The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  But that was crazy. Wasn’t it? Ham would be waiting, and a moonshiner desperate enough to have killed two agents already.

  First thing tomorrow he’d find Junior a new home, a fit home, with good parents. It shouldn’t be difficult. Despite what that receptionist had wondered, there was nothing wrong with this baby. Ingersoll had seen about every inch and Junior was a pretty little fella, no bad parts.

  Which hadn’t been the case with Ingersoll, in St. Mary’s Foundling Home for Boys. Which is probably why he’d never been adopted. He’d gained this insight one day when he was six. One of his earliest memories. He was standing beside Sister Mary Eunice at the third-floor window and pressing his forehead against the chilled glass to see two orphans, brothers, go home with new parents. Sister Mary Eunice was stroking his hair, and together they watched the woman climb into the carriage and then reach her arms out, and the man passed her the blanketed bundle that was their new baby. Her arms withdrew the bundle back into the darkness of the cab. Then the man turned and lifted the other boy, three years old, his skinny legs dangling out of his short pants, and placed him in the carriage, and then the man climbed in himself. Sister Mary Eunice sighed. “Two more of God’s children have a home tonight.”

  Ingersoll knew the sisters had decided to keep the siblings together. He’d heard them speak of it. Most people wanted only one child and they wanted it to be a little bitty baby. The sisters knew there would be takers for the baby but the three-year-old would be harder, so they’d bundled them as a package, hoping someone would want the infant enough to take the brother, too. They’d been right.

  Ingersoll fogged the glass with his breath so he couldn’t see the carriage drive away. “Sister?” He leaned against her leg. “What was I like as a baby?” He’d never seen a photo.

  “Ah, you were lovely. A lovely lad. And you still are.”

  “I mean, what did I look like?”

  “You were my handsome Teddy. My handsome dimpled Teddy. Would you care for bread and butter?”

  In the kitchen, at the butcher’s block where she sliced his bread, he kept on. Something made him keep on. “But what did I look like?” There must have been a reason his parents didn’t want him.

  Sister did her considering sound, the whispery insuck of breath that she did when presenting the record books to the monsignor. She must have decided something, because she sat down beside him on a wooden stool.

  “You were a special boy. You looked special, too. You had a strawberry mark, Teddy, my love.”

  “A what?”

  “A strawberry mark. A mass of tissue, blood vessels really, that bunched up under your skin, on your cheek. Up by your eye.”

  As she said this, Ingersoll’s fingers floated up to stroke his cheek, and even as they did he knew what she said was true, that his fingers had spent a lot of time on that place, and while his skin was now smooth there, his fingers remembered when it was bumpy and begged to be caressed. He did it to fall asleep. He remembered it like he had never forgotten. He’d suck his right thumb while rubbing his pointer finger over the lumpybumpy.

  “Is that why they left me here? My parents?”

  “No, no. No. Well . . . I don’t really know, Teddy.” She buttered a slice of bread for herself, too, and told him that the mark, a hemangioma was the fancy word, grew on his cheek until it squinched his eye a bit. The sisters were worried it would compromise his sight but the doctor said it wasn’t hurting him, just a cosmetic imperfection, and nothing to be done about it. It stopped growing when he was around ten months old and merely stayed the same size and color for a few years.

  “Like a strawberry?”

  “More like grape jelly,” she told him.

  He lowered his bread. He wondered what ugly thing he’d done to deserve an ugly mark. “Why don’t I have it now?”

  “We prayed over it. We prayed that the Lord would see fit to take it from you, and he did. It started fading when you were about four, and by the time you turned five, there was no sign of it.”

  “But why did he give it to me in the first place?”

  “Ah, Teddy. I always thought he kissed you there. He left the imprint of his kiss on your cheek as a sign that he would let me keep you for a while.”

  And she did keep him. He lived at the orphanage until he was sixteen and six foot three and enlisted, shipped off to fight the Krauts.

  Now, in the barn, the fire was nothing but coals. He watched the baby sleep, Junior’s breathing easy in a way he felt his could never be, or never had been. My God, thought Ingersoll, this month I’ve seen six dead bodies, including the ones at the crossroads store. Your mother and father.

