by Lydia Peelle
That night they camp in the foothills of the mountains. One of the horses breaks free from where he is staked and ambles slowly up the road, dragging his line, head down to crop grass. Charles takes off running after him. So skinny he seems to just blow along. Comes back breathless.
You don’t have to work so hard, Billy says, poking at a poor greenwood fire.
I’m just glad to be out of there. He stakes the horse again, spits and jabs his thumb in the direction of Bristol. Never going back.
Well you don’t got to thank me.
The boy puts his hands on his knees to catch his breath. Billy is wondering how he is going to tell him that he is his father. How he will even begin.
Oh, Charles says, I knew I was gonna get out of there. It was just a matter of when.
You sound awfully sure of yourself.
Why shouldn’t I be? My father was a real big man.
Then, on the other side of the thick veil of smoke rising from the fire, Charles tells the story. Philadelphia. The husband with the big name going out to buy her a fur coat. The streetcar that took him from her. The family that cast her out, left her with nothing.
Listening, Billy thinks only of her. What a story. Maura. She should have been a horse trader.
It is made of scavenged pieces, the story, like a bird’s nest, scraps of string and hair and twigs. But one scrap of it he recognizes. It is a small offering she sends him, from beyond.
Charles pulls out that rabbit’s foot. His rabbit’s foot. The one he gave her that first night, all those years ago, when they feasted on slippery mushrooms and she told him she was bound to leave him, that she was going off to seek everything she wanted, that she was going to break his heart.
The hind foot of a hare killed on a full moon by a cross-eyed man, Charles says solemnly. She told me it belonged to him, he says, turning it over in his hand, then holds it up proudly for Billy to see.
My pa.
Heat
By Friday evening, the pasture at Dillehay’s was full of mules. Charles went to bed with the sun, exhausted. He needed four more, which he could easily pick up at the Saturday auction. But there was no Saturday auction. On Friday night, someone burned down Kuntz’s barn.
When Charles drove in first thing in the morning, the fire was already out. It had burned fast, with a thoroughness. There was hardly any timber left.
A few men working a third shift at the slaughterhouse had seen the flames and run down and gotten all the horses out. Thrown coats over their faces so they would not rush back into the burning barn. When the Kuntzes came down they had to hold Gus Kuntz in the car and cover him, same as the horses. He’d had a fit, screaming and hollering, his eyes rolled back in his head.
They were leaving that afternoon, Shorty said. His wife had a sister somewhere in another state.
Should have left even before that burning cross in the yard. Should have got out of here when they dumped that paint on his porch, someone said. He’s been here on borrowed time. Surprised he ain’t been killed.
Charles looked over at the office. There was Gus. Calm now. Just sitting limp as a scarecrow on the bench. They must have given him something to calm him.
Charles went to him.
Gus, buddy.
No response. Gus blinked. He reached up and swiped at a fly by his ear.
Charles reached into his pockets, wishing he had something to give him. But he didn’t have anything for Gus. All he had was the rabbit’s foot. He pulled it out.
Take this, Gus. This ain’t doing me no good no more. Maybe it’ll help you.
Gus reached out. It disappeared into his big hand.
Charles climbed up on the hood of the Ford and ran his hands through his hair. Next to him a little donkey stood tied up to the iron rail. Men said the dark cross on a donkey’s back was a mark of honor for bearing Mary to Bethlehem. Or did they say it was for carrying the cross up Golgotha Hill the day they crucified Jesus. Charles couldn’t remember suddenly, but what did it matter to the donkey. It was terrible, the things men did to other men. The donkey, he only bore witness.
Tell me, he said to the silent creature. Where the hell am I going to find me four more mules?
Luck
Charles drove straight out to Dillehay’s. Billy listened to the story quietly, just listening. He shook his head and harnessed Gin.
Come on. I ain’t riding in that old rattletrap Ford of yours no more. Come on.
They met the roader not three miles out, passing over the bridge that crossed Calf Kill Creek. Pale eyes, stringy white hair that came to his shoulders. He wore a necklace made of small bones. His spine was twisted up so that it seemed his body had been put together wrong. There was a decrepit goat in a crate in the back of his wagon and four mules tied to the tailgate.
Charles went to look them over. His heart was pounding in his mouth. The goat threw its weight against the side of the cage, rocking it. Its stink rose up.
The man said what Charles expected. That the mules weren’t for sale.
We’re buying em for the war, he said in a rush. But the man shifted his pale eyes over Charles’s face, as if to say, What war? And Charles knew he shouldn’t even waste his breath on his speech.
He flashed the checkbook. The man shook his head. The bones of his necklace clacked and clattered. Squirrel bones, maybe. Thin as fingers.
He made a sound with his lips and tilted his head towards their wagon.
I ain’t got no use for that piece of paper, he said. But I’ll trade em all for that little mare of yourn.
Charles went back over to the wagon and put his foot up on the running board.
Well I should have known, he said. He swung himself up. He won’t take money for em.
What does he want?
Charles swallowed. He couldn’t look at Billy, because he knew Billy knew what he was going to say.
He wants Gin, he said.
Oh.
