The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  Buying Millie was maybe the first time she’d spent any of the moonshine money (what need had she for frippery when she kept a raccoon’s hours?). It felt good, so unexpectedly good, that the next day she tucked her son (her son!) inside her apron and buttoned her raincoat over him and rode him into town, where she bought baby supplies at Amity’s store. Amity was helping another customer and Dixie Clay kept Willy hidden, but her packages made Amity curious enough to follow her outside. Finally, after Jamie had loaded her mule and gone back inside, Dixie Clay opened her coat to Amity and lowered the top of her apron, revealing Willy’s face, chubby lips open in slumber, drool darkening Dixie Clay’s green blouse.

  “An angel,” Amity whispered. Amity herself had never had a child. “What did Jesse say?”

  “He hasn’t seen him yet.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  But then Jamie was calling Amity inside and Dixie Clay was glad to ride away from Amity’s ridged brow. They headed home and Willy seemed happy on Chester with her arms around him, and happy tucked into her apron front while she unloaded her purchases, and happiest of all that evening on the thumper keg. Her William. Willy. Willy-boy.

  Who wasn’t happy was Jesse, arriving home the next day with red eyes and a dent in the Model T and, she saw as he strode past, a tear in his calfskin coat. He didn’t even notice the baby at first, propped in a peach basket balanced on the Energex vacuum sweeper she was pushing over the rug. But after a nap and a bath, Jesse came out for dinner wearing a new navy pin-striped shirt and smelling like spicy oranges and was taken aback to find a peach-colored baby in the peach basket. Questions, and more questions. No, Dixie Clay didn’t know the man, the baby bringer, or where he came from. And no, Dixie Clay didn’t know his business in Hobnob, or how he found the house, or where he went when he departed. And no, she didn’t even know his name. And, no, she wasn’t very smart.

  At this point they were finishing their pork chops.

  “What did he look like?” Jesse asked.

  “I don’t know. Tall. Shaggy.” Dixie Clay cast her eyes up, remembering. “Maybe thirty, maybe not quite. Red shirt, muddy dungarees.”

  She stopped when she saw Jesse snap his head back, and she figured he knew the man, but didn’t know what that meant.

  “What did he do when he brought the baby? Did he look around?”

  “No.”

  “Ask questions? Seem curious? Try to buy whiskey?”

  “No. He just wanted to find the baby someplace to live.”

  Jesse lowered his knife and pushed his plate back and said, “Bring it here.”

  Dixie Clay lifted the basket of sleeping baby and tipped it toward Jesse. The evening light filtered soft through the rain-running window and lit up Willy’s skin, his peach fuzz hair. He was beautiful. She wanted Jesse to say so. She was hungry to hear it. Say “beautiful,” Jesse.

  Jesse studied the baby, then said, “Well, well, well.” He slowly refolded his napkin and tugged it into its ring and placed it beside his plate. “I suppose he’ll be company for you,” he said, looking up at her. Dixie Clay realized she was holding her breath, and she let it out. Jesse surprised her and compounded it by giving a wink of his blue eye, and a grin: “Just don’t let it slow you down none.”

  Dixie Clay nodded and turned toward the kitchen with the basket and had the impulse to give a little leap through the doorway, like a vaudeville dancer. She smiled at the thought, then sliced the jelly roll for Jesse.

  And Willy didn’t. Slow her down, that is. He had his days and nights mixed up, but so did she. He got fussy in the early evening before it was time to go to the still. But so did she. She calmed them both with the bouncy walk back and forth across the gallery.

  The night that Jesse said Dixie Clay could keep Willy, she gave him the bouncy walk and sang what little she knew of the cowboy’s song, “Trouble, trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days,” then fell to humming. Maybe she’d take some moonshine money and buy herself a Victrola and some records, some Bessie Smith. Back and forth on the gallery, humming and bouncing and humming as the sky grew dark and her boot soles made a scuffing percussion on the floor.

  When Willy fell asleep on her shoulder, she stood and moved to go inside, and when she opened the screen door, a bright flash beside her made her duck. A hummingbird, its needle nose caught in one of the screen’s tiny squares. So small. So furious. Dixie Clay waited for it to work itself free, its wings in their blurry panic sounding like Jesse’s boat’s outboard motor. After a moment of watching, with one hand on Willy’s back to steady him, she propped the door open with her foot and with the other hand reached underneath the hummingbird to quiet its whirring, and then she unscrewed it.

