by Lydia Peelle
Shorty showed up to help load the boxcar. The mules loaded beautifully. Not a kick. Ears disappearing into the dark. Shorty and Billy did it while the newspaperman shot questions at Charles. At one point he lowered his pad to watch Shorty take two mules past.
Would you look at that, he said, his little mouth twisting into a grin. Two by two. There they go. And the Lord said, ‘Noah, I kinda believe it’s gonna rain.’
When they were loaded Charles gave Shorty a dollar. He was not much older than he himself had been when Billy showed up at Harkleroad’s. He would always remember what Billy had said to him that day: Come with me, kid, and you’ll see the world.
He looked around. Billy was standing with one hand against the boxcar door, breathing hard, holding his side. He saw why last night Billy had said what he’d said about his mother having to go it on her own. He said it because he knew it would make him mad and knew it would drive him to make a choice, one way or the other. Charles shook his head. Billy Monday, Jesus, he did know how to work a fellow.
They walked with the newspaperman up to the interurban turnaround. The conductor recognized them and refused to take their fare.
You’re on official war business, fellas, aren’t you? Then we ain’t gonna charge you. Keep up the good work.
The newspaperman’s pencil got busy, taking all this down.
They sat up front, in the smoking section. The car rang its bell and rattled south out to the Pike. They passed the gates of Everbright, the turn to Dillehay’s. The green tobacco fields stretched out, broken up by the war crops, the wheat and corn and hemp. Someone was plowing a field for a winter crop behind two mules and a walking plow. The earth rose up behind them, soft, dark, rich-looking as cake batter.
At Arbuthnot some boys in uniform got on. They were home on leave, rowdy. Joking around. A row back an old woman knitted furiously, her needles clacking. Charles heard her scold the young girl next to her for not doing the same.
When all the soldiers freeze to death this winter and you die an old maid, it will serve you right.
They passed a Ford stuck in a ditch beside the road.
Git a hoss! one of the enlisted men shouted out the window, and they all laughed.
Hey, Billy said, hooking his finger at the newspaperman. You hear the one about the farmer and the banker and the car in the ditch?
A cloud that looked like a skull broke apart. The woman’s needles clacked. They stopped at Amqui, where a pretty girl got on, dressed for a day in the city, carrying an alligator purse, looking like she didn’t have a care in the world. They passed the vast military cemetery south of Madison. Charles watched the tessellating rows of identical stones change and flash as if it was they that were moving, all over the gentle hills.
The man on the opposite bench crossed himself with the thumb of the hand that held his cigarette.
Makes you think, doesn’t it, the newspaperman said, craning his neck. I’ve got an uncle out there. Died in the Battle of Nashville. A bugler, a kid in short pants. Fifteen years old.
He shook his head and flipped forward a few pages in his notebook and licked his pencil.
Now where are you from, Mister McLaughlin? Tell me a little bit about your family. A little human interest.
I’m gonna close my eyes a minute here, Charles said.
Nearly there. They passed slowly into the Edgefield neighborhood on the east bank of the river, which had been ravaged by fire the previous spring. It was still a wasteland. Stacked brick, roving dogs that were nothing but rib cage and legs, lonesome chimneys like sentinels. Men with defeated-looking shoulders pushed wheelbarrows of rubble. There was a rustle in the car as people turned to gape.
I covered it, the newspaperman said, knocking the window with his pencil. Want to know how it started? Colored boy playing set a ball of yarn on fire by accident. Got scared his mama would switch him so he tossed it out the window. Wind was whipping through that day. Fifty miles an hour. Picked up the flames and spread them like a river. Five hundred houses burned. Four churches. The entire goddamn neighborhood went. He snorted. Imagine the beating the kid’s mama gave him then.
Charles watched it go by. The devastation was complete. Even the trees were charred skeletons. The standing chimneys looked forsaken. Not only forsaken, but damned. Atop one, a buzzard ruminated, flew off. As if there would never again grow even a scrap of grass on this place. It looked like the pictures in the paper of the ravaged villages in France. A hellish malevolence to it, and this had been only an innocent accident. A spark, a scared child, a tossed ball of yarn.
