by William Gay
He shuffled through a stack of 78 rpm records reading the labels. Old Bluebird records by the Carter Family, Victor records by Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman. “Evening Sun Yodel,” “Away Out on the Mountain.” He could remember hearing these songs in his youth, singing them himself, he and Ellen playing these selfsame records on the Victrola. Jimmie Rodgers was a blues singer and he remembered that Ellen hadn’t been too high on him but she had been fond of the Carter Family. Jimmie Rodgers, dead of TB and still a young man after all these years and even turning a dollar or two off that: and that graveyard sure is a lonesome place, they lay you on your back and throw the dirt down in your face.
Well why the hell not, he thought. He moved stacks of folded quilts, old newspapers off the Victrola and wiped the dust off. The machinery creaked when he cranked it and he doubted it would work.
It did though. The needle hissed on the record and there was Rodgers’ distinctive guitar lick then a dead voice out of a dead time still holding the same smoky sardonic lilt: She’s long, she’s tall, she’s six feet from the ground.
The old man was lost in the song and didn’t hear the girl until she was in the room. He turned and she was crossing the threshold. She had a plate in one hand and a tumbler of iced tea in the other. Jimmie Rodgers was singing: I hate to see that evenin sun go down, cause it makes me think I’m on my last go-around.
He arose and lifted the tonearm off the record.
Mama sent this.
He hadn’t anticipated anything approaching human kindness out of the Choat family and he didn’t quite know how to handle it.
She said she bet you was hungry and hot as it was you needed somethin cold to drink.
He took the plate awkwardly and cleared a spot for it on the coffee table. She set the tea beside it.
Well. You tell her Fm much obliged. What’d Lonzo have to say about it?
He was down at the barn. What’s that you’re listenin to?
That’s Jimmie Rodgers, the Singin Brakeman. Evenin Sun Yodel.
What is that, country? Sure is some weird-soundin shit. Where’s he out of, Nashville?
Hell if he’s out of anywhere. He’s been dead and gone from here over fifty years.
Oh. Well, how do you know he’s in hell?
If drinkin whiskey and runnin other folks’ women’ll put you there then that’s where he’s at. Anyway he’s in the ground with the dirt throwed in his face. That sounds a right smart like hell to me.
Lord you’d cheer a person up. Are you always in this good a mood?
Just when I get rooted away from the trough, the old man said. He was studying the plate. He was of two minds about it. He mistrusted Ludie Choat’s cooking and figured her none too clean in her personal habits but then you didn’t know what was in Vienna sausage, either. All he had was the Viennas and besides there was okra rolled in meal and fried. It had been a long time since he had eaten fried okra. The plate also held garden tomatoes peeled and sliced and he figured if everything else proved inedible he could always eat the tomatoes.
What are you doin, movin in here?
Yes I am. I’ll have it right homey before I’m through. Curtains on the windows, bouquets of flowers to smell the place up. I may get me a dog.
Daddy won’t allow a dog on the place. He can’t stand to hear them bark.
Mmm, the old man mused. Say he can’t?
I got to get back to the house before Daddy turns up. Just set the dishes out on the porch in the mornin, all right?
All right, he said irritably, peering closely at the dishes. But if I ain’t badly mistaken they’re mine anyway.
AT FIRST LIGHT HE WAS UP as was his custom and in the dewy coolness he went up thé slope behind the tenant house following the meandering line of an old rail fence he himself had built long ago. At the summit he paused to catch his breath and stood leaning on his walking stick peering back the way he’d come. The slope tended away in a stony tapestry and the valley lay spread out below him in a dreamy pastoral haze and mist rose out of the distant hollows blue as smoke. The sky was marvelously clear and on this July morning each sound seemed distinct and equidistant: he could hear cowbells on the other side of the woods, a truck laboring up a hill on some distant road. These sounds and sights reminded him of his childhood long ago in Alabama, and they caused a singing in his blood and a rise in his spirits, he could hear his heart hammering strong and fierce as when he was a boy. He was alive and the world alive with him and he had come back to it without either of them being changed.
