The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  At the first farm they passed, they asked where they could buy two horses, and the farmer said, “I’ll sell you two horses and throw in a farm to pasture them on, too.” Ham said no, just the horses, and they barely had to lighten their Hoover envelopes for the two ribby roans.

  Now on the gallery Ham surveyed the three bodies, the clerk faceup and the looters facedown, and shook his head. “Goddamn it. They were looting for boots.” A lidless box beside the bigger body held nothing but cardboard boot lasts. Blood had soaked the bottom of the box and had climbed halfway up the sides.

  Ingersoll knelt and turned over the other figure. A woman. The baby’s mother. She wore trousers, dark hair pulled back behind a man’s hat. Her mouth hung open and she was missing a few teeth. Her stomach was open, too, where it had been shot. Beside her in the blood lay a paper sack, a rip revealing a box of puffed wheat.

  “Probably drunk,” said Ham, but without conviction. The flood had made regular folks desperate, and desperate folks downright reckless. Reckless, jobless, hopeless. You can’t be hired as a corn sheller when the corn’s been drowned.

  “We’ll send the police back when we get to Hobnob,” Ham said, patting the man’s pants, and then the woman’s. He stood. “No papers, no wallet. Don’t imagine they’re from around here. Gypsies, I guess.”

  Ingersoll heard the baby again, wailing. It was a terrible sound. He stood.

  As if to head off any crazy thoughts, Ham said, “Let’s go, Ing. We’ve delayed too long already.”

  “Ham.”

  “Let’s go. Now. They got telephones in Hobnob.”

  “Ham, we can’t leave it.”

  “Well, we sure as hell can’t take it. You heard Hoover. One week to find the still.”

  “But leave the baby?”

  “What? We should nursemaid the infant while the killer goes free?”

  “No, but . . .”

  “It’s not our problem, Ing.”

  “It’s an orphan now, Ham.”

  Ham’s gray eyes met his and relented. “Oh, for Christ sake. Fine. Fine. But I don’t like it.”

  Ingersoll turned and entered the store again, Ham behind him, and they crossed their bloody footprints back to the storeroom and stood above the baby. It wore a shred of diaper. It had stopped crying but made wavery, raspy breaths. The men leaned over it.

  “What do you think we should do with it?” Ham asked.

  “Do with it?” They watched the baby kick. “I think we should pick it up.”

  “Be my guest.”

  Ingersoll hesitated, then squatted to lay down the Colt he’d forgotten he was carrying and rubbed his hands on his thighs and crab walked closer, his knees cracking, and inserted his big hands stiffly beneath the baby. The cloth was wet. No wonder the little fella was unhappy. “Ham,” he said, “go get me a diddie. Got to be one here somewhere.”

  “Jesus, Ingersoll, go get one yourself,” Ham said, but he was already walking toward the door.

  Ingersoll lifted the baby to his shoulder, both of them so wet they couldn’t get much wetter, he figured.

  “Bingo,” called Ham.

  A blue box flew into the room and skidded to Ingersoll’s feet. He turned it over to read, in small cursive, Kotex.

  “It’ll absorb just the same,” Ham yelled.

  “Try again,” Ingersoll yelled back.

  And then, “Wait, here we go.” Ingersoll stuck his arm up in time to catch the package of diddies. He put the baby down and it started crying again. Ingersoll was unpinning the soggy cloth, with difficulty, pins so goddamn small, when Ham walked up, pulling on a taffy, grinning at the spectacle. The heavy slab of wet diddie fell open and the baby straightened his little legs as he screamed, an angry red acorn of a penis vibrating.

  “Least we know he’s a Junior now,” said Ham.

  Ingersoll yanked a cloth from the brown paper package and made several attempts to wind it through the baby’s legs and then he figured close enough and pinned it loosely. He picked the baby up with straight arms and held him out from his chest.

  “What now?” asked Ham. “You’re the orphan expert.”

  They decided the matter quickly, Ham agreeing to push on to Hobnob, find them lodgings, search for the moonshiners, while Ingersoll doubled back to Greenville. He’d drop the baby off in an orphanage; town of fifteen thousand, had to be one somewhere. But first he’d visit the police station, better to do it there than Hobnob if they wanted to stick to their story of being levee engineers.

