THE FIRST HOMESTEAD they came to the next morning was deserted—aback their horses, through the busted door, they saw standing water and a rat swimming in a lazy circle. Ingersoll was anxious. During the night he’d dreamed about riding up a grassy hill crowned with a sweet olive tree and finding tethered to it a massively uddered milk cow, and he admitted now to himself that he didn’t give a damn about finding the saboteurs unless they were running a dairy. The baby had been feasted upon in the night by mosquitoes and bore the bites stoically. It didn’t cry and felt hot. Riding, Ingersoll kept touching its head.
The next place they came upon seemed as deserted as the first. It was a stone building with slotted windows. Essentially a small fort, bearded along its bottom in green mold. Nothing moved.
But Ham said, “Wait.”
Ingersoll shifted the baby behind him and raised his sixteen gauge toward the windows.
Ham was already off his horse and standing against the wall with rifle ready. He spun and kicked in the log door. Ingersoll was on the ground using his horse for cover. He’d put the baby behind him and it was starting to fuss.
“Come on in,” Ham called to him.
Ingersoll blocked the baby with his body as he sidewindered up. He trailed his single-barrel in the room and followed his partner’s gaze to four people crouched in the corner. They were thin, white, dressed in rags. Three were men and one, behind them, a stringy-haired woman. The room smelled like piss. There wasn’t a stick of furniture. Only a big washpot and the remains of a fire in a dugout fireplace. They weren’t saboteurs, or even looters, but Ham eyed them warily. The baby was crying in a raspy way.
Then the girl stepped forward. “Can I hold it?”
She was skinny but her breasts were enormous under her tattered housedress. They were wet at the nipples.
“What the hell?” Ham glanced at Ingersoll.
“Here.” Ingersoll offered her the baby.
She took it and turned her back to them and the baby’s squall muffled for a second and then ceased, replaced by wet sucking sounds. She stood, rocking from side to side.
“Oh.” Ham grinned and lowered his weapon.
“You can put yours away, too, son,” one of the men said to Ingersoll. “We ain’t got no guns. All we got is sticks.”
Another of the men raised his, a pathetic cane.
Ingersoll slid his shotgun into his boot holster.
“What’s your all’s story?” Ham asked the oldest-looking of the men, though in truth you couldn’t tell how old (or how young) any of them were.
“Our story?” The man looked around. He flung out his arms. “Here it is. Me.” He pointed. “Him. Him. Her. This place that used to be a farm. Forty days and nights of rain, no goddamn ark. Near six days spent on the roof with a bellowing coon dog till we ate it. Then suddenly appear a baby and two maniacs with guns. That’s our story.”
“What happened to her youngun?” Ingersoll asked, nodding to the girl.
She stiffened and looked at him over her shoulder.
“It died,” one of the men said.
“How.”
He looked down.
“The way babies die,” the oldest man said. “In the middle of the night.”
“Y’all been sucking her milk?” Ham asked.
The old man met his gaze. “It’s worse sins than that when you’re starving.”
Ingersoll and Ham exchanged a glance.
“I expect it is,” Ham said.
Ingersoll looked at the girl. She just rocked with her eyes closed as the baby’s hand climbed her neck and hooked a finger in her lip.
“Who’re y’all?” another of the men asked.
“We ain’t nobody you need to worry about,” Ham said.
“Is anybody coming to help us down here? Is anybody sending food?”
Ingersoll shook his head. “Just to the camps in Greenville. Y’all should head over there. They’re giving tents and food and seventy-five cents a day to levee repairers.”
“We ain’t leaving,” the old man said.
“Suit yourself,” Ham told him. “But the next party through might not be so kind as we are.”
It was decided they’d leave the baby with the girl. They also left matches, sugar, lard and jerked beef, which the men fell upon instantly.
“Don’t eat too fast,” Ham said. “You’ll produce it right back.”
The girl didn’t want any. Ingersoll studied her and she smiled and revealed a row of small, even teeth.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Dixie Clay.”
“You okay, Dixie Clay?”
She didn’t answer.
“She’s fine,” the younger man said.
