by William Gay
The packer would fill the crate and slam the lid closed and whirl with it to stack it on the rear of the truckbed. Empty crates at the front of the truck, full ones behind. Coming out with their armfuls of chickens the catchers would glance surreptitiously at the number of full crates, the number of empties left to fill.
In the hot, fetid dark the air was full of down and small feathers drifting in the windless air and they stuck to the sweaty skin of the catchers and in their hair and eyelashes and in the white fluorescence the catchers took on a look curiously alien, like vaguely sinister folk lightly furred.
Winer’s arms grew weary. He was used to working and he knew to pace himself but even so six thousand chickens is a lot of chickens and the pace they had to keep was numbing.
Motormouth fared far worse. He grew hot and sweaty, his face so infused with blood he looked flayed. When he stood with his chickens aloft waiting for the packer to accept them his thin arms trembled spasmodically and he had a panicky look in his eyes as if he worked always a few degrees past the limits of his endurance.
“What the hell’s Hodges doin with those chickens?” Buttcut Chessor asked Winer. Buttcut was a friend from school who had been an athletic hero on a scale almost mythic and he had never quite gotten over it.
“Beats the hell out of me,” Winer said. “With Motormouth you never know. He may have another truck parked around there.”
Every few loads Motormouth would make a sidetrip to the window he’d rigged and dump his armload of chickens unceremoniously into the night. They lit in his homemade cage with soft, quarrelsome mutters, their chicken dignity affronted, their tickets punched for someplace they’d never been.
The only thing that kept him going was the boots. He’d about decided on the boots. They had cunning silverlooking chains draped about the ankles that had a Mexican look and when he’d hoist up the chickens he’d think of the musical clinking the chains would make as he strode into the poolroom.
At last they were through. The driver booming down the coops while Weiss passed among the stunnedlooking catchers with his thin sheaf of dollar bills.
Motormouth shoved his carelessly into a shirt pocket and went to watch the truckdriver, giving him unwanted advice and meaningless handsignals. “Pull up, back a little now. Cut ye wheels hard to the right.” At last the driver rolled down the glass and called, “Fella, would you kinda get the fuck out of the way so I can turn this damn thing? I ain’t got all night.”
“Turn the motherfucker over then for all of me,” Hodges said, but the driver wasn’t paying any mind. “Uppity up north nigger,” Hodges told the rolled glass, the racing motor, the big wheels crushing sumac.
He went and hunted Winer. “You want to go over to Hardin’s and get a sixpack?”
“Not me. I got to get up again tomorrow morning. Tomorrow’s old workday.”
“Well, it ain’t for me. I aim to get me a sixpack and ride around awhile.”
“If you're set on riding around you can drive me home. I've got to take a bath and get to bed.”
“We’ll do her.”
“Before you get the sixpack.”
Motormouth drove back up to the Mormon Springs road and turned left to Weiss’s place and parked in a sideroad below the house. He opened a bottle of beer and listened to the wall of night sounds start up again around the silent car. Through the trees he could see no light from Weiss’s windows. He turned the radio on and listened by its warm yellow glow to the halffamiliar jocularity of disc jockeys and to plaintive music and then after a while to a seemingly demented preacher ranting and raving and pleading for money. “Send me that foldin money,” he cried. “The Lord’s work don’t get done with them old clackin’ nickels and dimes. The Lord likes that quiet money.” Listening, Motormouth pondered what sort of radioland congregation of mad insomniacs this postmidnight preacher might have and as he ranted the preacher began to make spitting noises into the microphone, so choked with emotion was he. Motormouth began to wonder could this spit possibly short out his radio when this preacher calmed himself and began to tell Motormouth of a wonderful cloth he could have for a ten-dollar donation. It was a prayer cloth and spread over any afflicted area it did wondrous things. It had cured cancer, made whole an exploded appendix, repaired ruptures. Crutches and trusses thrown away hundredfold by folk cured by this miracle fabric.
