Adult Words (short story)

"When you can't tell words from reality. Words become reality." This story is an experiment in ambient discomfort. Some parts are a bit jarring but it's all just words. Nothing too graphic. Enjoy.

I

“If old man Grady would just let his bitch bitch breed, he’d make a killing around here.”

At the time, those words meant as much to me as I’m guessin’ they mean to you. But Jed said them, and that made them as good as gospel to me.

Turns out the “Bitch” he was talking about, was his border collie, Shiv. The killin’ was on account of her pedigree. She used to win dog trials every year. Local. Regionals. Nationals. Every single year.

Every farmer, lifestyler and sideline trainer with their heads half screwed on looked at that dainty border collie like her paws were dipped in gold.

Don’t ask me to explain that any further for you. I only understand half the words I use, and the rest of the time I’m just repeating barstool banter I pick up around town.

Anyway, those folks were probably over hyping that damned dog’s ovaries. How much can breeding really play into it? The joker spending nine hours a day training her probably had a bit more to do with it.

And if old man Grady didn’t want the attention, he was hardly doing himself any favours. Practically lead the pack on the hype: blowin’ little Shiv’s trumpet till the gin blossoms all over his cheeks turned purple.

“One litter of pups and she’ll never be the same again.”

“Not worth it. Too much potential to waste on a few dollars. Shiv’s a once in a lifetime bitch.”

In those days, the old todger wouldn’t allow a leadless dog within a hectare of his prized bitch. They say he emptied four pellets into John Coots’ best Huntaway just for poking out its wee lipstick in her direction. Doesn’t sound so bad till you realize the dog was locked inside a damned crate. Poor thing couldn’t have run away if it wanted to!

Jed reckoned that was half the reason why old man Grady hated him so much—and by proxy, the rest of our family. Reckoned the sheer thought of one of Jeddy’s pig dogs jumping our boundary fence and defiling his prize winner was enough to get the old fart’s heart pacer sending smoke out through his ears.

Now before it starts to sound like the whole town was holdin’ hands in unity over the Grady/Jed beef, I’ll clarify, Jed was known for more than his pig dogs around town. Let’s just say, he was no stranger to standing on the toe end of a gum boot. So old man Grady’s outsized hate could have been born from one of a hundred rumours. True or otherwise.

For a good while there, the animosity coming downwind of old man Grady drove the gossip mill in the RSA club rooms. Mostly the wives, but a few of the local farm hands would take a sip of DB draught, look over at old Grady supping on his ciggy and share their thoughts on what the beef was really about.

“Jed knows something about that old man, I’m tellin’ ya!”

“Jed used to work for him you know. I heard he got a little too close to Grady’s daughter.”

“Well you know what they say about that daughter?”

“I heard Shiv was bred off one of Jed’s old farm dogs back in the day.”

All that “reckoning” that had been goin’ on soon turned concrete the day the two neighbours got into it over their boundary fence.

Can’t remember the specific event he was trainin’ for, but it was a blistering morning. Mr Grady had his faded green cap on as always, a small mob of his “training” ewes running along the boundary fence, lookin closer to drones than mutton as the dog pushed them left and right through obstacles and ramps.

Our house looks over old Grady’s boundary and it was a Sunday, so you could trust Jed was on the porch with a box of beers, breathing in the stink of sheep shit for hours on end, as he loves to do to this day.

Now, the next bit is the cause of some contention: Both parties claim the other was the first to instigate. But bias aside, I’d put my money on Jed bein’ the one to make some wise crack between sips of lager.

Anyway, the bit that both agree on is that at some point, Jed said to Grady, “Y’know old man, If you got your bitch working up the hills , she might actually start bringing some real value to your sorry excuse for a farm.” — Jed’s never been one for burying the lead.

Gotta give old Grady credit here. If the accounts are true, he no-sold this insult like a poker pro. Stared right through my brother and spat, “Maybe that would mean somethin’ ta me if your Daddy was the one talkin’. But I haven’t seen a farmer on this land for over a decade…”

I came out of the house at this point, just in time to see Jed lay down his can. It’s never a good sign when he’s put down a half full can.

