Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  Mitcham Beat, his destination, ten miles of bad road east of Grove Hill, was the voting district that included much outlying farmland and the hamlet of New Prospect, which was little more than a crossroads store with a rarely used blacksmith shed on one side of the building and another shed for storage on the other. There was a croquet court there, too, where the people gathered when their work allowed. All told, there were probably a couple hundred voters in the beat, mostly white, mostly cotton farmers, all poor.

  Waite hadn’t been out there in a year—the journey ate at his nerves and bounced his aged skeleton in his saddle; he’d frankly hoped to live the rest of his life not worrying about the place, but the currents of his blood knew he’d one day head back, for often in his dreams the land he walked was in Mitcham Beat.

  The road would be tolerable for a few miles, but once you passed the covered bridge that marked the beginning of the beat, things changed: first, you had to bat your way through two miles of gnarled woodland called the Bear Thicket—this stretch of road, or shadow of road, which paralleled a creek, felt more like a cave, the trees overhead and understory below so thick at times you’d see little sky at all, the earth caught in perpetual twilight. Half-buried rocks were a hazard to your horse, and you were often off and working at moving a fallen tree from your path. To make matters worse, it was rolling land—which accounted for its not being cleared and planted—and some of the steeper hills were chancy if you were on a new horse. Waite felt good about King, though, a tall chestnut he’d raised from a foal; other than being a little knock-kneed, he was dependable and sturdy, gun-broke, fast when he needed to be, and of a mild temperament. This trip, however, could move any man or animal to foul spirits. When it came time to transport the cotton out, the farmers would take it southwest to Coffeeville.

  Once out of the thicket, though, the land grew pretty to Waite’s eye: field beyond field beyond field of well-kept cotton, each tuft white as a senator’s eyebrow. Between the fields there were less level, unplantable spaces, lush deep wooded ravines with sprawling water oaks in the bottoms and hollows crowded with pine and other evergreens, limbs hung with Spanish moss, ivy, wisteria, and honeysuckle, creeks where cool water smoothed the surfaces of wide white rocks. Locations perfect for whiskey-making. A farmer could tend his crops and, as he passed a hollow where he kept a still, climb to the bottom and check his mash.

  Which was one reason the place was an area to avoid. Waite himself didn’t care to interrupt the bootleggers as he was a whiskey drinker and didn’t think the tax laws fair, but there were government agents who poked about now and again. Ten years back one had supposedly disappeared out here, though nothing was ever proved, no body found. And getting these Mitcham Beat people to talk was like uprooting stumps.

  Some time ago, Waite, sheriff over the entire county, had given up keeping tabs on every beat—more people arrived each season, and now without a damn army of help it was impossible. He’d had miserable luck with deputies over the years—drunks, men who were fast to be bribed or who’d lose their nerve at the first sign of a fight. So now he found it simpler just to deputize a couple of reliable fellows on a temporary basis if things got rough—that way he didn’t expect too much from them and wouldn’t get any back talk. Most outlying communities kept their own rough order anyway, had justices of the peace for the little matters. But some areas, like Mitcham Beat, seemed destined for trouble, and if the soil hadn’t been so damned rich nobody but criminals would live there anyhow.

  He drew King to a stop at the covered bridge and dismounted slowly. He adjusted his sidearm. Good and light now, the sun hot over the treetops behind him. Watchful of snakes, he led the horse down the sloping land to the creek’s edge, their appearance launching a series of bullfrogs out of the grass, one after another farther and farther down the bank like archers firing. King’s front fetlocks sank in the mud as he lowered his muzzle into the water and drank, shaking his head at the water bugs skimming the surface. Waite took off his hat.

  The woods across the creek—beginning of the Bear Thicket—were a snarled overhang of vine, tree, and bush, and for no reason Waite imagined catapulting a donkey or ox into that mess and watching it bounce off the side and land in the water. It looked even more grown up now than it had on his last trip, when he’d investigated the murder of Arch Bedsole, a storekeeper who’d surprised everyone in the county by throwing his name into the race for state representative.