“Reckon it would make my dick grow an inch or two?” Motormouth asked the preacher.
He drank beer and waited. he knew he should be at home and he guessed his wife wondered where he was but he wasn’t even sure of that so he sat and cradled the bottle and listened to the incessant crying of whippoorwills. He knew that it was not just the chickens that kept him here and he knew subconsciously that some vague hunger for doom drove him, kept him tightrope-walking the edge, and he knew he was consumed by some fatal curiosity as to what nature of beast lurked beyond the abyss. Some affinity for ill luck that fed the grocery money nickel by nickel down the mechanical throats of pinball machines and drew and bet to inside straights.
Faint thunder came from somewhere behind him and turning he saw lightning bloom above the western horizon and flicker there bright and soundless and after a moment thunder came again. He got out and unlocked the trunk and took out the burlap bags he’d been hauling around for this occasion and climbed down the embankment and went up a concrete tiling higher than he was tall, his feet echoing strangely on the subterranean floor. He came out through a clump of blackberry briars ascending toward the head of the hollow. It was very dark save when the lightning came. He increased his pace, an anticipatory exhilaration seized him. He could smell the leather of the new boots, feel the crinkly tissue they came in.
He’d decided to bag all the chickens and move them into the woods to safety and then carry them down to the car two bags at a time. He only had two bags filled with the querulous chickens when the light hit him. He leapt up glaring wildly toward the source of the light but all he could see was the white glare and he stood for a moment frozen as if the light had seared him to his tracks. In that moment various excuses crossed his mind but none seemed adequate. Found them where they lost them off the truck. That nigger stole them and I took them away from him and brought them back.
“I’m armed,” Weiss called. “Don’t make a move.”
But by the time the voice came he had a series of them. He threw one bag across his shoulder and sprang into the sumac dragging the other. The chickens began to squawk angrily and brush and brambles tried to wrest the bags from him. A report came and a bright blossom of fire and short rattled off in the trees like hail falling. Bits of chopped leaves drifted unseen. He released the bag he was dragging and increased his pace, running blindly into the dark while intermittent lightning showed him stumps to dodge and deadfalls to leap. The sack bounced madly on his back and he ran constantly through an outraged din of protestation. Lightning bloomed and died and in the inkblack pause of thunder he ran fulltilt into the bole of a tree and went tumbling into the hollow in a riot of squawks and curses.
He sat stunned for a moment clutching his spinning heart. The sack had opened and chickens were running into the night. He held his breath and listened for Weiss. All he could hear was an angry muttering from the pullets. He arose and took up the empty sack and began to stalk the chickens, trying to lure them back into the sack. They wouldn’t come. Then he began to run after them one at a time but they fluttered away, cackling and flapping their wings, and finally he threw the sack away and began to curse them. He went shambling on down toward the mouth of the hollow and all about him chickens were taking to the trees like pale spirits rising.
3
Over the years Hardin had taken on the lineaments of evil. You would sometimes see him on a Saturday streetcorner, the center of a group of men itemizing the faults of the world. When he spoke men listened. He seldom laughed but when he did the rest of the men laughed too in sporadic bursts of mirthless noise. No one wanted to be in his disfavor, it had come
to seem that being in his disfavor was tantamount to being homeless.
There were folks in the bootlegging trade who had decided they might be in the wrong line of work. The Moon family had been at it for three generations and within a fortnight of Hardin’s decision to shut them down two of them were in Detroit bolting doors on carbodies and the third was logging for Sam Long. That was Bud. Bud was the first one to the still after the explosion rocked the hills and when he got to the head of the hollow the still was just not there. It was scattered over a larger area than Bud would have thought possible and there was no piece of it that would not have fitted comfortably into a shoebox. A week or so later they attempted to sell off what stock they had on hand and Bud’s house mysteriously burned.
Hardin’s vulpine face was leaner and more cunning than ever, the cold yellow eyes more reptilian. Or sharklike, perhaps, lifeless and blank save a perpetual look of avarice. And he went through life the way a shark feeds, taking into its belly anything that attracts its attention, sucking it into the hot maw of darkness and drawing nourishment from that which contained it, expelling what did not.