He entered the cool dappled green of the woods going downhill now and when he came out of the trees into the light again he was in Thurl Chessor’s pasture and approaching the barn and house. He went on past deceased tractors and rusting mowers and old mule-drawn planters like museum artifacts.
He was suddenly and against his will assailed by memory. It came to him that he was a repository of knowledge that was being lost, knowledge that no one even wanted anymore. The way the earth looked and smelled rolling off the gleaming point of a turning plow, the smell of the mule and the feel of the sweat-hardened harness and the way the thunderheads rolled up in the summer and lay over the hills like malignant tumors and thunder booming along the timberline and clouds unfolding in a fierce and violent coupling and seeding in the furrows a curious gift of ice that lay gleaming in the black loam like pearls.
He remembered laying out all night as a young man and trudging woodenly behind the mule the next day, sleep-robbed and weary, jerky as a puppet the mule was controlling with the plowlines.
He shook these thoughts out of his head and went on. He could see Thurl walking back toward the house from the pig lot with a feed bucket in his hand. Thurl was his contemporary and he had known him forty years but they had never been close. Thurl was not a very good farmer but he had managed to survive. Thurl did not have a head for business, an eye for the small detail. He was apt to leave a tractor out in the weather with the intake filling with rainwater and pine needles then curse the folks in Illinois or wherever that made it and wonder why it wouldn’t start. On the other hand, Meecham thought ruefully, he was not living in a tenant shack with Lonzo Choat reared back in the main house like the lord of the manor.
Chessor put the bucket on a slab shelf and turned and studied Meecham with no surprise. Well, I see you’re back. Run off, did you.
Yeah.
Are they after you?
After me? Hellfire. It was a old folks’ home, not a chain gang. Why would they be after me?
I don’t know. I don’t know anything about it. Where’d you sleep last night? Did Lonzo make you down a pallet on the floor?
That’s mainly why I come down here. I need to use your telephone. I need to call Paul and see if I can’t get this mess straightened out. I’ve got to get Choat out of there.
You’ll play hell doin it. Or doin it quick anyway. He’s got a foot in the door now. You get him evicted legal the law won’t make him move for thirty days. They’re not goin to throw him right out.
I need to use your telephone anyway. It’s long distance but I got money.
That’s all right. It’s in the front room where it always was.
He spoke with a young woman who would make no commitment as to Paul’s whereabouts. He was put on hold and treacly music began to play softly in the background. He was on hold for some time then she came back on the line. Mr. Meecham is engaged right at the moment, she said.
I’m fairly engaged myself, the old man said. You get him on here. I aim to clear this mess up and no mistake about it.
I’m sorry, sir. Mr. Meecham is tied up right now. His time is very valuable.
If I hadn’t sold calves and pigs to send him through law school it wouldn’t be worth fifteen cents. You get him on this phone.
There was the dawning of knowledge in the woman’s voice. Are you Mr. Meecham’s father by any chance?
There’s rumors to that effect.
Well, I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t und
erstand. He’s on his way to court but I’ll have him paged. He has a beeper. Give me your number and I’ll have him return your call in a moment.
Meecham read her the number and cradled the phone. Paul’s got a beeper, he thought to himself. He was unsure exactly what a beeper was but he was vaguely impressed nonetheless. He tried to call Paul’s face to mind but it was the child Paul had been that came swimming up from the depths of memory and the circles the adult Paul moved in were as strange to them both as some continent across the waters. He sat staring at the telephone as if he expected it to perform some bizarre and clever trick he had taught it.
He picked it up on the first ring.
Dad?
So you got you a beeper, the old man said.
Dad, what is this about?
I want them folks out of the house and I want them out today.
What?
That Choat bunch. Layin up there sleepin in your mama’s bed and eatin out of her dishes. Looks like you’d be ashamed of yourself. I want em gone.
Where are you calling from?
Where do you think I’m callin from? Thurl Chessör’s place, they’ve done broke my phone or somethin. Are you goin to get them out today or not?
