Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  He saw with a kind of momentary and icecold clarity that the place had attracted them, had drawn them as a magnet draws iron filings, dangling its erotic past before already faulted vessels, biding its time during the tenancy of those it could not use, waiting.

  You let such as that in.

  The Old Beale Homeplace, 1933

  Owen Swaw had a fight with his landlord over a broken double-shovel plow and found himself abruptly thrown off the place in midsummer, the crop he had planned to share in contention and hard feelings all around. Swaw had a wife and four daughters that ranged from grown to nearly grown.

  Lawed off a place we lived on four year, the woman said, bitterly. Her name was Lorene. Lawed off and not even by a sheriff. Lawed off by a man a sheriff sent. If I’da had sons stead of daughters I’da never been throwed off to begin with. Them as can done gets em, she said. Them as don’t makes do as best they can.

  Swaw was used to hard times. He had known no other. He was used to field peas and cornbread when he had them and he was used to not having it too. He was used to shotgun shacks with cracks you could have thrown a good-sized housecat through and floors through whose cracks a man could watch his chickens scratching for worms, if he was lucky enough to possess any chickens. In 1933 a man on Swaw’s status level was a good deal more likely to possess a housecat than he was a chicken, and Swaw was no exception.

  He was used to bonechilling cold in the wintertime with everyone crowded around a tin woodstove trying their best to keep it warm and kicking through snow to cut wood that was frozen to the heart. A sharecropper didn’t have time to cut his wood in the summertime. In July and August he was used to heat that wouldn’t abate even at night, when you’re exhausted but awake, feeling the droplets of sweat sliding across your naked ribs, wanting to cry out Great God is the place afire, listening through the thin board walls to the woods just outside your door, the whippoorwills and crickets and owls, and knowing that day was coming and another day’s work but the harder you tried to sleep the more elusive it became.

  He wasn’t one like the colored man in the story. A white man and a colored man went hunting together and killed a turkey and a buzzard. At the end of the day they divided up the game. Well, the white man said, it’s all the same to me. You take the buzzard and I’ll take the turkey or you take the turkey and I’ll take the buzzard. The colored man considered this for a time. Well, he said. It shore sounds fair but seems like I wind up with the buzzard most of the time.

  Swaw was used to getting the buzzard, and he was pretty sure he had it now. He was getting more of it every day, piece by scrawny piece, from his wife and four squabbling daughters.

  Then luck stepped in, a commodity with which Swaw had barely a passing acquaintance. Swaw had a friend who had one of the few steady jobs in Limestone County. He was helping log the timber of the Beale place. This friend’s name was Charlie Cagle and he told Swaw he could get him a few days’ work cutting timber. Cagle even let them store their household plunder, such as it was, in his barn and sleep on mattresses in an empty back room of his house.

  They were logging off the original homeplace and Swaw had never seen such timber. The land had never been cut over, and these were enormous beech trees of such girth you barely had room to pull a crosscut saw back and forth, trees you’d spend half a morning felling that sounded like thunder when they finally came down.

  In the thirties you worked long hours, and even in the summer the sun would be sinking when they came out with the mules past the old Beale houseplace, out of the woods and across a sloping fallow field. There was a knoll above the houseplace, and this was where the old Beale graveyard was. Once they had stopped and walked among the old graves, oblong declivities in the earth, each marked by leaning old-timey stones, marble lambs at repose and stark spires and graven angels. The hill dropped off then and there were the twin chimneys rising out of the riot of sassafras and sumac bushes like chimneys flanking an invisible house, a house no longer here. The great pear trees loaded, Swaw noticed, with green pears bigger than his feet. Swaw guessed you could have kicked your way through the brush and followed the line of the foundation rocks, but he had no desire to do so. He hadn’t lost a damn thing there and he’d bet there were copperheads in there big as a man’s legs.

  The place gave him the all-overs anyway, but he would have been hard put to explain why. There was just a curious quality about the place. He had heard the wild tales from the time he was a kid but he didn’t put any stock in them, and besides, that wasn’t what he dreaded anyway. For one thing, it just never seemed to be light enough to suit him there, or perhaps that was because it was usually dusk when he passed it. For another, the place reminded him somehow of a church or some other sacred spot. A place where something solemn and momentous had happened a long time ago, steeped in a kind of patient waiting for it to happen again.

