by Tom Franklin
William’s line was running now, and Mack dropped his pole to grab William’s and hauled forth an even bigger fish, William shaking his head and calling his little brother not just a robber of money and a killer of Bedsole but a damn grinnel-thief as well.
“Once a man goes bad he’s all bad,” William said, stringing the first fish and then the second. He wet his hands in the creek, flicked his fingers dry. They rebaited their hooks and sat back down, a hot breeze rippling the water and tugging at their lines, rattling branches overhead.
Something splashed in the creek and Mack jumped. The grinnel pulling at the stringer.
“Lord,” he said, his breath shallow, mouth full of hot spit. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. He dropped his pole, the tip splashing in the creek. He leaned forward. Oh God, he had killed Arch Bedsole. He gagged. Something had to come out of him. He began to sob.
William lowered his head. He lay his pole across his knees and reached and raised Mack’s out of the water and set it on the ground. He looked behind them, upstream, down. Mack lay back and covered his face with both forearms, his whole body shaking. He turned to his side, away from his brother, and drew his knees to his body and said, “No, no, no,” and kept saying it.
William stared straight ahead. Then he said, “Go on cry. This one time. This time right here and now, and then never again. You hear me?”
At the store a number of men stood in the dirt yard and on the porch and in the croquet court. Someone had built a fire from logs beneath the shed and several of them congregated around it, hands in their pockets, their collars upturned against the wind.
Tooch Bedsole went slowly past them on the horse, not looking at them but at the store, a long narrow building made of logs and tin with a stone chimney at the back, plank steps up to the uneven porch, and glass windows in front. Twin sheds built along the sides like wilted wings, an attic window overlooking the cotton field.
On the porch Lev James, a stocky bearded man, stood from where he’d been sitting on the steps and took the horse by its bridle.
“Tooch,” he said.
The man swung from the saddle and gave him the reins. “This everbody?”
“Everbody you can trust.”
Tooch squinted in the fading light, looking from face to face as they amassed before him, dirt-poor farmers all but a few, some holding decrepit rifles or wired-together shotguns, one a rusted Confederate infantry officer’s sword, its point snapped off. A sorry army, this.
“I count fifteen,” he said. “Including you, Lev.”
“Hell, you can count me twice, mad as I am.”
“We’ll get to that.”
As Tooch stood over them, Mack saw the bloodstains on his white shirt. In his pocket they saw the ivory grips of a revolver. He was no cotton farmer. He never had been.
They huddled in toward the porch.
Tooch rubbed his eyes, red from smoke and sleeplessness, with the heels of his hands. He blinked and seemed about to speak, but instead narrowed his eyes at where William and Mack stood. Both were armed, the same weapons they’d used in their robbery attempt.
“William Burke,” Tooch said. “How old are you, boy?”
“Nineteen in December.”
Tooch turned to Mack. “You?”
“Near—” His voice a squawk. “Near ’bout fifteen.”
“You can stay,” Tooch said to William. To Mack he said, “You can scat. Tonight ain’t no time for children.”
The boy lowered his eyes.
“Get on now,” Tooch said.
William punched him in the shoulder. “You heard him, Macky.”
Cheeks stinging, he left as ordered, but in the dark sandy road he stopped. He waited, holding the pistol. Then he turned and backtracked and hid in the cotton field outside the rim of firelight on his elbows and knees and listened to what he could.
“Tooch,” War Haskew said, “we got a question for you.”
“Go on ask,” he said.
“What do you intend to do about the killing of your cousin?”
Tooch drew deeply on his cigar and let the smoke out so slowly and for such a long time it seemed he was on fire inside and his lungs were a bellows.
“It’s your place,” said Huz Smith. “Whoever killed him, they got to pay. We’ll help you. All we can.”
“If we was to kill everbody who’s guilty,” Tooch said, “we’d have to slaughter the whole town of Grove Hill.”
The men looked at one another.
“What the hell’s that mean?” Lev James asked.
