The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  Jesse reached and took her hand. “When there are two more slashes there,” he said, nodding to the trunk, “I’ll be back for you. I’ll take you to Mississippi.” And with his other hand he lifted her chin and she looked into those eyes, trees and water coming closer, and her own eyes closed and, yes, he kissed her.

  Two more slashes: two more years. She would be sixteen. She loved the smell of pine trees now. She sometimes took her sewing to a stump in the piney woods.

  She waited. What did she do while she waited? She went to Pine Grove School to satisfy the nosy neighbors, though she didn’t learn as much as she had at home with her papa and his books and maps and telescope. When she wasn’t at the schoolhouse, she canned and skinned and looked after the animals and tried out new recipes on her papa, and at the neighbors’ turpentine boil she granted each boy one dance and one dance only: she was waiting for Jesse Swan Holliver, because Jesse Swan Holliver was coming for her. And he did, he did come; she was sixteen and Jesse Swan Holliver courted her and married her and took her to Mississippi.

  Now, in Mississippi, in Sugar Hill where Jesse had brought her, she’d finished the dishes and it was dark enough to shine. Willy started to rouse and she picked him up and he turned his head from side to side, searching for the smell of milk. She wished she could feed him from her body, as she had Jacob. When he’d fallen asleep while nursing and his lips slackened and fell off her nipple, she could see his tongue flexing a time or two, her creamy hind milk pooling there, or even leaking down his chin.

  She carried Willy to the stove and patted his back, which melded to her body, curving over her chest and shoulder. She fixed the bottle and held it to his mouth and he sucked it with a determined round chewing motion she liked and then she wrapped him in the afghan and took him to the still.

  Looking back, it surprised her, it always surprised her, how long it took her to learn she’d married a bootlegger. She’d been a smart girl, first in her class at Pine Grove School with figures and letters both, so all she could reckon was that she didn’t want to learn. Sometimes she’d imagine explaining it to a girlfriend, if she had one, just like it’d appeared to her as a new bride. The friend would reassure: “Dixie Clay, you couldn’t have guessed! No one could have guessed,” and the friend would hug her, and they would cry a bit and laugh a bit.

  Because, looking back, the signs were everywhere. After the night at the Thomas Jefferson Hotel they’d made slow progress to Hobnob because most every time they met a buggy or motorcar, Jesse knew the driver. He’d pull up on the mules, and she saw how easy he was, telling a joke, asking after one man’s sick wife, after another’s new boat. It was this friendly manner Dixie Clay’s papa had been charmed by when Jesse’d come to ask for her hand. Of course her papa had asked him how he made his living if his part of Mississippi was no good for cotton and Jesse had spoken only of fur trading and shipping the furs south to New Orleans. Lucius had sat by Jesse’s feet like a hound treeing a coon. For dinner, Dixie Clay made a roast. Jesse waited until her papa had gone to the parlor before he asked Lucius, “What’s the difference between roast beef and pea soup?”

  Lucius didn’t know.

  “Anyone can roast beef.”

  Lucius laughed so hard he snorted.

  Yes, Jesse was charming. She wouldn’t have to explain that to her girlfriend. But his charm didn’t obscure certain oddities. On her second day as a bride, as they passed the sign saying WELCOME TO HOBNOB, a car pulled alongside them—a Dodge Brothers touring car, said Jesse—and the man in the passenger seat cranked the window down.

  “How’s business?” he asked.

  “Good and fixing to get gooder. Come out to Sugar Hill,” Jesse shouted over the motor. “I got what you’re looking for.”

  As they drove on, Dixie Clay wondered—what furs did these men want? Also—why was his house named Sugar Hill? She wondered again when she saw the house, which wasn’t on a hill but in a wooded gully, at the end of a drive you’d pass without knowing unless you spied the crescents of wheels etching the turn. And why call it Sugar anything when cane wasn’t grown in these parts?

  But she was surprised and pleased by the house. It had been built as a dogtrot with the open central hall, and when Jesse bought it he’d enclosed it and added onto the back, so now it had three rooms on either side. To the left, a parlor, dining room, and kitchen, and to the right, three bedrooms. Corner cabinets, a butler’s pantry, wainscoting up to the chair rails, an inside bathroom, electric lights that went on when you pushed a little circle in a box on the wall. A back door that headed into the woods, a screened front door that opened onto a deep shady gallery with straight chairs and rockers, bordered by a rail the perfect height, Jesse said, for resting boots. He was almost twenty and had no kin to speak of, so he must have selected the brass chandelier, the mahogany mantel clock, the valance curtains in blue silk trimmed with rose, and the Queen Anne walnut bedroom set for which he was making payments of twenty-two dollars a month. The house matched him, his clean oval nails and waxed mustache.

