The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  “Yes,” he said soberly. “It’s meant to be. But he also has a nickname. XX.”

  “XX, that’s his nickname, is it? Well, that will be easy to write in his gowns.”

  And before too long, the nickname had a nickname, for they started calling the baby “Twenty.”

  Until Monsignor O’Shaughnessy visited and got wind of Baby Twenty and said to Sister Mary Eunice, “Do you really believe it proper to treat these poor abandoned children as jokes?”

  It put an end to Ingersoll’s name game and stung a bit, too. Naming was no joke, Ingersoll understood that.

  He thought on the names as he grew. At eight he realized the names he’d chosen at six were silly, and he felt a bit ashamed, sending out into the world a boy who’d forever be tethered to “Ivanhoe the Third,” when “the Third” is supposed to mean your pop had that name, and his pop, too. At ten he realized no one had been tethered to the names he’d chosen; the parents who adopted the babies would rename them, the nuns had known that all along, so his responsibility, his grand task, was nothing that amounted to anything, just a label to call a baby for three days, and a way to distract a small boy from the fact that no one wanted to adopt him, and he felt shame all over again. As a man of twenty-eight he thought of those names still, and the babies he’d hung them on. He wondered where they were and who they’d become and if they knew they’d once worn a different name, a God-given name whispered straight into Ingersoll’s unwashed ear. And though he’d never admit it to anyone, certainly not Ham, he still kind of liked the name Felix Xanadu.

  Now the road had gotten hilly and he recalled this stretch from when he rode out with Junior, knew he was close. Ingersoll was at the fourth hill when a squat yellow dog with a peg for a tail appeared. It had a long fish, a mullet, looked like, in its jaws. Ingersoll whistled but it veered wide and kept going, purposeful, its coat wet and tail aimed down, the fish like a handlebar mustache.

  The much-missed sun came out as they climbed the fifth hill and Ingersoll decided he should take the rest on foot. He gigged Horace into a copse of cottonwoods, tied him to a foxgrape vine, the kind a boy likes to swing on, next to a ditch swarming with crawfish, small clear ones, shrimplike. Ham had jawed to Ingersoll about these creatures, mud-bugs he called them, claiming they ate them in Louisiana, luring them with string and a lump of bacon from the holes where they blew bubbles. Just another story that might be only a story—you never knew with Ham.

  Ingersoll looked around to get his bearings and grabbed his Winchester and set off to find that yellow dog’s fish market, a stream called the Gou-ga-something, an Indian name. He’d find the dock and see what kind of boat Jesse had, then trace the stream to find the still. He wondered if Dixie Clay had any inkling her husband was a bootlegger. Sometimes the wives truly didn’t know.

  He didn’t fear making noise, the pine needles beneath his feet damp and springy, and soon he could hear the stream and smell it too, fresh-crisp yet woodsy, like the cool dim icehouse with its block of ice packed in sawdust. The sun felt good warming the back of his neck, and it prismed through the beads of water standing up on the green moss.

  The stream must usually have banks but was so fat now it just ran up into the marshy grass. He had to step high to make progress, and with this strange thing called a sun shining down, he was getting hot and stopped behind a sweet gum to unbutton his coat, watching a robin tug a long shoelace of a worm from the ground, and that was when he heard her.

  Her voice. No words to her song, just her voice sliding through notes, her voice high and clear, harmonizing with the stream almost. Sweet Jesus. Ingersoll pressed himself behind the gum tree. But, as if her voice was chucking him under the chin, he darted forward and crouched behind a closer gum.

  And there she was, with Junior, lifting him high over her head in time to a sprightly tune:

  Is your horse a single footer, Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe,

  Is your horse a single footer, Uncle Joe,

  Is your horse a single footer, Uncle Joe, Uncle Joe,

  Don’t mind the weather when the wind don’t blow.

  Hop up, my baby, three in a row!

