. The wood stove fires up for another season of green, snarling pine smoke hurling into the night sky, barring the stars from view. And one day there’s the unambiguous blast of a shotgun from inside the house when a census worker knocks on the door. ...

Share