by William Gay
Watching the boy go back up the roadbed Oliver knelt back in the sun and rested a moment. Well, go then, he thought. I can’t stop you. The sun was a warm weight on the paper lids of his eyes but it already had a quality of distance to it, a subtle eclipse of the seasons he had an affinity with, a clocking of the earth’s time he felt in sync with, he and the earth growing old together but never able to give up.
That spotted horse, he thought, remembering the hoofbeats and almost concurrent with them the horse and rider appearing apparitionlike and immediate out of the brush and morning fog, the bunched muscles of horse’s hindquarters when Hardin sawed the reins and the horse rearing its eyes wild and muddy but no more wild that Hardin’s own, the look of surprise lasting no more than a second then going blank and serene, all surface you could not penetrate. There was a Winchester cradled in the crook of Hardin’s arm and as the horse calmed he laid it across the pommel of the saddle. Just resting it there.
“What the fuck are you doin out here?”
It was fall of the year and the woods were the color of bright copper and the wind was blowing, shifting the depth of the driven leaves like water. The forest became surreal, a place he’d never seen or dreamed or heard rumored, a dark corner of childhood night and he thought. This son of a bitch is crazy. This madman is goin to shoot me where I stand and leave me where I fall. He would rot in these woods, black millipedes sleep in his chambered skull, the teeth of predators score his bones. “Just mindin my own business,” he said. “A pastime I ain’t noticed much around here.” There was a sharp, metallic taste to his saliva, like cankered brass.
“Your business, hell. I reckon you think anything moves in these woods is your business. Don’t think I ain’t seen you prowlin. Stickin your long nose in my business.”
There was a hot seeping anger in Oliver’s chest. “You don’t own this property,” he said. “You better check your lines.”
“My lines is where I make em,” Hardin said. “And I make a new set everday.” He spurred the horse and almost as an afterthought quartered the horse toward Oliver, the horse’s shoulder catching him in the chest and spilling him backward into the brush, the spotted horse passing almost over him, he could hear the creak of leather and smell the horse, then the hot, acrid leaves he lay in, breathless. His lungs were emptied as if he’d fallen from some great height. His mind was a torrent of rage and disbelief. He lay stunned for a moment. He heard the blood singing in his veins, the fallen cries from a blackbird winging above him. Falling his mind had seen what his eyes had not remarked, the shovel across the saddle, not a proper shovel but a military entrenching tool, the blade wet with fresh clay. The shapes in a gunnysack tied to the saddlehorn.
Them was fruitjars, he thought. I just like to caught him buryin his money.
He thought of the jars packed with greasy coins and wadded bills, overflow from the money machine Hardin was hooked to, tucked into graves like the hasty and unforeseen dead.
The sight of the rifle had raked his forehead and a fine, bright line of blood crept down his face unnoticed. I will lay for him and shoot him, he thought, but he knew already he wouldn’t. I am old, he admitted for the first time, old, tired of it all. All I want is to be let alone, all I want is for things to run along smoothly. All I want is peace, and an old man ought to have that, if nothin else.
BOOK TWO
1
The girl had black hair as coarse and glossy as a well-kept horse’s mane and it was cropped straight across below her shoulders as it if had been sheared. The first few days after school started Winer would see he come out and await the schoolbus, her books clutched against her breasts, her face self-absorbed and touched with a kind of sullen insolence, staring down the road the way the bus would come. Then after a few days she didn’t come out of the house when the bus blew its horn. The bus turned and paused momentarily a few mornings and then it didn’t come anymore.
These warm days of Indian summer she used to bring out on old metal lunge chair and sit on the sunny side of the house and watch them work. Winer, looking up from the pile of corners and tees he was nailing together or the blocking he was cutting with a handsaw, would see her sitting with calm indifference, her fingers laced across her stomach, watching the progress of the work not as if it interested her very much but as it if were just something to watch, a motion, like a cat watching anything that moves.
