The Long Home

by William Gay

  The old man was asleep worrying some old dream when the rain ceased and when it did he awoke immediately. Water was dripping sporadically into a coffee can he’d set under a leak, then that ceased too he could hear the creek. He arose from the swing he’d been catnapping in. In the west a band of clear sky lay above the treeline, a thin crescent of sun gleaming on the clouds above it. The clouds were the color of gold and they gleamed like something hammered from burnished metal.

  Wearing an old black coat and a straw hat he’d resurrected from somewhere Oliver looked like a scarecrow made clumsily animate. Carrying an enamel waterbucket he crossed his juryrigged system of planks spanning the stream’s meanderings, at last just giving up and wading in, the water swirling cold as ice about his thighs. “Waistdeep in water and havin to tote a bucket for more,” he complained to himself. “If that ain’t the beat.”

  Chestnut boards nailed in a V and shoved into an orifice in the limestone bluff fed the water into the springbox. The water was cold and virid. Mossgreen, it swirled against the lichened cedar planking of the springbox. Oliver stood immersed in the roar of water, the thousand seepings and drippings of a veritable mountain of water loosely contained by the fissured limestone, the continuous roar of the falls above him. It was deep shade here, cool, and dark. The perpetually wet earth was a ferment of watercress and the air drugged with peppermint. He set the bucket down by his feet and leaned forward, his hands cupping his knees. He peered into the springbox.

  He’d caught a flash of white, not gleaming but dull like the old discolored ivory. It was like peering into deep seas. From the shadows of the springbox slow strands of moss and fern waved like seaweed, echoed the slow circular movement of water. In these dark depths the object turned, winked a bright and momentary gleam of gold from beneath the near-opaque surface. He reached into the water.

  He held in his hands a human skull. It was impacted with moss and mud, a salamander curled in an eyesocket, periwinkles clinging like leeches to the worn bone. Bright shards of moss clung to the cranium like perverse green hair. He turned it in his hands. A chunk of the occipital bone had been blown away seemingly by some internal force, the brain itself exploding and breaking the confines of the skull. He turned it again so that it seemed to mock him, its jaw locked in a mirthless grin, the two gold teeth fey and winsome among the slime and lichens.

  It was concrete, irrevocable. Tangible vestige of old violence from chasms and channels so far beneath his feet light was not even rumored. To his hands. Mute sacrifice from the well of the world. He felt besieged by knowledge he had not sought and did not want. The past eddied and swirled about him as the waters had beleaguered the skull. For a bright moment he felt omnipotent, the years rolled by had opened a door and permitted him momentary passage through it, he knew he possessed knowledge denied all the world, save one other, but he had no idea what to do with it.

  The wagon had stopped in the yard. Pearl turned, the gauzy window curtain strung from her hand. She was heavier these years and her placid face bore few traces of her former bovine prettiness.

  “They comin in,” she whispered.

  “Then let em come,” Hardin said. “I don’t reckon the roof’ll fall in on em.”

  She turned back to the window. Two women stood by the wagon in the earth yard, a third climbing down awkwardly from the wagonseat. Sunday finery, lavender and blue and green catching the summer light and flicking it away, a trio of radiant peacocks approaching halfquerulously this den of iniquity. Parasols clung along though the sky held no hint of rain. A knock.

  “Reckon what they want?”

  He made no reply save a gesture toward the bed where Hovington lay.

  A knock, more assertive.

  “Well, let em in.”

  He arose, standing his glass by the edge of his chair. He crossed the room and turned the wooden latch and opened the door six or eight inches, peered down into a smooth country face beneath a gathered bonnet. He didn’t speak.

  “We come to see about Brother Hovington,” the woman said.

  He opened the door wider and stood aside. Pearl turned toward them, awkward gracelorn. “Come in,” she said.

  “How is he?”

  Hardin took up his glass, drained it. “You can see for yourselves,” he said. “Yonder he lays. Brother Hovington has fell on hard times.