  “How do you like your new house, Mrs. Holliver?” She was standing on the front gallery and looking to the west, and Jesse had come behind her.

  “I am well pleased, Mr. Holliver.”

  He rested his chin on her head and slid his hands around her waist and squeezed to make his fingers touch. He was shorter than average, but she was so slight that their bodies fit like a dovetail joint.

  She continued, “Of course—do you think—maybe the drive is a bit overgrown?”

  He said, “You let me worry about the outside of the house. No need to go chopping down perfectly good trees when we’ve no need for lumber. But the inside’s yours to fool with.” He kissed the crown of her head. “Tell you what—I need some supplies. Let’s see if there’s anything you want at the Hardware to gussy things up.”

  At the Hardware, Jesse had an account. “Put it under Mrs. Jesse Swan Holliver,” she told the clerk, though he clearly knew Jesse. Dixie Clay was enjoying the song of her new name: “Mrs. Jesse Swan Holliver, with an H.” The clerk’s fat wife, perhaps jealous that Dixie Clay needed so little fabric for her dress, sullenly pulled out bolts for Dixie Clay to thumb the slub. She charged dot crepe faille in “palmetto green,” sixty-eight cents a yard, and yellow paint, and green-checked gingham to make box pleat curtains for the nursery, yellow and green she figured good for either sons or daughters. Who wouldn’t be long in coming: every night she woke to Jesse sliding in bed behind her, peeling her nightgown up with his cold fingers—why cold—had he been outside?—a thought that disappeared as his hands slipped between her thighs, his thumbs inching higher, twiddling, the chilled thumbs warming and readying her along with his breath in her ear, then the hands on her breasts, “Sugar Hills” he was whispering, then the hands on her hips, flipping her and tilting her backside up, and then he was fully inside her and it was happening, hugely. After the first time in the Thomas Jefferson, it hadn’t hurt at all. I’m made for this, she thought, taken deep into the rhythm.

  After Jesse had fallen asleep on her, still moored, she would lie, smiling a little, feeling him shrink out of her ever so slowly, his chest rising and falling. He was the boat and she was the sea. His breathing deepened into a snore. Perhaps they’d made themselves a child that very night.

  But they hadn’t. Nor the next night, nor the next. Spring turned into summer, and she sewed an eyelet ruffle for the wicker bassinet. She made rhubarb preserves. She canned apricots, tomatoes, pears, peaches. Put up watermelon rind pickles, bread and butter pickles. Kumquats, sugared satsumas. Summer turned into autumn, and she put up applesauce, spiced crab apples, figs, wished for lemons to make curd but they were too far north. Autumn turned into winter, and Jesse had business in town a lot, more and more it seemed, or he went hunting in the woods. She would make special meals for him when he returned, but he wasn’t a big eater, unlike her father. She didn’t even have a dog to
feed the scraps to. Jesse didn’t like dogs. Why, she asked him once. “Maybe I got bit as a child,” he answered.

  But Dixie Clay missed the cool button of dog nose in her palm. Missed how Blue would nudge her leg where she sat reading until she scratched his ears, and how his red rubbery eyelids would droop in doggy pleasure. She thought of afternoons with Bernadette Capes in the dark, chilled springhouse, which smelled faintly of sour clabber. They’d take turns holding the churn between their knees and plunging. After a bit Bernie, like a lucky fisherman, would draw up a net that held a crock of cream, and they’d sit under the cottonwoods and pour the rich yellow cream over berries and biscuits. She missed churning butter while Bernie recited “Lament of the Irish Immigrant,” missed playing jacks with Patsy, missed buffing her riding boots alongside her papa while he hummed “Les Huguenots.”

  One day almost a year after they were married, when Jesse said not to hold supper, that he had business in town, she asked to go along. She asked as if asking were the most casual of whims and kept stirring the junket she was fixing to set.

  When she looked up, Jesse was eyeing her, but all he said was “I reckon. If your cooking can keep, come on then.”

