by William Gay
When Bellwether appeared finished, Hardin said, “You care for a little drink?”
“I reckon not. I ain’t ever been much of a drinkin man.”
“I didn’t mean nothin illegal, Bellwether. I got two-three cases of Co-Colas icin down in there.”
“I reckon not.”
The fell silent. Hardin’s hands were composed. He kept studying his shiny wingtip shoes. “Damned if I know what to tell ye,” he finally said. “That old woman’s crazy. And that girl ain’t even here no more. She took off with some soldier from Fort Campbell. But that old mother hen…you know how some women gets in the change of life. Some goes one way, some another, and I reckon she went crazy.” He paused, seemed to be in a deep study. “I hate to say this about southern womanhood,” he said. “But she got to horsin. You know how some of these women gets to where they got to have it. Well, she got to horsin and kept comin around here tryin to put it on me. Hintin around. Finally she spelled it out to me and I turned her down flat. Hell, I can pick and choose.”
Bellwether did not believe one word of this story but at the same time he divined that Hardin didn’t care if he believed it or not. He was spinning out the tale for his own amusement, just something to pass the time. Just keeping his hand in.
“Everybody knows she’s about half a bubble off plumb,” Hardin said. “Didn’t hang a Co-Cola bottle up in her that time and had to go to Ratcliff and have the bottom busted out of it fore they could even get it out? They tell it on the streetcorners. Ain’t you heard that?”
Bellwether stood up. He felt an intense need to be elsewhere, he’d stayed not only past his welcome but past the limits of his endurance. “It don’t matter if I’ve heard it or not,” he said. “As far as I know there’s no law against it. There is a law against threatenin people, and torchin off their property, and my job is to enforce it.”
“Shore,” Hardin said thoughtfully. “Folks always got to do their jobs. You got yours to do, I got mine.”
“It might be easier on both of us if they never overlapped,” Bellwether said.
“I was thinkin that very thing,” Hardin told him.
From the edge of the wood Hardin watched her get out of the truck, heard the door slam. The widow Bledsoe crossed in front of the old pickup, a square, unlovely woman with a masculine walk. She opened the door on the passenger side and a few moments later reappeared burdened with two grocery sacks, going up the walk to the front door. He unpocketed and glanced at his watch. “Go on in,” he told her softly. “It’s time for ye stories. Time to see what’s happenin on the radio.”
He sat in silence for a time seeing in his mind her movements about the house, a vivid image of her before a cabinet, arm raised with a can of something. Folding the empty bags, laying them by for another time.
When he judged her finished and listening to the radio he arose, followed the hillside fence as it skirted the base of a bluff. It was very quiet. Once a thrush called, in the vague distance he could hear the sorrowing of doves. The timber here was cedar and the air was full of it, a smell that was almost nostalgic yet unspecific, recalling to him sometime past, incidents he could not or would not call to mind.
He waited until she had her hay cut and stored and the loft was stacked with it nigh to the ceiling. A good crop, it looked to him, for a year so dry. The barn was made of logs and situated in the declivity between two hills and it sat brooding and breathless under the weight of the sun. The hills were tall and thickly timbered and the glade was motionless Not a weed stirred, a leaf, heat held even the calling of birds in abeyance.
Lattice shade, the hot smell of baking tin and curing wood and dry hay. Eyes to a crack in the log, he watched the hose. It lay silent as the barn. Some old house abandoned by its tenants, reliving old memories. Drowsing in the sun. “I guess you thought it was all blowed over,” he told the house. Eyes still to the unchinked crack he urinated on the earth floor, spattering his boots with foam-flecked bits of straw and humus. He straightened and adjusted his trousers. A core of excitement lay in him like a hot stone. He ascended through dust-moted light a ladder to the loft. Under hot tin dirtdaubers droned in measured incessance, constructed their mud homes along the lathing. Hardin was already wet with sweat. He turned toward the house, he could see the sun wink off the metal roof, instill in the wall of greenery a jerky miragelike motion as if nothing were quite real. Near the end of the roof the wind had taken a section of tin and the bare lathing showed, he could smell the hot incendiary odor of the pine. Harsh light trapped in a near-translucent knothole glowed orange and malefic as if already an embryonic fire smoldered there.
