Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  Waite drew his knife from his boot and got the blade between them as one of the men dove on him, the robber’s own weight killing him, no sound but a squeak of air escaping his lips as he folded on top of Waite and kicked a time or two before dying. Rolling him aside, Waite hurled himself onto the other man’s back and caught his arm as it raised in the firelight, a knife in its fist. Waite held him and Bit shot him in the chest, then the pair of them spent the rest of the night finishing the whiskey.

  At some point, Bit had said, “You saved my neck, Waite, and I won’t forget such a debt.”

  Over the years they’d seen each other only a dozen or so times, Bit making his home out here on the river, distilling whiskey, catching fish, existing without the need for town, or people, or law. Waite had let him alone, knowing the old man would keep to himself, visiting when business drew him near, spending a night on Bit’s porch, drinking his whiskey, telling the same stories over and over—the one about the soldier from Spanish Fort who had no horse and made his tall buddy carry him on his shoulders each time they crossed a river or stream. Waite always left with a headache and a good supply of drink.

  Now he went back outside, down the sloping land to the riverbank, looking for Bit’s skiff. Gone.

  Back in the cabin, he sat on the bed and leaned against the wall. Within minutes he’d fallen asleep.

  A hand covered Waite’s mouth. He jumped awake, his arms flung out, feeling for his pistol. The cabin pitch-dark.

  “Billy.”

  A familiar, hoarse voice.

  “Bit?”

  The hand let go. “Yeah,” he rasped, “it’s me.”

  Waite sat up, he could smell his friend as the man backed away, giving him room. Fish and sweat. He could hear his feet on the dirt floor, though in such darkness nothing could be seen.

  “How’d you know I was here?” Waite asked, blinking, pushing on his chest to quell his rabbit of a heart.

  “Seen your horse.”

  Waite had found his pistol butt and now drew the gun from beneath the pillow, where he’d laid it. Quietly, he felt its cylinder to make sure it was still loaded.

  “Hell,” Bit said. “Billy, I’d not empty your gun.”

  Waite let himself breathe. “I know, Bit. You just caught me off-guard.” He swung his feet to the floor and stood, careful not to bump his head on the low ceiling timbers.

  “Could we get a fire going,” Waite asked, “so I could see your ugly face and we could find us a drink?”

  No answer. Waite strained to get a fix on where his friend had gone, discomfited by the feeling of being unmapped in such blackness. Bit’s voice came from beside the window. “There’s been no fire here for a month, Billy. Nor no whiskey neither.”

  Waite focused on the voice. Outside was less dark and now Bit’s shape lay vaguely outlined, but only if he looked to the left or right of it. “What’s going on?” he asked.

  “I’m in a war,” Bit said.

  “With who?”

  There came no answer, just the brush of clothing and rhythm of breath.

  “Who with, Bit?”

  There came the whisper of dirt as he moved, Waite couldn’t tell which direction.

  “Well, I wish I could tell you.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “Cause they wear hoods on they heads.”

  “So you’ve seen ’em.”

  “Seen ’em? Hell, I done shot at ’em and been shot at by them. They want me to sign a damn paper swearing my loyalty to ’em. Say if I don’t sign they’ll get me.”

  “Are they the ones killed Anderson?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I’d guess so. He wouldn’t sign, neither, I expect. Though I reckon our reasons for not is about as far apart as reasons can be.”

  Waite asked other questions but Bit remained silent. In the end, he only said, “Y’all from the towns ride out here on your horses or in your wagons when you get crazy enough for some whiskey, and you find me or one of the other fellows makes it. Or you come when you want a whore. But this group of fellows in they hoods is bent on taking over. They done got all the other shiners. Done scared most of the niggers off. Got help from a lot of other fellows that don’t go about in hoods with ’em but feels like they do about things. I’m one of the only ones they ain’t beat, yet, and they’re gone keep coming, till they get me, or I get them.”

  “What you think they mean to do?”

  But Bit said nothing else, and Waite had stood for some time longer before he realized Bit was gone. He felt his pockets for a box of matches and struck one. The lit cabin, empty except for him, seemed even smaller in the dark, which fluttered around him like curtains.

  OVER THE DITCH

  September 1897 to July 1898

  MACK AND WILLIAM LAY ELBOW TO ELBOW on their bellies in the leaves beside the road, not too far from Bedsole’s store, each armed with a weapon that had belonged to his dead father, William the long single-barrel sixteen-gauge and Mack the Colt revolver, a loose-feeling weapon with screws that never seemed tight enough, its wooden grips, once etched with minute checkering, as soft now as a velvet deer antler in his fist.

  Clouds walled out the moon, the darkness around them a yawning, swallowing thing—as dark as the inside of a cow, the widow would say—and Mack suspected that in such overwhelming night they could have jumped in the road and waved their arms and been as hidden as they were in this noxious brush. His leg had started to tingle from disuse, but he let it alone and made a game of not moving, of lying still as long as he could, imagining he was dead, pulled apart by buzzards, melting into the ground, passing through the tubes of earthworms, then flying away in spoors on the air.