  She repeated the last line twice, tossing Junior gently in the air. He made a happy eeeeeee sound, his wispy hair lifting in the breeze, then she caught him and tossed him again. She was wearing a simple brown dress with an apron and looked like a wood sprite. Ingersoll wouldn’t have been half surprised if she turned into a doe and bounded away. Instead what she did was pivot with the baby on her shoulder to point to a yellow butterfly that bobbed past, and she hopped onto a stone with Junior to follow it, then hopped to another.

  Dixie Clay and Junior weren’t alone in following the butterfly’s trajectory. The creek had a logjam, and from his crouch Ingersoll could see a river otter pop up from the logs, then, as if in a barbershop quartet, three other sleek heads popped over the top. Dixie Clay laughed and turned to point them out for the baby, all the otters’ long, long noses flicking in unison left then right then left then right to watch the yellow butterfly dip and dance over the water. And then the butterfly lifted away and her glad face turned to watch it waft into the woods and that was when her eyes passed over Ingersoll, Ingersoll stupidly, openly grinning, forgetting that he was no longer crouching. She gave a cry and almost quicker than should be possible her face tightened, the otters leaping sideways as she staggered backward, one foot slipping from her stone with a splash and her free arm flying up to secure the baby.

  Ingersoll lifted his palm and called, “Wait. Don’t worry.”

  But she half ran, half stumbled to a wall of mossy shelving rocks where her rifle stood and she grabbed it with her free hand and tossed it so it landed in her shooting grip, her other arm still holding the baby.

  For the second time in seven days they stood faced off and panting.

  “Dixie Clay,” he yelled, “I . . . I just came to check on the baby.”

  “With your gun?”

  He’d forgotten about the Winchester dangling from his hand.

  “No, I . . . Look here,” he cried, and tossed the rifle a few feet off and gave an apologetic shrug.

  She kept her gun trained, however. “What are you doing here?”

  He said it again, this time with more conviction. “I just came to check on the baby.”

  “Why were you spying?”

  “I wasn’t. I mean, I didn’t mean to. You just looked so happy when you saw the otters—”

  “I was happy because I trap otters. Sell their pelts.”

  “Oh.” Her face hadn’t softened at all. “Can I see him?”

  She paused. “All right,” she said. “But stay on that side of the woodpile.”

  He walked to his side of the logjam and felt foolish. He said he’d come to check on the baby, and clearly the baby was fine. Better than fine. She wore him slung on the saddle of her hip, one of his legs in front and one in back, like he’d been riding there all his life.

  “Why do you want to check on him?” Dixie Clay wasn’t smiling.

  But the baby was. “What do you know. He recognizes old Ingersoll.”

  Dixie Clay frowned like she wanted to deny this, but the baby was leaning toward him. Ingersoll skirted the logs to reach for him, but she pivoted her hip. “Well?” She hoisted the baby a little higher. His hair looked fluffy, like she’d just washed it. He was clasping the bib pocket of her apron.

  Ingersoll shrugged. He felt his cheeks pinking.

  “I know you didn’t come to take him.” She said it as a statement, but when he shook his head, her shoulders softened a little.

  “No, I didn’t come to take him.”

  “I know. I just said that.”

  Ingersoll wasn’t sure how to reply. He wanted to keep her talking. He considered and discarded several observations, and the pause lengthened, and the longer it got, the harder it was to bear.
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br />   The baby broke the silence, squealing and then flinging his arm up to Dixie Clay’s face. His index finger hooked her lip. She detached his finger and pushed his hand down, but he flung it back up and hooked her lip again for another round.

  Ingersoll laughed and the baby turned and again seemed to recognize Ingersoll and lean toward him.

  “Hey, sport,” he said. Dixie Clay didn’t move the baby away this time.

  “If you were here to check on the baby,” she asked around Junior’s finger, her words slurring, “why not come to the house?”

  Ingersoll shrugged. He looked at the sky. “It turned out to be a nice day. I hadn’t seen the sun since I couldn’t tell you when. And when it came out—I was past the cornfields and by your woods, and when it came out—”

  “Seeing it made you happy,” she said.

  He shrugged. All he could do around this girl was lift and lower his shoulders like a stupid wooden puppet.

  She removed the baby’s finger and bent her head to kiss it.