So Jed started striding down the hill dodging the broken off bits of bone in the grass. His three white pig dogs came roaring out of their kennels at the same time. Pink rimmed eyes, one with a split open mouth from last month’s hunt. Spit streams slingshotted from their tongues as they ran to the end of their chains.

The biggest one, Pongo half hung himself as the chain snapped whiplash tight, and dragged him down —spine flat on the dead grass of our lawn. The poor thing stayed there for a good minute and a half, lookin up at the sky like some type of hippy, tougnue hangin’ out. Panting.

“come again?” —Jed always dials up his way of speaking when he’s about to get violent.

Mr Grady strode up to the fence, gripping one of the nearest batons. A chunk of moss came off in his hand as he looked Jed up and down. “I said, your Daddy is the only member of your ragged family who has any business throwin’ around farming advice.” He cast his dog roll coloured eyes around our property and scoffed. “Don’t get me wrong, when your poppa was alive, I coulda found more holes in his way of life than a creek-kid’s hinake. But when it comes to farming, I’ve got nothin ill to say.”

Flakes of something white scrapped from his chin as he scratched it. “Lord knows what happened to the rest of you.”

Jed’s jaw was clenched too tight to say anything, so old Grady kept on going. “Didn’t poor Lionel teach you anythin’ he knew?” he nodded, whistling out the edge of his mouth.

Shiv the bitch appeared by his side like she’d teleported there. Intelligent eyes looking up at Jed and I. Old Grady scratched behind her ear, but eyeing the suddenly horny pig dogs ahead of him, he looked over his shoulder at his daughter Chloe Grady who’d appeared from his parked ute.

I’m not sure what it was about her. I guessed it would be a few more years before I understood why her tidy figure and nice eyes always left me feeling guilty whenever I snuck looks her way.

Grady hugged the bitch a little too close before Chloe called it away. Turning back to Jed he pointed up the hill at the dogs. “What you feckin’ around with these mongrels for anyway? You don’t want to make something of yourself? Somethin’ of this farm?”

Jed released an exaggerated sigh. Gripping his chin in the “sophisticated” way he always did, when he was as angry as a wild boar, yet trying to hide it. “My Daddy might have known a thing or two about farming, but he hated every minute of his life.” He took a guru-like study of the land he’d inherited a year ago. Crumbling farm sheds, grass going to seed. The only animals—a handful of tied up horses, and some goats Jed herded down from the hills one afternoon just for the novelty of it.

He wandered back up the minefield of lamb femurs and dog shit, leavin’ me there alone with Old Grady. When the old fart reached out to pat me on the head, I ducked out of the way and followed Jed.

I found him up by Pongo, jeans getting wet in the morning dew as he perched himself in the unmown grass and hugged the ugly mutt in the same way old Grady had done his one.

Even back then I had the sense to be weary about how close Jeddy was putting his face to that thing. Barring the wet nose and wagging tail, it was practically a domesticated alligator. Nonetheless, he wore a lick on the cheek without flinching—by all accounts ready to accept a life of deformity should the killing machine beside him decide to snap. He left the saliva to dry on his cheek and released a superior sigh, “Old buggers like you and my Pa will never learn that life is about more than workin to a purpose.” He shook his head. “Some part of it has gotta be about lovin’ things,” He said, roughing up Pongo with a pat that spurred a docked tail wag.

Old man Grady scoffed. “Shit boy! You know what?” He rubbed his eyes, appealed to his slow daughter, then grinned back at Jed and I. “I think I mighta learned something new today!” He made a double take like a nineties cartoon and eyed me up. “Who’da thought you two sorry sods would be the ones to teach me a lesson?”

My head shot to Jed at this. I didn’t like any part of being implicated in whatever this was. The old bugger’s meaning flew miles above my head, but I sensed he was about to say something mean. Adult to adult, mean.

I could tell Jed shared my uneasiness. He did a good job of hiding it by stroking his moustache—which meant old Grady had to take all his evil satisfaction from my reaction alone. This sent a heaviness through my belly that I didn’t like at all. Jed and I both stayed silent as we waited for the follow up.