  Far down in the tunnels of his bowels, there came a rumbling he knew to be a fart, which seemed appropriate, for he’d heard the dead farted, and when this one blatted out into the open air it seemed nearly as loud as a shotgun shot. Far away in the night an owl answered and Mack giggled back to life until William’s elbow jabbed him in the side.

  “Hell, it ain’t like there’s any victim to hear us,” Mack said.

  “Macky,” William said. “Shut your pie hole.”

  He rolled onto his back, hands behind his head.

  Her figure came to his mind’s eye as it did often, from the nights the widow was gone to birth a baby, nights when they’d lit out and trotted two miles by moonlight and rowed the river in a skiff to stand at the edge of the swamp and watch her windows glow with candlelight. How she moved past the glass, straight hair down her back, her neck bare and white. The room tiny and clean, her plain dress, the things that went on in there, her and a huffing man, her knees in the air, the mattress jingling.

  “Will?”

  “What is it?”

  “You believe she’ll wonder where we got the money?”

  “She won’t care where we get the damn money, long as we got it, Macky. Hell, half her customers probably do the same thing we’re fixing to try—”

  The distant clop of horse hooves silenced them. No one they knew could afford a horse, so this was it. William clutched Mack’s shoulder and whispered, “Remember what I told you, Macky. I’m gone do all the talking.”

  They heard the chink of bridle and the squeak of saddle leather. Clip of shoe on a rock in the road.

  William rose from the leaves. Mack held his breath and felt for the torch and matches. It seemed like a very long time, the hoofbeats nearly on top of him, before William’s calm, disguised voice said, “Stop that goddamn nag, mister.”

  The rider must have been deep in thought or dozing in the saddle, for he sucked in his breath in a fashion more of awakening than fear. Later, as he lay in bed, Mack would see this as the first sign of trouble. What stranger would ride in these parts asleep, or even relaxed?

  There came no sound except the horse’s breathing.

  Then, “Nag, you say?” It was a man’s deep voice, filled with great irony, humor even, followed by the horse nickering and stamping. “Who by god is th
at? What’s your name, boy?”

  “Buck,” William said.

  “And Jess,” Mack called from the bushes, his voice cracking.

  “My country ass,” the man said. “You girls go play highwaymen someplace else.”

  Mack stood up, suddenly dizzy, then buckled under a right leg fast asleep. He landed on his left knee and the big pistol fired, flaring and lurching in his hand, a world bared by lightning, then gone.

  His ears rang. The crickets he’d forgotten hearing had hushed, and now the only thing larger than this ocean of night was the distant drumming of the horse escaping. An instant of relief. It was over. Failed, but done. The whore flickered in his mind, a long way away. He put his hand to his chest and felt his heart hammering at his ribs.

  “Macky? You all right?”

  He still had the pistol aimed. He dropped it to his side. “Yeah,” he said. “I believe I am. I’m all right.”

  “Why didn’t you light the torch? How come you was to shoot?”

  “I didn’t go to.”

  “Well, hell,” William said. “We best scoot on to the house. Case that fellow comes back with some friends.”

  Mack nodded, started toward his brother’s voice.

  His foot caught on something heavy and he tripped, fell to all fours. He scrabbled back, hands and knees sticky and warm, and bumped into William and stopped there, his shoulders against the comforting solidity of his brother’s knees.

  William patted his head. “Lord-a-mighty,” he said.

  Then they were running.

  “It could’ve been anybody,” said William.

  “Anybody killed or anybody that killed him?”

  “Either one.”

  “What’re we gone do?”

  “Nothing, Macky. We ain’t doing a damn thing. Just get up in the morning and finish that fence, like nothing happened. That’s what we’re gone do.”

  They lay in their beds, sheets flung back. Still no moon outside. Nothing in the world it seemed but their two voices in the room. Mack said, “We could take off.”

  “You want to leave Granny?”

  The answer was silence. The window was opened and the soft night chirring went on uninterrupted, ignored.

  “Besides, if we run, they’ll know it was you and me done it. Way I see it now, what’s to lead anybody to us?”

  Mack raised up on an elbow. “Who you think it was, that fellow?”

  “Some stranger, probably. Nobody around here. You know anybody rides a damn horse?”

  Mack lay back.

  “Will?”

  “What.”

  “Mr. Billy rides a horse.”

  “It wasn’t him.”

  “How you know?”

  William sighed and said what Mack had already told himself, that the sheriff didn’t come out here much.

  “You think we ought to tell her?” Mack said. “It was a accident. I didn’t go to kill him.”

  “No, I don’t think we ought to tell her. Killing’s a man’s business, and guess what. You just stepped across the ditch into being a full-fledged, full-growed man.”

  “You make it sound like it’s a ditch you done been crossed.”

  “I believe you yanked me over with you.”

  A hot breeze swept the odor of sulfur water from the well in their yard and the quick thought of the whore. But just as quickly she was gone from his mind. He closed his eyes. He opened them. He saw no difference, as if he were blind. He lay for a long time, puzzling over what it meant to be dead. Was it as simple as Heaven or Hell? Gold streets like the Bible promised and church singing? Or was it high-licking flames throwing grinning devils at you until time ended? Or maybe just nothing, the conclusion to your part in the world, like lying in a dark pine box forever, going to sleep and never waking.