Sonofabitch. It’s alright. Charles picked up the reins. We’ll find something else. It’s alright. Let’s get up to the feedlot on Greasy Creek before it gets too late.
Billy had not moved. He was studying the ground.
They good mules?
Yeah.
Billy pulled his hat down over his eyes.
Go on, he said. Go on up there and take her out of the traces.
Love
Before she was killed with a bolt to the skull and made into dog food, there was a story that Hatcher’s black mare knew, not in her brain but in the muscle and blood of her exquisite horse body: the story of a man. A story about love.
Love. That was what it was, even if the man never allowed himself to believe it. But that was what Leland Hatcher felt for the girl, the colored girl, the new maid, felt from the first time he saw her reaching up for something on a shelf in his summer kitchen, a love so powerful, so all-encompassing, so much deeper and hungrier than anything he had ever felt for his wife, that it frightened, shamed, repulsed him. That night he closed the door behind them in the summer kitchen and ran his hands up under the girl’s dress and moaned into her hair and had her because he thought this would settle it, this feeling that had taken hold of him, that this would cure it like a tonic. It did not. It never did. There were many nights like this, a year’s worth of nights, Hatcher moaning into the girl’s hair because there were no words for it, what he felt with her, except to say that he wanted her and he had to have her. The girl said nothing, terrified of this white man, her boss, terrified by the look that would come into his eyes when she entered the room. Said nothing, that is, until the cold winter night she said that she was having his baby, and that she was leaving, and that she wanted the money to get her to Chicago. That night she was in bare feet in the closed-up summer kitchen, had taken off her shoes for the walk home because she had a wound on her toe, a wound with blooms of yellow pus oozing from it, and Hatcher dropped to his knees and held her foot in his hands, and he loved her, he loved the pus, he loved the red gash of the w
ound, edged in black dirt, and he moaned and made clasps of his hands around her small wrists.
I cannot live without you, he said.
No.
His hands slowly tightened, holding her there.
If you leave me I am not going to give you any money. Do you hear me? Not a cent.
I’m going, she said again. Up north. I got a brother.
I forbid it. I forbid you.
He shook her. Then put his head against her legs. He was weeping. He would not let her leave. He would put that festering toe in his mouth and swallow it. She was his, she belonged to him. But she managed to break away, and she ran down the Everbright drive, ran fast despite her bare feet and her wounded toe and the cold winter ground, ran just as fast she could, ran all the way back to Freedman’s Hill. Leland Hatcher knelt in the summer kitchen weeping and then he got up and went out to the stable, where the young black horse stood peacefully in her stall. He took a pitchfork down off the wall and brought it down hard against her side. It made a sound like a heavy bag of flour falling from a shelf and the mare skidded to the other side of the stall and he did it again. Whump. Whump whump whump. He did it simply because she was there, and she could not run as the girl had run. And because she was beautiful. The Midnight Cool, named by his wife when she was born two summers before. His wife, who had once forsaken everything just to be with him.
Never in his life had he wanted something that he could not have and he hated the world for it, and now every night after his family had gone to bed, instead of going into the summer kitchen and moaning into the girl’s neck, he went out to the stable and beat the black mare. And every night the black mare tensed when she heard his footfall, knowing what was coming, balling herself up in the corner of her stall. Whump whump whump whump. This went on for months. One night the horse fought back. He walked into her stall and with a hoof she lashed out against him, this madman with the pitchfork. He beat her harder, after that. And after that she fought back more and more often, not just against the madman with the pitchfork but against the whole world, because now something had broken in her mind, she could trust nothing, not a sheet flapping in the wind, not a strange sound, not even the birds, anything might come after her with an inexplicable fury and she fought against it all. For her, every rule as she understood it had been violated, made null, smashed and burned. For her the world was now always and forever in flame.
Hatcher would hang the pitchfork on the wall. Take out his handkerchief. Wipe his face and then his fingertips, one by one. Straighten his coat, go back into the house, where his wife and his children were asleep in their beds.
Early that spring his wife found out about the girl. Then came the night soon after when she drove her car into the water. Because she refused to stay. Because she could not see, as he saw, what was best. Like the girl, she ran.
That night, he had beat the mare until she dropped to her knees.
Whump whump whump, the blows came down.
After that night he quit beating the horse. Just quit. Hung up the pitchfork. Walked back into the house. Never did it again. But he had ruined her. Her entire body was a tensed-up ball of nerve and fear, waiting for the next blow to come from the pitchfork handle, always waiting for the pitchfork handle. She might hold together for a day or a week but then she would explode. Then came the day the man took her down to Nashville and the other man came into the strange stall with a shovel in his hands to clean it, and with one terrible scream she reared up and struck him in the skull. Struck him dead.
In the morning they found her trembling in the corner of the stall. Waiting for the next blow. Wondering where it would come from.
After the war there was a word for men who left the battlefields like this. Shell-shocked.
When they carried the man’s body away Hatcher had lifted his hand and struck her hard, once, across the nose.
All of this, the mare held in her flesh. This she carried in her ruined beautiful body, impregnated in every muscle, corpuscle of blood, and marrow-fill of bone by the story of Leland Hatcher’s love that he could not say for the girl he could not have.