Grady gripped the wire and leaned across it, raising his turkey neck throat to enunciate. “In private company, I always referred to you kids as sheep shaggers.” He lowered his droopy eyelids to Pongo, “But now I can see, all your lovin’ is reserved for the dogs!”

Again, I couldn’t have told you a fraction of what those sentences meant at the time, but I knew they were gross. The wheezy, spittle heavy laugh that erupted from the old geezer told me that much. Jed screwed his face up, said some cuss word and walked back up to his box of cans.

In hindsight, old man Grady’s choice of words probably said more about him than it did us. But we'll get there soon.

II

“Someone put their shiv inside Shiv while Grady wasn’t looking. Knocked the bitch up while his back was turned.”

We’d just had our first health class around that time. You know the big birds and bees talk? Diagrams, carefully chosen words and lots of hissing laughter followed by frowns. So I had a loose outline of the general sex process, but naturally the teachers delivered it in a different way to Old Grady and the folks around town talkin’ about him.

In sayin’ that, when a scandal makes its way around town like that, I think it goes beyond language. Adults, the elderly and kids alike can’t help but take it in by some voodoo of osmosis.

Some reckoned Old Grady finally gave up on his “principles” and let one of the local farmers slide cash under the table to have his work-dog have a go. The kooks up on the hill treated it like a second coming event. Shiv the border collie was likened to mother Mary. Blessed with the seed without any gardener.

Of course Old Grady himself, reacted in the only way anyone could have expected out of him. Accusing any and every dog owner in the district to have sabotaged his prize bitch’s career.

“She was born with a gift, and you short sighted hicks have defiled that!”

Like everyone else, I had my own theory. My own guilt.

See, in that health class. They approached the pregnancy process with oven mitts on.

When a male gets close to a female. Closer than he’s usually allowed to, and touches her in a special way. Sometimes that female ends up having a baby.

So when Grady booked out a section of classifieds in the local news paper offering an anonymous opportunity to confess any incriminating details that might serve his investigation. I found an excuse to drag myself along there.

His living room smelt of dog biscuits and Vaseline. The once-upon-a-time-white wallpaper had burnt yellow stains creeping from each corner. Not one of the polished wood doorknobs lacked a human bite mark. I wiped off my hand as I closed it behind me and took a seat on his plastic wrapped three seater.

“Mr Grady. Sir. I’ve got an….I’ve got a confession.”

“Your dirty bloody brother. He did it didn’t he?!”

“—no sir. I—”

“I bloody well knew it!” The plastic crinkled as he left his seat. “Never ties those mutts up properly.”

I was thrown off when tears began to form in his already watery eyes. Never seen a man his age tear up like that.

“Me poor Shiv. She’ll never be the same. And the mongrels that are about to come out of her? If they make it out of her gentle little body.”

For reasons I couldn’t explain, illness overtook my guilt at that point, and I decided it was best to get it all out and get out of there as quickly as possible. “Last week, I snuck onto your land when I shouldn’t have.”

Those teary eyes grew big-bad-wolf wide. “You are the culprit?!” His nostrils seemed to malfunction, crunching and uncrunching impossibly fast—rabbit nose fast. “Why, www..what for? You led those un-sexed monstrosities onto my land for what reason?” he collapsed into his seat with as much purpose as when he’d stood up. “Are you sick boy?”

By this point I couldn’t keep the frown off my face. All I could do was shake my head. The guy’s living room felt like the mirror house at the A & P show I went to a few weeks before that. Bending my thoughts so they couldn’t quite sit steady between my ears.
”No, I…I left the dogs at home. It was just me…”

Suddenly he started looking at me in a different way. Not saying anything. Just watching. Holding his lips in a controlled way like he was trying to keep the horror inside his head at bay.

“Everyone talked so highly of your dog Shiv.” I toed the ground with my size four gumboot. “My big brother never let me come over to pat her with the other kids during dog trials. So I…”

The horror became fully fledged now. He looked at me like I’d dragged human-shit across his carpet. He looked down at my crotch—which sent my ears ringing and made me back towards the the door without thinking. My instincts told me, this had something to do with his comments way back on that Sunday afternoon— The Jed Affair— but I didn’t know how or why.