  There were things he could say, if he were the kind who could say things. Dixie Clay, seeing you made me happy.

  She looked up at him over the baby, who was wriggling in Ingersoll’s direction. “Well, since he won’t be denied,” she said, and didn’t give Ingersoll the baby so much as stop fighting him. Then Junior was in his arms, familiar feeling. He laid his face on Ingersoll’s chest like he was hugging him, he just didn’t know to use his arms to do it.

  “He likes you,” she said.

  “We’re old war buddies.” His voice was muffled in the baby’s neck. He could smell Junior’s breath. “What are you calling him?”

  “He’s Willy.”

  “Willy Holliver.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s . . . nice.”

  She turned and started walking and he turned and walked alongside her, matching her pace.

  “I’m glad you came back,” she said, “because I wanted to know—it all happened so fast—I never asked anything. Like how you found him. And where, exactly?”

  Ingersoll bounced the baby, and they walked beside the creek and he told her, him and Ham two engineers, riding along, and he described the store and the bodies on the gallery and the dying clerk inside and how he took the baby to the Greenville sheriff’s then the orphanage, but that it wouldn’t do.

  Ingersoll was aware she was watching him and he glanced to see her face, curious and considering and maybe relieved, he thought, hearing again that no mother out in the world roamed it searching for her baby.

  “But . . . why did you help him?”

  They walked past a thicket of blackberries that didn’t want Dixie Clay to pass, but she tugged her brown skirt free. She seemed to be giving him time to find the words. He looked at Junior, who had gotten quiet, his breathing deeper like he was nearing sleep. Then Ingersoll told her, “I know what it’s like, being an orphan. I’m—I was one. I grew up in an orphanage.”

  They walked on and, without discussing it, angled off from the creek into the woods. They came to a clearing and stopped. With the thick, tranced sunlight, and the mist giving up a few wisps as it steamed, and a dragonfly that zipped beside them, hovered, then zipped on, Ingersoll had the strange feeling that they were underwater. They stood close, the baby between them, all the world leaning in to hear.

  “What are you doing out here, really?” she asked.

  “I had to see you.” He had not known this until he said it.

  Neither spoke. Slowly she reached her arms out and, her eyes on Ingersoll, lifted the baby out of his hands. She placed Willy on her shoulder and stepped back, still tethered to Ingersoll’s gaze, and took another step back, and then turned and walked rapidly into the woods. Ingersoll couldn’t be sure but he thought, just before she disappeared, her small hand had raised, a white flash like a doe’s tail, but whether in farewell or warning he couldn’t say.

  The sting of a blackfly on his neck and the slap he gave it roused him and he turned the way they’d come to retrieve his gun. It was still there, by the logjam. He slung its rawhide lace over his shoulder and decided to find the still quickly before Dixie Clay returned.

  He found a barn, well swept and mostly empty, nothing but a milk cow with long green saliva dripping from her cud in a stall beside a swivel-eared mule. A path angled off behind the barn and he followed it and the breeze took on a metallic sweetness, like a spoonful of castor oil. It was easy then, he could just follow the odor. Amazing that he didn’t smell it the first time he was here. He’d provide excuses—the wind blowing from the west, say—but he knew his lapse owed more to a baby fussing in his lap, and a pair of speckled blue eyes coming up the gallery stairs, blue eyes with a rifle barrel between them. Of course, if he had known then that Dixie Clay’s husband was a bootlegger, he never would have left Willy here.

  He spotted the shack over a little ridge and in a hollow, looking more like an elf cottage than a distillery, its slanted roof crosshatched with pine branches and tucked among the pines, the way a clever bird hides her nest.

  Ingersoll flicked the safety off his rifle and waited. He heard nothing but a pileated woodpecker’s knock-knock joke and saw nothing but the invisible hand of a breeze smoothing the ridge’s long grasses. The grasses weren’t long by the door, though—feet had beaten a path to what must be the supply shed. Etchings of wheelbarrow tracks filled with water. And another path must go back to the stream, where there’d be a dock. He could imagine Jesse’s whole operation now.

