Little Sister Death

by William Gay

  The weather that year turned unseasonal. In late July the temperature climbed into the nineties and stayed there except occasionally when it eased over the one-hundred-degree mark. It was a fierce and strange malign heat that became a tangible presence, bad company that will not go home. The earth grew dry and fissured, miniature cataclysms appeared in the parched clay, widened and deepened, creeping like bower vines across the blistered dry earth.

  Some days dawned with the mocking promise of rain but the sun hanging over the eastern field withdrew it, the dew vanishing, the bog along the lowland almost instantly sucked into nothingness until all there was was a malevolent red sun tracking across the horizon into a sky gone marvelously blue and absolutely cloudless.

  Old men at their checker games allowed it had not been so dry and hot since the thirties, they could not agree on precisely what year. The secondary roads turned to a shifting layer of dust that rose listlessly in the slipstreams of passing automobiles, drifting down, talcuming the greenblack honeysuckle shrouding the shoulders of the road. Farmers began to fear for their crops, stood out at night studying the skies for a sign that was not there. Corn began to yellow in the field, the blades twisting limply on themselves in defeat. At night heat lightning flickered in the far-off dark, vague and impotent.

  After unrelenting days of this, tempers grew short and there were random outbursts of violence. People did things they ordinarily would not have done, began to think the old laws did not apply. Calvin Huggins, a local pinball cowboy, would-be poolshark, the kind of gambler who raises his draw to an inside straight, was the first to make a fatal mistake. He drank a cold beer on payday when the shoe factory let off. He was sitting on a stool in the Snow White Café, the end one nearest the air conditioner, feeling the pleasant warmth from his paycheck through his pocket and cold beaded beer bottle against his palm and he thought of his wife home in the hot little rental house with the busted air conditioner, probably waiting on the money and he for no good reason other than the fact that this was payday and he was red and worn out from the heat suddenly thought, To hell with her. Her face, bitter and accusatory, drifted freefall into his mind. Fuck her, he thought. I never could do anything to suit her anyhow. He bought a roll of quarters for the pinball machine. The pinball machine had been at the back of his mind all day anyway, like a glamour woman who probably won’t but just possibly will. He went home at midnight drunk and broke, the grocery money and rent fed quarter by quarter down the remorseless gullet of the pinball machine.

  At noon the next day, he was under the Pontiac Firebird that was his pride and joy, a metallic brown, just the color of the one Rockford had driven on TV, replacing the brake pads. He was on the last one, the right front, and had been moving the bumper jack corner to corner. He was ever one to tempt fate, it is a fact that a man who will draw to an inside straight will trust a bumper jack.

  She watched from the porch with eyes that were just smoldering hate in her face.

  Hey, you bringing that beer like I said or do I have to rattle your head around a little more?

  Wordlessly, she brought the can of beer.

  Set it on that block and hand me them fuckin visegrips, his final words.

  The jack was tilted ever so slightly. Perhaps a finger might dislodge it, the weight of a cool evening breeze. Her eyes found there was a crowbar leant against a cottonwood and without even thinking, she took it up and positioned her feet and slammed the crowbar against the post of the jack with all her might. The jack skewed crazily, went sidewise and the drum came down on his right temple as he reached backhanded for the beer. She went in the house and stood at the sink washing dishes thinking no thoughts at all and watching nothing whatsoever out the window, and when she was sure he was dead she dialed 911 to tell them about the accident.

  Long a watcher of the changes of the seasons and a believer in signs and portents, Annie Mae Hicks came out of a network of clay gullies just at dusk dragging an armful of honeysuckle vines and saw the first light bobbing across the field, angling down a distant rise toward the homeplace, a yellow light, not blinking as a firefly does but erratic as a lantern slung along by a man’s side. She didn’t think whose or what side it might be: she didn’t want to know. She just thought, so it’s finally back, but there was a kind of detachment, then a giddy relief. She knew intuitively it had nothing to do with her. Not this time. It’s them, she thought, them Yankees or whoever: I got nothing it wants anymore.

  Her husband told it around town about the lights but no one paid much attention to him, he had cried wolf once too often. No one believed him exactly but still there was something about the Beale farm.