  “I’ll say we’re just some fellas that needed chewing tobacco and had the bad luck to arrive after the shoot-out,” said Ingersoll.

  “Talk like that and they’ll know you’re a fed,” said Ham. “Most folks would call that good luck.”

  They picked out supplies, Ingersoll filling his saddlebag with two cans of Pet evaporated milk for the baby and a bag of fried pork skins and a Nehi soda and two cans of tuna for himself. Then they went outside past the dead couple and collected their guns and Ham flung his saddlebag over his horse and took the reins and hoisted himself up with a grunt.

  “Ditch it fast,” he said, jerking a thumb toward the baby on Ingersoll’s chest, “and get to Hobnob. I know you like that colored music, but don’t stay for no Greenville jamboree. Only thing them poor niggers are playing these days is shovels and picks.”

  He kicked the horse to a trot and it flung back two crescents of mud that Ingersoll turned to take on the shoulder, shielding the baby. He watched Ham ride away, patting Junior in time to the hooves, feeling like a discarded wife, husband gone off to fight Hoover’s war.

  Chapter 2

  Dixie Clay stepped onto the covered gallery of the Hobnob mill and shrugged off her slicker and untied the strings of her hat and held it dripping away from her body. She pounded the door, but rain guaranteed that neither her pounding nor any answer to it would be heard. So she put her shoulder to the swollen wood and shoved: it whooshed and she stumbled into the gloom, sending up a few puffs of flour. There were several groups of women seated around the roller mill. They looked up but none acknowledged her. They turned back to the work of their hands.

  Dixie Clay pushed the door closed against the roar of the rain, and scanning the room she saw, to her right, the unmistakable backside of Amity Tidwell oozing between the slats of a high-backed chair. She was sitting with three others before a pallet stacked high with sacks of cornmeal, covered with branches. Dixie Clay hung her coat and hat on a nail and stood wordlessly behind Amity, who looked up because the other women had stopped talking. “Dixie Clay,” said Amity. “Many hands make light work. Pull up a chair.” But there wasn’t a chair left so Dixie Clay hauled over an upturned grain bin. When she sat, her head was a foot lower than the others’. She felt like a child whose indulgent mother lets her sit with the grown-ups though she stifles their gossip.

  Amity instructed her to select branches of the same size from the pile of willow saplings and to weave them through the thicker switches already laid on the pallet. They were making fascine mattresses to buttress the riverbank, trying to siphon some of the rage out of the waves smashing into the levee where Hobnob hugged the river’s horseshoe bend. Dixie Clay watched the plump, ringed fingers of Amity and imitated them with her own smaller, work-nimble ones. The conversation that had ceased now picked up, the women talking about the flooding in Arkansas: five thousand people in Forest City without homes or food; six thousand refugees in Helena. The state newspapers had been told to downplay the flood but someone had fetched the New York Times from Memphis last week and it passed from hand to hand in the mill. When it came to Dixie Clay, she read, “Seven more die in flood along the Mississippi. . . . Additional levees broke today on both the Missouri and Illinois shores. . . . Somebody’s house passed through Memphis today en route to the Gulf of Mexico.” She was glad to pass the paper on.

  After a while
, the women moved to local news: the alligator that had swum into the Neills’ chicken coop, the oak that had crashed through David Gavin’s roof. Talk drifted to the mill itself. The farmers had no corn to be ground up for meal. Last summer had been the rainiest they’d ever seen. It rained all March, so farmers got only light plantings in the ground, and it rained all June so they got little harvested. The miller himself was a sandbagger now, though Dixie Clay preferred to remember him standing beside the millstones with his fists on his hips, his eyebrows and mustache battered with cornmeal.

  Talk meandered to their husbands, levering rain-heavy sandbags up the levees. Dixie Clay didn’t add to this conversation. Nor did they expect her to—they knew that when she rode home with a sack of cornmeal, warm and damp and laid over the pommel, she wasn’t frying corn pone or feeding chickens. “I prefer my corn in a jar,” Jesse liked to say. Many of these women hated her because they thought she was married to a bootlegger. But she wasn’t just married to one. She was one. She imagined telling them, just to enjoy their sputtering shock.