There was a pause. What are you doing there? You’re supposed to be in the nursing home in Linden.
Supposed to be? I’m supposed to be where I damn well please. Nobody tells me where I’m supposed to be, nobody ever did. What is this mess you’ve cooked up?
There was another pause, this one longer, and this time Paul’s face did come to mind, like a slowly developing photographic plate, the thin face filled out with rich food and prosperity, perhaps tanned from the golf course, the pudgy fingers massaging his temples as if the old man was giving him a headache.
This is getting too complicated for me, Paul finally said. At any rate it’s too complicated for the telephone. Use that phone to call a cab, and go back, to the home. I’ll come down there at—a pause again and the old man knew Paul was looking at his watch—five o’clock and explain everything about the sale.
Sale my ass. You can’t sell what ain’t yourn.
Well, obviously we need to discuss it, but as to what I can or can’t do, I’m your legal guardian and the trustee of your estate. When you started acting erratic after Mama died I got worried about you. I figured you were a danger to yourself, and the court—
I’ll be a danger to a whole hell of a lot more than myself unless you get your ass on the ball and unscramble this paperwork. I’ll do it myself, I’m not penniless. Do you think you’re the only lawyer that ever hit a golf ball ?
Five o’clock, all right?
The old man slammed the phone so hard Chessor glanced at it sharply as if it might have broken. Meecham was lightheaded with rage. Black dots swam before his eyes like a swarm of gnats and he felt dizzy and strange, as if his very soul was packing up to flee his body. It seemed to him that he had scraped and cut corners and done without just to send Paul to an expensive school where he’d learned a trade that was doing him out of what he had taken a lifetime to accumulate.
He sat on the porch with Chessor drinking morning coffee and trying to think what to do. He had to formulate a plan.
Well? Chessor asked.
The old man sipped his coffee and sat staring across Chessor s yard toward the pear tree. The yard was littered with a motley of broken and discarded plunder, and dogs of varied and indeterminate breed lay about the yard like fey decorations some whitetrash landscapist had positioned there with a critical eye.
He give me the runaround.
Ain’t that the way of the world, Chessor said.
I got to have me a way of goin. You still got that old Falcon?
Yeah. It still runs but I had to quit drivin it. They took my license a while back cause I kept runnin into folks. I can’t see like I used to.
What’11 you take for it?
I don’t know. I ain’t got no use for it. Two hundred dollars? Would you give that?
Let’s look at it.
He checked the oil and brake fluid. He checked the coolant level and listened to the engine idle with a critical ear. Thurl was apt to run an automobile without oil and use water for brake fluid and trust the radiator to take care of itself.
What was that place like?
It was all right.
All right. That’s why you’re livin in a sharecropper’s cabin I reckon.
No, it was all right. They fed pretty good, nobody mistreated you. It was just … just a job to them, I guess. You had the feelin if you died in your sleep they’d just move you out and somebody else in and nobody would give much of a shit.
You want the car?
I guess. You throw in that lit old tan dog with one ear up and one ear down and I’ll give you ten more bucks.
Why don’t I just sell out lock, stock, and barrel and you move in here, Chessor said. Anyway that dog ain’t worth ten dollars. That thing sets in barkin long about dark and don’t let up till daylight.
He may just be a fifteen-dollar dog, Meecham said.
HE NAMED THE DOG NIPPER and set about immediately training it to bark at his command. Showing a great deal of aptitude for this, the dog was a brilliant pupil and seemed to need little instruction. He rewarded its efforts with bits of tinned mackerel and in no time at all he could command, You hush, Nipper, and the dog would erupt into a fierce grating bark as annoying as a fingernail scraped endlessly across a blackboard, leaping and growling with its black little eyes bulging, ugly as something alien, something left on a beach by receding tides.
The old man had been to Ackerman’s Field and laid in supplies and he was feeling fairly complacent. He had bought bread and milk and tinned soup and a gallon of orange juice and he bought a hot plate to warm the soup on. As an afterthought he bought a box of shells for the pistol. He expected this night to pass far more pleasantly than the previous one. Sitting on the porch watching the day wane with the rusty green Falcon parked in his driveway and Nipper dozing at his feet he felt quite the country esquire.