  Coy Hickerson put it into words in the shade of the magnolia in the courthouse yard, trying to distract his partner into not noticing the potentially fatal move he had made on the checkerboard. Sometimes I think it’d be a good thing if that place burnt to the foundation.

  You can’t burn dirt, Cagle said.

  I don’t believe none of that bullshit about lights and voices, but I do believe in luck and that place is just as unlucky as it gets. Nobody never had any dealings at all with that place that didn’t come to a bad end. Them Beales had the right idea, just get the hell away from it and let somebody else sweat out the hard times.

  Them Abernathy sisters lived out there till a few years ago, a man said from the circle of watchers. Nothing ever happened to them.

  Hell, they died, Charles Cagle said, seeing the move and taking his double jump. Anyway, times don’t get no harder than that.

  Everybody dies, that’s a given. They’s different ways of doing it.

  Ginseng digging on the northeast corner of the Beale land, Thurl Cogdill slipped off a steep limestone bluff and broke his neck against a beech tree forty feet below and the searchers didn’t find him for a week. There was no way a truck could get in and out of there and they had to carry him, hot heavy work when you’re holding your breath, zigzagging the bluff, and lash him to the back of a four-wheeler ATV. Thurl was known to be addicted to ‘sang digging and they figured he had seen a bunch he just couldn’t resist. They were partly right. He had seen a four-prong bunch and a little patch of threes on a ledge against the cliff wall and he hesitated only momentarily before climbing out after it.

  It was no big thing and he had been in more perilous places without mishap but something drew his eyes up from the hole he was scratching in the flinty soil and there was a black Mastiff coming around the ledge, not walking or running, just coming, gliding as implacable as a locomotive, something from a bad dream. The sight of the enormous black dog was disturbing enough. When the ledge curled around an outcropping of limestone the dog came straight through the fissured blue rock and for a fraction of a second it was translucent, the opaque of the rock filtered through the head and shoulders of the dog. Not remarking him, looking like a dog but acting like no dog Thurl had ever seen, he saw too late the dog was making no attempt to avoid him: it was just coming on. He scrambled upright just as the dog passed through the calf of his right leg, the leg going suddenly numb and cold, brittle as ice. Thurl panicked and half-mad with unreasoning fear and just wanting gone, away from the dog at whatever cost, overbalancing backward and windmilling his arms madly as if he might at this late date learn flight.

  The woods turned sere and dry and volatile as gunpowder. Forest fires sprang up, random as the deaths by outbreaks of violence. The air carried the nostalgic scent of woodsmoke and at sunset the air was tinted a hazy blue like Indian summer. The fire was creeping down from Shipps Bend and at night you could watch it feed, the distant line of fire pulsing fine and bright as a burning thread.

  Binder climbed out of the bed of the pickup truck with the other three men and turned to help unload the rakes and shovels. The smell of smoke was very strong. He could see it shifting in the air far down the slope and out in what appeared to be a clearing of some sort. He could see the fire approaching, an orange glow that suddenly intensified both in brightness and in speed, e
normous showers of sparks shooting upward and the field seemed abruptly to explode.

  Boys, that’s reached the sage field, one of the men called, and coming like a goddamned freight train.

  Their faces were alternately light and shadow, the strobic orange fire, the moving shadows of the lowering trees.

  Binder felt suddenly out of place, wondered why he had bothered to come. The only reason he was there at all was because he had seen a load of firefighters disembarking a flatbed truck in town, and the men had looked so bonetired and weary that the radio announcements beseeching volunteers he had been hearing suddenly became real to him. Their pale eyes burned out of faces and they looked timeless, no part of the eighties, old sepia daguerreotypes, men out of the dustbowl thirties.

  Though if he admitted it, the whole truck was a little more complex than that. He had sat on the front porch and watched the smoke, the smoke that rose as if from distant battlefields, and there was a panicky feeling at the back of his mind that the battles were getting closer and he had to choose up sides, that fire might do to the Beale farm what a hundred years of time had not been able to do.

  What are we supposed to be doing? he asked.

