Earl was the young, lean, and only son of Matty Bear, a bereaved (on account of her dead husband) woman. Earl lived with Matty on a large farm which had been in the family of Carl, Matty's (now dead) husband for several generations. The fields of the farm stretched out into the distance. There were stretches of corn, and other stretches of lowing cattle that were constantly chewing up the grass beneath them with their flat, yellow teeth. Consequently, the grass was always too short, ripped, and harassed-looking. There was a white farmhouse on the southern part of the property, with a porch on which Matty sat in the evenings, pockmarked, looking out at the distance into which the fields stretched.
Matty Bear had, in her youth, been an attractive woman. In the photographs Earl found in the attic's tin box covered in mildew, previously hidden, but now discovered and easily opened by way of Earl's lifting of a small, dull, silver clasp, Earl observed, with surprised satisfaction, the shapely bare legs of his mother, then not a mother, but seventeen, about, and just married to Carl Bear, Earl's father. Matty Bear had had flax-yellow braids, long and thin, resembling the strands of a weeping willow in August. Her eyes were beautiful, if a somewhat common, cornflowery color. What Earl noticed, however, most, were her plump, white hands which, in the photograph, were in a perpetual state of rest at her sides, beneath their white cambric sleeves. But now, Earl thought, somewhat perplexed, as an eleven year old often is (and aught to be) with regards to questions concerning the Impermanence of Beauty and the Inevitable March of Time, his mother was not something at which it was extremely pleasing to look. In the evenings on the porch, her cornflower eyes gone to seed, so to speak, and looking off, and un-hearing, un-answering, she was decidedly pale and slack-skinned, as a chicken before roasting. She had no longer that firm, robustness of youth. Her once milk-white hands were red, and worn, as chewed upon by chores as were, by cattle, the near and distant fields. Now Matty wore a plaid neck cloth. She wore a checkered apron. She wore low, rubber shoes without socks. Around her porch swing, among her swinging, sock less, rubber shod, feet, the house cats were littered like so many wads of newspaper. However Matty did not see them, just as Matty did not read news papers, wadded or smooth. Matty kept her eyes strictly on the distance, as if it were a fascinating action movie rather than a a green, unwavering, line.
One warm summer afternoon, Earl sat below a large yard tree, singing a semi-merry song, and skipping stones across the yard in order to more thoroughly pretend it was not a yard, but a cool green pond with swimming fish. Sometimes, Earl wondered about the world. What was it like? Out there? Beyond the distance into which the fields of his farm stretched? Perhaps that was what Matty Bear looked for, too, so carefully with her faded, blueish eyes. Yes. What was the world like? Oh what. Yes. Oh What. Earl clucked and sang, ignoring the ants which raced up and down his thin, hairless legs. Eventually he ran out of stones to skip, stones, which he had gathered into a pouch from the gravel road. Now the pouch lay empty. Earl threw himself onto the grass, pretending, still, that it was water. That this, what he had just done, was a belly flop. He made a sound to resemble a splash of lake water. Then, presently, lying there, looking up at the filter of leaves hanging from the tree like a symposium of sleeping bats, Earl began to think about his birthday, which was encroaching on him. Any day now, he would be twelve. He then thought about that number, twelve, a seemingly solemn one. Solemn, like a slow march, a funeral march, one, two, one, two, everyone in black on a summer's day, with a bagpipe's out-of-breath wheezing at the back of the black line one two one two, one two.
When the tail end of the funeral had finished its march, Earl switched to thinking about the slice of pie he would buy himself on his twelfth birthday in town, as he had done last year on his eleventh ; a slice of pie which he would wolf down, but at the same time relish. He imagined each buttery, crumbling bite of crust, and the bright, oozing triangle of congealed, fruit. Unconsciously Earl licked his thin, hairless lips. He tasted salt, always salt in summer, even moments after a bath, the heat pulled it out, it seemed, the salt. At last, in the grass, or pond, depending on who's point of view it was, Earl, thinking of his birthday, fell sound asleep.