“Let’s skedaddle,” Ham said to Ingersoll. He touched the brim of his derby with his rifle barrel and turned for the door.
Ingersoll watched the girl. For a moment she seemed to lean in his direction, her eyes intensified at him, until the young man stepped in front of her.
“Thank you for your kindness,” he said.
“I’ll be back,” Ingersoll said. “To check on that baby.”
HE WAS QUIET as they walked their horses side by side, though Ham kept trying to provoke him.
“I read water poured through the Mounds Landing crevasse harder than Niagara. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“True. Three-quarters mile crevasse, and near three hundred levee workers swept clean away right then and there. Unless newspapers lie.”
“Some do.”
“Could be our saboteurs made that breach,” Ham said.
Ingersoll didn’t answer. He kept seeing the girl’s eyes and how tightly she held the baby to her chest.
It was growing dark and Ham said this looked like a good spot to camp, didn’t it, pretty dry. They dismounted and Ham sat on his roll and tugged at his boots, which slurped free. He peeled down
his socks and sat looking at his toes, wrinkled and mushroomed.
Ingersoll took off his hat and set it on the ground beside him. How empty it seemed. Ham produced two cans of beans and his opener as Ingersoll turned the pegs, played a lick, tuned it again.
Then he put it down and looked up into the night. “I’m tired of never seeing no stars,” he said.
“Just be glad it ain’t raining. You gone play?”
“Not right now.”
Ham set the cans of beans in the fire to warm and they’d just begun to bubble at the top when he sat alert and laid his hand on his .30-30. Ingersoll had heard it too, dried mud crunching, and they rolled away from the fire on their bellies, aiming into the dark.
“Don’t shoot. I got the baby.”
“Oh for Christ sake.” Ham spat into the dark.
Dixie Clay stepped forward into the firelight. She was clutching the baby, and she was bleeding across the forehead some.
“We nearly blew your fool head off,” Ham said, pushing to his feet. “And for making me spill my mescal, you’d a deserved it.”
Dixie Clay looked at Ingersoll, rising himself.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“They following you?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“They will,” Ham said.
“The baby,” she said, “the baby wasn’t safe there. With them.”
Ingersoll looked at Ham, who didn’t meet his eyes and sat down before the fire. He commenced to scraping mud from his book with a stick.
Ingersoll waited for her to say more, but she didn’t. “They eat your baby?” he asked at last.
She lowered her head.
“Girl? I asked you a question. If you don’t answer I’m gone send you right back to ‘em.”
“Yeah.” “Yeah?”
“Yeah. They eat her. She was dead already and they said we had to or they’d starve.”
“But they won’t eat this one,” Ham said. “They got food now. We gave ‘em some.”
She hugged the baby higher
on her chest. It was still wrapped in Ingersoll’s shirt.
“Well?” Ham demanded.
She was looking at Ingersoll. “Something’s wrong with them. Something went wrong.”
Ham resumed scraping mud from his boot heel. “Sit down,” Ingersoll said to the girl, and pointed to his roll. She sank onto it still holding the baby. It gave an enormous yawn. Its color was better.
He opened his pack and offered her an apple. “No, thank you.”
But he tossed it anyway and she caught it with one hand without disturbing the baby.
“Eat it, girl. Otherwise you and this little one both gonna die and all for nothing.”
She took a bite and chewed and looked at the baby in her arms and looked back up. “What’s gonna happen to us?” Ingersoll wondered the same thing.
WHEN INGERSOLL WOKE the next morning, Ham had already put coffee on and was pissing into a mud puddle fifty yards off. Ingersoll looked across the ashen coals where he’d lain out his bedding for the girl. She’d slept with the baby nestled against her, and in the dawn light he saw where some of her blood had crusted on the baby’s cheek. For the first time he wondered what its name was.
Ingersoll rose quietly and stretched and filled their tin cups with coffee and went to where Ham was loading the saddlebag.
“Obliged,” Ham said.
They stood together facing the lip of sun pushing itself over the flat brown world, glazing the mud puddles like copper ingots.