  “Last time I braided willow saplings,” said Lettie Ball, organist of Hobnob Baptist, “it was to beat that rascal son of mine, who’d gone and—”

  “Which one?” asked Dorothy Worth. “Eli or Arlis?”

  “Lord, Dorothy, you know my Eli is so sweet you get a toothache just looking at him. No, it’s Arlis, wild as a june bug on a string. And this day I’m talking about, you remember when the Washington County fair was just fixing to start, ’bout July first of last year—”

  Dixie Clay let their voices braid above her head as the switches braided through her fingers. She’d forgotten how women’s talk could harmonize women’s work. She remembered the pneumatic player piano owned by the mayor in Pine Grove, Alabama. At the Christmas party, it played a ragtime, the black and white keys depressing as if by ghostly fingers. Now Dorothy was telling a story on her son who worked for the bridge tender. Over the keening of wind and rain, the story and the lulling affirmative “uh-huhs” of the women were hole punches in the paper scrolling in the wooden piano, pulling the work along. Dixie Clay had never learned to play much piano herself, though her mother had begun teaching her before dying when Dixie Clay was ten. Her household after that was just her father and her brother, Lucius, and certain aspects of her education had fallen away, but she rarely felt their lack. The Irish neighbor, Bernadette Capes, had sent for Dixie Clay when it was time for canning or quilting, so Dixie Clay learned those skills firsthand. To learn the rest, she read a lot.

  A new woman came in with a gust and lifted off a rain bonnet and held it dripping at arm’s length to give Amity a quick kiss and move on down the table. People selected their seats carefully, because the bid to flood the town had divided them into Flooders versus Stickers. Dixie Clay hadn’t heard about the bid until after it had fallen through, but Jesse had been right in the center of things, as usual. He had friends and customers in New Orleans, and it was Jesse who brought the bankers’ proposal to the town meeting. Later she’d asked Jesse which way he’d been leaning when the offer was still on the table, and he’d lifted the bottle of Black Lightning he’d been drinking and said, “You think I wanted to dynamite my money-printing factory?” Dixie Clay would have sided with the Stickers, too, if anyone had asked her opinion. Not that she didn’t thrill to the idea of a fresh start, this whole rotten town underwater. But Jacob’s grave: that was what she couldn’t imagine losing.

  Again the door to the mill opened and conversations paused until it shut against the roaring rain. This time it was Bess Reedy, a Sticker, who would pay Dixie Clay no never mind. About two years back, Bess’s husband had been drunk and pissing into the river when he’d fallen in and drowned. He’d been drinking Black Lightning, sold to him by Jesse.

  “What’s the level?” another Sticker asked Bess.

  “Fifty-two feet.”

  “And the flood crest still upriver.” She shook her head. “How long till it reaches Hobnob?”

  “They say two weeks. Lord help us all.”

  Bess touched Amity’s shoulder as she passed.

  Well, if Hobnob snubbed Dixie Clay, Dixie Clay snubbed Hobnob. When she and Jesse were first married, she’d come to town every once in a while. Then she got tired of waiting for a baby to quicken in her and she took over the shining from Jesse, and after that she was too busy. She cooked the shine, and Jesse sold it, and it worked fine that way for a while. And then Jacob was born. Jacob and his necksweet. Jacob and his milkbreath. And then she didn’t shine as much, and still didn’t go to town. Why would she go to town? She had Jacob’s tiny fluted nostrils; she had the tender depressions on his temples where his pulse throbbed; she had his toes like ten shelled peas, each one delicious. But Jacob—Jacob didn’t last three months. She’d bundled his tiny body—he looked sunburned, the scarlet fever rash like sandpaper on his arms and legs, redder behind his knees, knees so tiny her thumb and forefinger could meet around them—and hitched up Chester and rode to Hobnob. When she got there, Jesse was gone, to Greenville, said the Chinese greengrocer, who was a customer. Greenville: thirty-five miles north. And not immediately afterward nor now could she recall how she got from Hobnob to Greenville. She must have ridden in someone’s car. The time after Jacob’s death was full of holes.