There was a gemlike core of malevolence beneath the sly grin, beneath the fabric of myth the years had clothed him in. In these myths he supplanted the devil, the tooth-and-claw monsters of childhood darkness. “You behave yourself or I’ll give you to old man Hardin,” women told their children. “You better get to sleep,” they cautioned them at night. “If you don’t mind, he’ll slip in that winder and carry you off so quiet we won’t even hear him.” His spirit moved in the night, rustled the branches outside their window, his familiars crouched in the brush where the porchlight faded away.
“He shot and killed old Lester Sealy just as sure as I’m settin here,” a man might say in the poolhall.
“Why, shore he did. Everybody knows he was goin with Lester’s old woman. But how you goin to prove he killed him? Bellwether tried that hisself.”
“Well, the kids of Lester’s could I reckon. At the first. You know they first told Hardin done it but I reckon they might’ve been persuaded Lester done it hisself. Old Mrs. Winsor told that that oldest girl of Lester’s said that Hardin was there with her mama when Lester come in and caught em. He cut for the bathroom and was halfway out the winder when Lester busted in on him. Said Hardin shot him though the heart and climbed back in and Lester’s wife fixed it so it looked like he shot hisself.”
“Course, Hardin birdhuntin with Judge Humphries ever few days didn’t hurt nothin.”
“I spect not. Nor all that money passin under this table at that.”
He prospered during these years. The war brought him a seemingly endless supply of thirsty soldiers and their women. The lights stayed on all night at Mormon Springs these years, the jukebox he brought from Memphis sang sad songs to closedancing couples, bereft or lonesome women, men touched by the shadow of war, the shadow of something dread that was creeping up on them.
Shifting hues of red, white and blue neon dissipated the shadows, bathed the dancers in the romantic hues of the unreal. The songs and the lights and the quickened pulse of their lives made them larger than life so that they saw themselves as figures of myth and tragedy. Overalled farmers side by side with furloughed or shellshocked stateside soldiers, momentary virgins from godforsaken hollows where the owls roosted in the shade trees, old painted women washed up like refugees from the poolhalls, the all-night cabstands, the shotgun coaloil shacks. Old stringy women with ribald mouths and furious, outraged eyes as if life had done them some grievous wrong. Among these demifamiliars Hardin moving like some perverse host, eyes watchful for the salesman on his way to Memphis, the cattleman back from the auction, the fat leather wallets on plaited fobs hanging like fruit for the harvest. For those with high tolerances for alcohol he had envelopes of white powders folks did not resist so well and he had knuckles fashioned from the handles of a galvanized washtub and what he called his Sunday knucks made from brass. An amorous drunk might step into the bushes, Pearl’s arm about his waist, or he might just ease out into the bracken to relieve himself. Where Hardin would relieve him as well, rising from the brush like some grim specter, the handkerchief-wrapped knucks finding just the right spot, quick hands to the pockets and fading back into the dark.
Morning. A hot August’s sun was smoking up over a wavering treeline. Such drunks as were still about struggled up beneath the malign heat slowly and painfully as if they moved in altered time or through an atmosphere thickening to amber. The glade was absolutely breezeless and the threat of the sun imminent and horrific. The sweep of the sun lengthened. Windowpanes were lacquered with refracted fire. Sumac fronds hung wilted and benumbered as the whores and smellsmocks rose bedewed from the foxglove and nightshade. Strange creatures averse or unused to so maledictive a sun, they were heir to a curious fragility as if, left to the depredations of the sun, their very flesh would sear and blacken, their limbs cringe and draw like those of scorched spiders.