Ham sipped his coffee and studied his partner. “What the hell are you about to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Yes you do.”
“I can’t leave ‘em.”
“Yes you can.”
“No I can’t, Ham.”
“You’ve connected ‘em and saved that damn baby’s life. At some point you just have to do your job. Our job.”
Ingersoll stood silent, watching the sunrise.
“Shit,” Ham said. He flung his coffee into the mud.
“Just tell ‘em I’m dead. When you get back.”
Ham sighed. “That won’t even be no lie,” he said. “It’s what you call a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the looters don’t get you, or the saboteurs, ole Coolidge will. You done seen too much.”
“Just do what you have to.”
“I will, Ing. Got damn it.”
They shook hands and looked for a long moment into one another’s eyes. Ingersoll couldn’t see a thing in Ham’s and wondered what Ham saw in his own. For the first time it occurred to Ingersoll that if Ham killed him now he’d merely be doing his job. But instead Ham nodded and turned away and Ingersoll turned too with his coffee and went to nudge the coals.
The girl’s face had relaxed from its fear and he watched her sleep. She was pretty under the dirt and the blood, freckles on her up-turned nose and brown hair that she could probably fix nice if she wanted. The baby was sleeping too, its mouth slack around her nipple, a trace of watery milk on its tongue. He stood and turned to gaze across the cracked leather earth to where Ham was cinching the girth on his horse.
“Last chance,” Ham called. He kicked the flap of his boot sole down and swung into the saddle, grinning. “Russian girls can smoke a cigarette with they virginias. They let you do ‘em up the chute if you pay ‘em five more dollars.”
“Naw,” Ingersoll said, grinning too, and raised his hand, and Ham raised his back and then turned and rode away, the sorrel kicking up arcs of mud behind him.
When Dixie Clay woke he doctored her head a little while she licked her thumb and rubbed some of the dirt and dried blood from the baby’s cheeks. He told her about Ham leaving and then turned his attention to heating another can of beans so she could nurse. He sang as he stirred, a tune of nonsense, swimming with bowlegged women, the words not making sense but neither were his feelings.
THEY WERE ABACK HIS HORSE, the girl before him on the saddle, holding the baby, and they were headed west. The sun was out and the earth drier, trees on the horizon. Dixie Clay said she was two months shy of eighteen. One of them back there had been her husband.
“Which one?”
“The one with the different colored eyes.”
“What was his name?”
She paused. “I’ll say it just this one more time. But don’t never ask me again, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Jesse Swan Holliver.” She brushed away a mosquito from the baby’s forehead. Then she turned her head to look up at him. “I’m better off now.”
A little while later, facing forward in the saddle, she said it again. “I’m better off now.”
He rode on, thinking, as she slept within the cage his arms made. He remembered killing the looters in the house in Leland. Killing the baby’s mother. She’d had a gold-plated forty-five caliber pistol and she was fixing to shoot him. Instead he shot her. Now in his imagination he shot her again. He shot her and then the man she’d been with and the one before him and the saboteurs in Marked Tree and the Krauts on the Flemish Coast and all the way back through his life of murder and mandolining. He probably should have shot Dixie Clay’s husband and the other two, and might come to regret not doing so. But it was not yet noon and already he’d carried them fifteen miles farther west from the river and closer to land where you could see some stars. Even the horse seemed spry, its head high and pace quickening despite the heavier load.
The girl nodded in the saddle as she slept. He thought about the Memphis Minnie song, “Going to Chicago, Sorry but I can’t take you.” He sang it softly to himself and Dixie Clay opened her eyes.
“You gone leave me?” She sat up and turned to look into his face.
He could smell her sour sleep breath, his chest warm from where her back had rested.
“It don’t look like it,” he said.
She reached to where his hand lay over the pommel and wove her fingers through his. He wondered if she noticed how calloused he was. He wondered was it too late to unlearn being good at certain things with your hands. He wondered about the tiny half-moon scar on her lip that shone white when she smiled as she was doing now. He had time to find out.
