Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “Hard to count.”

  “And who won?”

  “I did.”

  “Son, you better tell this man who really won. Joe, if I was to shoot my buddy here for a liar, would you swear I was with you? Would you be my witness? We could say we was out squirrel hunting. ’Course we might ought to shoot us a couple, just to make it look real. I could brang ’em over to your house for supper this evening. Get your wife to fry ’em up. Then me and that older girl of yours could spoon on the porch.” He flapped his tongue and cackled, his coating of ash cracking at the edges of his mouth.

  Anderson had gone pale. “Trash like you will never darken my table.”

  James stepped closer and looked him in the eyes, their noses an inch apart. “How you know I ain’t gone strip you nekkid and shoot you right in your tracks here, then put on your duds and round up that mule of yours and ride over to your house and not only darken your table but darken your wife and girls, too?” He jammed the barrel of his shotgun under Anderson’s chin and pushed it up so the man appeared to be looking at the sky. He forced him backward against the bank, dirt crumbling onto his shoulders, in his hair, and began rifling the older man’s pants pockets, lingering around his crotch, grinning.

  “Hey,” he called to his partner, “you got to come here, feel this man’s little biddy tallywhacker. It ain’t no longer than your pinky finger. Nor no fatter neither.”

  The hooded man laughed, high and strange.

  James pulled a watch from Anderson’s pocket and snapped its fob and put it into his own pants. He found a jackknife, too, a coin purse and two metal washers which he winged down the road as if skipping rocks. Then he backed away, patting his pockets.

  Overhead, clouds moved across the sun, the ground darkening, the men’s shadows growing faint on the dirt then disappearing, a change so abrupt the three paused in their doings to study the sky. A flock of crows began to collect up the road in the bare branches of a dead oak tree, their voices gathering strength as they funneled down from the sky in a whorl, like a tornado in reverse, coloring the tree black.

  “What is it y’all want?” Anderson said. “If you mean to kill me, then by God do it. I won’t grovel.”

  “See,” James said. “I told you. My buddy here bet me a dime you’d gravel and I said you wouldn’t.”

  Anderson lowered his hands and clasped them together over his chest in a prayerful pose.

  “Hey, Will,” James said to his partner, “are you watching? First he won’t gravel, next he goes and lowers his hands.”

  The hooded one didn’t answer. He was watching the treeful of crows, stragglers filtering into the spaces where the sky showed through, an endless storm of descending birds.

  “Young Burke,” Anderson called to the other one, “if that’s you behind that mask, I ask you to stop these insults and return me my property and let me go fetch my mule. You were raised as a Christian, so what are you doing in the company of this trash?”

  James fired from the hip. At the same instant the crows exploded as one from the oak, dragging with them for a moment the shape of the tree. Anderson’s shirt ballooned and sagged, he turned to the right, that arm raised. He looked down at his side, his arm starting to shiver. He moaned and ground his shoulders into the bank, more dirt falling on him, his shirt pocket bulging with it. The crows were whirling in the sky, their cawing impossibly loud. Anderson slid to a sitting position. Let go a breath.

  It grew suddenly light underneath them, their shadows spilling out from their feet and spreading toward the east, the woods around them changing to a brighter green. James lowered his shotgun and broke it open and removed the smoking hull. He smelled it, wiggled it on his finger, and put it in his coat pocket. He reloaded, closed the gun’s breech, and walked to where Anderson sat and knelt before him and gazed at the shut eyes.

  “I believe he’s playing possum on us.”

  From beside him he got a fistful of sand and underhanded it into Anderson’s mouth—his lips moved, his teeth bloody.

  “Hell,” James said, waving his hand before the farmer’s face.

  Anderson’s eyes came open, wet and bluer than before. He looked at the tree the crows had fled, his lips glistening with sand.

  William Burke snatched his hood off and glanced down the road the way the mule had gone. “You ain’t gone shoot no more, are you, Lev? We ain’t too far from the next place.”