  After another moment of waiting, he darted to the door, laid his ear against it, and heard no sound. He brought his eye to a crack in the boards and saw no movement. The door was locked. He thought of his old trench knife with its knuckle guard, left beside the German belt buckle embossed Gott Mitt Uns in a motel in Jersey City that he and Ham had had to vacate precipitously. Instead of the trench knife he had a utility knife now with several blades, and one did the trick. He swung the door open with the barrel of his rifle and found what he expected to find, the large drums and kegs connected with pipes, funnels, and coiled tubes.

  But he found, too, what he did not expect. Even with only the light from the door, he could see the place was tidy, the dirt floor patterned from the drag of a broom’s bristles, the kegs gleaming where a shaft of sunlight reached them. A shelf where bottles were lined, several varieties in neat rows, slashes of black lightning aligned. Something was off here. There was a map or canvas on the far wall, must be hiding something. He crossed in the gloom and with his rifle lifted the corner of the cloth but nothing was there but more wall. The cloth floated down and then it occurred to him what it was. Curtains. Green-checked curtains. Beside a table that held a stack of books. He picked up the top one: The Sonnets of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The next: Best Loved Poems to Memorize and Recite. Smudge on the wall to show where the kerosene lantern usually sat.

  Christ almighty, this was her still. It was Dixie Clay, not Jesse, he should be arresting. He reeled toward the door and then saw it. On the thumper keg, one of the nippled baby bottles he’d bought for Junior and left with the girl.

  She was running the still with the baby.

  He’d done something worse than giving a baby to a bootlegger’s wife. He’d given it to the bootlegger.

  He flung the door open and it smacked against the wall and rebounded closed. In the harshest light imaginable he stood and realized he’d have to tell Ham. He gave a snort of bitter laughter, recalling the cupped flame of his precious pride, that he hadn’t abandoned the baby in the Greenville sheriff’s office or the chaotic orphanage. Oh no, not Ingersoll, saint of orphans and outcasts: he’d given the baby to a bootlegger, perhaps a murderer. And now the baby would be orphaned once again, Dixie Clay destined for the prison or the grave.

  Chapter 10

  Dixie Clay was torn from her nightmare by the shovel-in-gravel scrape of thunder. She lay stunn
ed by her visions, for they were of a terrible black steam train. Long windowless cars humpbacked over each hill on Seven Hills and chuffed closer, louder, needing no track at all, coming to cart her away, to take her to the lynching tree. The two missing revenuers were leaning out the windows. So she snatched Willy from his baby bed and took off into the woods and up the ridge, and when she turned, she saw the train slow at her drive then take the sharp right, following her yet. She thought, I’ll lead it to the still, I don’t care, and we’ll make our escape. So she ran past the still, but the train kept coming, gaining on her. She broke through the woods to the stream and held Willy aloft while fording, passing the bloated carcasses of a doe and fawn caught in a logjam, the train snorting its smoke at her back. That’s when she realized it was coming not for her, or for the still, but for Willy.

  She was glad the thunder had woken her, though Lord she hated thunder by now, hated thunderclouds, hated clouds. It stormed so often that storms managed to be both terrifying and tedious. Still, better wake in this storm than sleep in that dream. She lay unmoving in the dark and then heard the shovel-in-gravel again but it was coming not from outside but inside her room. It was coming from Willy.

  When they’d returned from the still around 3 A.M., she’d given him his night bottle and he’d coughed then too and she’d thought he’d gobbled too much milk—greedy baby!—and it had choked him. His cough had not been his sweet airball cough, a teacup-sized cough, soft as a match struck to light a lamp. His cough had been a knife scraping a tin plate. Now, shortly before dawn, he gave it again.

  She rose and bent over his willow branch baby bed and studied him in the dim light. His color seemed high and fine, pink cheeks and closed eyes. She heaved a breath and made a step back to her bed when he coughed again. She turned and saw his body knock with the force of it, his eyes slitting open and gleaming in the half dark.

  Hmmm. Willy has a cold. Naming it made it better: babies got colds, didn’t they, poor things. They got colds and you fretted but then they got better.