  This was no life for a baby. All the short-lived jobs, all the short-term rentals. Everything about him was temporary. He couldn’t even parent a guitar.

  The baby deserved someplace stable. Yes, he’d find some family for Junior tomorrow.

  Ingersoll bunched some hay under his jacket for a pillow and lay down on his side, sliding the hatful of baby to his chest and curling around it, to keep him safe and warm.

  Chapter 4

  Dixie Clay woke past noon, and even waking she noted that the world sounded different from when she’d retired at dawn. As she swung her feet off the bed and into rubber boots, she looked out her window. The rain lashing Hobnob had slowed, now just fat drops plopping from greasy-looking leaves. By the time she was drinking instant coffee in her kitchen, the sun was coming out. This had happened a few times since the big rains had started in November, but Dixie Clay no longer ran to the door. She didn’t look for a rainbow. No, she no longer hoped, merely waited for the rain, and when it came, falling harder than ever, as if it’d shored up its strength in the interval, she took a bitter comfort in being right.

  Meanwhile, she’d roam a bit. If she didn’t go out during breaks in the storms, she rarely saw light at all, as otherwise she was sleeping. Or it was dusk and she was doing chores, getting ready to work the still. Or it was dawn and she was warming up after working the still, rocking before the fire, wrapped in the Circle of Hearts afghan that the Pine Grove Knitting Society had made for her wedding gift. So tired that, without Jesse to cook for, breakfast and dinner were indistinguishable, Cream of Wheat, a whip of beef jerky. She’d grown as stringy and tough as late-season game, had lost the soft swell in her chest and tummy where she’d used to pillow Jacob. She made another cup of Red E—she preferred brewed coffee, but brew a pot just for herself?—then emptied the five pans trembling with last night’s roof leaks.

  There was another reason why she didn’t shine when the sun did—Prohibition agents in low-flying aircraft. She’d become attuned to their hornet’s buzz. Her still was camouflaged, and so was Dixie Clay—she wore brown among the trees plastered with leaves. Now she yanked on a pair of Jesse’s old trousers. Once she’d been in the garden pinching worms from the corn tasseling out, and a navy seaplane had swept so low that she ducked, the corn blown into italics all around her. When she raised her head she saw the plane’s shadow, like a cross, belly over her house, and she got the heebie-jeebies. She described all this to Jesse the next day in the drive where he’d squatted beside the Model T to patch a tire, his peach silk necktie flipped over his shoulder.

  “The plane barnstormed the house like Lindbergh,” she said.

  He removed his boater and hung it on his kneecap and wiped his forehead with his peach pocket handkerchief and then turned back to the lace-on grommets. “Them boys were just having some fun with you. Don’t worry, Dixie Clay. They’re on the payroll.”

  Perhaps. But they couldn’t all be, could they?

  So she’d avoid the still today and instead scout the Gawiwatchee. The stream was usually about twenty feet wide, bordered by slick mossy shelving rocks that trapped pools of whirling minnows. It was fast but shallower than it looked due to a ridge of midstream sandbars that beached boats. That’s why the I
ndians called it Gawiwatchee, meaning “Place Where the World Tilts.” Or so Jesse’d said. He’d also said that a hundred years ago the river pirates of Crow’s Nest, an islet north of Natchez, would paint false markers on the rock banks of the Mississippi to indicate that the Gawiwatchee was a passable channel. When the boats beached, the pirates would slaughter the crew, slicing open their chests and filling them with rocks and sewing them shut so the bodies would sink. And then the pirates would steal the boats and cargo and disappear.

  That seemed like an awful lot of trouble to go to get rid of bodies, though. What would she do if she had two bodies to get rid of? If she were Jesse, that is? Assuming there were two bodies. Every afternoon as she fetched her Winchester—she never left without it now—she vowed to go to the police, but every evening found her trimming Chester’s hooves or bringing him a new salt block, then heading to the still. To do nothing meant—well, it meant letting Jesse get away with murder. But to go to the police meant prison, where he’d be murdered. Sure as eggs are eggs, as Jesse would say. Sure as God made little green apples.

