by Brad Watson
Aunt Phoebe’s laid up on a stack of pillows.
-Well, he says after a minute, his voice kind of husky soft, I’m waiting. He looks again almost like what he is, her baby brother waiting on her word.
She has her speech prepared.
-I know I was wrong, she says. -I thought you didn’t have to shoot Thad but I know he would have come at you with that knife. I know he wouldn’t have stopped and you’d have had to shoot him anyway, and maybe gotten stabbed. But I couldn’t forgive you for taking him away. I loved him too much. I let him beat me because I loved him. But I know that couldn’t have gone on, either. Now I’m dying. I want to tell you I know you did it in self-defense, like you said to the judge. I’m sorry I didn’t say so. I knew you wouldn’t let little Earl into court. And I lied. I lied about the knife. But now I’m dying. I wanted to tell you how sorry I am for not telling it like it was and for you going to the penitentiary. I’m dying now and I need you to forgive me, Junius. Before I go to my maker.
Papa stands there a long time not saying anything. They’re all straining their ears, sweat running into their earlobes, they let it stand, still. Aunt Phoebe has started to cry, not making a sound herself but the tears trickling down her chalky face.
Papa says, -You can rot in hell, for all I care, Phoebe. I’ll never forgive you.
Aunt Phoebe’s mouth then looked like it’d already been sewn shut by the undertaker, cinched in. Her eyes seemed smaller as if receding with her old soul. They watched him place his hat on his head, walk out without looking back. His own sister. Last time she ever saw him, nor would the closed lids of her dressed corpse deflect the light of his image, nor her shade darken his thoughts but for a flitting second as if seeking some sentimental purchase and, finding none, would it pass into scattered fields of those souls whose lives on earth had found nothing but unhappiness.
Poor Aunt Phoebe. Poor Aunt Phoebe, he’d often thought. I should have known seeing her grieve that no one in this family would ever sow much love in the family garden, what passed for love anyway being just a few unswept and moldered seeds at the base of an otherwise empty grain bin. A clutch of dry and twisted hearts. His love for Birdie was one thing, one move in the right direction, a grasp at goodness the closest thing to which he knew was his mother, poor God-ravaged grackle of a woman that she was, squawking scripture to ward off the terror of eternal fire. When Birdie balked at physical love it fired in him a muted, enraged despair, as if the demons in the old woman his mother had infected his bride somehow between the courtship and connubial bliss. Why, aside from his general greed, would his father have become the biggest pussyhound east of the Mississippi? Because the pussy at home was about as receptive as just that, might as well try to hold down the housecat by the nape of its neck and fuck it—that was his guess, anyway, given all signs and signals in the air all his growing up life.
Still, it was in the blood. Only one of them didn’t cheat on his wife was Rufus, and that because he was a drunk half the time and a teetotaling holy roller the rest, and between being drunk on whiskey and drunk on Jesus he hadn’t the time or the inclination for fucking around. Papa had set Rufus up in the barbershop years before. You never had to worry about Rufus being mean, that was for sure, only drunk. Earl always suspected he had a big heart and it was some kind of self-loathing kept Rufus such a gentle and ineffectual sap.
So he, Earl, would work hard and do well, finally set himself up in business, and extend a hand to Levi, helping to set him up with his own shoe store, too. Never mind competition, which was admittedly part of the plan, that with Levi as competition they could control things, keep a share each of different stock, swap around, lob customers back and forth between the stores like tennis balls. Never mind, of course, that Levi would order on the sly the same stock Earl was getting and offer it at lower prices, wouldn’t put it out where Earl might see it but would sidle up to customers and happen to drop that he could get her this or that shoe a little cheaper than Earl, and sometimes that stock actually being Earl’s own, which Levi would get out of Earl’s store at night or Sunday mornings until Earl got wise and took away his key and slapped him around a little when he, Levi, called him, Earl, a liar.