A dog wove through the charred remains of a house, sharp-nosed as a wolf.
Into Charles’s mind floated Bonnyman’s voice.
The greatest tragedy of war is the realization that what lies at its center is the human heart.
The bridge was before them, the great wide brown Cumberland below.
River’s awful high for this time of year, the newspaperman said, to nobody.
* * *
In America, you write your own story. You pick one and it’s yours.
Lola Montez was born Marie Dolores Gilbert, in County Limerick, Ireland. She invented herself when she came to America. Just like that. New name, new story, new life. They named a gold mine after her. And a mountain. All she had to do was show the miners a little leg, and it rained in.
It’s easy, in America. You make up a name, you pluck a story out of the air, out of nothing you create the image of what you want your life to be. Then you fight for it, tooth and claw.
* * *
They got off at the end of the line and walked down Second Avenue to the transfer station. The newspaperman headed to his office, arranging to meet them later at the Roan and Huntington yards. The coolness of the morning had been a trick. Heat came up off the paved streets in waves. Second Avenue stank of rendering fat, the smell coming from a soap-making business down the block. An undertaker, a harness maker. Traffic headed to the city market. Next to an Army recruiting poster of the Statue of Liberty was a sign for the state fair, advertising an airplane flown by a lady aviator, promising a display of fireworks to mimic the shell fire of the Western Front.
They went into the barbershop across the street. Charles needed a shave. There was a notice on the wall.
buy a liberty bond
soldiers win battles—wealth wins wars
It was the old-fashioned kind of place where every customer kept his own shaving mug. Each was labeled with the man’s name. Trabue. Wooster. Kirkpatrick. Martin. Galliano. Szyjek. Balajian. Morris. Saint Cyr.
Yes, the barber said, seeing Charles looking. We got men here from every rat hole and woodpile in the world. Where’d you get that shiner?
The poster above all those men’s names made Charles remember one of Hatcher’s Money Matters columns, something about the value of a man’s life. Billy had told him that Ernestine refused to take money for her mule. He had not believed him at first, but when Billy recounted the conversation he had come to understand what was behind the gesture and he saw it for what it was, bighearted and true. He leaned back in the chair and let the man wrap the hot towel around his face, hoping it would get rid of the thought of poor doomed Rattler quick.
Back out on the street Charles looked down and saw a pamphlet in the gutter. He bent down and picked it up.
a soldier with the clap is a traitor
Looking at it, he remembered what Catherine had said last night about John Rich. How she could not look him in the eye. What will he say to his grandchildren, she said, when they ask what he did for the Great War?
Up the street their car was coming towards them, the Number Three car, out to Jo Johnston. Billy was looking at him. Standing in the crooked way he sometimes stood now, since the mare attacked him, shorter on one side than the other. Like half of him had collapsed. They stepped back from the track.
Here she comes, Billy said.
* * *
Maura. My dear Maura. I thought you knew a trick.
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Well no trick’s 100 percent foolproof, Bill Monday. You ought to know that as well as anyone.
* * *
The streetcar headed northwest on Fourth. They passed below the Capitol, and the fine houses in its shadow. Billy and Charles had to stand, hanging by straps in the front. Someone in the back was coughing, coughing, coughing.
Goddamn, said Charles finally, would he quit!
They turned onto Jo Johnston. Under the tracks and into a shantytown. Tin roofs, houses that looked as if they would collapse in a stiff wind. The smells shifted, grew stronger, ranker. The air grew even heavier.
Then, there they were. The Roan and Huntington mule yards. A line of great mule sheds nearly one block long that backed up to a wide swath of track. Bonnyman had once told them that here two stablehands could load seven hundred mules onto a line of waiting boxcars in thirty minutes. The figure had not impressed Charles because he could not imagine it. But when he stepped down off the streetcar and looked up the street and saw the size of the sheds, he could. There were more mules in there than he could even get fixed in his imagination.
