Rant: The Oral History of Buster Casey

But already two eggs gone, disappeared inside Mr. Casey's hand.

And yelling loud, outdoors loud, Mrs. Casey says, 'Not those!'

Mr. Casey turns to the window and—tap-tap-taps—the eggs against the sink edge to peel them.

Me, I drew a wax bird in the sky, flying over my house, invisible. I put itty-bitty drops of wax in the tree to make apples.

Lunchtime that day was the first I ever felt time get stuck. With Rant and his mom frozen solid, the smell of egg sulfur and vinegar dye and vegetables boiled to stains, a week, a summer, a hundred birthdays come and went. We sat with the sun stopped a century, smack dab in the window above the kitchen sink.

Even the clocks held their breath.

Mr. Casey ate the eggs, looking out the kitchen window, his shadow making the candle flame bright enough to see on the table. The hard-cooked smell of sulfur from the peelings he dropped down the drain. He gobbled the two eggs and the screen door went—spree-whap—behind him.

After that, the sun moved to touch one edge of the window frame. Time came unstuck. All the clock hands started back to tick.

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle (Childhood Enemy): Don't make Chet Casey the villain for the crimes his boy done. My take is you're not born loving nobody. Love is a skill you learn. Like house-training a dog. Maybe a talent you do or do not build up. Like a muscle. And if you can't learn yourself to love blood family, then you'll never truly love. Not nobody.

Bodie Carlyle: The first egg Mrs. Casey spooned into the dye, that's the first time all afternoon we saw each other's secret picture.

Wood-spooning my egg into the pot of boiled red cabbage, the stink of vinegar and farts, she dipped the egg out colored blue. Sky blue. Blue except where the wax showed a tree with apples, a house, a cloud, and a sun in the blue sky. My house, where I wanted to get home to before Mr. Casey come back.

Spooning her own egg into the pot of boiled-down beets, Mrs. Casey dipped it out all red. Blood red. Red except for, all around, the fancy work of wax lines, complicated as spiderwebs or lace curtains. But not curtains —words, handwriting. Fancy as poetry you'd find in a valentine card. Too fancy to read.

Spooning up Rant's egg, his mom says, 'What color?'

Green, Rant says.

'Green it is,' she says.

She stirs the egg around in the pot of soggy, slimy spinach greens. Dipping the egg out of the pot, the wax lines make it look striped, side to side. Sectioned up to make squares.

Rant touches a finger to the egg. Touches it a second time. He lifts it from the spoon his mom holds. Pinching it by just one end, Rant dips the egg a little ways into the pot of boiled onions. The yellow dye.

Lifting the egg out, Rant holds it, striped half green and half yellow. The white lines of wax cutting the sides like the lines on a world globe at school.

'That's a beautiful pineapple,' Mrs. Casey says.

'Ain't a pineapple,' says Rant.

The half-green, part-yellow egg, striped into little squares by the white lines of wax. Between two fingers, at the top and bottom, Rant holds up the green-yellow egg, saying, 'It's a MK2 fragmentation grenade.'

Packed with granulated TNT, he says. Throwable up to a hundred feet. With a burst radius of thirty-three feet, a cast-iron body for shrapnel. A kill radius of seven feet.

Rant sets the hand grenade on a kitchen towel, where the other eggs, my blue one and his mom's red one, are drying out. And Rant, he says, 'Let's make lots more.'

Echo Lawrence (Party Crasher): According to Rant, the garden was his mom's territory; the lawn, his dad's. Irene told time by the flowers in bloom. First crocus, then tulips, forget-me-nots, marigolds, snapdragons, roses, day lilies, black-eyed Susans, and sunflowers. The spinach, then the radishes, the lettuce, and the early carrots. To Chester Casey, one week equaled time to mow the grass. One hour meant time to move a lawn sprinkler. We all live by different clocks and calendars.

One Easter, Rant said his mom hid the eggs among the tulips and rosebushes. She gave him a basket and told him, 'Happy hunting, Buddy.'

Rant still has the scar on his hand where the spider bit him.

Bodie Carlyle: Easter morning, Rant's reaching under a plant or a rosebush and he pulls back his hand. Rant's eyes go—kah-sproing—big and bugged-out—looking at the spider perched on the back of his hand skin. He slaps it away, but underneath, the spot's already gone red and puffed up. The veins crabbed up, dark red, branching away from the throbbing, hot tooth marks.

Rant goes back to the kitchen, crying, holding out his bit hand, the fingers already swoll up big and stiff as a catcher's mitt.

Mr. Casey takes one look at his boy, one hand swolled and red, the other hand swinging a pink Easter basket of colored eggs, tears rolling down Rant's cheeks, and Mr. Casey tells him, 'Pipe down.'

Shot Dunyun (Party Crasher): The church scene where his Granny Esther keeled over, dead, that's still fresh in Rant's mind. The way her dentures bit into her tongue.

Bodie Carlyle: Mrs. Casey, she's in the bathroom, putting on her finishing touches before church.

Mr. Casey swats Rant on the seat of his best Sunday pants and says not to come back inside until he's found all the eggs.

Rant still holds out one fat hand, sobbing it's a black widow spider, sobbing how he's going to die. Sobbing how bad it hurts.

His dad turns him around by the shoulders and shoves him back, saying, 'Soon as you bring back all those eggs, we'll get you some medical attention.' Latching the screen door to keep Rant outside, Mr. Casey says, 'If you don't take too long, maybe you won't lose that hand.'

Sheriff Bacon Carlyle: Rant always went on about leaving home, getting out and hand- picking himself a new family, but to my way of seeing that's never going to happen. If you don't accept your folks for all their worst ways, no stranger can ever measure up. All Rant learned himself is how to leave folks behind.

Bodie Carlyle: Dressed-up Rant in his bow tie and white shirt, his black patent-leather shoes and belt, his plain, regular Easter egg hunt, it's now turned into a Race Against Death. His little hands are knocking flowers to one side, busting stems. His feet tramping down petunias. Crushing carrot tops. With every heartbeat, Rant can feel the poison in his hand pumped closer to his brain. The sting of the bite, fading to numb, first his hand losing feeling, then the most part of his arm.

His mom come outside to find him panting in the dirt, facedown in the compost pile that's left of her garden, dirt stuck to the web of tears spread out around each green eye.

Echo Lawrence: So they left him there. They got in their car and drove off to Easter morning services.

Again, that moment, the end of what we wish would last forever.

Bodie Carlyle: Rant never found more than those three eggs. They come home and that's all he had to show for a whole day of hunting. Three eggs and the spider bite, his hand already shrinked back to kid-size.

That spider, it's that black widow spider that got Rant hooked on poison.