  Would Jesse have dumped the bodies on their land? Two days prior she’d spotted a trio of wheeling buzzards and hurried to their shadows gyroscoping the ground but found only an Appaloosa horse wedged between shoals in the Gawiwatchee. A few days dead. Probably slipped off the levee where it was being worked in Greenville. She hoped it had broken its neck in the fall, that it hadn’t merely hurt itself, hadn’t tried to clamor and hoof helplessly up the sliding walls of mud before being swept away.

  Dixie Clay poured the last of her coffee down the sink and tucked a stale biscuit in the pocket of the trousers. Then she slung the rawhide strap of her Winchester across her back and exited by the kitchen door, avoiding the still as she headed toward the Gawiwatchee. The walk was shorter than it used to be, because the moiling and nonsensical stream had leaped its banks and kept spreading, spreading, now maybe sixty feet across. It was blood-red due to swirled clay, full of downed trees, snags that river folk gave names to, planters and sleepers and sawyers and the trees, called preachers, that submerge and then spring back up. Two pecan trees, yoked, pierced the water—where Dixie Clay used to hang laundry after washing it in the stream. She hadn’t used that line in years, not since Jesse had bought her the Thor Electric Washer, first one Hobnob had seen. Now she dried her laundry near the house, but she hated to see the line hyphenated above the water, something rudely interrupted.

  In addition to searching for the revenuers, Dixie Clay liked to check the stream because, though the traps were drowned, storms sometimes brought surprises. Two weeks ago, that mandolin. Before that, a Flying Arrow Jr. Wagon, the wood warped but all four red enamel wheels working. Dixie Clay cleaned it and used it to transport jars from still to storage shack. Before that, she found a frilly white waterbird in her last remaining badger trap. The bird looked sewn of snowflakes, or what she had seen of snowflakes in National Geographic. Dixie Clay would have freed it, let it fly back to—what place was exotic enough—Timbuktu, Constantinople? But it had snapped its neck on the spring-loaded door. So all she could do was fold its wings and lift it out and carry it home, where she identified it in her field guide: a great snowy egret. Like Dixie Clay, it didn’t belong in these parts.

  As she walked the muddy banks, high-stepping to pull her boots free and scanning the water for the sinuous ribboning that decried a snake, she remembered leaving her wedding. Held in the backyard of her father’s house, with all of Pine Grove picnicking on tea sandwiches. She and Jesse had sat for the photographer, and then Jesse had loaded her trousseau in the bed of his wagon—the same light and speedy wagon that had bounced away singing in its traces three years earlier when she’d sold him her bundle of skins.

  Without a mother to advise her, Dixie Clay had duplicated the trousseau recommended in Ladies’ Home Journal: six pairs of sheets, two dozen pillowcases, three dozen tablecloths, three dozen napkins, all finished with neat hemstitching. For dress—she had this memorized—“personal linens embroidered with the bride’s maiden initials, one smart dress of serge, one afternoon frock of georgette crepe, one dark suit with several gay colored blouses.” She’d packed some books—Meredith, Swinburne, and Hardy—her mother’s Bible with the family tree inscribed on the flyleaf, the medal she’d won for the county’s best Spencerian penmanship, the clover pin from the 4-H club. She’d packed her bell-end, hickory-handled hammer. It was small, child-size, really, but with a good head-to-handle ratio, perfect balance, practically swung itself. She wouldn’t have traded it for Thor’s. So practiced was she that she didn’t even have to look as she balanced a pecan on its flat end and swung, crack. Pick out the good sweet meat, the nestled halves like tree brains, she’d always thought.

  She’d packed those items, and the gift from her papa of a pearl bracelet, but her wrist was so small that she’d had to make a fist to keep it from sliding off, which made her appear angry in their wedding portrait. Dixie Clay had packed as well the books her father had given her, Husband and Wife, The Physical Life of Woman, and Getting Ready to Be a Mother. They would stay the night in the Thomas Jefferson Hotel in Birmingham.