  “Will?”

  “What is it.”

  “I killed a man.”

  His brother made a sound like a laugh. “You sure as hell did. Now go on to sleep.”

  William’s breathing grew regular, but Mack stared ceilingward. How could Will go to sleep so fast? A stranger’s body out there in the road draining of its blood and the killer lying here in this room, if anything more alive than ever, adrenaline surging through his body like a stampede of horses, as if in murdering a man you got the energy out of his blood. He linked his fingers behind his neck.

  In his imagination he returned to the road, replaced himself with William and put the pistol in William’s grip and had William do the shooting. How would that feel? To know your brother had killed a man? You would be an accomplice, nearly as guilty as the shooter, but what would your ultimate sin be? Would it be loyalty? Is that what you’d call it? You would never turn in your brother. No man could do that. For your brother you would tell lies to the sheriff and repeat those same lies on the courthouse stand, your hand resting on the Bible. Your mother would do the same, had she lived, and your father, had he. The widow too. And Sheriff Billy Waite and Justice of the Peace Tom Hill and every man in the jury and every face in the crowd would do the same, and would expect you to, too. Your only sin would be that you were your brother’s keeper. Which is no sin. So now William slept the sleep of the righteous, chest swelling and sinking and swelling and eyes easily shut and mouth opened as if all that lay behind him on this night were a cleanly plowed field.

  But Mack…

  He looked across the darkness to where his brother had begun to snore lightly and knew that he and William had stepped over two different ditches at the moment of the killing. William would live the same lie as Mack, but for different reasons. William’s guilt would free him while Mack’s would call to him from the darkest hollows of the night—at any moment there could be composed from the darkness a torch-lit group of lawmen or kin of the dead man, and Mack could be wrestled from the house, a noose stretched over his neck and tightened, the other end looped around a limb and hands pulling him into the air, his legs kicking, face going blue, pants darkening with piss.

  He sat up.

  Was this the cost of killing a person? Your sleeplife? Your peace? A heart so kneaded and stretched it no longer held the shape of a heart?

  Now Mack understood. He had murdered a man. Murdered. A man. And in doing so, he had condemned himself to a life of thoughtfulness.

  “Will?” he whispered into the darkness.

  “Will?

  “Will?”

  When they woke in the morning the widow was gone and they didn’t see her all day, neither knew why. Neither was surprised, though, as she often disappeared on birthing missions unbidden—she would simply look up from the table and say, “Anna Bradford’s due,” and rise with her supper unfinished and go across the floor, pausing only to lift her midwife’s bag from its nail. As boys they’d accompanied her on these trips but now, since they’d grown older, she had them stay home, saying women didn’t like boys or men not their husbands to hear the wails they made as their babies split their way into the world of air.

  The dog, heavy with puppies, lay in the yard in sunlight while they sat on the porch. Mack hadn’t slept and the skin beneath his eyes seemed weighted with sand.

  “You want to walk over to the store?” William asked. “See what we can see?”

  Before he could answer, the dog rolled to her feet, growling. Somebody was coming.

  War Haskew. Holding a shotgun aloft, he rode his mule into their yard with a croaker sack for a blanket and dismounted and as the mule wandered to the trough and drank, Haskew sat on the edge of the porch scratching the dog’s head and told them Arch Bedsole had been shot dead. That Tooch, his cousin, had called for a meeting tonight, at the store.

  “Who done it?” William asked casually.

  “Don’t nobody know.” Haskew looked at his mule. “They say he burned down his house, Tooch did.”

  “How come?”

  “Mad, I reckon.” Haskew rose. “Y’all boys be there,” he said. “Tooch wants ever’ available man.”

  William nodded and
they watched Haskew cross the yard, climb onto his mule and wave, then ride away.

  The boys waited fifteen minutes before William said, “Let’s go on down to the creek. This setting here ain’t doing nobody any good.”

  On the large rock, their lines going south with the current, William spat into the water.

  “They know I did it,” Mack said.

  “How come? How come you, Macky? You liked Arch as much as anybody else.”

  “What if they ask me?”

  “Just say you don’t know nothing about it.”

  “I ain’t as good a liar as you.”

  “Listen,” William said, “the main fellow has to believe a lie is the liar hisself. Then it ain’t a lie no more. It’s the truth. For you and me, the God’s truth from now on is that we don’t know nothing about Arch Bedsole being shot.”

  “What about Tooch?”

  “What about him?”

  Mack’s line twitched and he looked at it, surprised.

  “Hold it still,” his brother said.

  He lowered the tip to the face of the water, his arm tense, the line slack.

  “Wait’ll he starts to run,” William said, and no sooner had he said it than the line shot away as the fish made for the tangle of submerged limbs across the creek. When the line was taut Mack yanked it and the pole bent double. He leapt to his feet, swinging the line over William’s head, and began to backpedal up the bank. William tossed his pole aside and clambered into the water to his knees, pulling the line in hand over hand. He raised the gray-blue body of a foot-long grinnel and hauled it out onto the sand, put his bare foot on its tail, and carefully picked it up behind its head.