  And they rode into town, Dixie Clay noticing two sets of tracks, the outer tracks for wagon wheels and the inner set for car tires. It was March and the dogwoods, usually lost in the understory, were offering their white teacups. Jesse held the reins loosely in his yellow leather gloves, and Dixie Clay thought, with his black curls against the greenery, he looked like a jungle bird. He was telling her the plot of Nosferatu, the last picture show he’d seen. Today he would take her to Valentino’s Blood and Sand, he said, before conducting business. He said before the picture began, a blond midget named Big Boy Lloyd Adams walked down the aisle in his light blue tuxedo and climbed a riser to the piano bench and flipped out his tails and started to play. The music helped those who couldn’t read—the darkies sat up in the balcony, Jesse said—and Big Boy Lloyd could make thunder with his piano, or rain, or locomotives, or autos, or just about anything.

  After the movie, they went to McMahon’s diner for forty-cent coffee-and-waffles. Jesse didn’t eat much but smoked and shook hands with the men who dropped by their booth.

  “So this is the missus,” one would say, and tip his hat. Another would add, “Well, Jesse, now we know why you’ve been keeping her all to yourself.”

  Jesse expanded, arms stretched along the back of the booth, entertaining and entertained. He asked, “Boys, I bet you’re all wondering how I keep my youth.” He paused, then: “I give her anything she wants!”

  The men exploded into laughter. When they slapped Jesse’s back in farewell, he invited them to come by the house. “Business is fixing to expand. Grand opening on Tuesday,” he would say. “Tuesday, dusk.” In the wagon on the way home, she asked him about this, but he said he was tired, too tired to discuss it, and she didn’t press. It had been the nicest day she’d had in ages. She laid her head on his shoulder and looked at the falling stars.

  “Maybe I’ll buy you one of those waffle makers,” he told her.

  And Tuesday as Dixie Clay washed the dishes she heard wagon wheels, then car wheels, and she dried her hands on her apron and set to tucking her pin curls and just when she had redrawn her red Cupid’s bow smile and was ready to go in and offer coffee with it, she heard the front door slam. Jesse clomping down the steps. She walked to the window but it was dark out and she saw not a thing but the lantern’s aureole bouncing away into the night, the men’s boots muffled by pine needles. Three times this happened, and at last she went to bed with Jesse still out of the house, and hours later when she woke to moonlight and Jesse over her shoulder and the nightgown yanked up, the seam ripping, she named at last what she smelled and had been smelling: whiskey.

  Jesse’s secrecies and disappearances. Jesse’s popularity with the men, all the visits, but all so quick. The ugly look from the clerk’s wife at the commissary. How they didn’t go to church. How she’d thought to make turpentine like she’d done in Alabama, figuring Jesse would be glad, but what he’d said was, “Don’t go beyond the ridge.” How often he went hunting, yet how little game he killed. How measly, how unloved the vegetable plot was. How nice their house was, though nearly lost in the pines, and in a gulley, a gulley that everyone called Sugar Hill.

  Night visitors for three weeks, and then one day Jesse hitched up Chester and Smokey and stayed away three nights. When he came home, it was behind the wheel of a black Model T, with only Chet hitched behind. The noise brought Dixie Clay outside and she put a hand to her eyes to admire the car against the sun. He laughed to see the wonder on her face. Jesse must have swerved a bit on the road, as a sprig of bridal veil bush was fretted into the grillework. She squatted to slide it free.

  “How does it work?” she asked.

  He showed her beneath the car’s hood, let her sit in the passenger seat, modeled how to set the throttle—“This controls how much gas goes into the engine”—and adjust the choke. In front of the car, he bent to crank it with his left hand, his turquoise silk four-in-hand flapping over his shoulder.

  “What do you think?” he yelled over the noise.

  “Can I try it? Please?”

  Jesse chuckled. “Maybe not, squirrel. This machine cost two hundred and sixty dollars.” He slid into the car and turned it off, pocketing the keys.

  Dixie Clay wished she’d had a chance to say good-bye to Smokey, rub his floppy black-edged ears, but mostly she was wondering where Jesse would keep the keys.

