by Alex Taylor
The smoke from the fire had dried his mouth out and he reached a hand toward the milk jug. “Can I have some of that water?”
Pete picked the jug up and shook it so that the water sloshed around inside. “This?” he asked.
“Yeah, give me a drink.”
“Sure. Anytime you want it, it’s right here.” Pete set the jug back on the ground and smiled. “Then again, maybe you ain’t so healthy that you can get up and get your own drink of water. Maybe you better take this salve after all.” He stared at Beam, waiting to see if he might raise himself up from the ground to take the milk jug. When he didn’t move, Pete picked up the jug and stepped over to where Beam lay and handed it down to him. Beam uncapped the top and drank the cold water down in long, refreshing pulls.
“They could just take you up yonder, honey,” Pete said when Beam had finished and handed the jug back to him. He seated himself on the elm log and placed the jug between his feet.
“Why are we in a graveyard?” Beam asked.
“Was there some other place you needed to be?”
“It ain’t what I had in mind, to tell the truth,” he said.
Pete chuckled. “I expect you was looking to wake up on satin sheets with the Queen of Sheba?”
Beam didn’t say anything. His chest pained him greatly, and the breath dragged through him in thin serried gusts, as if one of his lungs might have collapsed. He managed to get up on his elbows and, arching his back, propped himself against the sack of pine chips that had served as his pillow. Suddenly, he coughed violently and spat a bloody clot onto the ground. His breathing evened, and a sudden lightness filled his chest.
“We’re in a graveyard because they won’t look for us here,” Pete said, taking a pack of non-filtered Berley cigarettes from his shirt pocket. He shook one free, struck a match, and began to smoke. He offered the pack to Beam.
“I don’t smoke,” Beam said.
Pete nodded and tucked the pack into his pocket again. He stroked the side of his belly, then spat a sprig of tobacco. “You’re a Sheetmire?” he asked.
“If you know that,” Beam said, “there’s no need for me to talk.”
“Plenty I don’t know.” Pete drew on the cigarette. “Like the kind of trouble you’re in.”
“I don’t know exactly what kind of trouble I’m in,” Beam said, shutting his eyes.
“Does Clem know?”
Beam opened his eyes. Across from him, the firelight bronzed the old man’s features so that they seemed hardened and polished.
“You know my dad?”
“Yes, know your mama, too. Not well enough to speak to, but I could sure enough spot both of them if I was to see them in a crowd somewheres. Do either of them know the kind of trouble you’re in?”
“It don’t matter what they know. They can’t help me.”
Pete studied the embers swarming up from the fire into the blackness overhead. “Maybe not,” he said. “But Clem is your daddy, right?”
Beam settled himself against the sack of pine chips. He recalled the Sheetmire homecoming, and the rowed kinfolks lining up to fill their plates, each with the sad loose smile of his father, and none bearing neither trace nor sliver of resemblance to himself.
“I don’t know who else would be my daddy,” he answered.
Pete pinched the fabric of his pants between two fingers and then crossed his legs. “What does Loat want with you?” he asked.
“You know about Loat Duncan?”
“Everybody knows about Loat Duncan,” Pete answered. “But not everybody who gets in a fight up a Daryl’s forces a phone call to the sonuvabitch. If you’ve gotten yourself in trouble with Loat, then you’ve waded out over your head.” Pete picked up the metal skewer and stoked the inner coals of the fire until they burned even hotter. “You’re in some bad country and it’s full of bad men,” he continued. “There are folks around here that don’t never even see all the trouble that’s right under their noses. They sit out in the evenings on their porches listening to the whippoorwills and think that everything is peaceful. Then there’s the other kind. The kind the porch sitters don’t like to think about. These are the ones that stand up and walk around with the dark all their lives until they are the dark. And who knows, maybe they are the whippoorwill singing way off in the wild places while the homefolks swing on their porches. Maybe that’s what they are. The birds and the dogs crying and howling in the nighttime.”