  Dixie Clay opened her palm, but the hummer didn’t fly away, just sat, stunned, its heartbeat rapid. She lifted her hand close to her face. The hummer’s grommet had three or four scarlet flecks, and so she knew it was a young male, just easing into its ruby muffler, one feather at a time. Like Willy’s eyes, which she’d studied earlier that day, in the process of turning from blue-gray to brown, not by darkening overall but dot by chocolate dot.

  I’ll show you hummingbirds, Willy. I’ll show you every wondrous thing.

  And then the bird lifted and flew like an arrow, westward and gone.

  Dixie Clay took Willy inside to the kitchen and laid him on a pallet so she could wash the jelly roll pan. As she began to scrub she remembered how, when she was a girl, she was like a baby hummer, genderless to look at, a quick darting thing, preferring the woods behind her home to the home itself.

  Every winter since she was six, her papa had taken her on his weeklong hunting trips, leaving her younger brother, Lucius, home with their mother. Those weeks were better than Christmas, opening the tent flap to the dawning world woozy with hoarfrost, Papa already setting a match to the crackling rosin pine tinder they’d gathered the night before. She’d tote the aluminum kettle to Petty Creek and fill it and set it on the fire for coffee. Papa, checking the guns, whistling, mockingbird answering. Soon, the smell of bacon fluttering its fatty edges in the pan. Blue digging his front paws into the grass and pulling his weight back to stretch in what could only be pleasure. Ahead of her, the synchronicity of her shot hitting, as if all she had to do was aim her eye at her target. A few years prior, government men had put telephone lines between Pine Grove and Birmingham, and though her father explained the science—the voice translated into a wave of sound that was sent down the line—she knew that the real explanation, like how she knew her bullet would hit, owed something to magic.

  It was the last trip of her twelfth winter, right before spring planting, the grandpa’s greybeard blooming so thickly the tree trunks looked covered in tatting lace, when she’d shot the panther. Papa had taken the long way home, pretending to need horseshoe nails at the mercantile, really wanting to brag on her. But his pride cost them. It was then that some of the women began asking how old she was, and did she not go to school? Soon there was a rare visit to the old home place from the plump red preacher. Dixie Clay, making dinner, had been sent to the kitchen but heard enough. It didn’t look right, not with Dixie Clay turning thirteen and becoming a woman. Besides, the younger son was coming up, right? Nearly eight, wasn’t that right?

  “Nearly nine,” answered her father.

  “Well, there you have it,” and the preacher smacked his palms together, or that’s what Dixie Clay imagined from the sound. She pushed through the swinging door into the parlor and found the preacher standing before the mantel, hands clasped behind his back, examining the photograph of her mother, dead from childbirthing, the baby swelling her dress also dead. Would have been her younger sister. Then girls would have outnumbered the boys. The preacher turned and his lips were drawn back as if snagged by fishhooks: a smile. “What’s that delicious smell?”

  She’d shot two rabbits and fixed stew with sweet potatoes and onions but no
w wished she hadn’t. She glanced at her father, who offered no help. “Please join us, Preacher Nettles, for stew and biscuits.” They followed her into the kitchen and, with her back to the table, she covered a nostril with her finger and huffed snot into the preacher’s bowl. Yes, she was a good shot all right.

  And that was why she was alone when the fur trader drove up. Papa had given Lucius a rifle for Christmas, the Winchester Model 1895 Takedown chambered for the 30-40 Krag cartridge that Dixie Clay had admired in the catalog so often the book fell open to its profile. So far, Lucius had done nothing with it but sit on the gallery and shoot holes through her underwear clothespinned to the laundry line. But now they’d gone into the woods with their rifles, leaving Dixie Clay stuck at home to tend to the turpentine trees, with Bernadette Capes checking on her. They had near five hundred pines, and it was February first, so yesterday she’d swept the pine straw away from the trunks to protect them from fire, and today she slashed the V low on the trunk and attached the drip iron and patent cup to catch the gum. She hoped to get through half the trees before sunset, but heard a wagon, coming fast, its trace chains singing like fiddle strings. She walked back to the house and saw the fur trader’s wagon, the same one drawn by the same mules as last year, but a new driver atop the buckboard, not the old man she expected. With the sun behind him, she couldn’t see his face, even shielding her eyes.