Got into league with their sister Merry against him. Depended on Earl, the both of them, and the both of them hated him for it. Merry’d get drunk and drive around town shopping for dresses, purses, makeup, flowers, groceries, even whiskey and gasoline, and telling the merchants Send the bill to my brother Earl down at his store. He’d round up whatever hadn’t been unwrapped or worn or drunk or eaten or shot through a carburetor and fired out the tail and take it back, make her pitiful cuckold husband R.W. pay for some, and would end up paying himself for the rest. Then she’d laugh at him over it. Say What do you care, you got plenty of money, nobody’d ever squeeze a nickel out of you Earl if they didn’t steal it.
Your problem, he’d often said to her in private, is no man can satisfy you in bed so you just want to cut off every pair of swinging balls comes within your reach, but you can’t have mine, you’ll just have to be satisfied with R.W.’s hanging from your neck and all those johns’ stuck somewhere in your craw but don’t come looking to me for the piece of bread to help choke them down.
And Levi’s problem he had no balls in the first place, and a brain about the size of a testicle itself. He’d ruined Earl’s relationship with Maurier down at the fish camp in Pascagoula when he’d kidnapped that new salesgirl he lost his head over and then beaten her up when she tried to run off down the beach. When Earl found out he wired him there, LEVI STOP CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WOULD JEOPARDIZE ALL WORKED FOR TAKE SOME GIRL OFF BEAT HER UP STOP DO NOT LEAVE STOP I WILL BE THERE QUICK STOP EARL. Hauling ass through the blackleaved tunnel of 11 to 49, blowing the shutters off little towns along the way and down the flackity flackity 98 to the dirt road to Maurier’s, dawn just breaking over the Sound, and busting into the cabin, their cabin, he even had to go and do that, and Levi there lying naked on the bed and the goddamn girl tied up in a little kitchen chair in the corner and screaming her head off, wearing just a powder-blue blouse and trying to hide herself with her legs. Maurier in right behind him yelling Cajun patois, took all he had in him not to simply beat the shit out of Levi right then and there—pointed, said, I’ll deal with you later. Levi laughing, crying, couldn’t tell which maybe both. Turned to Maurier, You shut up, too, I’ll have them both out of here in thirty minutes. Don’t never want to see him again! You’ll never see either one of us again, goddamnit. Bon! Finee!
Fairly knocked and wrestled whining Levi into some clothes and shoved him onto a bus in town, gave the driver a ten, drove back to Maurier’s, where he’d padlocked her in the room with the phone removed. Went to the office to pay the bill, Maurier in there fuming. Said, I got to make a phone call first. You pay for it! I’ll pay for it goddamnit. Took out another ten-dollar bill and threw it onto his floor.
-Fred, is Pinkie there. Well where is he. Never mind. What time is it. Seven o’clock. All right. Tell him to be on the corner of 5th Street and 22nd Avenue at ten sharp. Wait on me if I’m not there, I’ll be there around then. I’ll make it worth it.
Put her in the front passenger seat she wasn’t nothing then but a foul mouth on a couple of scratched-up skinny legs and a cigarette he kept burning in her waving hands, where in the hell did Levi find them, floored it after gaining 49 again and headed north. Took about three minutes before she began to realize something about the speed. Seventy, eighty, ninety, topped a hundred straight through Perkinston. Talking slowed, then she got real quiet. Damn near up on two wheels in the hard curve south of Wiggins, she screamed and grabbed the armrest and the dash. Up to then talky enough, You better get me a good job somewhere else is what you better do, I know about you and that woman in Tallahassee, your store down there, you get me something like that, you set me up somewhere or I’ll have your asses, I’ll get you son bitches thrown so deep in jail you won’t never see the light of day I’ll—
&n
bsp; -You want to take everything I’ve got because of my fool brother, do you, Earl said. -Well you can take every goddamn thing he’s got for all I care, but you threaten me and you got a whole nother problem, sister.
-You don’t scare me.
-You offer this kind of arrangement to Levi he’ll kill you and you know it, and you think you can just sit here and threaten me, then? Was looking at her and barely got back in his lane to miss a tractor trailer rig barreling by, foghorn blasting, woman screaming You’ll kill us both!
-That may be, but if it happens, happens say in a car crash, won’t nobody be the wiser, you’ll be dead.