  “Naw.” James set his gun against the bank and fished in his pockets for the jackknife. He pushed Anderson’s forehead back, revealing his throat. He opened the knife one-handed—“Hope for your own comfort you kept this sticker sharp,” he said to Anderson—and swiped the blade over the skin between his Adam’s apple and chin, opening a bright gash that began to spout and bubble blood. In seconds Anderson’s shirtfront was red. James watched his eyes, which were wide now, and the eyes watched him back, the chest twitched and a gurgling sound issued from within. One arm came up and poked feebly at him. When the eyes had gone flat he stuck the knife blade into the sand a few times to clean it before he put it away.

  III

  Clarke County Sheriff Billy Waite sat peeling a large green apple on his front porch, a Havana corona smoking on the rail beside him, his long sore feet propped on the rail by the cigar, his shined boot toes reflecting the bright white moon. On the other end of the porch the swing creaked pleasantly on its chains. This was the time of home-night he enjoyed, when his wife was inside asleep and he, at last, was alone. Time of year he enjoyed, too, the kind of peaceable weather you needed sleeves for but not a coat, chill in the air to make your scalp tingle but not set you to shivering.

  What he’d been thinking about tonight was something he’d been pondering for a while, how his thirty-and-some years as a peace officer had so often taken him away from his family that he now felt distanced from them, the wife especially: Sue Alma could chatter straight through a day, all small talk, and not say anything of substance, or at least anything he could make sense of. How delicate the candlewicking on the coverlet. That the piecrust had too much flour. He knew, because he was a different man at home, at the head of the supper table, in bed, that she really didn’t understand who he was at his core, didn’t know the person who rode the trails and roads and tacked up eviction notices, who’d killed six men from behind his badge and wounded seven more and brought a dozen others to be hanged, their full names and the dates of their deaths something he could repeat backward and forward and did on occasion when the hour grew long in the saddle or when sleep seemed a young man’s luxury. Sue Alma’s ignorance of his true self was his own fault, though, for he’d chosen never to tell her of that other life he had lived, of blood and hurt, of exploring the dark, widening canyons that ran through some men’s hearts. His own heart, too. For when was he happier? Here on the porch or there in the saddle?

  Now, faced with ending his reign as sheriff, his sixty-year-old body giving out, he wondered what the two strangers in their house would say to each other once he’d handed over his badge. For what had occurred to him—stopped him as he crossed the street one morning last week—was that if Sue Alma didn’t know the true him, it was entirely possible that he didn’t know the true her, the self she composed behind walls and among the clink of dishes and silverware and a cranked Gramophone.

  His apple peel had about reached the floorboards, one continuous curl, a feat of peeling he took pride in, took in fact more enjoyment from than the eating of the apple, which was just chewing and swallowing. Same with the cigar, which he’d lit and got to burning well but now drew from but rarely, not until it was about to go out, when he’d have to pull deeply with his lungs and puff his cheeks. It kept him alert, and there was nothing to equal these little pleasures of control to Billy Waite, a peel a yard long, a cigar all the way from Havana sucked back from the dead.

  Did Sue Alma know even these things about him? Or if asked, would she just flip her hand and say, Billy, he loves apples and cigars?

  Down the road
a ways a dog had gone to barking, that mongrel the dim-witted feed store clerk kept tied to his porch post. And then another couple following suit, the sibling pair of coon hounds belonging to the undertaker. Language clear as English, telling Waite someone was coming his way. On a horse.

  He kept peeling, unhurried, hoping to finish before the person reached him—it was always him they came for—the peel now curling on the porch floor. He took his feet off the rail, noting that his cigar had stopped smoking, and looked behind him at the screen door. His son was grown and gone, a logger in the next county, where a fellow could make a little money if he worked hard enough and didn’t drink it up or spend it on women. For a moment Waite longed for the way the boy would, on hearing the dogs, already have slipped on his boots without socks and come to stand behind his father, his black hair rumpled, a pistol concealed in the small of his back, not saying a word, just waiting.