Beam didn’t know what the old man was trying to tell him; his voice sounded far off and lost in the night. “I got no truck with Loat,” he said. He waited for Pete to respond, but the old man remained silent, for once.
Beam lay his head back against the sack of pine chips and watched the stars in the great and silent distance of the night sky. His breathing leveled and steadied until he was on the verge of slipping quietly into the realm of sleep. He felt calm, as if all he’d done was some flimsy dream fetched from the back closets of his mind, easily forgettable and forgiven.
“You like graveyards?” Pete asked.
Beam snorted awake in surprise. “Can’t say I ever thought much about them,” he said.
“You can tell a lot about a patch of ground by who’s buried under it. Who was in the wars, when and where they fought. You can tell if there was a tough winter by how many babies and women were buried one year. All of that’s on these stones.” Pete waved through the firelight. “The great marble orchard. That’s what all it is.”
“What are you talking about?”
“History.” Pete patted the ground. “Right here under us is history.”
Beam looked at the headstones that were visible. He had never thought of any of this before, and he didn’t want to think about it now. What he wanted was a soft bed and silence from the old man.
“You like ghost stories?” Pete asked.
“I don’t believe in ghosts,” Beam answered.
“That’s not what I asked. I asked if you like ghost stories.”
“No.” Beam shook his head. “I don’t. That’s kid shit. I don’t believe in any of it.”
Pete stubbed his cigarette out on the ground and pitched the butt into the fire. “I don’t believe it neither,” he said. “But what I will say is that there’s an old house down in the woods here where ain’t nobody lived in quite a time and there ain’t money enough in the president’s wallet to make me sleep in there of a night.”
Beam readied himself. He knew another long story was coming.
“There were these two brothers,” Pete began. “Grown men. They lived there with their mother. Had a little farm, but they never worked it much that I know of.” He spread his hands on his lap and began picking at the dirt under his fingernails. “So it was the three of them. The brothers and the old woman. I don’t know where the old man had gone. Maybe he just left. I would have. But they lived there and the brothers never went out chasing girls. Or work neither. They just lived down there in that holler. One was all right, but the other, he was kindly simple and the woman was old. One day she says to her eldest, the one who wasn’t simple, she says, ‘Jessup’—that was his name—‘I think it’s time we took care of David.’ That was the one that was simple. She says, ‘We have got to be rid of David. He eats all the groceries and can’t hardly talk plain and he’s not bringing any respect to me and you.’ Jessup said he reckoned that was right, though I don’t know why any of them would care what other folks thought. They never seemed to before. And I don’t think they never even saw many folks. But, and now this is something you may not believe though it is what happened, Jessup took David out one night in the woods and got him drunk and tied him to an old dray pony they had. I guess they wanted rid of the pony as well. So he’s got David drunk and tied in the saddle and then he knots a rag soaked in kerosene to the pony’s tail and lights it and there they go, off through the dark, the horse bucking wild and screaming and poor David screaming too with that flame growing smaller and smaller as it went slithering off through the t
rees.” Pete dipped a spoon into the salve and held his hand over it, to see if it was cool enough. “Jessup didn’t have the heart to just knock the poor boy in the head, but he got rid of him just the same he reckoned. But then Jessup went out one day, doing I don’t know what. Maybe he had him a still going somewhere, though they take work and I don’t think that old boy Jessup was too much of a hand at anything other than getting rid of simple-minded brothers. Anyway, he come back and the old woman was gone, which was some curious, seeing as she never went further than the toilet they’d dug out back. But the house was empty as Christ’s tomb. Jessup sat around the house for two days waiting for the old woman to return. Finally, he goes out looking for her, thinking how maybe she’d got drunk and wandered off somewhere and he’s gone for the good part of a day and when he comes home it’s night and there’s a lamp burning in the window and he creeps up and looks inside. And there his mother is. Sitting on the bare floor of the living room with not a stitch of clothes on. Hair full of leaves and streaked with mud like she’d been drug through a creek. When Jessup looked in at her she started screaming, beating herself and waving her arms. And then the horse comes tromping into the living room, blinking its sad eyes. Like it was wondering what the old woman had to scream about. It didn’t have but a stub of a tail left and its rump was burned black and it stood there in the house looking at the crazy old woman while she screamed and beat herself.”