He underestimated the dryness of the chaff and last year’s hay: when he threw the match it very nearly exploded. An enormous wall of heat assailed him, knocking him backward. He scrambled down the ladder swearing and feeling to see was his hair afire. There was a fierce muttering above him and he could smell the clean scent of the hay burning. He wasted no time. He went past the tractor parked in the hall of the barn and through an eight-foot wall of pokeweed and through the fence and began to climb the hill, his breath coming harder, the white shirt plastered to his sides and stomach.
He paused halfway up the hill and watched through the gap in the cedars. The glade below danced with heat, a fierce quarter acre of hell consigned here shimmering and vibratory with menace, smoking bits of lathing falling into the dry sedge and small, bright flames darting playfully into the lot, a growing tide of fire that rode the crest of sedge toward the house like a wave on water. A landscape from a palette of fire. The tin curled and was blown off smoking into the wilting pokeweed and he could hear the enormous Whoof Whoof of the fire sucking, drawing off air from the hollow flue.
When she finally did come out he knew it not by seeing her but by the screech of her voice and even that seemed strange in the glassy air, something grating and mechanical, a shrieking of metal on metal. The voice through the fire came distorted and fragmented, foreshortened then elongated. When he heard the grinding of the truck motor even that sounded like nothing he’d heard before. Filtered so by the fire it intercut with her voice, became surreal, a garbled electronic shrieking there was no one about to hear.
A warrant was sworn out and Bellwether arrested him. Pearl followed the squad car back into Ackerman’s Field and he was on the street within the hour. In a week he appeared before Judge Humphries and the case was bound over to the grand jury. When the jurors met they threw it out. They decided there was insufficient evidence for prosecution and that they all owned barns.
Weiss’s wife was named Alma. She didn’t have much to say and when she did speak her voice was a wheeze like air leaking from a broken accordion in one endlessly sustained note. She had asthma attacks. Each breath she took was audible from several feet away. Winer caught himself waiting for her to breathe, holding his own breath. Then it would come, the tone of the wheeze breaking off in an agonizing pause when her lungs were filled, changing then, the pitch lowering as if some tension had been relieved, then the battle for oxygen would begin again.
She had a small dog she perpetually clutched in her arms and she swore it had saved her life during three separate asthma attacks. It was a breed Winer was unfamiliar with and it was the ugliest dog he had ever seen, possibly the ugliest anything he had ever seen. He judged it some model of lapdog. It had a mouthful of tiny needle-sharp teeth like some malign form of life dredged up by appalled fishermen from the keep of the sea. It did not like Winer any more than he liked it and it would bare its teeth and snap at him from the safety of the woman’s cradling arms in a gesture curiously catlike. It had black, shiny, bulbous eyes devoid of any emotion remotely doglike and with its bulging eyes and spiderlike limbs it looked like some grotesque insect the old women had taken to her bosom. Their fates were intertwined, for when she died in September that year the dog was put to sleep as well and placed in her coffin, a talisman whose own luck had run out.
“They say he went crazy and pulled a gun on R
atcliff,” Sam Long told Winer in town the Saturday after she died. Long was arranging the boy’s purchases in a cardboard box, totting them up in a ticketbook. “Ratcliff doin all he could to save her and Weiss throw down on him with a pistol thataway. Ratcliff said he was just a rippin and a rarin. Said he said, ‘You let her die and by God you die with her.’ Old Ratcliff told him, ‘Son, can’t nobody but God Almighty blow breath back into the dead woman and he ain’t no more impressed with pistols than I am.’”
“Are they burying her around here?”
“Lord, no, boy. You think the ground around here is sacred enough for old man Weiss? I reckon not. He hired a ambulance all the way to Nashville. Puttin her in one of these aboveground tombs, what I hear.”