  Hovington lay under a comforter, an electric fan whirring the listless air toward him. In truth he seemed to know no times other than hard. He was skin and bones, his knees drawn against his chest. His skin was sallow, the bones delineating the yellow flesh. All that seemed alive in this face was the quick black eyes darting about. When he opened his mouth the teeth were long and wolfish and yellowed.

  As the visitors entered the austere room Hardin went through the kitchen door with his glass. The women stood uncertainly looking about. All these decadent wonders. The silent jukebox. Stacks of cased brown bottles.

  “Get yins a seat,” Pearl told them. “Rose, you get some more chairs out of the kitchen.”

  The darkhaired girl arose silently and went through the doorway. She came back carrying three ladderback chairs and aligned them by the bed. Her longlashed eyes were downcast. Pearl fussed with the chairs, realigning them to her satisfaction. “Set down,” she said. “Can I get yins bonnets?”

  One of the women touched the girl’s shoulder in a gesture of fleeting kindness. “Ain’t she a little lady? And ain’t she the prettiest thing you ever saw?”

  The girl seemed not to notice. She seated herself in an armchair by the window and sat staring out at the yard, remote, as if in some manner she was able to will herself somewhere else.

  The women subsided into chairs and took out cardboard fans and began to wave them about. Pearl stood behind them, harried, distraught, as if she were the uninvited guest here. “Can I get yins a cold drink? We never thought about no company.”

  The woman in the middle loosened her bonnet strings, let the bonnet fall onto her shoulders. Her gold hair lay in intricate rococo plaits. Sweat beaded on her upper lip, a glycerinous mustache. “Nothin for me, thank ye.” The other two shook their heads. “We just come up here from church. Brother Hovington’s name come up in the service as one afflicted and we prayed for him. We come by to see did he need anything.”

  From where Brother Hovington lay he seemed past the need of anything they might have about their persons. His eyes were closed, he might have slept. Or yet he might have been dead save the soft, liquid movement of the eyeballs beneath the near-translucent lids, the slow, hypnotic blue pulse of his throat. For Brother Hovington lay in agony, in an alteration of time juryrigged so by pain that its passage seemed scarcely discernible. In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accretions of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time’s next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman’s mutterings from a snare in the world.

  “Pearl?” Hardin called from the other room, and she arose, smoothing her skirt with her big hands, hesitated.

  “I’ll be with yins in a minute. Let me see what he wants.” (As if Hardin were the husband, the women would tell each other later. Not this frail vessel already faulted, life seeping from every fissure. Hovington might have been some stranger, or worse, an unwanted relative come to visit, remaining to die).

  Then voices, his mocking, conspiratorial, hers interrogative, faintly protesting, both made at once indecipherable and unmistakable through the thin walls, laughter vague and androgynous, and they all felt rather than heard the descension of flesh onto flesh, timeless, the protest of the bedsprings, an involuntary gasp, sounds they seemed to have possessed all their lives as inherent knowledge. S
ilence then save the whirr of the fan tracking in its mechanical orbit and then, unbelievably, the creak of the bedsprings commencing in earnest, intensifying, attaining the desired rhythm. The front door opened and closed and they saw that the girl Amber Rose had gone out.

  The women sat in a hot, aghast silence. Color crept into their faces, they did not look at each other but all stared at the dying man who seemed charged with the performance of something that might break the furious agony of silence, propel them on to whatever their next action might be. When he made no move the woman in the middle rose, peered at the wasted face. “I believe Brother Hovington’s gone to sleep.” The other two arose with a thick rustling of silk, turned to the door. “Poor soul. I expect he needs his rest.” The door pulled to when they crossed the porch and passed into the sun, parasols fluttering open, their foreshortened shadows darting attendance like dark fowl underfoot.

  The horses turned to watch them come, moving a little already in anticipation, the wagon creaking, the traces rattling musically. The girl watched them clambering into the wagon, their faced flushed and flat with revulsion. “Come around here,” one of them yelled peremptorily to the horses, snapping the lines. The wagon turned itself laboriously in the yard, dust billowing up from beneath the horses’ feet, rising in a palpable cloud that had them at their fans again, turning the wagon then onto the road in a sigh of prolonged noise.