The cool breath of the abyss drew them through the undergrowth like a magnet aligning iron filings on a glass slide. Hardin went down with his morning coffee. Silent, unjocular. In fact the glade seemed permeated with silence and appalled hush in response to the night’s bedlam, as if ultimately all things must balance. The air rising from the pit seemed to emanate from some reversal of the seasons at the earth’s core. The far-off voices were murmurous, vaguely placating. The undergrowth was more luxuriant here, darkening perceptibly toward the pit, the earth mounding in a fashion vulval, the cleft in the rock mysterious, enigmatic.
And how would you lock him out? Short of killing him, how would you ensure the sanctity of your home, your family? Doors will burn, windows melt and slide viscous and flaming down the sills, locks blacken and lie unrecognizable among the ashes. If you expect him you can prepare, but he is cunning. When will he come, what will be the hour? He has all the time in the world, he can pick and choose, all the time you have is the moment of his arrival. He is a bearer of grudges, trifles drive him to limits an ordinary man only reads about.
“Wood will burn,” the note he sent the widow Bledsoe said. It was unsigned, ambiguous yet final. She carried the note into town and laid it on the high sheriff’s desk.
The high sheriff that year was a young man named Bellwether. Bellwether had been wounded at Pearl Harbor, badly enough to be discharged but not badly enough to prevent him from performing the duties of a sheriff. He was discharged just in time to be elected in an early wave of patriotism. Bellwether was a hero. He had a Purple Heart and a Distinguished Service Cross to prove it. He had a series of scars climbing the length of his right leg and a starshaped explosion of scartissue on his back where shrapnel had struck him. He was a local boy. The best thing you could say about him was that he was honest, the worst that he was a sorry politician. He washed his hands all by himself. He did not work well with the local judges, both of whom Hardin carried folded like banknotes in his pocket. He had been born poor and doubtless would so remain.
Bellwether had light wavy hair going prematurely gray. His mild eyes were gray as well and his smooth face calm and reassuring. He had the note unfolded on his desk. The three words were blockprinted on a leaf of foolscap from a nickel tablet. They looked like the work of a child. Bellwether shaking his head.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want him put away.”
“There’s no way I can even arrest him on the strength of this. His name’s not on it. It’s not even a direct threat. Even if I sent it to Nashville no expert could tell me anything about that printing. It may just be a prank. What did you get into it with him about?”
“My daughter went out there with them DePreists and took to hangin around down there at Mormon Springs. Runnin wild, layin drunk down there. I went after her a time or two and the last time Hardin cussed me and run me off. I told him what I thought of him. I told him I was going outside the county if yins wouldn’t do nothin.”
“And then you got this.”
“What happened to your daughter?”
“Last I heard she was still down there livin with Hardin. Her and that Hovington trash too. God knows what kind of devil’s nest of meanness they’ve got down there. But I’ve give up on her. All I want is not to be burned out.”
“I’ll talk to him.”
“What good’ll that do?”
“Maybe none. But it’ll let him know you know who wrote the note and that if anything does happen we’ll know where to come lookin. It might scare him.”
She arose, an angry, heavyset middle-aged woman clutching a shiny black pocketbook. “If you plan on scarin Hardin you just might as well set here in the courthouse,” she told him. “I knowed all the time it wouldn’t do no good but I come anyway. All right. You go talk to him. And I’ll tell you what I aim to do. I’ll lay for him with a shotgun. And the next time I need you it’ll be to gather him up out of my back yard.”
“I’ll talk to him anyway,” Bellwether said.
Bellwether talked but as he did he got the distinct impression that Hardin was not even listening. His eyes looked abstracted and far away as if he were already experiencing what he knew he was going to do and perhaps could not have been deterred from doing even if he had been willing. They sat in the shade on Hardin’s porch and as Bellwether talked a slight, pretty girl with violet eyes that in the shade looked black as sloe came out and stood leaning against the screen door. No sound came from the house save the constant whirr of an electric fan. A drunk man naked to the waist and wearing army O.D. pants and dogtags reeled around the corner of the house. His mouth was already open to speak but when he saw Bellwether in his neat pressed khakis and badge he veered suddenly back out of sight. The girl smiled a small, secret smile and said nothing.