-Like you!
-I’ve lived a good life, made money, my family’s secure. You’re just a young woman, got your whole life ahead of you. You want to throw it all away like that?
She rips through a mindless wide-eyed recital of every cuss-word or phrase she knows, goddamn son of a bitch motherfucker dick pussy asshole shit piss cunt prick go to hell!, runs through them three or four times in a row, Earl thinking how most had to do with bodily functions, how little they strayed, two about condemnation, one comparison to a dog.
-Well I don’t think that’ll do it, he says. He doesn’t slow up until just outside the city limits, coasts down the highway past the airport and the creosote plant, down 8th into town, turned down onto 22nd and stopped there at the corner of 5th. Sitting there engine idling, girl still breathing hard, staring straight ahead, steaming, finally and mercifully mute. Hands her five one-hundred-dollar bills in plain view.
-This ought to get you to another town and another job.
She grabs it.
-Don’t you think you’re done with me.
He nods to Pinkie standing at the lamppost in his uniform, twirling his nightstick, who tips his hat to Earl, the girl.
-Pinkie here just saw you take that and put it into your purse, he says. -Good friend of mine. He don’t know just what this is. You could be a street whore, for all Pinkie knows. Wouldn’t hurt my reputation much, but you wouldn’t want it on your record. So we got a deal.
She spits a few choice ones, get out, slams the door, walks off. He laughs to himself, lights a Camel, waves to Pinkie, and drives out to the country to cool off awhile. Later over to Levi’s house, Levi in the bedroom lying down, Rae sitting and smoking at the dining table, gives him a murderous look full of sloppy lipstick.
-Don’t look at me, I just saved the damn fool son of a bitch.
-That’s what I’m steamed about.
-Not if you knew what I saved him from.
-I know, all right.
Levi turns off the radio when he walks in, gives him a grin, nothing but an inch or two of tiny teeth bared on the perfectly round ball of his head.
-If you ever pull a stunt like that again Levi I’ll kill you. You owe me five hundred dollars.
-For what.
-Never mind what. For saving your ass from picking cotton at Parchman for the next five years that’s what.
-You give that whore five hundred dollars? Whistles. -You got a cigarette?
Never get that money, he knew, but easier to keep Levi straight if he owes you cash. The memory of it would last a year or two, anyway, things somewhat under control. Before Levi and Merry like bad children cooked up some other scheme to entertain themselves and torment him and Birdie.
Asked himself sometimes why in the hell he never left Birdie for Ann whom he loved and there’s your answer: Might not have been much of a marriage but by God it was his family and a good one compared to anything he’d ever known, and be damned if he was going to give any of those godforsaken Urquharts the satisfaction of seeing him fail at anything.
Wanting to reach a hand out for the ax there in the graying film of his vision, not inches from his eye yet as if across some vast and light-bent field at the end of a long day, piecemeal light scattering the air like mercury from a broken thermometer skittling across the floor.
Habeas Corpus
AS SOON AS Miss Birdie called from the hospital and said Mr. Earl had died out at the lake, Creasie went to her cabin, got her coat, and walked down the driveway to the road. She stood nestled into the leaves of the redtop bushes beside the highway and when she saw the yellow-orange school bus coming she stepped out and flagged it down. It was how she got into town and back on the occasional weekday she needed a ride. All the children raucous in the back so it was the only time she rode a bus and sat up front behind the driver and she liked it. The view was good, with the world swinging by so fast when he made his turns. But she hardly noticed, today. Every so often a little balled-up piece of school paper bounced off the back of her head to the wild chorus of delight behind her but she paid it no mind.
When he had delivered all the children to their homes, the bus driver drove back to town and let her off beside the road near the path down into the ravine. She didn’t wave, as she normally did, when the bus drove off. She crossed the street and started down the trail. She hadn’t realized she’d left her house shoes on, with the heels all flattened, until she got on the trail, with its roots and little dips and gopher holes, and so she shuffle-stepped slowly along it. Her feet cold in them now. A rabbit scooted a brown-and-white blur from the trail’s edge across and into the brush on the other side and a gray squirrel barked at her from the low limb of an oak tree. And the winter birds everywhere, hardly singing but fluttering by so close as to breeze her face and sometimes squawking when they made a perch, or dipping away like on a bob string weaving down the trail ahead of her as it narrowed and the light grew gray and solemn blue through the deepening canopy of skeletal and veiny leafless great hardwoods and silent pines.