“It means the folks that killed Arch is town folks, one and all. It means they knew Arch was running for office, and it meant they thought he might just win. If we’re gone level things with the folks responsible for killing my cousin, we’re gone have to level the whole goddamn town of Grove Hill.”
For a moment there was utter silence. Then the sounds of the night seemed to regain themselves, crickets, cicadas, whippoorwills, owls.
“How you level a whole town?” Floyd Norris asked.
“We’ve known each other a long time,” Tooch said, looking from man to man. “I trust most of you fellows, and I hope you trust me. This here is the first time I’m going to invite anybody who ain’t comfortable with certain things to leave. What I’m gone talk about, starting here, is outside the law. If any one of you is nervous about killing, I invite you to go on home right now, but I warn you: Don’t speak of this to nobody.”
Joe Anderson, one of the few unarmed men, lifted his hand and said that nothing would be gained by killing except more killing, and other voices were raised in both agreement and disagreement, and soon yelling had erupted. Yelling which settled down only when Anderson and four others stalked off, shaking their heads and grumbling, looking back to where Tooch stood on the porch, arms folded.
The men who stayed—William among them—gathered closer to the porch. Tooch came down the steps, and as the moon rose and the air grew cooler still a jug surfaced and someone prized out its cob stopper and they all knelt around the fire passing the whiskey, their voices low, the things they said things that Mack couldn’t hear from the cotton stalks rustling around him. Flat on his belly with his pistol in one hand and his hat in the other, he tried to slide in through the rows and listen, but when he got too close Tooch paused in what he was saying and raised his head up out of the pack, his face white in the moonlight but his eye sockets dark as snake-holes. He seemed to be looking right at Mack, who began to slide back. In the trees beyond the field he pulled on his hat and got to his feet and brushed the pine straw and dirt from his overalls. Stealing a look across the field behind him, where spots of fire watched him like eyes from the cave of men over it, he stuffed the pistol into his pocket and made himself walk, not run, home.
At dawn he drowned their dog’s litter.
Within two days: a man dead at his hand and six puppies as well. The puppies, had they lived, would have gone on to live as dogs do—on the porches of people or under houses or feral in the woods—and then to die as dogs die, beneath the wheel of a wagon or rabid and frothing or from a bullet to the brain.
Men were more complicated—gone now were all the repercussions of Arch Bedsole’s life, all the work he would do with his hands, the things he would sell, the animals he would kill, women he would love, children he would sire and raise and beat or not beat. He was dead and there was no way to bring him back. Mack would always have that burden, would forever carry it in him, no matter how long or short he lived.
The next time he saw Tooch Bedsole was at Arch’s funeral. A preacher who’d lost an arm and a leg to the War spoke of a good man smote down in his prime, of a generous heart, of the danger of other men seeking vengeance. He said he’d heard rumor of a group of men organizing with thoughts of revenge, and he said that vengeance was the Lord’s and His alone, that the guilty man or men would find themselves facing the Almighty on a fateful day, Arch there at His side, and on that day would immortal justice strike with the v
igor of a diamondback, fangs as long and curved as the infinite horizon. Yet until that time, the preacher warned, we must let our duly appointed lawmen perform their jobs and work to bring the men to mortal but lawful justice.
They’d started to sing “Amazing Grace” and were watching dirt spaded into the hole, over the pine box, when the Widow Gates whispered that Tooch wanted to see him. Mack looked past her pointing finger out beyond the fence into the field at the dead tree from where Tooch had watched the service in the strip of shade the tree laid across the cotton.
Tooch crooked a finger to motion him over.
He looked at the widow.
“Go on,” she said. He felt her hand pushing hard against his back and remembered her giving him the sack of puppies. Far out in the field, Tooch folded his arms, waiting.
Mack pushed his hat down on his head, furrowed his hands in his pockets and stepped between a pair of graves. He could feel her watching him and wondered what she was thinking.
He opened the iron gate and closed it quietly behind him and went along the other side of the fence. It was a long walk up the sloping hill to Tooch Bedsole, a walk during which he didn’t think, seemed capable of little more than containing the heart flinging itself at the bars of his ribs.