Pete sat back against the log he’d been resting on. “That’s the way Jessup told it when he wandered into town the next morning. He was white as an old fish bone. But all that we found, me and the ones who went out to the place, was that horse in the living room, standing with its head in the fireplace like it was a feed trough. There weren’t no old woman and there weren’t no David. And they weren’t never found neither. But I’ve heard a few old fox hunters say they’ve seen things in these woods. In the black of the moon, they say they see an old naked woman wandering lost through the trees and that they hear a horse screaming awful. They say the hounds won’t run in that holler where the house still stands. It’s marked ground, you see. And the dogs know it. Me, I don’t much believe in hauntings. But I will say that a place can get old just like a body. And a place can die out just like a body. And once a thing dies it starts to rot. And what is rot but a kind of haunting. You think blood don’t remain with a spot? You think all the trouble that goes on in certain little places just goes away once it’s over?”
Beam thought about the man on the ferry. He saw him sprawled across the floor of the boat with his head smashed, a trickle of blood seeping from his ears. His lean face seemed sculpted out of clay and his eyes were two empty smoking holes.
“What happened to the horse?” he asked.
“What horse?”
“The dray pony. The one with its tail burned off. What happened to it?”
Pete dragged on his cigarette. “Oh, he just plain didn’t give a shit after that,” he said. “But anyhow, what happened to that horse ain’t part of the telling.”
“Why’d you tell me that story?” Beam asked.
“I don’t rightly know,” Pete answered. “Maybe I thought it might make you feel a little better to know there’s been a whole score of folks worse off than you.”
“It don’t make me feel no better.”
“No, guess not.” Pete covered his hand with the rag and picked up the can of salve and moved to where Beam lay atop the green tarpaulin. “It never does.” He stirred the salve with one of the aluminum spoons and then measured out a dose. “Lift up your shirt,” he said.
Beam did as he was told.
Pete began ladling the salve over Beam’s bruised torso. Beam winced at the heat, but the discomfort quickly faded.
“Keep that shirt up and I’ll get some bandages,” Pete said. He went to his possibles bag and returned with a roll of gauze and some athletic tape.
“What are you anyway?” Beam asked. “Some kind of country doctor?”
“I ain’t no doctor. What I am is just somebody that knows enough to get well without heading to the hospital ever time my nose runs. Used to be that’s how most folks were. But not no more. Now everybody runs to the doctor at the first ache or pain. Hell, when I was growing up we never called the doctor unless one of the women was getting ready to calve. And there were times when we even tended to that ourselves. My aunt Gracie midwifed more babies in this county than I can count. But not no more.” Finished with the bandaging, Pete pulled Beam’s shirt down. “You keep soap and water and salve on those bruises and they’ll not swell so bad.”
Beam felt the bandages under his shirt. The pain was already drifting away.
“Why’d you help me?” he asked.
Pete laughed. He stood up slowly, rubbing his thighs, and went back to his place beside the fire. He lifted the flap on his bag and brought out a tall green bottle nestled in a cooling glove of woven henequen. He gnawed the cork off and drank. The bottle giggled as the liquor washed into him. When he was done, he stoppered the cork back in with the heel of his palm and dragged his knuckles over his lips.
“What else was there to do beside help?”
“I don’t know. Walk away. That’s what most people would have done.” Beam shook his head. “I know it’s what I would have done.”
Pete set the bottle between his legs. “The thought never even occurred to me to walk away. Those fellers back there at Daryl’s would have killed you.”
“They might do it anyway.”