  But he couldn’t put it into words exactly. All he knew was he didn’t like going past it and if there had been another road out he would have taken it, let Charlie Cagle laugh at him all he damn pleased. So going out he wouldn’t look too close. He would walk along, weary, feeling the chambray workshirt stiffening with drying salt against his back, concentrate on the sounds the mules’ hooves made over the stony field and their trace chains chiming halfmusically in the twilight, and he would be glad Charlie was walking along the wagon road with him.

  Then one day in late July Charlie broke his arm and took the mules and went in early. A hackberry they were sawing split twelve or fifteen feet in the air. It kicked back, and it was a wonder they both weren’t killed. They had abandoned the saw and ran like hell, Charlie’s arm flopping like a broken chicken’s wing as he ran, stopping only when they heard the hackberry tumbling off down a hillside. Charlie left to get his arm set and left Swaw to trim up and mark the timber they already had down.

  Of course, Swaw quit as soon as Cagle was out of sight and whittled himself a sharp stick and went to digging ginseng. Swaw would work as hard as you wanted him to as long as you watched him, but if you ever looked away he’d be long gone, almost as if the photoelectric weight of your eyes triggered some delicate sensory mechanism in his brain that kept the ax or saw moving.

  Ginseng grew in abundance around these beech trees and this was found money. Clear money above his dollar a day he was going to get anyway and digging was a sight easier than swinging a chopping ax. He liked digging it anyway. He fairly flew at it, like a miser turned loose in a roomful of money and allowed to keep all he could pick up. Before long his overall pockets were bulging.

  At the cry of a whippoorwill he leapt up, startled. All at once he looked up, as if he had been awakened from sleep or in a trance. Oh shit, he said. He swallowed hard. All there was of the sun was a thin rind of gold drowning in mottled red, and a thick blue darkness was seeping out of the hollows like rising waters. A fine thread of fear ran through him. He trudged out of the woods, into the field, his gait gradually increasing until his legs were fairly scissoring across the field.

  He told himself he wasn’t going to look when he passed the graveyard. If you don’t look, it won’t be so, he told himself. He looked anyway and there was a girl sitting on Jacob Beale’s tombstone, plaiting her long blond hair. She was watching Swaw with bold eyes out of a pretty, sullen face, and when she arose the pale fall of her hair swung behind her. She beckoned him.

  He ran, listening to the sob of his breathing, thinking desperately that that must have been old Clyde Simpson’s daughter and knowing full well all the time that Simpson’s daughter was dumpy and heavyset and had a flat, stupid-looking face.

  Cagle could work the mules snaking timber one-armed, so he was back to work in a few days. Swaw didn’t see the girl for over a week. He kept his mouth shut, too. Then one Monday at dusk she came walking out from beneath the pear tree, humming to herself. Swaw could hear her, could hear the melody that had a haunting childhood familiarity about it, and he was about to say, There by God, now what do you say to thi
s, when he saw Charlie’s bland, preoccupied face, jaws patiently worrying their quid of tobacco. His eyes widened and he turned to the stolid mules, walking stumblefooted down the slope, stopping momentarily to crop grass, coming on when the slack pulled out of the lines, and Swaw thought, They don’t see it. Nary one of them does. This is supposed to be just for me. A moment of blinding insight crept over him.

  The girl was visible from the knees up, her calves and feet lost in the weeds, and even as he watched she changed from a pale sepia transparency to flesh and blood, a live woman of seventeen or eighteen standing there petulant and curiously erotic, so that he felt a rush of desire, a quickening of the blood in his groin that sickened him. She tossed her hair back. She seemed to be waiting for something. Her face was bright and conspiratorial, as if she and Swaw shared some secret the world didn’t even suspect. She raised a hand and pointed at him. Her mouth opened. He could see the clean line of her teeth. Her lips moved. You, the lips mouthed.

  Cagle asked, Hey, what the hell’s the matter with you?

  She vanished.

  What?

  What the hell’s the matter with you?

  I thought for a minute I seen something.

  You look like you know damn well you did.