A desperate shake of the head seemed to drive some sense into his brain though, and the look in his eye returned to the defeated confusion of before.

“Boy, explain yourself. You snuck onto my land. Presumably approached my Shiv in her Kennel, and then what?”

My lips were like a fan belt by this point. feeling the guilt rise up. I swallowed a lump. “I reached between the wire….”

“—and?” Even though he wasn’t touching me, Old Grady made me feel like I was being suffocated by his presence.
”—And I patted her.”

“Patted her where?”

I blinked. “On the head…behind the ears.”

“And?”

My shoulders hunched up by their own accord. “I think…maybe down her back a little bit.”

He grew pale. “And then?”

This part was strange. He seemed to be expecting something else from me that wasn’t there. I blinked some more. Looked across the room to his daughter. She was no help. Sittin’ cross legged in the middle of the lounge poking a spoon at a milkless bowl of weet-bix.

“Then I thought I heard your truck pulling in so I went home.”

He narrowed his eyes on me the way principal Spout does when he knows I’ve lied, but can’t prove it without crossing some sort of adult to child line. “So why did you feel such a need to come out here and confess to me this afternoon? What does this have to do with my Shiv’s investigation?”

This time I narrowed my eyes, as if to let him know—this ain’t my first rodeo sir. You know what I’m tellin’ you.

He sighed. “Boy, what part in my dog’s pregnancy do you feel you’ve played?”

By this point I well and truly felt I was being messed with. “I know how sex works mister. If a male touches a female in the right spot, for too long, sometimes—”

“Go home kid.”

The coldness of this caught me off guard. But I didn’t need any more encouragement than that. Shit, my skeleton had been trying to follow that instruction since before we’d even entered his living room.

III

I would have been Jed’s side of the boundary before the door closed shut behind me if not for the squeaking. At first it hardly registered. It was perfectly plausible to me that this shit-hole of a house might have mice, but then I heard a second squeak, closer to a squeal.

A tiny ball of closed eyed blubber was wading/dragging its fat body through the low thread carpet.
A flash of black and white appeared. The blubber dangled from it’s own scruff, from the mouth of Shiv.

But not quite Shiv.

In place of the militant, all-business canine. This Shiv looked younger, with a sparkle in her eye. No less intelligent as she looked across the room at me, I swear to god I caught a smile.

A second blob emerged from the kitchen. The Grady daughter made a groan, but old man G shushed her. He had a goofy smile I’d never seen before, a row of filling speckled teeth. Waterworks going again as he watched his “ruined” pride and joy prancing around her puppies like a puppy herself.

Suddenly Jed’s words from that afternoon came back to me for some reason. The thing he said about not always workin’ to a purpose. About finding something to love instead. I didn’t understand them the first time and even now I don’t think he was all the way wrong.

Yet as I sat there watching old man Grady, taking in his pride and joy, trying to hold back a smile, I realised something.

Jed didn’t know shit. Old man Grady and the rest of the town for that matter, didn’t know shit.

I might not have understood half the adult words that flew above my head on the daily. But neither did they. Not really.

All those words, all those secrets, all those complicated theories I was tryna wrap my head around. They were just born from a bunch of adults tryna wrap their head around shit they didn’t understand either.

Making their assessments about how other people think.

Why other people are doing whatever it is they assume they’re doing.

Why your way is the right way.

Why your mistakes weren’t really mistakes.

Now that Shiv had her wee half bred pups, I saw the difference. I didn’t need a single fancy word to realise in that moment, old man Grady, his slow daughter and I were all witnessing a truer truth that sat somewhere in the middle of what we’d all been thinkin’ and above it all at the same time.

There were no big words here. No adult terms I’d later learn. It was just pure undiluted truth.

I don’t have the language to lay it all out, all I can give you is the image of Grady’s bitch Shiv lookin’ happier than she’s ever been seen. The old man hugging his daughter and grinning for the first time I’d ever seen him grin.

I went home. Didn’t mention any of it to anyone.