“That’s surely true. But not yet. Because you’re right there in front of me, drawing air.” Pete passed the bottle to Beam, who held it briefly before yanking the cork out and taking a large swig. The liquor was full of fire and it burned down through him, a bald clean fire that settled in his gut and tended to the warmth already growing inside him.
“You sound proud,” Beam said.
“Take a look at me,” Pete said. “I’m dirty and old with hardly a tooth in my head. What else has a man like me got to be proud of other than helping somebody?”
Beam took another big swig. “I wouldn’t help nobody,” he said, coughing.
Pete took the bottle from Beam and corked it. “That’s no way to be,” he said.
Beam drew a long breath and let it out slowly. The image of the man he’d killed floated before him again, his mouth caught in the rictus of death, his eyes agape in the low burning lights of the ferry.
“Do you think you can change the way you are?” he asked.
Pete cleared his throat and then spat into the fire. “I’d say that’s pretty much got to be the one choice God gives a man,” he answered. “You looking to change yourself?”
“I don’t know. I think I’d rather change a few things I’ve done.”
“Now there’s a druthers I’ve not heard before.” Pete leaned his head back and yawned.
Beam looked across the fire at the old man. His eyes were closed. Light glinted off the wet hairs growing from his nostrils and his chest moved with each slow breath. After a time, he began to snore quietly.
Beam rested his back against the hard sack and folded his hands over his belly. He wished he hadn’t taken the liquor. He was not used to drink and now he felt it dragging him toward sleep. He fought to stay awake, but soon his eyes closed and he heard only silence.
In the hollow of the night, Pete woke to the sound of screaming. Beam was having a nightmare, a blurred watery vision where he was being pulled underwater by clawing white hands, dozens of them, pulling him on down.
Pete shook him. “Wake up. It’s not real. It’s a dream,” he said.
Beam shuddered awake, trembling.
“I’ll build the fire back. Don’t worry.” Pete turned to the smoldering kindling and began stoking it up with a hickory stick, startling brief flares from the embers while Beam continued to quiver like a child beset by the feral terrors of night.
Pete held a match to a crude tender of oak leaves and cedar straw. “I’ll build it back again,” h
e said. “Don’t worry. I’ll build it back again.”
XI
FRIDAY
The morning lay worn and frayed on the Gasping River. Sickly anemic light floated down from a sky of clouds, and everything was silent except for the slosh of the current against the shore and the sound of sucking mud and driftwood clashing in the shoals.
Clem had winched the ferry boat ashore and lifted it with a pair of engine hoists so that its rent and broken hull was exposed. He’d already spot-welded the gouges in the bottom and was finishing up by padding tar over the remaining hairline fractures. A small transistor at his side yawned out the early news of the world and then played some kind of country music. Clem worked and tried not to think.
When he was done, he washed the tar from his skin with gasoline from a red plastic jug, cleaned his hands and face in a bucket of suds, and then rinsed himself in the river. He was toweling off with a torn piece of yellow shirtsleeve when the cruiser came down the boat ramp and parked under the locust trees. Clem eyed the vehicle, feeling a pinch in his belly. He fetched the box of Arm ‘N Hammer from the spot in the grass where he’d stowed it and gave himself a healthy tablespoon, choking down the chalky white powder until the roil and splash of his stomach had ceased.
Elvis stepped out of the cruiser, short and thin in his khaki uniform. An empty leather holster on his hip shone brightly.
“Forgot your gun,” Clem called out, poking the spoon back in the box of baking soda as the sheriff approached.
“I don’t need it.”
“Glad you think so highly of me.” Clem sat the baking soda back in the grass and returned to the hull of the ferry boat. He began scraping a putty knife against a patching of J.B. Weld, peeling the gunk off the aluminum and then slinging it from the end of the blade onto the ground.
“Any news?” he asked the sheriff.
“Not really. None that concerns you, anyhow.”
“That’s my favorite kind.”
Elvis leaned against the ferry. He studied its hull, noting the fresh welds and the tar streaked over its keel. “Looks like you met with an accident,” he said.