But that story had been ground up and tinned and eaten and shat out in coils by a dozen dogs. And no one was ever going to know it.
A Nice Little Story
Charles and Catherine stood in the dusk light at the Richfield freight yard, looking out at the pen full of mules. Everything was ready. In the morning he would go to Nashville to deliver them and meet Huntington. Then he would come back up and marry her. The thought of it filled him with a nervous anticipation that tipped over into dread. He had the feeling that it was all some strange dream.
Bud Morgan was over by the express office, giving his goats a drink of water from a pail. Charles remembered how when he had first seen the giant he suspected him to be a soothsayer or a proselytizer or even something violent, dangerous. But Bud Morgan had turned out to be nothing but another hustler trying to get by in the world.
Catherine looked over at the goats, which were bleating and pushing with their horns over the pail.
One for a nickel, three for a dime, she said, her voice a little ragged. When I was a girl I must have had a stack of fifty of his postcards. Coming to the depot to watch the trains was my favorite thing in the world. Just to sit here and wonder where all the people were going, and where they had been.
And now you’re up here staring at a bunch of old long-ears, Charles said. He studied the side of her face, trying to read her. He wanted to hear her say that everything would be alright.
She sighed.
Well I ought to get used to it, don’t you think? The sight of mules. Where we’re headed that’ll be the view. Miles and miles of mules.
She had been so stoic. Resigned. One foot in front of the other, in every decision they had made. As much as he wanted to hear her say she was happy, he knew what she must be thinking. Of all the things she had wanted in her life, she was getting Columbia and mules.
He leaned on the rail beside her.
Everything’s going to be alright, Cat. Everything’s going to be fine.
She looked beautiful, clean, out of place here beside the dusty pen. They had come from a dinner Leland Hatcher had hosted for them at Everbright, and she was still in her evening dress, cream-colored lace and taffeta. A substitute for the wedding dress I’ll never wear, she had wryly joked when she met him at the door of Everbright. It would be a simple civil ceremony. Hatcher had decided that. No need to have anyone calling you a slacker, he told Charles.
The guests at the dinner were the Tisdales and the Riches and the Walkers. When the meal was served, Hatcher had grown silent, gazing out the window. The other men talked of the second round of the draft. The Army had not raised the numbers they needed and so had called back all the men they rejected on account of small shortcomings, bad teeth or low weight. Charles, nervous, kept his eyes on the portraits around them: Hatcher’s false ancestors. From time to time he would steal a glance at Catherine, her neck so pale and vulnerable above the ruffles of her dress. He thought about the way she had questioned Maura’s story about his father, the night of the Bone Dry party, and how it had made him lash out at her. He had hung on to that story for so many years it had become as constant and necessary as a pebble held under the tongue to slack thirst. The day he came to buy the mare he had yearned to shout it into Edmund Hatcher’s disdainful face, to holler that he too came from a line as high-blooded as these faces on the dining room walls. He had wanted many times to say it to Hatcher too. But as it turned out Leland Hatcher had muscled into this house the way a cuckoo bird muscled into another bird’s nest to lay its egg. He could lay claim to nothing more than what he had made with his own two hands, and Richfield, for better or for worse, had been forced to accept him. His wife’s family, on the other hand, never had. Looking across the table at Catherine, Charles could see that because of this their children were of two worlds, of two worlds and at home in neither. And he saw that when she had questione
d his story she might have being trying to say that she understood what it felt like to not belong anywhere. She might have been trying to say that where either of them came from did not matter a hill of beans.
And Edmund. Edmund Hatcher was finally coming home, though you would never guess it from the melancholy way Leland Hatcher stared out at the lawn all evening. It was Catherine who answered Tisdale and Rich’s questions about him, Catherine who brightly declared what a relief it was to have the waiting over.
After dinner they walked with Cherry and John Rich out to the garden. John had gotten his commission and they were headed to Washington in a week. Cherry was expecting a baby. In the garden she was matronly and serious, going on about how glad she was that Catherine had finally cast aside her childish ideas about never getting married. Catherine only smiled her new stoic smile, the one that was not big enough to show the gap between her teeth. She had told Charles that she forgave Cherry for what she had done to Edmund. I’ve been rereading his letters from the past year, she said, and I’ve realized that if he’s forgiven her, in the midst of all the awfulness he’s been through, then I’ve simply got to as well.
After the guests’ departures, she had looked so tired that Charles was surprised when she asked to go with him to see the mules. When he went up to the house to tell Hatcher what they were doing he found him sitting on the front porch, staring into the dark magnolias. He had a piece of paper in his hands and he was tearing it into smaller and smaller pieces.
I’m going to send a newspaperman with you to Nashville tomorrow, he said flatly. He’ll work up a nice little story.
Sir. I don’t believe that’s necessary.
Nonsense, Hatcher said. His voice was still dead calm, but his fingers clawed and tore frantically at the paper. You have got to let people know what kind of a man you are, McLaughlin. They’ll try to drag you down. They’ll bury you. They will if you give them an inch.