Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “That’s a good little speech,” Bedsole said. He took a cigar from his own shirt pocket and put it in his lips. “What’s it mean?”

  “Means I’m fixing to get to the bottom of some things.”

  “Pleased to hear it. When you find the son-of-a-bitch that killed my cousin, let me know so I can come in for the hanging.”

  “You’ll be the first,” Waite said. He went down the steps and looked back. “One more thing. That boy ought to go see the widow. It ain’t right him not seeing her. Next time I come out here, I expect him to have paid her a visit or two.”

  Bedsole turned and went inside the store. Waite heard the door lock.

  Dusk found him filling his canteen in a slow creek at the bottom of a ravine. He sat on the raised roots of a magnolia and unwrapped one of Sue Alma’s biscuits and chewed thoughtfully, watching shadows he knew were small largemouth bass below the surface of the creek water. About the time of day for them to start biting. He flicked a crumb out and several of the fish rose to inspect it as it dissolved, then minnows came in like flashes of light and the bread was gone. A mosquito landed on the water in the shade of a broom of pine needles and skated across the top tethered to its reflection, then a sudden uprush and the bug was gone.

  Waite ate three biscuits and some jerked beef. He wished he’d brought a bottle and had half a mind to poke about looking for a still. But he didn’t. With King unsaddled and hobbled, nibbling at a clump of grass, he slept on the ground and woke with his back feeling better than it had in a damn month.

  Let it be a lesson, he mused. You hand in that badge, get ready to stiffen up sitting on your porch peeling apples, smoking cigars, and listening to Sue Alma gab about bird feeders.

  The sun reached over the horizon to find him walking the land. Around ten he shot a rabbit with his pistol and built a fire and cooked it on a spit held by forked limbs. He watched his fire burn and made coffee and drank it and ate the rabbit while listening to every sound and cataloging them: squirrels barking, a hawk’s cry, wingbeat of an Indian hen, rasp of a diamondback’s belly over fallen leaves.

  In the afternoon Joe Anderson’s widow and two daughters had little to say. Waite had finally found their house after trying two other farms and went to the opened door and saw them still dressed in funeral black and packing, a wagon half loaded in the yard, three somber-looking blond boys with enormous ears dragging a mahogany sideboard down the steps. When Waite asked Anderson’s widow where they planned to go, the woman said back home.

  “Where’s that?”

  “Wilcox County.” She pointed to a table beneath the front window, iron pots and dishes full of collards, peas, corn, brought by neighbors. Flies swirled in and out of the light. “There ain’t nobody left to eat it ’fore it spoils.”

  At his request, they sat with Waite on their porch, the mother hanging a black veil over her face before stepping outside, the plain-faced girls—ages fifteen or sixteen—sitting on the edge of the porch with their legs hanging over.

  He pried gently. Had men in hoods come by?

  They had, she said. Some weeks ago.

  Could she tell him about it?

  “Two of ’em. They come up to the porch and beat the dogs off. Stood there waiting till Joe went out. He had his gun but soon as he stepped on the porch there was another one come up behind him—”

  “So there were three in all?”

  She nodded.

  “Could there have been more you didn’t see?”

  She reckoned so. Said they’d demanded he sign a paper, in blood cut from his hand. Said if he didn’t, they’d get him. Get him, they said. But he didn’t sign. Flat refused to. They’d looked at each other in their hoods. For a moment it seemed they might shoot him and come inside. She couldn’t believe it—watching through the sliver between the drapes, the girls behind her clasping each other—how he stood there while they held guns on him and him reciting verses from the Bible. Proverbs, always his favorite. She hated him at that moment. What about the three of them—she wanted to know—his women, nothing but the wood of walls and the cotton of their dresses between them and these hooded things? She wanted to say the devil with your principles, Joe Anderson. Sign in your blood. Sign in what little amount it will take to write your name, for how much will you sign in later? With my blood? Your daughters’ blood?

  But in the end the hooded men left. Left him standing alone with the last Proverb dying on his lips as they crossed through the cotton, stopping to shoot Joe’s dogs, saying he had a week to think it over.

  “Go on,” Waite said.

  “Didn’t wait no week. First they poisoned our well. Then they pulled down a fence and let our cow out, we almost never got her back. They’d come of a night and shoot in the house.”