Of course Choat noticed the dog right away, he could hardly have avoided it. He ignored it until nightfall then came in his shambling graceless walk down the slope from the main house. White trash right down to the ground, the old man thought. He even walks like it.
Where’d you get that thing?
The old man was sitting on the stoop cradling the dog as you might a child. The dog watched Choat with its eyes shiny as bits of black glass.
It followed me home, Meecham said. I guess you could say I found it.
You better lose it then. I ain’t puttin up with no dog on this place.
It’s my dog and my place and I guess you’ll like it or lump it. He don’t bark much.
Yeah. I heard it not barkin much most of the goddamned day. It’ll come up with its neck wrung and you may not fare much better.
He’s a good boy. He don’t bother nobody. You hush now, Nipper.
The dog began to bark ferociously at Choat and snap its fierce little teeth and strain against the fragile shelter of the old man’s arms.
You learnt that little son of a bitch to do that, Choat said viciously. I don’t know how you found out a barkin dog drives me up the wall but by God you did and it’s goin to cost you.
The old man felt an uncontrollable grin trying to break out on his face but he swallowed hard and fought it down. Then something in Choat’s face sobered him. Choat had raised a fist and he looked as if he was going to attack man or dog or both, his flat porcine face was flushed with anger.
You touch me and I’ll have you in jail for assault before good dark, the old man said.
Choat lowered the fist, he turned toward the main house. You need put in the crazy house. And that’s where you’ll be before this is over.
You hush there, Nipper, Meecham told the dog.
♦ ♦ ♦
HE WAS ABED EARLY but he awoke at eleven o’clock the way he had planned to do and went barefoot with the
dog onto the porch. Lace filigrees of moonlight fell through the leaves, the main house was locked in sleep.
He sat on the stoop and packed the bowl of his pipe with Prince Albert. He could feel· the warmth of the dog against his thigh. When he had the pipe going and the fragrant blue smoke rolling he opened a tin of mackerels.
Hush, Nipper.
The dog began to bark.
He forked out a mackerel and fed it to the dog. It stopped barking and snapped up the fish and looked about for more. Now I’ve done fed you, the old man said. You behave yourself, now.
The dog began a frenzy of barking. After a while the porch light came on at the farmhouse and the door opened and Choat came out onto the porch wearing only a pair of boxer shorts. Gross and misshapen against the dark doorway. How about shuttin up some ofthat goddamned racket, he called.
I can’t get him to hush, the old man yelled. I don’t believe he’s used to the place yet.
He’s about as used to it as he’s goin to get. You bring him up here and I believe I might manage to quieten him down some.
He’ll be all right. I expect he’ll hush by daylight anyway.
You contrary old bastard. I’m just going to let you be and outlive you. You’re oldern Moses anyway. You’ll be in the ground before the snow flies and I’ll still be here layin up in your bed.
He went back in and pulled the door to and cut off the light. After a while the old man went back in with Nipper. Before he went to bed he got out the pistol and loaded it. He found a can of machine oil and oiled the action and when he spun the cylinder it whirled, clicking with a smooth lethal dexterity.
♦ ♦ ♦
SOME TIME PAST MIDNIGHT he awoke to such bedlam that for a moment he was disoriented and thought he must have dozed off in a crazy house somewhere. Looking out the window into the moonlit yard did little to refute this view. What on earth, he asked himself. Choat was beating someone with what looked like a length of garden hose. His wife Ludie was swinging onto his arm and trying to wrest away the hose. He paused and turned and shoved her and she fell onto her back with all her limbs working like some insect trying frantically to right itself. All of them seemed to be screaming simultaneously at the top of their lungs. The hose made an explosive whopping sound each time it struck. You little slut, Choat was screaming. Then Meecham saw that it was the girl, such clothes as she had on torn away by the hose.