She went to her own cabin, which she’d painted green because she liked the color and the way it made the house almost invisible in green season when you were a ways off on the trail looking into the clearing at the bottom of the ravine. Inside, she shoved a few sticks from the trail into the stove, sprinkled them with some kerosene-soaked sawdust. When that was crackling she laid in a stick of stove wood and closed the door and sat beside the stove with her hands out, warming.
She got up and looked out her tiny kitchen window and could just see Vish’s cabin in the gathering dusk, come early here in February. Was ending up a dreary afternoon after the sun peeking early on. No drizzle but the air in the woods turning so gray and damp as to almost seem like it. She stood there looking. Couldn’t see anything for a long time and then a little light inside, just a flicker. She went back to the stove. Getting hungry. She got a sack of meal from the cupboard and poured some in a bowl. She got a dab of lard from a little bucket and put it in a skillet and put the skillet on top of the stove to heat. There was some water left in the water jug and she poured a little into the meal and stirred it. She took an egg from where it was wrapped in a soft rag in her handbag, cracked it into the bowl, and stirred that in. Would be better if she had some buttermilk but water would do. Just needed something on her stomach, for nerves as much as hunger.
When the lard in the pan started to smoke she gave the meal another stir and poured it in, hissing in the hot lard, watched it cook. She liked to make bread in the oven but didn’t want to fool with that, and with no milk it’d be better browned on both sides and crispy. She’d made it thin. She watched it thicken and crack on top and then she turned it over with a spatula. The bottom was dark brown. She cooked it another few minutes and took the pan off the stove and set it on the table and cut out a piece to cool on a plate, and she ate it with a cup of water from the jug, chewing and washing down the dry bread with the water, and looking at the little flickering flame in Vish’s cabin down the path. She saw something cross over inside and block out the flame for a second, then the flame again. She wiped her hands on a rag and took another drink of the water, closed the stove vents, and put her coat back on, looked out the window again, and then went out to the porch. It was getting pretty cold. She stepped carefully down the steps and into the path and walked toward Aunt Vish’s cabin.
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-Creasie! she’d heard him call, heard a clatter in the sink. He stuck his head into the pantry, mad. -I’ll be back in an hour, so make up a fresh pot of coffee. That’s the worst cup of coffee I ever tasted in my life.
-No, sir, Creasie said to herself now as she stepped up onto Vish’s porch and lifted her knuckles to rap lightly on the old plank door. -I reckon it was worse that that.
AUNT VISH LOOKED made from a tough, blackened root in the flickering faint light from the coal oil lamp on the little shelf behind her. The cabin was hammered together of unplaned planks, burlap tacked to the walls for insulation tattered and torn here and there and stained. She held out a clean mason jar toward Creasie across the table. Her breath like smoke from her mouth when she spoke in the cold air.
-You put it in this. Tell young Mr. Parnell to put it in this.
-Yes’m, Creasie said. -What do I do with it after he give it to me?
Vish’s bloodshot, jaundiced eyes watched her without movement. Outside it was quiet as inside, not a breeze rustling a single dry leaf. Still February winter, maybe a drizzle drifting in, maybe a patter on the dead leaves carpeting the trails. The woods around there black as what you see when life goes out, before whatever light in whatever world comes next shows itself, black nothing, switches of branches and sticky spiderwebs like some gauntlet between here and there.
-You keep it with you.
After a moment, Creasie nodded.
-Yes’m.
The old woman’s hands lay on the table before her, two black crooked claws, long yellow nails resting on the unfinished plank top of the table. She showed what teeth she had then, one long dark horse tooth in front, gaps between what seemed occasional sharpened incisors here and there on back.
-Tell him what I told you to. Don’t tell him who I am. He smart enough, he’ll know.