And you could hear them. Christ you could hear those mules. Braying, hee-hawing, snorting. Smell them too.
A colored woman who had got off the streetcar with them hurried into a church on the corner. For a minute the big door swung open, revealing the darkness inside. Charles wanted to follow her. Just dart in there and hide himself away.
He turned. Directly in front of them was a park, where a few boys were playing stickball. Next to it the Union Stockyards, cows crowded into a pen so tight that chins rested on rumps. A lady’s fancy hat dropped in the middle of the street turned out to be a dead rooster. A car passed, and its feathers lifted. A cow lowed.
* * *
Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do
I’m half crazy all for the love of you
* * *
I can’t do it, Charles said to Billy. I can’t send those mules over there.
He turned in the direction they had come. The Capitol, flag flying above the cupola, was a ship on the crest of a wave.
You saw that place back there, he said. One spark in one goddamn ball of yarn. One spark, and the whole thing gone.
He looked back at the mule barns.
There’s got to be a thousand mules in there. When they unload that boxcar, who knows how quick it will spread. And after that—there’s a nursery rhyme—my mother, she used to sing it to me. I can’t—I’ve been trying to remember it all morning. ‘For want of a nail,’ it goes. ‘For want of a nail, a shoe was lost. For want of a shoe—for want of a shoe—’
Billy sucked his tooth. Ain’t the time for nursery rhymes, don’t you think, Charlie boy?
Charles dropped his head and raked at the back of his neck. Again a cow in the stockyards lowed. Shit. I need a smoke. I need a drink. I need something.
Let’s sit a while, Billy said.
They crossed into the park. There was a hot black shade under a stand of magnolias, big as a cave. They sat down on a bench at the edge of it. Charles took a nickel out of his pocket. He flipped it, smacked it down on his knee. He did this half a dozen times and then he sighed and put it back in his pocket. His hands were trembling. He grabbed his forelock and shook it and blew out a breath. His mother’s voice was there, distant, singing out from the darkest corner of his mind.
‘For want of a shoe,’ he said again. ‘For want of a shoe, a horse was lost. For want of a horse. For want of a horse. For want of a horse, a king was lost—’
He gave up.
Ah, shit. You know what it is, Billy? You want to know what happened? I gave my old rabbit’s foot to Gus Kuntz. Lost all my last damn luck and then some. Serves me goddamn right.
Don’t be foolish. That old rabbit’s foot was a mail-order fake, Billy said quietly.
Charles swung his head to look at him. How do you know?
Billy waved his hand and coughed. Could tell just by looking at it.
Well my father was probably nothing but a mail-order fake himself, Charles said. She probably made the whole damn story up. She was so good at it, telling stories.
In a rush the whole rhyme came back to him then, and it came out of him with a force of its own in the singsong rhythm she always recited it in. He spoke it not to Billy but up into the leaves of the trees.
‘For want of a nail, a shoe was lost. For want of a shoe, a horse was lost. For want of a horse, a king was lost. For want of a king, a battle was lost. For want of a battle, a kingdom was lost. And all for the want of a nail.’
He rubbed his face.
Ah, dammit, Billy. I can hear her voice plain as if she’s right here singing it to me. It’s terrible. It makes me want to lie down right here and cry into the damn dirt. Makes me want to cry like a damn baby. And I’m going to be a damn father myself.
Billy had taken off his hat. He was turning it slowly in his lap, staring hard at it.
I got to tell you, Charlie boy. I was in your shoes once. With a girl.
Charles’s head swung towards the tracks. A switch engine and two boxcars screeched along the siding. Not theirs.
Yeah?
A real high-class girl, Billy said. A hell of a girl.
Charles looked down at his knuckle. He had chewed it up so bad it was bleeding.
She probably did. She probably did make that whole story up. I’m probably nothing but a low-down mongrel after all.