He looked into her lap where she held the baby, his eyelids jerking in sleep, but his breath was easy, his lungs puffing, and
Ingersoll knew they were tiny bellows that would play the rest of his days.
“He’s dreaming,” she said. “Yeah,” he said, “he must be.”
Suzanne Hudson
Suzanne Hudson won an international prize for short fiction in a contest whose judges included Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Toni Morrison. Then she withdrew from the publishing world. Over twenty years later, however, a short story collection, Opposable Thumbs, was published and was a finalist for the John Gardner Fiction Book Award. She has since had short stories in Stories from the Blue Moon Café, volumes I, II, and IV; The Alumni Grill; Climbing Mt. Cheaha; A Kudzu Christmas; Christmas Stories From the South’s Best Writers; and A State of Laughter. Her first novel, In a Temple of Trees, and her second novel, In the Dark of the Moon, have both been released in paperback. Her current book is a genre-bent fictional nonfiction one, Second Sluthood: A Manifesto for the Postmenopausal, Pre-Senilic Matriarch by Ruby Pearl Saffire. She lives at the Waterhole Branch Art Project near Fairhope, Alabama, with author Joe Formichella.
Opposable Thumbs
In a Temple of Trees
In the Dark of the Moon
Second Sluthood: A Manifesto for the Postmenopausal, Pre-senilic Matriarch
David Sheffield
David Sheffield is a Mississippi writer whose credits include Saturday Night Live and the screenplays for Coming to America and The Nutty Professor. He and his wife, Cynthia Ward Walker, live on a farm in Ovett, Mississippi, where they keep four horses, three dogs, and each other company.
Ace Atkins
Ace Atkins, a former journalist, has written eight novels. His writing career began at twenty-eight, when Crossroad Blues, the first of four Nick Travers novels, was published
. In 2001, he earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his investigation into a 1950s murder that inspired his 2006 novel, White Shadow. In 2008, he published Wicked City, also based on a true story from the 50s and set in the author’s native Alabama. His latest book, Infamous, was published in 2010. He lives outside Oxford, Mississippi.
Crossroad Blues
Wicked City
Leavin Trunk Blues
Devil’s Garden
Dark End of the Street
Infamous
Dirty South
New Orleans Noid
White Shadow
In the Wake of Katrina
Alice Jackson
Alice Jackson is a veteran journalist who has reported on crime, politics and public corruption for newspapers, television and magazines, including Time, People and the New York Times. During the 1990s, her investigative reporting of questionable land deals and government bond issues led to the indictment and prosecution of a prominent Mississippi politician and resulted in the return of millions of dollars from off-shore bank accounts to taxpayer coffers. During more than 30 years of news assignments, she traveled her adopted state from the Mississippi Delta to the Mississippi Gulf Coast. She resided on the shores of the Mississippi Sound, near the coastal arts community of Ocean Springs, until Hurricane Katrina destroyed her home in 2005. “Cuttin’ Heads” is her fiction debut.
Bill Fitzhugh
Bill Fitzhugh is the award-winning author of eight satiric crime novels. The New York Times called him “a strange and deadly amalgam of screenwriter and comic novelist. His facility and wit, and his taste for the perverse, put him in a league with Carl Hiaasen and Elmore Leonard.” Warner Brothers and Universal Studios bought the film rights to his novels Pest Control and Cross Dressing, respectively. Pest Control was produced as a radio series in Germany by Deutschland Radio and as a stage musical by Open at The Top Theatre Company at the NoHo Arts Center in Los Angeles. Reviewing Highway 61 Resurfaced, Time Magazine said, “Fitzhugh’s dialogue is as cool as a pitcher of iced tea, and his characters are just over the top, like a Carl Hiaasen cast plucked from the Everglades and planted, as Dylan would put it, out on Highway 61.” His novels have been translated into German, Japanese, Italian, and Spanish. Fitzhugh also writes, produces, and hosts a show on Sirius-XM’s Deep Tracks channel called “Fitzhugh’s All Hand Mixed Vinyl.” He is a member of the Southern California Chapter of Mystery Writers of America. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, two dogs, and a cat named Crusty Boogers.
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