  “Howdy,” he said, looking her over. “I’m Jesse Swan Holliver, and I’ve taken over the trading from Cody Morrison, and I’m here to see to your skins.” He cinched his reins and swung off the bench. He wore a fine beaver hat and a red kerchief at his neck. His hair was black and curly, which she saw when he tilted the hat toward her.

  Dixie Clay said nothing, and he lifted his gaze from her face to the house. “Your people home?”

  “No,” she said. “But I’ll fetch the skins. Got a mess of ’em.”

  “Well, that’s good to hear, seeing as how I had to fight to reach you. Those roads from Kirby are washed out. My axles were dragging.”

  She turned toward the house and he strolled alongside her. “Wagon got stuck on Reynders Road. Had to throw down some pine knots to pull out and not fifty feet later move a big tree; took me an hour.”

  They climbed onto the gallery and Dixie Clay invited him to sit on the rocker as she’d seen her father do with the fur trader. She went inside to fetch him a glass of buttermilk and made a second trip to carry the bundle of skins, which she set on the floor and inventoried as she cut the strings. “Three coons, three otter, three mink, two skunk, one pelt nearly black entire—”

  This was a particularly fine fur, and she flicked her eyes up at the trader’s face to see if it showed interest, which it did—“one white possum, a civet cat—”

  “A civet cat?”

  “He was borrowing my eggs, and I got tired of lending ’em.”

  He hooted.

  She continued, “One civet cat, three deer, and, oh yes, one large panther.”

  She rocked back on her heels and watched as he graded the skins, turning them over. “Who shot ’em?” Jesse asked.

  “I did.”

  “Who skint ’em?”

  “I did.”

  “And you stretched ’em, too?”

  “I shot ’em, skint ’em, stretched ’em, scraped ’em, cased ’em, and I’m selling ’em. Ten dollars for the bundle.”

  At this the man laughed, and his laugh was boyish. She thought of the root beer float at the lunch counter at Wiggins’, the ticklefizz in her nose. Maybe he was younger than she’d guessed, seventeen or eighteen.

  “Can’t see my way clear to paying more than five.” He fingered the panther pelt, well shaped and soft.

  “The skunk alone is worth a dollar.”

  “This old black skin?” He dangled it between his fingers. “Ain’t hardly got any white on it at all.”

  “And that’s precisely why they want it in New York City.” She felt his eyes flick to her face, but she continued smoothing the skins. “Yup, Papa decided not to wait on Morrison this year. Said prices traders pay around these parts weren’t hardly worth checking his traps for.” She began stacking the skins, all business now. “Said this year we’re sending them straight up to Fogarty Brothers of New York City.” She squeezed the skins to roll them into a bundle.

  Jesse looked at her shrewdly. “Your papa wouldn’t go to all that trouble.”

  “Would too. These skins were wrapped in burlap, all ready to be toted to the post office, before I opened them for you.” Dixie Clay wondered if she could support this, but couldn’t think of a single piece of burlap in the house. She squeezed the bundle together with one hand and slid the twine beneath it. “Now press your finger, please, sir, so I can tie a knot.”

  “I’ll save you the trip to town. Give you six dollars.”

  “I fancy a trip to town. Make it ten.”

  “Seven.”

  “Ten. Fogarty Brothers’re keen on otter right now. Say they’re drowning in orders for otter-trimmed opera cloaks with three-quarter bell sleeves and ivory buttons.” This came straight from the Sears catalog. When she’d seen that cloak, she’d thought of her mother but didn’t know why: she’d never been to an opera, nor worn a cloak for that matter.

  Dixie Clay was still cinching the bundle, waiting for his finger so she could knot the twine. But instead he rocked back with a smile and took off his hat and laid it on his knee. Dixie Clay sat on her heels, figuring out what was so funny about his eyes. One was blue, the other green. She wasn’t sure which one to look at, both so marble-pretty, and almost like you could choose between two people to talk to. Like a baby doll of Patsy McMorrow’s that had a smiling face in the front, and, if you twisted its head around, a crying face on the other side.