“Mack Burke,” Tooch said as he drew close. He had a low, gravel voice, as if he needed to clear his throat, or didn’t speak often. He resembled Arch, as people had said, but in a kind of weathered way, as two pistols of the same make and model might differ due to the use they’ve seen, one oiled and gleaming from a life in a glass case; but the other well-spent, carried in a belt and used as a bludgeon and thrown and dropped so that certain screws had had to be replaced, the checkering worn from the grips, a gun you knew had sent its rusty bullets into the hearts and backs of other men, a gun burdened, not blessed, with history. Tooch had the same long, down-angled face Arch had but with a cragged look and hollow, under-circled eyes and a speckled complexion. The corners of his mouth were cracked and he blinked his eyes a lot. Where Arch had been clean-shaven, Tooch’s jaws held a scab of beard and he wore a mustache, as if he were an inside-out version of Arch sent back on a mission of haunting from some ghost world.
Tooch turned. “Come on, son, let’s you and me take us a walk. I’m sick of them graveyard vultures over yonder watching.”
Mack lingered a moment, gazing toward the cluster of people who appeared to be watching only the grave being filled, the widow standing apart, her hands folded in front of her. William had removed his coat and joined the stooped group of men shoveling dirt over Arch’s coffin. Nobody seemed to care a damn about Mack. When he looked back Tooch was nearly to the woods and he hurried to catch up.
As they walked, Tooch slid a cigar from his shirt pocket and ran it through the groove between his nose and upper lip. He paused to strike a match, cupping his hands against the wind. Mack stopped, too. When Tooch got it going he walked again and Mack followed; they passed under the limbs of a live oak and into the shadow of forest. The temperature changed. Cooler. Cigar smoke trailing, Tooch walked for a long time, ducking branches and sidestepping briars and avoiding puddles. Once he reached out and snapped off a twig and, as he walked, broke it into tiny pieces, scattering them.
Presently the light grew stronger and they came out of the trees and into a field of cotton, which they crossed, and ducked through the fence on the opposite side, then walked along the road for a while. From beside them a quail hen exploded and they watched her rise in the wind and pause, then crumple back to earth, only to rise again and flutter a few feet over the ground.
“She’s got chicks,” Tooch said. He stopped. Pointed with his cigar. “They’re hid out yonder in the weeds. She’s trying to draw us away from ’em.”
“Where we going?” Mack asked.
“First lesson you better learn,” Tooch said, resuming his pace, “is not to ask questions.”
Behind them, the hen settled back into the weeds.
Half an hour of cotton fields later the wind brought the smell of something burning, or something having been burned. That odor of cooling coal. Then he knew. The house Tooch had set afire.
They walked through a gate, no fence, just the two posts and the gate that Tooch opened and held open for Mack, and there it was, a squarish pile of ashes and a leaning chimney that seemed little more than mismatched blocks stacked to the height of a house. A few strings of smoke leaked into the air from the rubble and the ground was charred where the fire had spat itself.
Tooch sat on a log with drag marks in the dirt behind it and stretched out his legs toward the ruin and crossed them at the feet, as if he’d burned the place for warmth. Mack sat at the other end of the log with his hands grasping his knees. Tooch puffed his cigar and then looked at it, just a nub now, which he ground out against the log and flicked into the ashes.
“You’ll be among the first to know,” he said, “that I’m in the process of purchasing Bedsole’s Dry Goods. From Ed Bedsole. My uncle. Including all its assets and liabilities.” He looked down along the log at Mack. “You know what that means?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good,” he said. “One of the biggest liabilities of the store is the damn debts people owe. Charge accounts. First thing I aim to do is start collecting ’em. Charity’s one thing I don’t believe in. Nobody ever give it to me. And the biggest account on the book is your granny’s. I reckon Arch was too softhearted to make her pay, an old woman with two castoffs. Arch, he run the store not as a business but as a social club. As a way of getting elected.”