  The leave-taking went too fast, the wedding guests throwing rice and hooting, her brother shooting his pistol in the air, her father looking stricken despite his smile, spilling punch down his shirt. She twisted on the bench for a last glimpse of his red kerchief as Jesse pulled the wagon onto the road. He held the reins loosely and sat relaxed while he chatted about Hobnob, Mississippi, population 3,244, where he’d built his house—“Our house,” he corrected himself—which sat seven miles off from the town square, in corn country, not cotton country, this rocky, hilly pocket of the river. One hundred acres of wooded hills bordered by a stream. Three bedrooms, the house had. One a nursery. He reached across the wagon seat to give her hand a squeeze.

  The town’s full name was Hobnob Landing, nestled where the Mississippi doubled back like a black racer fixing to bite its tail. The Chickasaws had camped there because it was a good launch for canoes, Jesse said, the high sediment load causing a braided river where several smaller channels joined the main one. The Indians were long run off, but the slow and churlish meander bend still had enough sandbars to beach unwary craft. The town grew up around the docks where the men did their repairing and trading. There was always such a ruckus of quarter boats and showboats and puffing, hooting, grinding steamboats with rattling paddle wheels—the old wild river filled with black thumbs, gamblers, hustlers, and medicine men, Jesse said, with what struck Dixie Clay as a nostalgic sigh—that it became a place to hobnob.

  “Of course,” he said, “the river has been mostly straightened out.” He jigged the reins to steer around a dome-backed turtle. “Corseted, you could say. All those government levees, river can’t change its course anymore. Neither can the rivermen. They’ve straightened out, too.” As he talked she listened, but she was also admiring his red lips beneath his upturned glossy black mustache. It was like a bow, his face her wedding present. He wore a dove-gray cloverleaf lapel jacket with a gray-and-black checkerboard tie. His black curls were tucked under a snap-brim hat, gray with a black band. Even the black ears of the bay mules, Chester and Smokey, seemed part of his getup. So pretty he was, she gazed at him and not the road. He glanced at her and smiled. He looked like someone used to being looked at.

  Jesse had told her that after his father died of Spanish influenza, he’d left Louisiana and skipped around from Arkansas to Alabama, trading skins, but had decided that he’d settle down by the time he was twenty and start building a future. And he was about to turn twenty.

  It was the first Dixie Clay had heard that he didn’t plan to keep fur trading. She pondered on it, then asked, “What will you do with yourself ?”

  In answer, Jesse reached his right arm around Dixie Clay’s small waist and slid her close. He nuzzled his lips below her ear, and his ticklish mustache made her squeal and rippled gooseflesh along
her forearms.

  “Jesse, quit now.” But she was smiling. “You’re giving up trading?”

  “Can’t keep traipsing around forever.”

  “But what will you do?”

  “Make a name for myself.”

  “But how?”

  “Don’t you worry, pretty li’l wifey. Ole Jesse has a plan.”

  Wifey. She liked—loved—the sound of it, but a car was coming and Dixie Clay elbowed Jesse’s hand from her waist. He turned his head to watch the car pass and whistled. “That’s an Austin,” he told her.

  She’d never heard of it.

  “Austin 20 touring car. Know how much one of those will set you back?”

  She shook her head.

  “Six hundred and ninety-five dollars.”

  Dixie Clay craned her neck, but the car was gone in a cloud of red dust. It was too much to even consider.

  The mules’ ears, which had pricked forward as the car approached, softened again into the floppy rhythm of their walk. She’d always liked mules, their boxlike upright hooves, less prone to cracking than horse hooves.

  “I aim to have a car before long,” he said, glancing over to see if she was impressed. She was. My ambitious husband, she thought.

  “I’ve stayed at the Thomas Jefferson before on business, you know,” he said. “Uh-huh. Before Prohibition you could get oysters on the half shell and champagne. Now, you’re lucky to get fruit cocktail with marshmallows.” He snorted. “But I know folks. We’ll have some fun.” He told her the hotel had a blind pig around back.