  Amber Rose smoothed the dark wing of hair from her eyes. It seemed to her the world was full of things she had no control over, and she watched them go with no look at all on her face.

  Weiss parked the car in front of the Utotem Market and cut the switch off. “Say he works in here?” he asked Winer.

  “He did the last time I was in there. He was picking chickens and cutting em up.”

  “A man of experience then,” Weiss said dryly. “Just what we need. I don’t know whether I remember Hodges from the last time we caught. Was he the tall, redhaired one with the shifty eyes?”

  “He’s all right.”

  “Then get him. But if you can’t, call me so we can get someone else.”

  “All right.”

  Winer got out of the car and crossed the sidewalk to the front of the grocery. It was hot on the street but inside the Utotem a fan whirred somewhere above him and he could feel cold air blowing from somewhere. It was almost closing time and there were few customers in the store. He walked past the checkout counter and down the aisle to where the drinkbox was. He had the lid back and was peering inside making his selection when a voice hailed him.

  “Hey Winer.”

  He turned but couldn’t see anybody he knew. It had sounded like Motormouth but he was not about, only two women shopping, making their selections from shelves and putting them into shopping carts.

  “Hey Chicken Man,” the voice said. A chicken was ascending slowly past the chrome rim of the meatcase. Winer stood clutching a dripping Coke and staring at it. The chicken rose until its feet rested on the chrome rail. A human thumb and forefinger gripped each yellow foot. The chicken pranced across the length of the metal lip with delicate little mincing steps. It pranced back. It was halfplucked and its head lolled drunkenly on a broken neck. Its eyes seemed to be leering at Winer through their blue eyes.

  The two shoppers paused before the meatcase the better to consider this wonder. Perhaps warming to its audience the chicken began to dance, slowly at first, kicking out first one drumstick, then the other, a fey, loosejointed sort of shuffle to no audible music. Above the trays of hamburger meat and liver and the packages of its own dissected brothers it began a macabre country buck dance, its loose head whipping back and forth, its feet fairly flying on the chrome lip. A demented cackling sound issued from behind the meatcase. The two women stared at each other in awe or disgust when the chicken began a slow, lascivious bump and grind. They shook their heads and wheeled their buggies away.

  Rapidly approaching footsteps across the waxed tile drew Winer’s attention. He turned away from the chicken to see old man Christian coming down the aisle, taking off his apron as he came. His face was flushed and angry.

  Winer judged the floorshow about over and he left. He paid his nickel at the counter and went out the door with its small chime and into the sun white and blinding off the tops of parked cars. Motormouth’s Chrysler was parked down the block in its bristling array of antennas and lights and he got in and rolled all the windows down and sat in the heat and waited. He didn’t figure he’d have long to wait and he didn’t.

  “He fired your childish ass, didn’t he?”

  Motormouth leapt and swore when his neck touched the hot plastic seatcover. “Old Christian was supposed to’ve been in Nashville till tomorrow. I been cuttin up like that all day. How’s I supposed to know the son of a bitch was back?”

  “I guess you weren’t. Did he not think it was funny?”

  “That whorehopper can’t take a joke. He said it was disrespectful or somethin.”

  “What’s your old lady going to say?”

  “No tellin,” Motormouth said. “I guess she’ll up and go home to Mama. She’s been lookin for a excuse and this is made to order. She’s always throwin up I can’t hold a job. She thought I was clerkin anyway. She didn’t know I was jerkin feathers off damn chickens and such as that.”

  He stared the car and studied the sporadic traffic through the back glass. “I don’t know. Seems like I squander myself huntin a job and then I ain’t got the energy left to do it after I get it. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  He began to back the car into the street. When he was turned to his satisfaction he barked the tires of the Chrysler and then squalled them again braking for the red light.

  “Weiss catchin chickens tonight?”

  “Yeah. He said if you want to catch be there before dark. I figured I’d ride up with you.”