She would sit with a kind of studied unawareness of her spread legs, the glimpses they stole of her white thighs. Her eyes were halfshut beneath the weight of her long lashes and she might have been asleep but she was not.
“She’s got a case on one of us,” Gobel Lipscomb told him. “And somehow I just don’t believe it’s you.” Lipscomb was the carpenter. He took to working shirtless so she could watch the play of muscles in his sunbrowned back, to ordering Winer around more. He used to drop his tape or hammer and stoop floorward for it and pause staring upward at the juncture of her thighs and he’d straighten with a look on his face near pain. “Black drawers,” he would say. “Godadmighty damn. Black drawers.”
Hardin’s business seemed to keep him pretty well occupied but sometimes on slow days he would come out and sit beside the girl and watch. Once he laid his hand on her knee and said something to her and glanced toward Lipscomb and laughed and she smiled a small smile and said nothing. When Hardin was about, Lipscomb found a higher gear in his nailing arm and seemed unaware of anything that transpired beyond the maze of partition walls he was erecting.
Carrying a beachtowel the girl came out of the trees above the abyss. Her bathing suit was wet and her black hair plastered seallike and glossy to her head. She passed the building where they worked without glancing toward them and walked on toward the house, her hips rolling like something meshing on ball bearings.
Lipscomb was suddenly frozen, the hammer frozen in midstroke as it if had come up against some invisible barrier. Even the jaws that were perpetually kneading tobacco were still. He stood for a moment and then with great deliberation he laid his hammer aside.
“If that ain’t a invite then I don’t know one,” he said. “Here goes nothin.”
He stood before the bedroom window with his hands shading the sundrenched glass.
“Hey,” Winer called.
Lipscomb might not have heard him. He didn’t turn. Stood leaning back to the sun staring into the room. Whatever he saw there seemed to have rendered him immobile as stone.
“Hey, Lipscomb,” Winer called again.
When Lipscomb turned he threw a hand to his eyes as if struck blind or perhaps paradoxically illuminated by divine revelation and he staggered across the yard. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “Oh Lord.” He wiped his brow and flung off imaginary beads of perspiration. He crossed the yard in great rolling seafarer’s strides and thrust his pelvis forward spasmodically, his hands and hips miming masturbation of an enormous phallus. His tongue lolled, his eyes rolled in his head.
“How high a fever you run with the fits?” Hardin asked him. Hardin leaning against the corner of the house smoking a cigarette. “You reckon I ought to send that boy after Ratcliff?”
Lipscomb ran a hand through his sandy hair. He seemed tonguetied. His face was so engorged with blood it looked swollen. “There ain’t nothin wrong with me,” he finally said.
“The hell there’s not,” Hardin told him.
Winer fell very busy. He knew intuitively that he had never seen a man so close to dying. His hand counting the nails in his nail apron. One, two, three, his busy fingers counted.
Hardin didn’t say anything to Lipscomb all day. He just got in the black Packard and left. At lunch they ate leaning against the wall they’d erected. “You see that bastard, how he looked at me?” Lipscomb asked. “If looks killed I’d be lookin at the underside of a casketlid right this minute. I’ve about decided he’s got the hots for that little gal hisself.”
Winer didn’t reply. He drank cold coffee from a pint fruitjar and ate his sandwich and thought a
bout the way Hardin had looked at Lipscomb. Winer did not anticipate ever being looked at by anyone in just that way.
“Hell, he looks like one of these killdees,” Lipscomb said. “And they aint nothin to him but legs and pocketbook.” He studied his own thickly muscled forearms, his big hands. He seemed to draw comfort from them. “He fucks with me I’ll fold him up like a rule and stick him in my pocket,” he said. “Or else come upside his head with a clawhammer.”
Winer judged he’d about decided Hardin wasn’t going to say anything.
A few minutes before four they heard the Packard drive up and the door slam to, then Hardin came around the corner of the house. He stood there for a time watching them.
“Lipscomb, you want to step around here a minute? I need a word with you.”
