by Tom Franklin
“How you boys getting on?” Waite asked.
“Fine, Mr. Billy,” William said.
William extended his hand and Waite shook it, then did the same with Mack, who remembered, years before, the sheriff teaching them how to shake hands. “Not too firm,” he’d said. “You don’t want to hear bones crunch, but don’t squeeze too light, neither, like you’re a little girl. Just the right amount of squeeze, like you’d use to milk a cow. Fellow shakes too hard, means he’s too eager. Too soft, you can’t trust him.”
He tried now to give Waite that handshake and made himself look him in the eye which was difficult—like opening your eyes underwater—considering that in the next second the sheriff might arrest them. Waite didn’t seem angry, though, didn’t seem anything other than old. But the fact that he’d come up here meant something.
He switched the rein from one hand to the other. “Cat got your tongue, Macky?”
“No, sir,” he said.
“Can I water your horse?” William asked quickly.
Waite handed over the reins and said he’d appreciate it, cautioned him not to let King drink too much. “He’s like a damn hound.”
“Can we take him for a ride after?”
Waite smiled. “Naw, I’ve rode him pretty hard and I got a ways to go yet. Better let him rest up while I talk to the widow.”
He winked at Mack and headed to the porch, where the old woman stood waiting, arms folded, the potato now a lump in her apron. Waite took off his hat and mounted the steps slowly, a hand on his lower back, his shoulders tired, and he and the widow spoke somberly, not their usual gentle teasing. They sat side by side in the rocking chairs given as payment by Joe Anderson for his twin girls while the boys led the horse to the trough where he submerged his rubbery muzzle.
“You damn fool,” William hissed from the other side of the horse.
Mack made himself look at King. He stroked the wiry mane while William drew his fingers along the gunstock protruding from the attached sheath. He glared at Mack over the saddle. “That man’s gone know something’s up if you keep acting guilty.”
As the horse drank, they watched the old woman and sheriff talk, but could tell nothing of what they said. Presently the horse raised its head and they led him to the barn and unbridled him and let him pull tufts of hay from the mule’s feeder while they sat on the dirt floor watching the adults through cracks in the barn wall. Neither the widow nor Waite smiled as they rocked and stopped rocking now and again at something the other said and then gradually started moving again. Mack rested his forehead against the hot, coarse board and tried to hear but couldn’t. He picked at a splinter of wood in the wall until his finger bled and he sucked the blood. Beside him William began to snore and he stared at his brother as if he’d never seen a creature such as him before, a thing with empty air where a conscience should be.
The horse, done eating, wandered over behind him and nuzzled his neck with its hot fleshy nose. He looked up into those large yellow eyes and frowned at its earthy breath.
“Hey, boy,” he said, rubbing him along the underside of his face. King nickered back, blowing his hair.
When he looked out again, Waite had stood and put his hat on. Mack got to his feet and kicked William awake. “I swear,” he said, “you’d sleep through your own hanging.”
His brother grinned. “Or yours.”
William put the bridle back on the horse and took the reins and led the horse out as Waite descended the steps and walked over to where they stood.
“Got him ready?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Billy,” William answered. “He’s good watered and we fed him, too. Got some burrs out of his mane.”
Mack looked at him—another lie.
“I thank y’all.” Waite took the reins from William and climbed into the saddle and looked down on them.
“I didn’t bother the widow too much with this mess about Arch Bedsole getting shot,” he said. “Old woman ought not to have to worry much about such business, hard a life as she’s had.” He looked at them, from one to the other. “But y’all are just about grown so I’ll ask you, man to man. Have you heard anything might give me a head start on this business? Any idea who might’ve shot him? I ain’t got no clue about where to start looking.”
“No, sir,” William said. “We don’t hardly get to leave here.”
“Well, I don’t know if I ain’t a little jealous,” he said, gazing out at the scene below. He seemed lost in a trance as if recalling the long-ago days of his own boyhood. Then he blinked and looked down at Mack. “Well? What about you, Macky? You heard anything might give me a foothold in this mess?”