  What she recalled was knocking at the garish painted door of Madame LeLoup. A light-skinned Negress answered, wearing a blue flapper dress that stopped at her knees.

  Dixie Clay realized that she must speak. Seemed like days, maybe weeks, since she’d spoken to anyone but Jacob.

  “I’m here for Jesse Swan Holliver.”

  “Never heard of ’im,” the Negress said.

  “Jesse Swan Holliver. My husband. He has different-colored eyes.”

  “Ain’t nobody here like that. Ain’t never been.”

  “Please,” Dixie Clay asked, and then “Wait—” as the Negress started shutting the door. Dixie Clay held up the bundle, Jacob wrapped in the baptism gown she’d made from her wedding dress, though the child hadn’t been baptized.

  “Lord,” said the woman. “Lord.” She blessed herself and said that she’d bring the husband down. And she had.

  Now Dixie Clay flinched to feel a hand on her shoulder, Amity’s warm palm pulling her back to present. Amity angled her shoulders to address Dixie Clay privately as the women’s conversation shifted down the table.

  “Jesse know you’re here?” she asked in a low voice.

  “I reckon he’ll guess. Can’t work Sugar Hill when there’s no sugar. Can’t even check the traplines.”

  “Traps washed away?”

  “Traps and animals both. Beaver dams sunk. Minks drowned. Rabbit burrows collapsed. So I figured, might as well do something useful.”

  They wove in silence for a few minutes. “Any word?” asked Amity, barely above a whisper.

  “Word? About what, the flood crest?”

  Amity’s fingers stilled. “No, about the Prohibition agents.”

  The two that had come to her house? How could anyone know about that? “Amity, what are you talking about?”

  “Surely you know, Dixie Clay. Two Prohibition agents were undercover in town, and they’ve gone missing. About two weeks ago. It’s being investigated.”

  Amity was studying her, Dixie Clay struggling to control her face.

  “Never reported back to the agency,” Amity continued. “Last place they were seen was here.”

  Mercifully, Amity’s attention was called away, and Dixie Clay bent to the floor, gathering discarded branches and trying to breathe. The day after Jesse had marched the revenuers away from their property, she’d waited for him on the dock of the Gawiwatchee. He puttered up in his boat around noon and threw Dixie Clay the rope and she caught it and tied a bowline knot and cinched it around the post. While he climbed onto the dock she watched to see if he had been drinking—he had—and if the boat
had been christened a new name. This past year it had been the Teresa, then the Cheri, and now it had been the Jeannette for four months, and still was. She knew without anyone telling her that these were the names of women he’d run with.

  He lurched past her onto the uneven dock. “Jesse,” she started, her voice thin. She called again, louder. He stopped but didn’t turn.

  “What?” he said, spitting the t.

  “Last night, after you left with the two men, the revenuers . . .”

  “What, Dixie Clay, what?” He turned then, his blue eye and green eye both squeezed with anger. She said nothing and he began walking toward the house. But this was her chance. If she didn’t ask now—

  “Jesse!”

  He whirled. “Jesus H. Christ on a Popsicle stick, here you are harassing me before I’ve even had my breakfast.”

  “But, Jesse—”

  He took two rapid steps toward her and raised his hand and she stepped toward the edge of the dock. She was lifting her arms toward her face when he slipped on some fish scales and skidded and dropped to a knee. He pushed to his feet and began scraping his two-toned calfskin boot against the dock piling. And just like that, the anger was directed at the dock, which he cursed, and his workers who’d cleaned fish there between whiskey deliveries. Finally he kicked the boot off and said, “I’ll take dinner in town tonight. Have this cleaned up by the time I get home,” and teeter-tottered up the path to the house in one sock foot and one heeled boot, heeled to make him appear taller. He moved into the trees, hissing “ . . . sicka this small town.”

  Jesse hadn’t come back after dinner, and Dixie Clay couldn’t stop thinking about the agents. What if Jesse’s bribe wasn’t big enough? What if they came back when she was in the still, alone? She’d taken her Winchester with her everywhere.