“Here it comes,” Lipscomb said in a low voice. He slid his hammer into the strap on the leg of his overalls.
Winer went on nailing a wall together. He kept waiting for threats, blows, the sound of violence. All he could hear when he paused in his nailing was the murmur of the brook, doves mourning softly from the hollow.
Lipscomb was gone only a few minutes. When he came back his face was red all the way down into the collar of his blue chambray shirt and he was not pleased. He had an old plywood toolbox with a length of rope knotted through each end of for a handle. He began gathering his tools up and slinging them into the box.
“Get you shit gathered up,” he told Winer. “We’re draggin up.”
“What?”
“We’re quittin, by God. We’re goin to the house.”
“We, hell,” Winer said. “I didn’t know we came in a set like salt and pepper shakers.”
Lipscomb straightened with a square in his hand. He looked as if he’d just as soon take it out on Winer as not.
“What are you, some kind of Goddamned scab?”
“I’ll make up my own mind when to go the house. You never hired me.”
“Why, you snotty little bastard. I ought to just slap the hell out of you.”
“Why don’t you just fold me up like you did Hardin?”
“By God, I believe I will.” He took a step toward Winer but Winer held the hammer and he did not retreat under Lipscomb’s tentative advance, just stood with an almost sleepy look in his eyes. Lipscomb dropped his hands and stood staring at him, his eyes fierce and malignant. “You little backstabbin shitass. You set this whole mess up, didn’t you? Now you think you got the job and the girl too. All you had to do was holler, but hell no.”
“Why, hellfire,” Winer said. “I called you twice but you was so busy making a damn fool out of yourself you couldn’t be bothered.”
“Ahh, the hell with you and him both,” Lipscomb said, turning away. He laid the square in the box and took up the box by its rope handles. He started toward the door. “I’d like to stay and see the mess you’ll make out of things. You couldn’t build a fuckin chicken coop if you had a book to go by.”
After a while Hardin came out and climbed onto the subfloor. He sat on a box of nails watching Winer work. He had a slim cigar clamped in his jaw. He wore expensivelooking gabardine slacks and a yellow shirt. He began paring his nails with a bonehandled knife.
“Well, I had to let ye runnin mate go,” he said. “I couldn’t afford union scale for winderpeepin.”
Winer went on working.
“Hold up a minute. You ain’t gettin paid by the nail nohow.”
Winer ceased and stood waiting.
“Ain’t you worked past quittin time anyhow?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have a watch, we used his. Besides, I wasn’t sure what you wanted.”
“I told you what I wanted when I hired you. I want a honkytonk built. Can you do it?”
“Well, I can do most of it. There’s some things it’s hard for one man to do, like puttin up the joists and rafters. And I can’t raise the walls and plumb them by myself.”
“That’s all I wanted to hear you say. You measure em and nail em together and I’ll grab a handful of these highbinders I’m always waistdeep in and we’ll raise em for you. You run into anything requires more than two hands, just holler. All right?”
“I’ll give it a try.”
“Shore you will. You can do it. Ain’t you goin to ast me about the money?”
“What about it?”
“About how much I was payin him. I’m payin it to you now, you’re the architect and the carpenter and the hired help too. You fuck up we’ll know who to blame it on.”
Winer grinned.
“Come on and I’ll run you home. Can’t have my builder walkin to work totin his tools. Folks’ll be talkin about me.”
Winer was still wonderstruck. I am rich, he thought. I am a wealthy man.
Lately Winer’s mother had taken to cleaning herself up more and doing her hair. She seemed always to have on a clean dress and there was something foreign about her. Winer realized for the first time how much she had let herself go down through the years. She was not pretty but had she been less dour and practical she would have qualified as plain.
He noticed tiretracks even before she got the pans.
“Had company today?”
“No. A salesman stopped by.”
“A salesman? Selling what?”
“Sellin pots and pans,” she said irritably as if there were no other kind of salesman, as if he was interrogating her.