Winer remembered the Sandburg book she had given him. In the dust, he thought. In the cool tombs.
He took up the cardboard carton and balanced it on his left shoulder, steadied it with a hand. He moved toward the door and opened it onto the hot sidewalk.
“I’ll see you.”
“You come back,” Long said automatically.
The door closed behind Winer with a soft ching from the bell and burdened with the box he went on down the street toward the cabstand.
Motormouth came out of the pasture past the looming bulk of the barn and halted where the moon threw cedared shadows, paused a moment to gain his bearings. A thin figure propelled by sheer anger dark to dark and shadow to shadow past the barn and on to the house. The world lay in a grail of silence, the only color a square of yellow light a window threw misshapen into the yard. One shadow among the others less mobile, he moved past the truck in a soundless lope through unprotected light, the gun clasped across his chest, gaining invisibility momentarily in the accumulation of shadows against the wall.
He lay in the grass. It had just been mown, he could smell it, could feel it, wet with dew, adhering to his bare arms. Slowly he began to rise, straightened to a crouch, scarcely daring to breathe. The screen was cool against his cheek.
The room was yellow. He could see three-quarters of the bed and a man’s freckled arm, a yellow wall bare save for a door and a calendar with a scene of a lovable waif wending his way down a country road, fishing pole on his shoulder. Unloved and perhaps unlovable, Motormouth straightened further when the door opened and a young woman came through it. She was young and pretty, Motormouth’s wife. She wore a peachcolored slip and now she drew it over her head in one smooth motion, tossed her hair, breasts bobbing, turning toward the lightswitch. He stared at the darker thatch of her pubic hair as the room went down to darkness. He fumbled open his clothing, spent himself in an act of bitter solitude, affected more by the sight of her naked now than in all the nights she’d willingly shared his bed. He moved limberkneed back to the truck, more confident now that the lights were out.
He brought out a packet from his hip pocket, unwrapped it. A soft avalanche of sugar down the throat of the gastank. “One lump or two?” he asked it. He moved on toward the barn, a figure curiously simian in the cold night. Somehow the sugar did not seem enough. He could smell the sour ammoniac odor of the horsestalls. He brought out his wirecutters and knelt in the grass. He could hear the soft shuffling of the horses. The woven wire clicked when he cut it, when he was through he went on to the barbed wire. The barbed wire was taut and it clanged when he cut it and sprang away into the darkness. The moon slipped behind a cloud and the horses were lost to his sight. He could hear them moving about the pen fretfully, almost furtively.
He pocketed the cutters and took up his rifle and turned hurriedly back toward the woods. The cloud passed the moon then and its huge shadow paced him, dreamlike, through the surreal field of silver weeds.
4
In Hovington’s last days they moved his bed out of the long front room and into a side room as if the sight of his dying might offend the sensibilities of such drunkards and whores as the nights seemed to draw ever more of. The long room held more cardtables now and the jukebox and sometimes late at night couples danced in the end where his bed had been. He’d lie in the darkness and listen to their laughter through the slatted walls, to the thump and slide of their feet on the rough floorboards. Perhaps in these last hours he was grateful for the jukebox. This world is not my home, the Crater family saying. Oh Lord, what will I do? Or perhaps he lay in the darkness and thought no thoughts at all, not even dwelling on the thousand deeds and nondeeds that had brought him to such a pass.
The room had one fourpaned window and he used to lie curled facing it and peer across the weeds to the branch and past that to where the hills gave way to autumn sky.
Visitors didn’t come much anymore and with the cessation of a need for appearances Pearl had stopped shaving him and his thin cheeks were covered with a soft black beard flecked with gray. He might have been a fanatic consumed from within by the fires of some fierce and obscure religion.
The girl used to come sit by his bed in the ladderback chair and watch him without speaking. In those days she could study his face at leisure. His eyes would be closed, the eyes unmoving beneath the yellow lids, and she guessed he didn’t dream much anymore.