  Waite had always hoped Johnny-Earl would want to be his deputy—the position was his to appoint—the boy tough and independent and sharp of instinct and loyal and of a fair mind. It had taken Waite some time to understand, however, that what would have drawn Johnny-Earl out of bed, what would have caused him to arm himself and stand on the porch behind his father, was not a love for justice or peace, but a love for the father. A fear of losing him. While Waite could peel his apples and watch his cigars smolder and feel a calmness, could duck behind a tree and maintain presence of mind while some crazy outlaw filled the brush around him with squirrel shot and the air with cordite, what Johnny-Earl experienced was dread. Waite had tried to tell him, dead set as the boy was on leaving, that these nerves were precisely what a deputy needed. They were a tool as tangible as a pistol or a blackjack. Recklessness would kill a lawman instantly, he’d said. The smart ones, the men who lived, were those most cautious, the fellows who handled their fear each day like they loaded a gun.

  Even as he said this to Johnny-Earl, though, he’d known it to be a failing argument. And his son knew it, too. So two summers ago, at nineteen years of age, the pull of his own will finally stronger than his father’s, Johnny-Earl had shrugged beyond his guilt and boarded the chuffing train in Whatley with two of his friends and a parcel of Sue Alma’s almond cookies.

  Now the visitor had grown close, Waite heard the horse. The dogs had fallen quiet, already bored with this event and waiting for the next thing to move through their lives and set them abark. Waite’s peel fell in one piece between his boots and he rose, placed the naked apple and his pocketknife on the rail next to the dead cigar, its ash an inch long. From beneath a cloth napkin he picked up his Smith & Wesson revolver from the table and folded his arms, concealing the gun.

  “You sure it ain’t just a story?” Waite asked. He’d gotten his cigar going and held it between two fingers and watched its smoke drift over the rail. “Rumors fly out of Mitcham Beat like hair in a catfight.”

  “No,” Ernest McCorquodale said, fanning his cheeks with a newspaper. He sat across the porch, his horse hobbled to the rail—he’d ridden ten miles from Coffeeville, where he ran a store. “A farmer I loan to told me. Reliable Christian fellow. He come in to pay on his bill and said everybody out there knew about it. They ambushed Anderson in broad daylight, not five miles from here. Them poor people ain’t got no idea what to do.”

  Waite didn’t care for the pious set of McCorquodale’s chin, his thin pinched lips, and resented that he’d come here, tonight, to tell such news. How many ragged farmers had the storekeeper foreclosed on in the last two, three years? Dutiful Waite riding out to over half the county with a sealed piece of paper to serve, the hungry families watching him with their smutty faces, the father of each brood, nearly every damn time, asking even as he took the paper what it said because he couldn’t read. McCorquodale didn’t seem to give a damn that they had nowhere to go.

  “This Christian have a name?” Waite asked.

  McCorquodale’s fan stopped. “He swore me not to use it. They’ll kill him if they know.”

  “Well, I ain’t likely to ride out yonder revealing your secrets, Ernest.”

  McCorquodale looked off into the yard. “I just give him my word, is all.”

  “He didn’t say whether the justice of the peace out there had any notions of who’d of shot him? These country folk usually act pretty quick. Time I ride out yonder they’ll have done took care of it.”

  McCorquodale snorted. “The justice is probably one of ’em.”

  Waite ashed his cigar. He’d heard the rumors about Mitcham Beat—a gang of outlaws, dressed in hoods, were robbing folks and burning houses and barns. Chasing off colored people. The justice of the peace, Tom Hill, hadn’t been able to stop the violence and so Waite had been expecting this moment, when he’d have to do something.

  “The fact is it’s done got way out of hand out there,” McCorquodale said. “As a tax-paying citizen, and a Christian, I aim to see something’s done.”

  “You keep slinging that word around, don’t you.”

  “What word?”

  “‘Christian,’” Waite said. “In this day and age you’ll get farther with ‘tax-payer,’ I expect.”

  The storekeeper stood up. “Well. I’ll bid you good night, Sheriff, and hope I’ve had some influence on you. If not…” He didn’t finish, just left the threat turning in the air like a smoke ring.

  Waite watched him, and once McCorquodale had mounted his horse and disappeared into the darkness and the dogs had started up again, he looked at the door behind him and reached beneath his chair for his bottle and twisted off its lid and sipped, then sipped again. He would ride out in the morning.