He shook his head. “It wasn’t me,” he said.
Waite’s face looked strained a moment. Then he smiled. “Hell, boy. I know that. But do you know who it was?”
“Course he don’t,” William said. “This boy don’t even know his own name.”
Within days of that Mack had gone to the store to begin his new life there.
On his last evening at home, the widow sent him into the yard to chop wood. He’d been at the woodpile with his shirt off and the ax in his hand gazing at a horned lizard he’d just chopped in half—an accident, he hadn’t seen the lizard until it flew into two pieces—when he saw her walk past the garden to the chicken pen. She bent at the gate and turned the wooden latch and stepped inside the cage and knelt as best an old woman could and spoke softly to the chickens. He liked how she called their noises talking and how she talked back, how she called them “her ladies.” She must’ve had the one she wanted in mind for several came to her upturned palm to peck at the feed she had showing and each of these were shooed away, until finally the big white one bobbed cautiously up and she seized it by its neck and took it out fluttering, across the yard. It flew up in her hand and she seemed so small he wondered if it might not fly her away. He stood holding the ax one-handed at his thigh as she rounded the cabin. He listened as she killed it, thinking of all the death they lived amid and wondering why he wasn’t more used to it.
When he finished stacking the wood alongside the cabin he came inside where she was cutting up the chicken. He carried a few sticks of wood to the stove and piled them in.
“Your last meal,” William said. He had feathers on the arms of his shirt from having plucked the chicken.
“Hush,” the widow said.
They ate in silence. In the morning she came to wake him but he was awake already.
“It’s time to go,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.” He got out of bed. William lay snoring. Mack went into the kitchen.
She made him eggs and even cooked some bacon. The smell woke William who came in without his shirt on, rubbing his eyes and stretching.
“If I’d a known the food would be this good,” he said, pouring himself coffee, “I’d of sent you off a long time ago.”
“Get dressed,” the widow told William.
He left with his coffee and came back buttoning his shirt.
They sat eating. Through the window Mack watched the sun break over the trees.
Those first days at the store were long ones where Mack imagined scenarios, all of which ended with him getting killed. At night he lay on an old mattress ticking in the tiny storeroom in the back and listened to Tooch’s footsteps above—the man never seemed to sleep—obsessed with the notion that Tooch somehow knew he had murdered Arch and had brought him to the store to keep him close until he did away with him. Mack would shut his eyes and see Tooch coming at him with a knife. With a club of firewood. Noosing him in a rope from the tack aisle and dragging him across the floor and over the jagged teeth of the porch boards and down the steps. Night after night he considered rising from the bed and escaping, but the widow’s final words to him kept him there. Whatever you do, don’t get on his bad side. His or Lev’s either. Do whatever they tell you to.
Which he did. He never questioned washing Tooch’s clothes, for instance, carrying the washboar
d down the steep hill past the mounds which were graves already and climbing back up to get the sack of laundry. He’d seen the widow wash clothes all his life and knew how, but had never imagined himself as the washer. He’d get a good fire going under the washpot and fill it with pails of creek water and add in lye and let the clothes soak, staring across the creek at the land on the other side, an easy enough jump should he choose to make it and keep going, straight for a time and then up the opposite hill and out the edge of the woods into the cotton field he knew was there. But he never jumped. Instead he rolled up his sleeves and knelt and reached into the tub and withdrew one of Tooch’s wet white shirts. He laid the washboard against his knees and scrubbed the shirt, rinsed it in the creek, soap bubbles lazing downstream, then hung the shirt on a limb. Another shirt, a pair of cotton pants. Soon a dozen garments would hang in the air around him and move in the slight rustling wind, an arm of a shirt moving in the breeze as if offering advice, or pointing the way to run.
Done, he’d stand and gather the clothes and climb the hill, careful not to snag a shirt on a briar or let a pair of britches get dirty brushing against a tree trunk. At the top, out of the woods, he’d hang the things to dry on the line behind the store and return to the bottom for the washboard, rinsing the soap off in the creek. And looking once again at the opposite side, he’d clamber back uphill.