  Hell, we got a gravy train here, the man nearest him said. You lucked out. The state’s already plowed a firebreak and all we got to do is wait.

  The men were smokeblacked and weary. They smelled of trees, earth, smoke, and sweat. They had come from the fire at Shipps Bend, Binder and the rest of the volunteers being split up and sent with experienced crew who had already been fighting the fires.

  He looked around for someone he might recognize and was surprised to see Charlie Cagle leaning against a tree watching the fire.

  Mr. Cagle, he said, I see they got you out here.

  Ain’t it hell? Cagle said. They’re down to seeds and stems. Nothin left but little boys and old men like me.

  The men formed a loose circle around Binder and Cagle, some leaning on shovels, others hunkered against the boles of trees watching the fire cross the field.

  Didn’t figure to see you here. Don’t reckon they get many forest fires in Chicago.

  I’m really from East Tennessee, I was only in Chicago for a few months. Woods burn up in the mountains, too.

  You the feller lives out on the old Beale place? another asked.

  That’s me.

  Then it don’t surprise me, you bein here. I know I’d rather fight fire in the piney woods than go to bed ever night out where you do.

  Why’s that?

  Don’t pay him no mind, Binder, the first man said. Clyde’s a notorious chickenshit. He’s known for it across five or six counties around here.

  Not too chickenshit to kick your sorry ass, Clyde said. Too damn tired maybe.

  There was an easy camaraderie among the men that Binder had occasionally aspired to but never attained, no matter how hard he tried it always seemed the seams of his effort always showed force, and there was a distance between himself and others he could not breach.

  Hell we might as well set, Cagle said, hunkering down and rubbing his knees. Nothin to do till it gets to the firebreak.

  What if it crosses? Binder asked.

  It won’t if the wind don’t get up, Cagle told him. The break ought to be wide enough to hold it but they got us strung out here to beat out what little fires spring up from burnin leaves blowed across. It don’t take but a minute for a little bitty fire to be a great big one.

  I seen you around town but I never met you, a man said out of the dark. He stuck out a grimy hand and Binder shook it. My name’s Buster Sharp, and we was just joshing you about where you live. That place has just always had a bad reputation. Anybody willing to pick up a shovel and help, I ain’t about to piss him off. I expect you’ve heard plenty about that place from folks you’ve met.

  Actually I haven’t met hardly anybody, Binder said. Mr. Cagle and Frazier, the A/C man. The only other person I met I never learned who he was. He just beat the hell out of me right quick and left.

  Say he did? Where at, in town?

  No, out on the farm. I walked up on him in the woods there back of the old Beale house, told him who I was and stuck my hand out the way you just did. He hit me a time or two before I knew what was going on and when I got up he was gone into the woods. Binder laughed. He was real too, there wasn’t anything ghostly about him. My jaw was sore for a week.

  Didn’t he say anything?

  He said something about snaketraps. I didn’t get all of it.

  Son of a bitch, Sharp said, Aaron Swaw.

  That’s Swaw all right. His mama was the only one of Owen’s kids that survived. He traps snakes with rabbits in cages. Big heavyset fella with one eye cocked off toward Memphis or somewheres.

  Well he was big. It was about dusk when I met him and I didn’t get a real good look at him.

  Swaw was a nightmare waiting for a dreamer, lying sweating on his cot in the humid dark going through the list he carried in his head. The list was the name of folks who had done him grievances, real or imagined. A sense of the power he possessed made him giddy and almost ecstatic there in the darkness. With a match to be had for the asking he could destroy anyone he wanted to, and when blame was handed out no one would even think of him.

  There was a farmer named Milford on Jacks Branch who had run him off twice for hunting: the second time he had even gotten the drop on Aaron with a .30-06 and taken the brace of squirrels. He had called Aaron names Aaron was not accustomed to answering to. Had he known that his own name had been mentally entered on a little white card in Aaron’s head and that he was just waiting for his lottery number to come up, his sleep would have been more troubled than it was.