  Did you not see anything back there?

  All I see is night comin and you wastin time.

  They commenced walking. Swaw didn’t say anything. He began to roll a cigarette. His fingers started to shake, the little brown flakes of tobacco sifting about his moving feet, the plain rice paper shredding so that he wadded it in his fingers and dropped it covertly beside the pack.

  Owen, I ain’t sayin you seen somethin and I ain’t sayin you didn’t, but I know what I’d do if I did. I’d put it out of my mind damn quick. I’d tell myself somethin likely it could have been and I’d hold on to that as hard as I could.

  Swaw didn’t put it out of his mind. His mind was playing with her image like a cat worrying a mouse. She went just like that, like blowin out a coal-oil lamp. He wondered where she went to. He thought she went somewhere he remembered with a vague familiarity, someplace he had been years ago.

  More luck. Good for some, not so good for others. Clyde Simpson had been sharecropping Beale’s land. He had the crop laid by and was waiting for fall, enjoying the pause before harvest time. In the white still heat of noonday he ran a snarling black dog out of his cornfield. It kept snapping at the cuffs of his overalls, and when he bent over to pick up a clod of dirt to throw at it his heart burst and he died there with the hot sun in his eyes and the Mastiff watching him from the edge of the cornfield.

  Beale was in a quandary. Here he had a fine corn crop already making and no one to tend it and gather it come autumn, save Simpson’s widow and his simpleminded daughter.

  A man named Hinson told it at the Snow White Café: he was wonderin who he could get. Hell, everybody that was worth a damn already had a crop goin. He’s too tight to hire it gathered. Swaw’s name came up somehow and somebody said, You don’t want Swaw. That tore it. You know how contrary the old son of a bitch is. He studied about it. I want Swaw, he said. Swaw’s the very feller I need. Swaw don’t know how lucky he is.

  I wouldn’t mind workin that land, a man named Qualls said. But I wouldn’t want a man to have a stroke and die just so I’d get it. That ain’t the kind of luck I want.

  Beale sent word for Swaw to come in and talk to him. He didn’t live on the Beale land. He lived in a tall redbrick house on Walnut Street in town and he didn’t lower himself to drive out to Cagle’s and see Swaw there. He figured he could work a better deal in his imposing study. He offered Swaw a tenant’s share of the ungathered crop: half the crop to Beale, twenty-five percent to the Widow Simpson, twenty-five percent to Swaw.

  Swaw said he’d think about it.

  Beale couldn’t believe his ears. He had offered Swaw a tenancy on the finest farm in the county and the occupancy of a house any other dirt farmer in the county would have mortgaged his soul for, and Swaw said he’d think about it. At that moment, though he didn’t know it, Swaw’s fate was sealed. Beale was determined to have him now.

  What do you mean you’ll study on it? Lorene asked him. Us with no roof of our own over our head and Mama’s bed settin out there in a mule barn. It don’t seem to me you got anything to study on.

  That place gives me the all-overs, Swaw said sullenly.

  Look around you. Looks like seein your daughters livin piled up in the same old room like hogs would give you the all-overs, she said.

  The analogy had never occurred to Swaw before, but he did note that, strewn out across the floor of the little moonlit room, their bulky bodies did remind him of sleeping hogs, and during the day they’d be just as useless, couched somewhere in the shade grunting to each other, probably, he thought about some boar: all they seemed to think about anymore was men and just showin up for feeding time, he thought. Fightin over what’s in the trough.

  And about as shameless as hogs, too. He couldn’t walk around the corner of the house without catching one squatting to pee. It had got to where they didn’t even leap up anywhere adjusting their skirts. They’d just sit there with their bare cheeks shining moonlike and gaze at him stolidly as grazing cows. Or hogs. They’d set across from him or he guessed any man who happened to be there with their skirts hiked up and their legs spraddled out, gleaming like barked-up whiteoak logs.

  All except Retha.

  Retha was the youngest, and she might have been a changeling the little people left, she was so different. She was so different in fact that Swaw had always felt some vague unspoken unease about her parentage. Perhaps she wasn’t his. He’d almost rather believe she was the only one who was.