In general Tooch said little, but on the first day he told Mack, “Your job don’t involve gabbing unless a customer asks you a question. Then you’ll answer in as little breath as possible. I mean yesses and noes. Polite, though.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tooch watched him. “Ain’t you gone ask ‘How come?’”
Mack shook his head.
“Good. Yours ain’t to question, just to do. But for your good judgment, I’ll tell you the how come of it, this one time. There’s fixing to be some events happening that people will talk about for a long time to come. We’re fixing to embark on a mission like this county ain’t ever seen. Any other counties, either. And you’re gone be right here in the eye of the storm. So if you’re up yonder jabbering to ever knucklehead that buys a bar of soap or a nickel cigar, something’s liable to slip out. I believe a man gathers strength from one place, boy. Within. You’re fixing to have you a goddamn lonely spell, Mr. Mack Burke. But ever river’s got a opposite side, and this lonely time’ll come to a end for you, too. You mark it down, boy.”
The men had their first official meeting after Mack had been at the store about a week. Those who came were the ones who’d remained the night Tooch had called them to the store after Arch’s murder. Those eight—Lev and Kirk James, Floyd Norris, Massey Underwood, Huz and Buz Smith, War Haskew, and William—had begun arriving at the store just after dark. In no time a jug had come out. Tooch told Mack to go to his room and shut the door. He left it cracked, though, and on his knees he peeked out into the dark store and listened.
He saw the circle of men, shoulders and lowered heads capped with flimsy hats. He heard the soft rain outside. Pecan branches scraping the back of the store. Saw the jug passed and unstoppered and heard men sigh after raising it and letting it drain down their throats. He could imagine their eyes watering with the burn of it and their gullets constricting with pleasure and he wanted to be with them. For almost an hour they told stories about Arch and laughed, but with a tension, as if this were the wake of a man no one had liked. And finally, what had begun as a fairly loose circle closed as it grew even darker and harder for Mack to see as they knelt close to one another, speaking softly. Mack’s knees hurt from the hard floor where he crouched but his ears were good. As long as the rain stayed low, he could hear.
At last Lev James shifted on his haunches. He said, “Let’s get to it, Tooch.”
Tooch sat opposite Mack, and between the shoulders of two men, lit yellow by stovelight; he could see most of the storekeeper as he slid a cigar from the pocket of his shirt. As he ran it through the groove between his mustache and nose. Bit off the end and struck a match on his heel and lit the cigar and sat smoking it with his forearms on his bony knees and his long chin jutted out. Even Mack’s tiny room held now the smell of burning wood and tobacco juice and smoke and whiskey and sweat. He shifted on his knees and opened the door wider.
Tooch extended his arm and ashed his cigar into the spittoon. “What we’re gone do,” he said, “is form an alliance.”
“Alliance,” somebody—Mack couldn’t tell who—repeated.
“What kind of alliance?” Lev asked.
“A secret one.”
“Alliance,” Lev repeated.
“Gang, he means,” Kirk said. “Like the Masons.”
Lev scowled. “Secret. Who’d know about it?”
Tooch: “Just the members.”
Lev shifted and spat. Mack viewed him in profile, beefy face and, his hat off, a bald head aglow in the stovelight. “What’s the point of some alliance nobody knows about?” he asked. “Seems to me the whole reason to get together like you’re saying is that we can do more damage. We’d be more of a threat to the town folks if everybody knew how many of us was in the alliance and knew our names.”
Tooch nodded and considered. “Two things,” he said. “First, if nobody knows your number, you always got the element of surprise. You got mystery. And if you got mystery, you got power. What people’s most afraid of is what they don’t ken. Keep folks in the dark, you control the dark.”
Lev grunted.
“Next, you got a powerful tool. What they call alibis. Men backing each other up. What if we rob McCorquodale’s store? What if Lev and William and Kirk and Huz did it? If somebody comes out here and tries to pin it on ’em, the rest of us will swear we was with them that night. If that damn Waite comes to arrest one of us, we’ll get other fellows in the area to back us. If they don’t, we’ll punish ’em.
