The Angel’s Trumpet Pinckney Benedict (bio) treat yourself to the best That’s what it said, in letters eighteen inches high, on the wall of the dairy at our place, at the Goins place. chew mail pouch tobacco. You’ve seen the Mail Pouch signs on the warped walls of old barns that stand tipsily along the roadside out in the country. You’ve maybe even stopped your car, pulled over to the side of the road, crowded your vehicle against the ditch that’s full of trash and weeds and scrubby little trees in order to take photographs of some tilting granary and its picturesque sign. You likely used a clever little camera no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, thinking to yourself as you did so, “How quaint.” None of us chewed tobacco. But there it was all the same, the sign (there must have been money involved, back when it was first painted, or my father, a worldly man, would never have allowed such a thing), bigger and bolder and more brightly tinted than anything else on the place, the paint just beginning to flake off here and there toward the end of our time; but the slogan continued, declamatory, hanging over our heads as we worked, as we saw to the cattle, repaired the machinery, pumped out the manure, planted the corn and harvested it, cut and raked (those long golden fragrant windrows!) and bailed the hay on our sloping, rocky fields: treat yourself to the best. We didn’t smoke either, we Goins men. We didn’t drink. We didn’t use hard language. We were clean-living people. Right up until we died. It was the manure pit that killed us. It didn’t kill quite all of us, to be honest. Killed all of us but me. The shear pin on the impeller in the pit gave way and was the origin of the tragedy (as the newspapers all called it, tragedy, to a one). That’s what shear pins are made to do, to snap cleanly when the strain is too great, when something must give way. The shear pin’s a sacrificial part, the element of the machine that breaks by design. Every machine must have a weak point, as perhaps you are aware, and you want it to be something inexpensive and easy to replace. In the particular case of a manure storage tank pumping system like ours, you want it to be a cheap metal rod that you slip easily through hub and axle right behind the impeller, rather than a complex and expensive drive train or motor. The shear pin that secured the pump’s impeller gave way when we were nearly finished pumping out the manure tank—some chunk of hard [End Page 25] matter in the viscous stuff caught in the spinning blades, most likely—and to fix it my big brother Albertus climbed down into the manure pit located under the floor of the barn; the barn that said so plainly on its broad wall (there were days it seemed to shout at me, that slogan) treat yourself to the best. Albertus: What a grandiose name he had! What grandiose names we all bore. My father was a man who read the works of antiquity and who wanted us to have names that spoke to the world beyond the confines of the Seneca Valley where we dwelt, beyond the narrow confines of the age in which we lived. You learn about history, he told us in authoritative tones, so that you have something intriguing to think about while you’re milking the cows. I myself am named Athelstan Brunanburh, after the first King of All Britain and his greatest military triumph. From The Cave of the Bulls, an illustrated history of the cave paintings in Lascaux, France, a book in my father’s collection: one of my favorites, although I am not a great reader of history. The illustration that accompanies this passage—surprisingly, even astonishingly graceful, suggestive of motion, of a life so monstrously vigorous that even now, even nearly two hundred centuries after it was made, it seems to want to come...