A week later she had the pans. He saw them when he came in from Hardin’s, a great motley collection of them, coppercolored, gleaming, skillets and cookers and spatulas and doubleboilers and seemingly a pan for every purpose the mind of man could devise.
“Great God,” he said.
“What?”
“Where’d you get all that stuff?”
“I bought em.”
“Bought em? Why?”
“Because I wanted em is why. I always wanted me a set of cookers like that.”
He was a little awed by them. “Well.” He paused. “What’d they cost?”
“Never you mind what they cost. It won’t be a nickel of your pocket.”
He took his razor and mirror and a bar of soap down to the branch. Beyond the barn it curved and there was a hole of water deep enough to swim in. He washed and shaved and came back out of the woods and onto the stoop and she was awaiting him. Apparently their conversation was not yet over.
She laid a hand on his arm. “I got a friend,” she said. “Sells them pots and pans.”
He thought, a friend, not understanding at first. Then he saw in her sallow face some commingling of shame and pride, the eyes imbued simultaneously with humility and stubbornness, and he thought, she means a man. He didn’t know what to say though her face expected something, she looked as if she were ashamed of whatever it was she was doing but had no plans to stop.
“I think you’d like him, Nathan. He wants to see you.”
“Well. Sure.” He was looking all about. “Where is he?”
“He’s supposed to be here next Friday,” she said. Not “He’ll be here Friday,” Winer noticed, not yet with sureness or even confidence, she was uncertain of her hold on him, or did not believe it yet.
Monday he was there long before worktime planning his day. There was more to know than he had realized and now there was no one to ask. Old questions on the pitch of roofs, the cuts on rafters, troubled him. Yet as the week wore on he discovered an affinity for planes and angles, for the simple rightness of things. His corners formed perfect squares and they stood as plumb as a level could plumb them. There were things he did not know how to do but he found there were several ways to do everything and that even if he took the long way it did not matter if the end result was the same.
He seemed always to work with an audience. With the weather holding fair Hardin’s coterie of convivial drunks used to follow the sun and in the afternoon they’d align themselves on Coke crates or folding chairs or old ladderbacks as spindly and loosejointed as themselves and against the whitewashe
d concrete blocks of Hardin’s addition they took on the character of a sepia daguerreotype, old felthatted and overalled rogues watching time pass with attentive eyes out of dead faces. Watching anything that life chose to parade before them. There was a great calm about these old men, they seemed to have arrived at some compromise with life long ago and nothing much surprised them anymore.
The young men were mostly furloughed or shellshocked soldiers or over-the-hill sailors far from any seas and they would be inside drinking and trying to get the girl to ride down the road with them. Finally drunk they settled for whatever whore chanced to be in attendance or even Pearl herself should the need be acute.
Winer was comfortable with the old men but he could never become comfortable with the soldiers, there was an air of desperation about them. They acted as if time were the commodity they were shortest on, as if they did not have the leisure to take life as it came but were eternally seeking shortcuts, must twist each moment until it suited their purpose, bend every event to their own amusement. Something had to be happening for them every minute. They were wound too tight, Winer thought. He knew why and he didn’t guess he blamed them but he thought they were wound too tight anyway. They reminded him of a war being fought that had heretofore been just a disembodied voice in a radio and he knew that unless things changed it would not be long before he was fighting it too.
All the soldiers looked alike to Winer and he thought if he ever saw one sober he might think about them differently but around Hardin’s he wasn’t likely to. All the ones he saw were a little drunk and a lot belligerent. They always wanted to fight the sailors but if there were no sailors they’d fight each other.
One afternoon he paused nailing weatherboarding on the walls when a fight erupted inside and boiled out the back door, the old men picking up their jars or jellyglasses or whatever and retreating to more neutral territory. Two soldiers were rolling in the yard and when a stringyheaded blond broke a beerbottle over the topmost one’s head a girl with red hair knocked her down with a two-by-four and fell upon her. Winer, watching their exposed white thighs and rent clothing, ultimately counted eighteen participants and he wondered how they kept up with who was fighting whom and which side they were on.