  The bluish predawn found him rising without having slept much from beside his softly snoring wife and sitting on the edge of his bed waiting for his lower back—it hurt all the way down to his heel—to loosen up. It found him standing in his socks over the commode waiting for the last of the night’s urine to drizzle out. Searching for his reading glasses among Sue Alma’s cluttered talcum and toilet water shelves and finally leaving without them, scratching her a quick note he could barely read himself. He had a headache from his drinking and took a powder for it.

  On the porch he picked up last night’s cigar—only half smoked—and tapped off its cold nub of ash and dropped it in his coat pocket and with his Marlin Model 1893 went slowly down the slick steps and through the grass of the pasture toward the stable where his eight-year-old gelding was nickering in his stall, hot white vapor blooming from his nose. Waite fed King a few old carrots and brushed his coat and combed his mane, then hung a felt blanket over his back and set about saddling and bridling him, fastening on his bedroll, a knapsack, and a russet leather gun sheath, into which he slid his rifle.

  He hadn’t been out in a month, not since tracking a bigamist to Washington County, and he had to admit it felt good to be here in the dawn with the promise of heat and his boots wet with dew and the morning birds hitting their bright notes.

  Passing his cousin Oscar York’s large house, a few last stars overhead, he was surprised to see Oscar, the probate judge, coming down the steps between the columns, carrying a rifle. He’d obviously been waiting in the darkness of his porch.

  “Morning, Billy.”

  Waite stopped the horse. The windows in the other houses set back along the road were lit, people stepping onto their porches to pitch last night’s water into the yard, a rooster crowing from somewhere. Waite stretched his legs in the stirrups and looked down. “What gets you out here this early, Judge?”

  “Just on my way to see you.”

  Waite looked past Oscar’s shoulder and frowned. “Don’t know why I even bother going to my office.”

  “Where you off to now?”

  “Just some business. What’s with the Winchester?”

  Oscar looked up the road and down. He moved in close by, horse between him and the trees across the road, and rubbed King along the underside of his jaw. “With folks being assassinated, I’m just protecting myself.”
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  “That’s a long way out in the country, Osk. Them old boys ain’t crazy enough to bring their doings to town.”

  “Ten miles ain’t that far, Billy. And Anderson was a lot closer in than that. I ain’t taking no chances.” He looked toward the trees. “Ernest said he stopped by last evening. He’s in our guest room now. You ain’t never for the life of you heard such snoring.”

  “Yeah, he stopped by. Damn near nine-thirty.”

  “So I take it you’re heading out there.”

  Waite eased back into the saddle. “I don’t like being told how to do my job, Oscar. Not even from you.”

  “Nobody’s telling you nothing you don’t know already. The truth is, them folks have been on a tear since Arch Bedsole. And everybody’s saying the same thing, Billy. Voters, I mean. Saying you’re too old to take on something like that bunch by yourself.”

  Waite folded his hands over the pommel, waiting.

  “Ain’t it about time you got a deputy,” Oscar asked, “somebody official to watch your back?”

  “Let me guess. You got just the candidate.”

  “Well. What about that Ardy Grant? He’s been home damn near a month, looking for work. And talk about shooting. That knucklehead can take a skeeter’s head off with a pistol.”

  “It’s a lot more to it than being able to shoot,” Waite said. “And I don’t trust that boy.” He gigged the horse’s ribs with his spurs and Oscar stepped aside, stood in the road with his rifle.

  Minutes later Waite had left behind the town and county seat of Grove Hill as it clacked and clanged to life. The yells of workers and the up-fluttering of shades along the storefronts and bump of boot heels on the wooden porches and the snorting and whinny of horses hungry in the livery and the click of wagons on the wide street—it all grew indistinct as the road steepened and narrowed and trees drew over him, twittering their leaves across his view.

  Waite felt better in his bones now with the morning’s rust behind him and lit the half cigar despite the early hour. King lifted his head and began to lope, splashing through a puddle. Leaving feathers of bluish smoke dissolving in the fog behind them, they passed the cotton gin with the operator already setting up the scales and two fellows wrestling with a sitting mule. A tall farmer Waite knew waved with a wrench. Half a mile farther he encountered a mule-drawn wagonload of raw cotton driven by a black man; Waite eased King out of the road and let the wagon pass, a pair of sleepy children sitting atop the cotton, one sucking his thumb. He waved to the children, then rode on.