“If this is a problem to any of y’all,” Tooch said, “I’m extending an invitation. Go now. Go, goddammit, right now.”
Floyd Norris rose.
“Tooch,” he said, “it seems like you’re fixing to ask us to do something that just might get us killed.”
He considered. “Yeah. It might.”
Without looking at anyone, Floyd said, “Listen. Ain’t none of y’all got families. Most of you is young fellows, ’cept Kirk there, and Massey, but they ain’t got nothing holding ’em back. Tooch, you chose good, if you’re making up some kind of army. Fellows ain’t got much responsibility. But me, I got a wife. Got them four young ones. If I was to get killed, there’d be nobody to see after ’em. So I’ll say good night to you all.”
Mack had never heard him say that many words in his life. He and William and the widow had picked cotton with him in years past, and a quieter man you’d not find, except Buz Smith, who’d never been able to speak.
“We understand,” Tooch said. “But don’t speak a word of this to nobody.”
Floyd nodded. “I swear I won’t.” He shrugged, turned, and walked the length of the aisle, opened the door and shut it behind him. They listened to his footfalls down the steps and then to nothing.
“If one of us do get jailed,” Massey Underwood said, “what will become of us? Will the rest of you abandon us?”
“We will not,” Tooch said. “We’ll first swear to your innocence, and we’ll have other men swear, too. We might send in Joe Anderson. Or some other fellow with a good reputation. We might let Floyd Norris go and say you was with him butchering a hog. So you might get put in the jailhouse, but you won’t stay there long.”
“You’re saying you’ll put up the money and do all the thinking,” Lev said, “and we’ll do all the damage, but won’t be no way to get throwed in jail?”
“Yeah,” Tooch said. “I’m saying that.”
Lev popped his suspenders. “Sounds all right to me. I never did care too much for thinking. I’m in.”
“I got another question,” War Haskew said.
Tooch nodded.
“We all liked A
rch. We all mad about what happened to him. But the truth is, this is your fight. We’ll help you, but what do we get out of this club of yours, other than risk and time all used up?” He looked around. “I don’t know about you fellows, but time’s a thing I can’t spare much of. I got a crop to tend. And William here, well, he works for me. He ain’t got much time to spare, neither.”
“Camaraderie’s one thing you’ll get,” Tooch said. “And the protection I’ve spoke of. You think them mean sons-a-bitches from Grove Hill would of come in here if there was a gang of meaner sons-a-bitches waiting for ’em? They’ll be scared to set a foot in our beat, and if they do we’ll send ’em running out with a ass full of buckshot. We’re gone take the law by the shoulders and shake it, boys, we’re gone run this beat. Then we’ll bypass them crooked bastards in the courthouse and in the capitol and set our own order.
“But them ain’t the only reasons. That’s just the start We’re gone split the money we get. So even if you don’t care about none of the other reasons, how ’bout silver dollars? A lot of ’em.”
There were other questions, and the meeting went far into the night, Mack missing some details, but by the end Tooch had convinced them all and unfolded his Case pocketknife. Mack strained to see as Tooch opened his hand and drew the blade over his right palm. He passed the knife to War Haskew, who did as Tooch had, and the knife went down the line and each man cut his hand. Tooch had a sheet of paper on which he used his finger as a pen and his blood as ink to write his name at the top of the page. When he finished he handed the paper to Lev, who, unable to write, made an X and passed it to Kirk, who made an X as well. To William. To the Smiths. War Haskew. Massey Underwood. The jug came round and each man in the circle poured a bit in his palm and closed his fist, then drank from the jug before passing it on. When all had signed, Tooch took the paper and stood and they all stood with him. He blew on the page. He read the names aloud. He said, “Y’all have committed. This is our first step.” He waited, and when the jug found its way back to his hands, he announced that the name of their alliance was to be Hell-at-the-Breech.