  “Where was Tom Hill while this was going on?”

  “He come over. Looked is about all he did. Looked at the dead dogs. Down the well. Looked where Joe had fixed the fence. He spent three nights waiting for ’em, but they didn’t come those nights. But the next night, the barn burned.”

  Waite scribbled in his notebook. Did Joe have enemies they knew of? Anybody who’d want him hurt? Dead?

  “Maybe that Lev James. As mean a man ever lived.”

  “Anybody else?”

  No one. Joe was a good churchgoing deacon. You never heard a better singing voice in your life. Bass or tenor either one.”

  The three big-eared boys, barefooted and filthy, stumbled out, struggling with the weight of a grandfather clock, its pendulum clacking against the glass.

  Waite looked out at the fields of flourishing cotton. “Who’ll harvest the crop after you go?”

  “Mr. McCorquodale. He held our lien.”

  “Will he buy you out?”

  She said she didn’t know but she bet not. Probably McCorquodale would cheat them. Joe had handled such things.

  They sat in silence, the women watching their belongings dragged past, not seeming to care if a bedpost got scratched on the way down the steps, not even looking up when a long, flat drawer slid out of the curtain-top desk and spilled papers over the porch and into the yard. Waite rose and hurried past the slack-jawed boys and began to collect the contents of the drawer as best he could, chasing letters and newspapers across the dirt, scattering chickens, into the cotton field.

  Back on the porch he aided the farm boys with a table. As they stood at the wagon, the table secured, he asked the older boy to tell him his name.

  He shrugged.

  “You boys got tongues in your mouths?”

  The middle one stuck his out. “We don’t supposed to talk nor listen to you,” he said.

  Waite noticed that he had dull eyes. Snot crusted in his nostrils.

  “Shut up, Arnold,” his brother said.

  “Who says you ain’t supposed to talk to me?” Waite asked Arnold, holding up a finger to silence his brother.

  “You the law,” the youngest one said. “The law’s bad.”

  “Who told you that?” Waite asked.

  “Daddy.”

  “Don’t y’all say nothing else,” the older boy snapped. “Get on inside.”

  Arnold clomped up the steps after his younger brother, pausing to look at one of the daughter’s ankles, which she promptly swept beneath her skirt.

  “Who’s your daddy?” Waite asked the oldest.

  “I ain’t got to tell you,” he said, following his brothers.

  Waite had a good mind to go inside and whip the three of them. Instead he returned to his seat on the porch and tapped his foot.

  “Who’re them young ones?” he asked.

  “They belong to Floyd Norris, down the road a ways.”

  Waite knew Norris by reputation. Borrowed from McCorquodale to finance his cotton crop, one of the best growers out here, handling six or seven acres. Him and Anderson both. By all accounts decent men. He waited for the boys to come back out with the next load.

  “They gone,” Mrs. Anderson said.

  “G
one? How you know?” He leaned and peered in the opened door straight through the house to where the back door stood ajar. He noted that three of the dishes—a plate of fried chicken among them—were gone.

  You’re losing your instincts, Billy, he thought.

  So despite his sore back he finished loading their heavier things by himself, a large canvas-covered stateroom trunk filled—it seemed—with bricks, a rolled-up rug that he carried over his shoulder like a dead man, and finally a strange piece called a Napoleon chair, the name of which he knew only because Oscar had one in his office, by the fireplace. The girls helped inside, packing away glasses in newspaper and laying them in wooden boxes while the mother stayed on the porch, rocking.

  When he was done, Waite stood over her, unrolling his sleeves. He looked out at the charred remains of the barn. Curiously, a milking stool sat amidst the ashes.

  IV

  Floyd Norris rose from where he’d been pulling water from his well and watched the sheriff ride out of the cotton on his tall horse. A cigar poking from his mouth, Waite pulled the animal up and stretched his legs in the saddle. He said, “Good evening.”

  The dogs were in a fever, leaping up alongside the sheriff’s legs, wetting his pants leg with their drool. He swatted at them with his hat.

  Floyd whistled and pointed toward the porch and the hounds clambered up the steps and sat, their glittering eyes fixed on him, their lips smiling.

  The sheriff folded his fingers over the pommel of his saddle. “Them’s mighty well-behaved hounds you got there, Norris.”