  What Jesse didn’t know was that while he’d been finding his car, she’d been finding his still. She’d followed the path over the ridge, the sweet medicine smell growing, and discovered a low, rusty shed of corrugated metal, slanted like a house of cards. Inside the dust-mote gloom was a chain of fifty-five-gallon steel drums, each attached to a smaller keg with an elbow of pipe that was attached to another steel drum, and so on, for about fifteen feet—field hands lifting heavy pails. Dixie Clay peeked under a lid and the fumes backhanded her and she dropped it. Then, turning her head and taking a deep breath, she lifted the lid again, studying the thick bubbling sludge, a few mosquito hawks dead on the surface. The last drum must have lost its lid, for it was covered only by a sheet of rusty metal. When Dixie Clay lifted that, she saw a dead squirrel in the bubbling mash. She’d scooped it out with the metal sheet, flung it into the woods, and returned to the house to brood.

  Now, in the slow of the afternoon with the purple hulled peas coming to a simmer on the stove, she sat at the secretary with a glass of lemonade to write her weekly letter to her father and brother. This time she could tell them about the Model T. Lucius had been so smitten with the first automobile they’d seen that he’d chased it for a mile, and the next day he sketched motorcars in the church hymnal until the choirmaster boxed his ears.

  But if she wrote about the Model T, she’d have to explain where the money came from. She laid down her pen. When she picked it up again, it was to write about the weather, and in this way she said good-bye to her home, good-bye to her papa, the man she had yelled for at the age of eleven when they were hunting and she’d looked down and seen blood on her saddle, blood on the pommel, but she hadn’t cut herself or her horse—this man whom she could go to even with that, and who turned their horses homeward and went upstairs and fetched his dead wife’s elastic sanitary belt and then had stood outside the bathroom door and explained to Dixie Clay how to pin the cotton gauze—to this man, she wrote about the weather. Good-bye, good-bye.

  And good-bye to Jesse, too, in a way. Certainly good-bye to the dream of Jesse. For maybe if she’d confronted Jesse the night he’d driven back in the Model T, they might’ve been able to find a kind of honesty, damp kindling that wouldn’t warm much but would be something to stretch their hands toward. But she didn’t, wishing him to tell her, so she waited, pretending she didn’t know, and went on mend
ing his shirts and frying his eggs. He still came to her cold fingered in the night, but she enjoyed it less. Before, what she took as his hunger for her made her hungry as well. But now she felt she could have been anyone to him. Still, she never refused. A baby a baby a baby, she chanted inwardly to the gentle thump of the headboard.

  After a year of pretending to be stupid, she was stupid. One evening, she came to, near the henhouse, startled to see a porcupine waddle just a few feet from her toes. Had she been still so long she’d given the impression she was a statue or a tree? The basket of chicken feed balanced on her hip, her fist sunk into it, and she raised and flexed her dusty fingers. She remembered the girl who’d shot the panther and traded its speckled skin to the handsome stranger, and she recognized neither herself nor the stranger. She remembered also how she’d thought his two different eyes made him look like two different people, like that turn-around doll, and understood how right she’d been. He was two people, but she had only married one. And the one she’d married was never facing out.

  And so the night of her eighteenth birthday (he gave her a silver brooch and a thimble engraved with her initials; he liked to buy elegant gifts), she made Jesse a business proposition. He’d just returned in the Model T and was tugging his leather driving gloves off as he climbed the gallery steps. From his smile, she guessed he’d made a big sale. She met him at the top. “Teach me how to cook that moonshine,” she told him. Jesse finished removing the second glove and paused.

  “You can’t cook it steady and deliver it, too,” she continued.

  When he looked up, his eyes were keen, and she realized how long it had been since he’d really bluegreen looked at her. “Well, well, well,” is what he said. Then he slapped the gloves against his palm. “Alrighty then.”

  So in this manner the Jesse Swan Hollivers entered the business phase of their marriage. The following evening, Jesse showed her the shed where he stored the corn, bran, yeast, and sugar. He taught her to mix the mash and ferment it and cook it off, to heat it just to the point where it would steam but not boil. The risen steam threaded through the arm pipe and into the thumper keg for the double run, filtering out any solids, and, now pure, coiled into the worm pipe and condensed in the worm box of cool water. Jesse filled an aqua Ball “Perfect Mason” fruit jar from the spigot at the barrel’s bottom and took a sip and swallowed hard. “Wildcat whiskey,” he said, holding it up. “White lightning. Mountain dew.” He swooped a thumb under the end of his mustache and flicked it into its curl, then repeated the gesture on the other side. He looked at her, as if considering, and held the jar out, but she shook her head.