  Jesse set his hat back on his black curls. She was sad to see them go. He took a long pull of buttermilk, and she had the urge to offer him something more. With her father and brother gone, she hadn’t been fixing meals. But if it was a month later, she’d have rhubarb, could offer him a piece of pie.

  He leaned forward then, elbows on his knees. “What’s your name?”

  “Dixie Clay.”

  “Dixie Clay. And how old are you, Dixie Clay?”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Thirteen. Well, well, well. Miss Dixie Clay, thirteen years old, how about that.” He bent down and at last placed his finger on the twine she was still pulling tight. “I suppose I’ve been outfoxed. And I’m not even sure I mind. Ten dollars it is.”

  She tied the knot, feeling how close his face was to hers.

  “I’ve traded in five states, Miss Dixie Clay, and if I had a nickel for every time I’d run up on a gal as pretty as you—”

  She felt her cheeks warm and worried he’d feel the heat.

  Then he stood, lifting the skins. “—I’d have a nickel,” he finished.

  She stood too and he stuck out his hand to shake. A business deal, she thought, and held out her hand, but he didn’t shake it, just stood holding it, and holding it some more. She wasn’t sure what to do with her eyes so she trained them on her hand in his, which was white and clean.

  “Tell your father,” Jesse said at last, “he raised a heck of a deal maker. And a heck of a hunter.”

  When she looked up, he tilted his head—a flash of green eye beneath hat brim—and then he released her fingers suddenly and turned to walk down the steps.

  She followed him to his wagon, where Jesse overhanded the bundle of skins into the bed. With a key he opened the lockbox under the seat and removed ten dollar coins. She’d almost forgotten about the money, somehow. The coins felt cool in her palm where his had been.

  Jesse found his seat and his reins. “Give Fogarty Brothers my regards,” he said, and winked. Then with a “Git!” he turned the team and set off at a quick trot, the chains singing, a music she listened to u
ntil there was no more of it to hear.

  The next year he’d come in the same manner. She’d been waiting. Lord, she’d been waiting, impatient when the winter rains kept Papa from the hunting, but at last they’d gone. She had a new dress because, though she was still slight around the rib cage and nimble at the waist, her old dress pulled across the armpits where her breasts had grown to fill her own surprised palms. Papa had given her money at Christmas, the same amount he’d spent on a new hunting coat and ear-flap cap for Lucius. Papa didn’t say what he expected her to do with it and seemed surprised when what she did was walk to the mercantile and buy a pattern, McCall’s “Misses Empire Dress, Suitable for Small Women,” along with five and three-eighths yards of fabric. She’d eyed a bolt of silk georgette crepe but knew it wouldn’t last, though the gossip would. Instead she selected cotton voile in “Copenhagen blue,” a name she said aloud on the walk home, whirling around after to make sure she was alone.

  At her sewing table, she pinned the brown tissue to the fabric and chalked and scissored. Then she pieced it and stitched it and basted it, and she put it on and ran to show her father and then stood embarrassed as he looked up from the account books, embarrassed, and said nothing, and she said nothing, and turned and walked somberly away.

  Clad in Copenhagen blue, Dixie Clay stood in the piney woods and heard Jesse’s music, almost as if he’d known she was finally alone. She ran to the house but when he crested the drive, she slowed to a stroll, even made herself toss the chickens some scratch. He’d grown a mustache, a fetching, fetching mustache. She’d baked a chess pie and hidden it from her brother under a tea towel in the icebox. She sliced it for Jesse, who ate two pieces, but she was too nervous to eat. When he left after the trading—she only got $3.40 but Lucius had buckshot both deer he’d managed to bring down—Jesse walked her out to the turpentine trees. They stood before a young pine with two V’s etched low into the trunk, last year’s V scarred over and, below it, the fresh cut she’d made that morning, oozing its honey-brown gum. Silently they watched the sweetness bead and stretch and elongate over the aluminum cup and finally, finally drop. The plink seemed loud.