She remembered his laughter from a childhood so long ago it might have been a tale she’d read in a dusty schoolbook. Then a little at a time silence had taken him over and there had been a time when she wanted to scream at him. “What’s the matter with you? Why do you let him run over us like you do?”
When his back began to bend like something folding what was left of his life inside it, and the perimeters of where he could go and not go were marked by the dimensions of the bed, he had grown more silent yet. Sometimes he’d come awake from dozing and she’d be a slim, dark presence by the window, watching him, her face as unreadable as his own. And he had no words to say, no deeds to do. Everything seemed said, nothing left but waiting.
He lay seeped in pain and oblivious of his surroundings like a dying rat preoccupied with the pellet of poison slowly dissolving in his belly. Death by misadventure, a garbage can explored better left alone.
“He’s coughing up blood again,” she told her mother. Pearl laid aside the dishtowel and went into the near-dark room.
Hardin shuffled a poker deck and dealt himself a full house, the cards rippling smooth as water. He reshuffled and dealt a jackhigh straight flush, conscious of the sounds from the sickroom, of the door opening. The shiftless shuffle of her houseshoes ceasing. He could feel her behind him, silent and somehow accusatory.
The she said, “He’s dyin.”
Bored with straight flushes, Hardin laid the cards aside. “Well,” he said, “there’s no news in that. He’s dyin ever since I knowed him.”
“He’s bad off.”
Hardin went to see. Hovington’s flesh was gray and clammy. Hardin’s hand came away moist with cold sweat when he touched the sick man. He wiped his hand on a trouser leg. It seemed to him he could already feel a rigidity seeping into Hovington’s flesh, stealthy, covert, he could already smell the sweet, carrion presence of death.
“You reckon he needs a doctor?”
“Undertaker is more like it.” Hardin passed through the door and paused and lit a cigarette. He went on through the house and onto the porch, then sat on the edge of the porch in the sun. Pearl followed him out, the door closing nigh soundless behind her. “Stay with him,” he said. “It’s him in there dyin, not me out here.”
Pearl was silent awhile. “He’s wantin somethin,” she finally said.
“I don’t doubt it for a minute,” Hardin said. “In his place I might could think of a thing or two I’d want myself.”
“He wants that Winer woman brought up here. He wants to talk to her.”
“Say he does?”
“That’s what he asked for.”
“He’s out of his head.”
“Maybe, but he ain’t never asked for nothin else.”
“That’s crazy and a waste of time besides.”
“All these years and he’s never asked for n
othin,” she persisted. “Nothin only what a preacher could give him and he never even got that. Just laid there all this time and took what come.”
“That’s all any of us can do, take what comes.”
She looked stricken, the flesh of her cheeks folded on itself, her lips trembling. A damp and fearful blue eye. He thought she might cry.
“Just shut up,” he told her. “Don’t think it’s a bit late in the day for this? He made his bed and by God you made yourn and all you can do now is lay there with the cover pulled up around your chin and rest as best you can.”
Yet there was a stolid immutability to her he hadn’t known was there, an immovable weight of stubbornness that held her rooted before him as if he were wedded to her, condemned alike to her tardy sense of guilt. He thought suddenly that to move her aside he’d have shove her, cut a path through her with a hawkbill knife. He dropped his cigarette and ground it out with the toe of his boot.
“Then by God get her. But get her on your own book. I’ve got more to do than run up and down the road.” He stepped off the porch and strode toward the barn. She went back in.
The girl came out and hurried across the yard, a momentary hand raised to shield the sun. It was early yet, the morning sun resting above the green treeline. A day brimming with incandescent light and filing up with birdsong and she thought she’d never seen a brighter day. So bright a day to lie dying on. She was touched with horror, with a desperate need to hurry.
Her shoes made flat little plops in the roadbed and little clouds of dust arose like phantoms pursuing her. She increased her pace and the hash green world became a world in motion, a bobbing wall of greenery like murky water, and even the cries of birds were muted and distorted like sound filtered through fire.