  From inside, his wife peered through the hole in the wall, her hand upheld to keep three boys silent. When the baby fussed and wiggled his arms and legs, she undid her dress and her teat plopped out and she stuffed her nipple into his mouth to quiet him.

  “Could you answer me a few questions?” the sheriff asked.

  Floyd had gone back to lowering the bucket into the well. “If I can.”

  “Oh, you can. How many boys you got?”

  Floyd drew a bucketful of water out and poured it into the washtub. “Three last time I checked,” he said. “And a baby.”

  The sheriff was gazing out at the high cotton. “When you plan to start picking?”

  “Oh—” He cast an eye skyward. “Week.”

  “Them boys help you?”

  He nodded, dropped the bucket into the mouth of the well. A splash far below.

  “Your wife help, too?”

  He nodded.

  “What you use for fertilizer?”

  “Guano.”

  “You get it over at Bedsole’s store?”

  “Naw. I borrowed from McCorquodale’s, so I got to get the goods from him, too.”

  “Anybody been by here? Strangers?”

  He shook his head, pulling the bucket up hand over hand, blue veins rising in his forearms.

  “Could you tell me what you did the day Joe Anderson was killed?”

  He got the full bucket out and set it on the lip of the well and screwed his forehead, his eyeballs lolled up to the left. “Yeah,” he said, “played some dominoes with Lev James and a young fellow called William Burke. Drank a little whiskey.”

  “Dominoes.”

  He nodded.

  “Who won?”

  “Lev.”

  “Where’d you get the liquor?” Waite looked around. “Don’t look like you can afford the luxury.”

  “I can’t.” He emptied the bucket and dropped it into the well. “They brung it.”

  “If,” the sheriff said, ashing the cigar, “there’s something else you want to tell me, I can promise you you’ll be safe. In no time at all there’d be several certain parties in the jailhouse and you’d be in no danger. It could be the end of this chapter in your all’s life.”

  Inside, his wife shook her head. What kind of ignorant fools did this lawman think they were? Did he think Floyd would turn over his friends? And even if he did, how could anybody arrest them all, when nobody was sure who they were? Or how many. There’d been a meeting at the church months ago. Joe Anderson had said, All we got to do is tell the sheriff. Then it’s his problem. And someone else had said, Tell him what? We don’t even know who they are. There could be some of ’em here, now. They’d all gotten quiet, then. Everybody looking at each other.

  “There ain’t nothing else,” Floyd said.

  The sheriff looked about at the well, the trough, the leaning barn, the endless white fields. He seemed at a loss.

  “Your boys has got some strange notions about lawmen,” he said.

  Floyd didn’t stop dragging the bucket up.

  “Thinks the law’s bad,” Waite added.

  Floyd paused and squinted up at him, then set back to work.

  Waite watched his downturned face as he pulled at the rope, then looked at the hornet’s-nest gray wall of the house. If he saw her eye centered in the space between the logs, he didn’t let on.

  “I’ll see you,” the sheriff said, and turned and rode off with a plume of dust rising into the sky. The dogs came down the steps and stood smelling the earth where the horse had stood.

  “You boys get on,” he said, clicking his teeth, and they disappeared beneath the house.

  Inside, his wife rested her head against the wall and closed her eyes. Later she planned to take the dominoes left by the hooded men and throw them one at a time into the creek, where they could grow moldy with algae and grit and be a corruption only to the goggle-eyed bream and the whiskered catfish sucking along the bottom.

  V

  After visiting Norris, Waite talked to a few other farmers and learned nothing. He found War Haskew and William Burke patching Haskew’s barn roof and sat aback the horse talking up at them. He told William he ought to go see about the widow and the boy spat tobacco juice and promised he would. He asked if they knew where Lev James was but they didn’t. In the early evening he ran across Massey Underwood who was so drunk he fell off his mule. When Waite asked him what he knew about a group of hooded outlaws Underwood grinned and said, “I’ll tell you one thing I know, Waite. I know they name.”

  Waite grew excited. “What is it?”

  “Call they selves Hell-at-the-Breech, what I hear.”

  “Where you hear it from?”

  He was struggling to get back on his mule, which was swatting him with its tail.

  “Hear what?” Underwood asked.