He looked at Mack. Then went on:
“That there’s just one of the differences between me and Arch that folks is gone have to reconcile with. Now. I spoke to the widow and told her what she owed me, a debt that some of it stretched back before you was born, and together we come up with a plan to make us even. You got an idea what that plan might be?”
“Me.”
“Yeah, you. You gone be my helper. You’ll begin a week from tomorrow at seven in the morning. You’ll not be late. You’ll live in the back room of the store and do my bidding for two full years. At the end of that period you’ll be free to return to the widow, or do whatever the hell you want. I’ll feed and clothe you from the store. Our deal,” he said, “ain’t original. It’s got a fancy name. Arch, him and his big words, would’ve called it indentured servitude. You know what I call it?”
He shook his head.
“I call it your hide belongs to me.”
The next day, when William came outside stuffing his shirt into his pants, Mack had the ax and was chopping at a long piece of hickory he’d dragged from the woods, halving it for posts. Ten other nearly identical posts leaned against the side of the barn.
“This don’t hardly seem like acting normal,” William said, rubbing his eye with the heel of his hand. “Enough posts for a damn fort.”
Mack ignored him.
“You get any sleep last night?” William asked.
“No.”
William hooked a suspender over his left shoulder, then went into the barn and returned dragging the post spade. He scratched the back of his neck and watched Mack for a while, then picked a spot, raised the tool in his hands, and began digging.
Shortly the widow came onto the front porch. Mack had taken off his shirt and worked in his undershirt alone, his pants filthy to the knees, sweat trickling down his back, shoulders glistening. He looked up. Fog still hung in the air but had begun to burn off, the dull red sun perfectly round behind the low oak branches over the barn’s tin roof.
The old woman came down the plank steps wearing her apron and stood in the yard by the washpot and watched them for several minutes—she’d been after them about getting this fence up for a week now—but if she thought anything out of sorts she didn’t say. She was psychic in curious ways but had said that in regard to her two boys she couldn’t see a speck of the future or the past, which often was the way with foresighted folk, that the things clo
sest to them in the physical realm were the things farthest away in the spiritual one. Which was why she could touch a penny in a store and know the man who’d paid it was going to die within a week, or could tell what sex a baby would be just by touching its mother’s belly, but if she tried to see Mack’s future it just came out fuzzy, she said. Images like you remember from a dream, but ones that flicker away before you can get your mind around them. You know something is there but you don’t know what.
From the corner of his eye he saw her wave a gnat from her face, then look toward the sky. Presently she climbed the steps and went inside.
Mack leaned another readied pole against the barn wall.
The forlorn dog had been watching the work with little interest, nip-ping at early flies and moving with the shade, until she stood and began to bark. Mack paused, a maul held at his waist, and William peered past the handle of the spade. They heard it at the same time.
A horse.
Mack moved behind his brother. “Will?”
“Hush,” he said. “Don’t say nothing.”
The door slammed. The widow stood on the porch, a half-peeled potato in her hand. A strip of sunlight cut across her body. She descended the steps and stood at the bottom of them with her knife hand shading her eyes, the dog advancing behind her, barking.
A man on a familiar chestnut horse cantered up the hill and into the yard, and Mack felt he might faint. It was Sheriff Waite. He tipped his hat to the boys. William waved in response and Mack raised his arm and moved his hand, like someone who bore some nervous disorder and whose arm would flap on its own, at the sky, a bed of ants.
The sheriff stopped his tall horse before them and dismounted slowly, the ivory grips of his pistol showing under his coat. Mack hadn’t seen him in several months. His hair was grayer and he looked thinner, his face red from the heat. There were burrs in the horse’s tail and the sweat-tracked coating of dust on its belly brought to mind maps in an old book he’d seen once that showed regions of the uncharted west, huge blank areas of gray, a river going in at the edge of the unknown and coming out at the opposite known, the river drawn in straight and true but everything around it in those unexplored regions empty, vast with possibility.