  Bedsole’s father, a longtime resident of Mitcham Beat, had known every man, woman, child, and dog in the area and beyond the area, too, and until his legs gave out from some undiagnosed malady and his health buckled in other, less discernible ways, he and Arch with their “We’re one of you” song and dance had traveled on a mule-drawn buckboard wagon from farm to farm all over the county bad-mouthing the area’s prominent landowners, claiming that they only cared about middle-and upper-class folks and didn’t give a damn about the so-called little man, the out-in-the-field-sunup-till-sundown cotton farmer whose product supported the whole economy. The crop lien system—where a farmer used store credit to finance his crop and paid it and the interest back based on the cotton he produced—made it impossible for the farmer to get ahead, the Bedsoles claimed, and the farmers would find themselves more deeply indebted as each season ended. They’d have been told to expect eight or nine cents a bale, say, but when the harvest came, when the cotton was brought to gin, the price would have often fallen to six or even five cents. The farmers naturally blamed merchants like McCorquodale and saw them as greedy, but Waite knew the markets were set not by lenders here in Clarke County but up in the north, in New York.

  Try telling this to a farmer, though, his profit lopped off by nearly half, his young ones shoeless another winter and the shingles he wanted for his roof a dream for next year.

  Waite had always thought the Bedsole clan more akin to the merchant class of town folks than they were to these rural cotton farmers, yet Ed, Arch, and the rest of them had lived out here in the country and run their store for so long that they’d gained the farmers’ trust. As part of his campaign, Arch had been known to roll up his sleeves and amble out in the field and pick cotton himself—he was a good picker, at that—earning him the nickname Strut. It was said, too, that the Bedsoles knew whiskey makers (or were makers themselves) and traveled with a jug of hooch, and when they left, the farmers were often “campaigned” into a right good drunk.

  Waite had no idea who would’ve won the election, and no one would ever know, either, because a year ago August, a mile from his own store, as the storekeeper rode home from a debate in front of the courthouse against the town candidate—a debate he’d arguably won—someone had ambushed Arch Bedsole. And to Waite’s knowledge the killer still hadn’t been caught.

  He tugged the rein and King resisted—the horse would drink until Revelations—but then relented and allowed Waite to lead him back uphill to the road. He mounted up and they clopped into the darkness of the covered bridge and then into the darkness of the thicket. He wasn’t particularly nervous—no one was expecting him and so he doubted himself in much danger—though the truth was that each time you traveled this route you might be fired upon.

  By what he judged to be nine o’clock he rode through the gate of Tom Hill’s place, a former plantation, a nice spread contained within a barbed-wire fence, a rarity out here—most folks cut their cross boards from trees. The place looked exactly the same as Waite remembered. Hill raised cattle and several polled Herefords stood along the fence as Waite loped past. Beyond them he could see the two-story house—painted the same shade of white as Waite’s—and beyond the house a large barn and outbuildings that had once been slave quarters.

  Last year, seeking Bedsole’s killer, Waite had come here to see Hill, the Mitcham Beat justice of the peace, who resented the sheriff and viewed his questions as evidence that Waite thought him ineffective. Which was true. The only thing of note Hill had reported was that a cousin of Bedsole’s claimed th
at before he died Arch had said that the ambusher or ambushers had been “from town.”

  After seeing Hill, Waite had ridden from one dismal homestead to the next in the hot sun, sweating through his shirt while pregnant wives with stringy hair and scurvish children peered at him as he beckoned the tobacco-spitting farmers in from their rows to ask what they knew of Bedsole’s murder, listening to each man say, “Don’t know,” or “It was a fellow from town’s what I heard,” only to ride to the next place and hear the same damn thing. No surprise: these people distrusted the town law as much or more than the town people distrusted anyone from the country.