Well if you are, Billy said, his voice far away. If you are, there ain’t nothing the hell wrong with that. He was looking towards the mule sheds. He rubbed at his cheek and Charles could hear the rough skin of his palm against the stubble of beard.
What do they say about an old mule, Charlie boy? ‘No hope of progeny, no pride of posterity.’ A mule’s got nothing but his own life to prove himself by. A man’s not much better off than a mule, in the end. A man’s got his lifetime. No more and no less.
Charles picked at his bleeding knuckle. A woodpecker hammered three times in the branches above them.
You think that’s true?
Billy shrugged. I reckon that’s the beauty and the shame of it, all at once.
Charles wiped his hand on his pants, leaving a tiny smear of blood.
Kuntz once said to me that in America it don’t matter where a man comes from. But look what happened to poor Kuntz. Run out of town for no reason but for the fact of where he came from.
Don’t change the fact that he made of himself the man he wanted to be, does it? Billy raised his finger, tracing letters in the air. Painted it right there on the side of his barn. Kuntz and Son.
He told me that he believed that after this war would come a time of peace and prosperity and brotherhood the likes of which the world ain’t never seen. Peace. All over the whole damn place, peace. That’s worth anything, ain’t it, Billy? That’s worth everything a man’s got.
Charles shook his head.
I don’t know what to do. I don’t think I can go through with it.
Billy was looking hard at him. What do you want, Charles?
It don’t matter anymore what I want.
Maybe. But a man wants something even if it don’t matter.
I want to be a good man. And Catherine. I want to deserve her. I want to be worthy of her.
The switch engine behind them squealed and jangled and screeched and hissed, slowing at the Marathon car works. On the other side of the tracks a massive foundry belched smoke. Under another magnolia close by two little girls held and rocked handkerchief dolls.
Then it’s simple, Billy said. You’re taking care of her. You’re worthy of her.
I don’t know. Not if I do this. I don’t know.
* * *
William, William, I’ll give you my answer true
I’d be crazy to marry the likes of you
* * *
Charles watched the little girls with their dolls. At the Crimson Shawl, in those last dark days, she would put him in the closet when the men came
in. Tell him to put his hands over his ears. After it was over she would pick him up and he would press his face into her neck. Clinging to her would be the smell of the man who had fucked her. He would hold his breath against it. He had once said to another boy, in a moment of hating what had become of her, She ain’t nothing, my ma. Sometimes still at night he would think about saying that. All his life he had regretted it, saying this that one time, in a hot moment of shame.
* * *
Billy could hear her now. He could hear her now plain as if she was right there singing to him. It was terrible and it made him want to lie down and cry into the damn dirt.
* * *
Charles turned back to Billy. He saw that his eyes were half closed, his face contorted, creased by dozens of lines. It must be the pain.
Well what did you do, Billy? Tell me what you did when you were in my shoes.
Billy let out a long breath. I’ll tell you sometime. Let’s just sit here a minute, Charlie boy.
They sat. The woodpecker hammered again and then he pumped off across the air to another tree. The girls were laughing. The streetcar went by.
Charles stood up. Billy rose beside him.
I can’t do it, Billy. I’m going in there to tell him the truth. He can’t send those mules. If those mules went I’d have to go too.
Billy put his hand on Charles’s shoulder. You can tell him it was me, he said. That I’m the one who covered it up.
No. I’m gonna tell him the truth. It’s gonna be alright. Charles knocked the dust off his hat and set it back on his head. Bonnyman and I will work something out. We’ll work it out together. He’s a sensible man. And the damn newspaper fellow, he can print whatever story he wants. I don’t care what he prints because I’m doing the right thing and I’ll tell Leland Hatcher that to his face. What you said, Billy, it’s true. A man’s got his lifetime to prove himself. No more. No less.
Charlie boy, Billy said, and Charles felt his hand tighten on his shoulder, then fall away.
Yeah.
You are a good man, Charlie boy. You’re a better man than me.