  And that was all he said.

  Maybe I should’ve gone to see old Bit first, Waite thought, as he dismounted and slid his rifle from its scabbard and levered in a round and half-cocked the hammer. He felt safer now, near Coffeeville, Mitcham Beat miles behind him. He looped King’s reins around a solid limb and felt in his knapsack for a carrot for the horse, then fed it into the long hot snout, the thick lips wetting his fingers.

  “Good boy,” he whispered. “I won’t be long.”

  Below, he could hear the cluck of the river, smell its fishy wind, too. See its dull brown shimmer through empty spaces between the trees. He was glad to be here, eager to see his old friend, taste his whiskey, and eat whatever the old man would grill over the coals. Bit had a way with wild mushrooms—in an iron skillet with a slab of lard he could bring the holy spirit out of a deer’s rump.

  Carefully, Waite made his way down the incline with his rifle in one hand, clinging to limbs and tree trunks with the other. A couple of chipmunks chased each other over the face of a large flat rock, the pursuer stopping as Waite passed and standing on its hind legs with its head cocked at him. A red-tailed hawk called from atop a high tree and when Waite looked back the chipmunk had vanished.

  Presently he came to the first sign, white-painted letters on a board, nailed to an oak: NO TRISPASING. There were others: FURIAS DAWGS ABOWT, LOOK BEHIND U. Waite grinned and went a few more paces, stepping over a fallen log covered in ragwort. He moved aside a fern and the river cabin’s wall appeared in the distance. Because Bit wasn’t expecting him, he knew it’d be better to announce himself. “Ol
d man!” he hollered. “You got a spot of coffee for a war buddy?”

  No response.

  He called louder. “Got no kindness for the man saved your life?”

  Still nothing.

  “Don’t make me regret it.”

  Perhaps he was on the river. Waite made a lot of intentional noise as he approached the cabin, crunching leaves, whistling, coughing. Kept his rifle down. The place looked deserted, though. He knocked, not yet alarmed, then pulled the latch that opened the door and lit the floor around his shadow.

  Empty. The ceiling was low—as his name indicated, Bit was a slight man and had built the place for himself alone. Same table as always, centering the room. A dusty tin cup sitting in front of a chair, one leg mended with tightly wrapped ivy. Waite looked around, still standing in the door. The gun rack was empty. Ought to be a rifle there, or a sixteen-gauge shotgun. Bit didn’t usually take both out at the same time. In one corner was the rickety homemade bed, shred of a blanket on its ticking.

  Waite ducked and stepped inside. Something slithered up a corner wall, gone before he could tell what it was. Dank smell of cold ash. He cast about the room, then went to the window and with his rifle inched the shutter open. Ferns. Spanish moss.

  He and Bit had met twenty years back, when a couple of fellows from Mitcham Beat had robbed a store—after shooting a young clerk in the throat—and escaped into the Bear Thicket, so thick even then it was said a snake had to grease itself up with lard to pass through and beetles just took the road. Aware of Bit’s reputation as a soldier in the War, his knowledge of the thicket, and his skill as a tracker, Waite had sought him; but only after hearing the gruesome details of the shooting of the clerk, a boy fourteen years old, did Bit agree. They’d hacked their way into the thicket with his three deputies, but within a day the deputies had gone down next to a creek with a malady that left them vomiting and shitting and shivering with fever.

  Waite and Bit had gone on alone. Before a campfire in a clearing, the dogs tied and pulling at a beaver carcass, Bit produced a jar and he and Waite had exchanged war stories, delighted at the discovery that they’d both fought at Nashville in ’64—Bit from the 36th Regiment and Waite the 38th. After the battle, remnants of their regiments had come together and they’d known the same lieutenant, a man whose stutter only showed itself in the quiet moments between rounds of fighting. Bit did a damn good impression of the man and they laughed, then grew somber before the fire as they recalled the bullet that took the lieutenant’s life, entering his face just below his right eye. Neither knew where he’d been buried, if he’d been buried. For a long time after that they’d sat in silence, little else but the night passing around them with its clicking and chirrs, the stars and moon overhead ceilinged out by the foliage. Presently they got to talking again, the jar half gone, dogs snoring, and were trying to recall the name of a tall bearded private when the two robbers rushed out of the darkness.