  As it was he got off light. Aaron only burned his barn. He watched from the hilltop above the farm by the orange flicker. He could see miniature black figures darting about the barn lot, impotent and spastic as the jerking of marionettes on strings. Aaron lay in the leaves and had no word for what he felt, it was better than anything, better than the whitebreasted woman on the Beale farm.

  The next night he lay and thought of David Binder, though what he saw in his mind was not a name but a face. He did not even know his name, just thought of him as the Yankee. But he was saving Binder: Binder he was intending to kill, wanted to kill, there was something crazy in his eyes. Binder was going to burn in his sleep and all his family was going to burn with him but he had plans for the woman first, all that he was wanting was the opportunity, and it would come round, it always had before.

  Labor Day Weekend, 1982

  Vern was a lover, Binder thought, surely amused, watching him study himself critically in the hall mirror. Vern fancies himself a ladies’ man. Vern was leant to the glass, peering closely at his face in the poor light. Now comb your hair, Binder said to himself. Vern took a pocket comb from his hippocket and ran it through his hair, eyed the result. His hair was the color of bright copper wire and it was naturally curly. Binder knew it was naturally curly. Vern had told him.

  Even if he had not seen Vern scrutinizing himself in the mirror, Binder would have known Vern considered himself a ladies’ man. It was inherent in the clothes he wore, a kind of pseudowestern rigging boots and a yokebacked cowboy shirt, jeans riding low on his hips. It was encoded in his very stance, a kind of urban dream of a cowboy’s lockhipped work. The very essence of macho, Binder thought. He is a truck driver without a truck, a cowboy squinting in a carbon monoxide sunset.

  There was other evidence as well. Sitting on the porch before supper, Vern had told him while Corrie and her sister Ruthie were in the kitchen.

  You talk about women, Vern said. Boy, you know a motel operator meets a world of women.

  Is that a fact, Binder said noncommittally.

  Vern lowered his voice, glanced toward the screen door. It damn sure is. Them old gals on the run…dodgin their husbands, dodgin their boyfriends…calling me up at all hours to come down to their rooms, this ain’t right, that ain’t right. Givin me them up
-and-down looks. That old long eye. Run in, run out, what’s Ruthie to know? What’s fifteen minutes?

  Fifteen minutes is not very long, Binder said bemusedly, studying the wind in the sedge above the creek, the gradations of failing light. Binder could look at seemingly insignificant things for hours, losing himself in them. Now he was far away, lost in last week’s work, before Vern and Ruthie came for the Labor Day holiday.

  Vern considered Binder’s reply for a time. What’s that supposed to mean? Fifteen minutes is not very long.

  It doesn’t mean anything.

  Vern was placated. He leaned closer, gouged Binder in the ribs with an elbow, winked. This old gal one time, he said, peering intently into Binder’s face, said she was from Omaha. Rung me up on room service and I went down there and knocked on the door. Come in, she says. Son, she was spread out there on the bed buck naked. I mean not a stitch on. That thing gaped open like a alligator’s mouth.

  Binder didn’t say anything.

  Don’t you believe me?

  Sure, Binder said.

  How come you keep backing up?

  I’m not backing up.

  Yes, you are.

  You get right up in my face to talk, Vern. I can hear you very well. I never could stand anybody right up in my face. The territorial imperative, I guess.

  The what?

  I never did like anybody grabbing my arm, either, Binder said, disengaging the fingers from his bicep.

  Vern studied him. Maybe you’re a latent homosexual, he said.

  And maybe you’re full of shit, Binder said amiably.

  But the main reason Binder knew what Vern was was he had seen him looking at Corrie. Corrie had on a pair of very tight faded jeans and Vern had been staring at her crotch, where the denim was pulled taut over the upthrust pelvic bone. Corrie had been looking away toward the creek, the sun in her face, animatedly talking to Ruthie, unaware of Vern’s scrutiny. Like the true ladies’ man he was, Vern didn’t care who was looking. He was staring at her crotch with a kind of constrained hunger, momentarily forgetting where he was or that Ruthie and Binder might be watching. Binder remembered Vern’s face with a kind of clinical detachment, as if he was watching the curious behavior of a stranger in a crowd. He told himself he had no feelings about it one way or another.