  Waite eased down and tied King to a porch post and dusted off his legs with his hat. He stood bent a moment, letting his back loosen, then straightened and walked up the steps to the front door and knocked, remembering that era, forty years before, when a black servant would’ve admitted him. The illusion vanished as Hill’s plump, unsmiling wife answered and asked him in, shushing a pair of girls in pigtails behind her. The woman held a clothbound book—she was likely the only person in the beat with the luxury to read during daylight. Waite asked if he could speak to Tom about some business. Curtly, she told him to wait and disappeared through a pair of double doors, the girls following. An octagonal cabinet clock, cased in fancy carved walnut and sitting atop a parlor table, ticked at the far end of the hall; a high window lit its glass face so Waite couldn’t see what time it gave.

  “Sheriff,” Hill said, coming out of a room behind him.

  Waite turned—neither made a move to shake hands—and followed Hill outside and down the porch steps toward the barn, where he kept his office. In his early forties, the justice had gone completely gray, even his eyebrows, his hair nearly to his collar. He wore house slippers which made a lisping sound going over the dirt.

  In the barn, horses were nickering in Dutch door stalls and a goat bleated from some dark corner. Waite folded his arms as Hill stood on the single block used for a step and unlocked the padlock, then followed him into the office, a narrow room with no ceiling above where the walls ended, just open air to the tin roof, pieces of tack hanging on pegs. Hot in summer, cold in winter, Hill conducted business here, settling disputes, witnessing official acts or, on occasion, marrying folks. Hill indicated that Waite should take one of the chairs across from his stockman’s desk and then raised the window—he’d glassed it—to let in some air. He sat and opened a drawer and withdrew a logbook and wiped it on his pants leg and laid it on the desk between them.

  “You can probably figure out why I’m here,” Waite said. He crossed his legs and took off his hat and hung it on his boot toe. “Now I don’t mean to offer insult by coming into your territory again, but folks are talking and putting the pressure on me. I’m hoping we can help each other.”

  Hill drummed his fingers on his desk.

  Waite fished in his pocket for a notepad and pencil, then leaned up in his chair. “First off, have you found out anything else about who shot Arch Bedsole?”

  “No,” Hill said. “Far as I know, the same folks that killed him has still killed him and he’s still dead.”

  “You still believe it was somebody from Grove Hill?”

  “Or Coffeeville one. Ain’t nothing happened to change my mind.”

  “Who was it said he claimed they was from town? His cousin?”

  “Tooch Bedsole. Owns the store in New Prospect now.”

  “Store Arch had?”

  “Only store out here. Tooch’s house burned down the same night Arch died so he lives in the store now. Got a boy there too.”

  Waite wrote down Tooch Bedsole and underlined it.

  “What about you?” Hill asked. “You ask all your buddies where they was that night?”

  “I did. They’re all accounted for. A good many of ’em was with me, in fact.”

  The two men sat staring at each other until Waite said, “Well. What I need to know next, then, is what you’ve come up with on this Anderson murder.”

  “What I come up with, Sheriff, is this. Nothing.”

  He waited, but Hill seemed to have said all he meant to say.

  “You didn’t go talk to nobody?”

  “Sure I did. You don’t think I do my job?”

  “I didn’t say that, Hill. Don’t get your dander up yet. Just tell me what you dug up.”

  “Nothing. Cause there ain’t nothing to be found. No witnesses, and nobody saw any strangers, so I couldn’t question ’em. Anderson, he had some folks he didn’t get along with, so I went to see them, but they all have alibis. Good ones, too.”

  “What about this gang I keep hearing about? Fellows wearing hoods?”

  “I keep hearing about ’em, too.”

  “Well?”

  Hill looked weary. “I ain’t sure if there’s a gang or if it’s just one or two fellows. Nobody ever sees more than a couple of ’em, so if there is something organized, nobody knows who’s a member and who’s not.” He tapped his logbook. “I’ve investigated a number of occurrences. Fires. Livestock shot. A real mess with the nigger church. Peddler gone missing. But ever time there’s a suspect, he’s always got somebody to say it couldn’t of been him.”

  “Maybe whoever gives the alibi’s part of the gang. Maybe that fellow’s in a hood another night.”