  “I might as well I guess. Money’s money even if you do have to breathe chickenshit to get at it. You want to ride out to my place awhile?”

  Winer thought about Motormouth’s wife. “Not really,” he said.

  “I’ll show you all my carparts.”

  “I’m really not much on carparts. Besides, it’s liable to get squally around your place when she hears you got fired.”

  “Yeah, I guess you’re right. Listen, when you see Ruby don’t say nothin about me makin that chicken dance. She’s got even less of a sense of humor than old man Christian does.”

  “It’s nothing to me.”

  “It’s early yet. Want to shoot a game or two of pool?”

  Late in the afternoon they drove up the road toward Weiss’s place. Passing Oliver’s gray clapboard Hodges said, “There’s a feller lives there you don’t want to fool much with.”

  “Tell Oliver? Why, that old man don’t bother nobody.”

  “He may not now but he used to be rough. Back fore my time his old lady took up with some Ingram feller off at Jack’s Branch. This was a long time ago. Anyhow, she sent Ingram back with a wagon and team to pick up her stuff while Oliver was at work. He come in early and caught this Ingram feller draggin a chifforobe across the yard. They took to scufflin I guess over the chifforobe and he pulled a gun on Oliver. They was fightin over it and somehow Ingram got shot through the heart.

  “They locked old man Oliver up and then let him out on bond. I guess he’d a got off, justifiable homicide or whatever, but the Saturday after he got out Ingram’s brother jumped him in Long’s store. Ingram come at him with a pocketknife and Tell Oliver jerked a axehandle out of a barrel and like to took his head off. They give him some time over that. I reckon two in one week was a little hard to take. Or else they figured they better get him out of the way while there was still Ingram breedin stock left.”

  “That old man’s had a lot of bad luck.”

  Hodges glanced at him curiously. “I don’t reckon you could say them Ingrams exactly come up smellin like roses.”

  A tractor-trailer rig sat parked before the long chickenhouses.
A muscular black man dozed behind the wheel, a checked gold cap pulled over his eyes. Seven men or boys were grouped before the truck telling jokes and lies and waiting for dark to make the chickens drowsy enough to facilitate catching. A floodlight set in the eaves of the chickenhouse washed them with hot bright light.

  Hodges walked from the group toward the corner of the chickenhouse and unzipped his pants. He stepped around the dark corner. Out of sight of the men he leaned to avoid the lowering branches of sumac and went at a dead run toward the far corner of the building where it intersected the woods.

  He worked rapidly, chuckling to himself. Beneath a window he constructed a makeshift cage of chickencoops. Two high and six square. Standing atop them he took from his pocket a pair of cutters and scissored a triangular cut in the white mesh covering the window and then leapt down. He pocketed the cutters and went back up the ammonia-smelling alley into the light.

  He came back into view blinking his eyes and zipping his pants ostentatiously under the acerbic eye of Weiss and his frail wife. Weiss fixed him with a hawklike look of suspicion but Hodges paid it no mind. It was a known that Weiss was suspicious of everybody and besides Hodges was busy computing his money and planning the trip to Lawrenceburg tomorrow to sell his chickens. He fell to thinking of a pair of cowboy boots he had seen in a shop window, a pair of low beam foglights from the pages of a part catalog.

  With good dark Weiss awoke the packer and gave the men the word to proceed. “Be easy with my babies,” he told the catchers. Though they were already doomed to the meatpacker’s knife he could not bear to see them handed roughly or maltreated. The packer took his place halfreluctantly on the truck and opened the first row of coops and prepared the onslaught of chickens.

  Four chickens in the left hand, three in the right. Groping in the musty dark where the chickens huddled, rising, out then into the white glare of the floodlights where the packer waited and Weiss watched the proceedings with a critical eye. Weary arms loaded with somnolent chickens upraised for the packer to take. Fourteen chickens to the crate, an inordinate amount of empty crates to be filled. Six thousand divided by fourteen, Hodges thought wearily. The precise figure eluded him but he knew it was a lot.