  Lorene was big and rawboned and she had hands and arms like a man’s. Her voice was masculine, too, a coarse sandpapery whiskey voice, though she didn’t even drink. And all the daughters except Retha seemed to be growing up divested of any mannerisms Swaw had been raised to consider feminine, save the essential and quixotic fact of their sex itself, the moonoriented flowing of their menses.

  Lorene and the four daughters had already felt a subtle shifting of their social standing. They had been offered the Beale place. They wouldn’t own a scrap of land, but they would have a strong house and what was left of the Simpson crop. They were still oneeyed, but they were, after all, in the kingdom of the blind. They went to look at the Beale house, touring it with a proprietary air before the Widow Simpson had even begun to think of packing her bags. They came back for three consecutive days, and on the third they saw Widow Simpson’s brothers loading her furniture into two wagons. The Swaws sat on the wagon seat watching from a stand of cypress like distant spectators at a funeral. The horses stirred and the wagons began to roll soundlessly. The mirror of a tilting chifferobe winked at them in the sun like a heliograph.

  Swaw was not far behind in the awareness of his altered level at the bottom of society’s sediment. A man long accustomed to walking anywhere he had to go, he suddenly had a fine team of horses at his disposal. There was a rubbertired wagon, not yet two seasons old and with the red paint not even weathered off that was a source of great wonder to Swaw. It was the closest thing to an automobile he’d ever ridden in.

  Swaw is a fool about that rubbertired wagon, they said about him in the Snow White Café. He don’t never walk no more. Thinks he’s too good. I bet Swaw won’t go down to the shithouse lessen he hooks up that rubbertired wagon.

  Swaw piddled about the place waiting for the corn to mature and for frost and he spent much of the time before the dead fireplace with his feet propped up, slowly turning the pages of the new fall and winter Sears Roebuck catalog. He was making lists in his head of all the things his twenty-five percent of Simpson’s crop would buy. And he wasn’t the only one making lists. A veritable epidemic of list-making ensued.

  Swaw was already thinking of next year’s crop. There was a turtleback Hudson Hornet setting in the second row of Toot Grimes’ carlot th
at made him want an automobile so bad there was something achingly erotic about it. He hungered for the feel of the steering wheel in his hands so deeply that he dreamed about it at night. He imagined driving it down the main street of Beales Gap, his head reared back a little, his eyes looking neither to the right nor to the left. He might even start going to church. Church would be a good place to show off his automobile. He saw himself on the way out, his dark suit crisp with newness, his boiled white shirt blinding in the sun, his black hair slicked down and gleaming pomade. Women turning to look at him speculatively.

  All this was before the rats began in the walls. They began first in the girls’ room. He didn’t hear about it for a few days.

  What rats? he asked. Rats doin what?

  Eatin, they said. Chewin in the walls. Grindin their old teeth together.

  Long as they ain’t chewin you, just pay em no mind, he said.

  A shriek in the night brought him barefoot down the moonlit hall. The oldest girl was cowering in the corner of the room, half naked, white as a bedsheet. There was a rat in the bed with me, the girl said, shuddering. I could feel it rubbing against my leg.

  You get some goddamn clothes on or I’ll be rubbing something against that hind end, Swaw said.

  He went through the bedclothes a piece at a time until there was a white mound in the center of the floor. Nothing. With the coal-oil lamp in his hand and his shadow humped and broken against the wall he searched for holes in the baseboard, in the paneling, for anywhere a rat could have gone.

  It ain’t nowhere a rat could have went, he said. If it ain’t nowhere it could have gone and it ain’t no rat in here, then you ain’t seen no rat.

  I know a rat when I see one, the girl said, and I seen that one jump off the bed. I heard it hit the floor.

  Get in that bed and get to sleep, Swaw said. I got work to do in the morning, and I’m damn tired of hearin about rats.

  When he was back in bed they began in earnest: a rising ocean of rat sounds, as if a veritable legion of them were steadfastly gnawing the structure into sawdust that would ultimately come sifting over their heads as they lay abed. The sounds spread incrementally, infinitesimally as air, over the floorboards to the footboards of the bed itself and ascending on the wooden bed, steady and unrelenting gnawing over all the bed at once. He lay clutching the covers.