  “Sheriff, them fellows that vouched is fellows I’ve known my whole life. Go to church. Own property. I ain’t fixing to start calling ’em liars cause Joe Anderson’s barn burns down or somebody messes with the niggers.”

  Waite looked past him through the window, where a bull swiped its tail against its flank. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, got his hat, and put it on. He stood up, boards giving beneath his weight. There was a bridle hanging on a nail on the wall and he walked over and took it down, felt its dry leather, and rolled the bit in his fingers. “Well,” he said, and tossed the bridle to the justice, who caught it. “I’ll see you.”

  He left the office and strode past the horses and mounted his own animal and rode off, glad to be done here. Though Hill would deny it, there was plenty in common with these goings-on, at least the events Waite knew about: one of the burned barns had been attached to tenant property belonging to a lawyer in Coffeeville. And a house that had been fired upon belonged to a Grove Hill banker—he’d been trying to sell it for a number of years but no one in town wanted to live so far out. Then there was the “incident” at the colored church, which had rippled back to Grove Hill chiefly because of its strangeness—somebody had carried all the furniture outside and butchered a hog and hung it over the pulpit. Lynched a colored man who came upon them.

  Waite rode east through more high cotton until the land dipped and they entered a grove of water oak, Waite glad for the shade, the sky netted with vines and ivy. When King splashed through a swamp, a haze of mosquitoes enveloped them, Waite slapping half a dozen bloody splotches on his neck and the backs of his hands before he could spur King to a run. Half an hour later, in sunlight again, they flushed a covey of quail from the corner of a field, pausing to watch them scatter, then Waite turned them northwest and felt the land rising beneath them.

  He looked forward to his next stop, where he’d see the old midwife known as the Widow Gates, hers one of the nicer homesteads in the area, a small, sturdy three-room cabin built in the shade of pecan and magnolia trees, an artesian well at the edge of her yard. The old woman was a genius at coaxing things out of the ground and further coaxing the plants to bloom rich, ripe squash, gigantic cucumbers, and tomatoes. Her corn tasseled out before anyone else’s and tasted sweeter, no one knew why. Down below her property ran a creek where the two boys she’d raised swam and fished, fine cold water that made him think of his own youth.

  He looked forward to seeing her boys, too. The old woman had reared them alone after the death of their parents. The older one, William, had often been a burden to her, Waite knew, had gotten into trouble from time to time, stealing a harmonica from McCorquodale’s store once, fighting at school. The
younger one, Macky, reminded Waite of himself as a boy—polite and shy, he seemed happiest when watching his cork bob in a slow creek and was glad to help the old woman with her garden or to wash her birthing implements after she’d brought another baby into the world. Waite and the widow had marveled at how different siblings could be, Waite admitting his sorrow at having had only one son.

  “Be glad you got that one,” she’d said, and he’d agreed.

  For the widow herself had saved the life of Johnny-Earl, and probably the life of Sue Alma, too. Twenty-one years before, the Grove Hill doctor had been called to aid a gunshot victim in Coffeeville just before Sue’s water had broken. This being their fourth child—they had three older daughters—they’d felt at ease at the outset of labor, but Sue began to double over with cramps and when she stood up to go to the bathroom the back of her dress was bloody.

  Waite went for help and found the Widow Gates walking along Main Street, gazing in store windows. Hardly believing his luck, he put her behind him on his horse and rode back with her clinging to his shirt. He remembered how his three girls had cried as Oscar hurried them off to the drugstore for a soda, remembered praying that the screams he heard from the bedroom would stop. Finally the old woman had called him to help and he went in, rolling up his sleeves. What he saw froze his heart. He’d witnessed a world of blood in his life, seen men lose limbs in the war, seen a head and one shoulder swiped off by a cannonball once while the soldier continued to stand, still holding his musket one-handed—and then the musket had fired. He’d seen men dying from his, Waite’s, gun and knife: but nothing would ever compare with the scene in his own bedroom.