Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “What you think?”

  William looked behind them, down the inclining hill to where the creek chuckled below.

  “I done told you, Macky. Don’t ever mention that.”

  “It’s easy for you to say. You ain’t gotta walk around knowing you killed him, knowing he ain’t gone ever come back.”

  William got up from the stump he’d been sitting on and with his jug started downhill, up to his ankles in dead leaves.

  “Wait.”

  When he stopped, the paper leaves stopped rustling. Not looking back, he said, “If you mention that one more time, I’m going down this here hollow and up the other side and you won’t see me no more. There’s things I need to tell you and things you need to hear. But I ain’t gone waste my time if you’re still the same goddamn baby you was five months ago. I’d have hoped Tooch would’ve worked some sense into you, after all this time.”

  Mack squatted on his haunches, holding the rake like a banjo. “He has. Come on back. I done said the last of all that.”

  “Cross your heart.”

  He crossed it.

  William returned and squatted beside Mack. His brother looked older, his hair longer and stringy around his face, his cheeks mossy with a red stubble. He smiled and reached across the distance between them and grasped Mack’s shoulder and squeezed it hard and shook it.

  “He ain’t killed you, I see.”

  “Not yet.”

  William held up the jug. “You want to try a little? Put some hair on your tallywhacker?”

  He nodded. Drank and spat it back out, a fine mist that landed on William’s face.

  His brother laughed. “You better learn to hold your liquor. Try again. Go slow, though. Just take little sips at first. And go on swallow it. Don’t try to hold it too long in your jaw or you’ll taste it and won’t never get it down.”

  He did, then opened his mouth to cool his tongue. His eyes were moist.

  “That’s the boy.” William took back the jug and drank from it as if he’d been doing it all his life. “It tasted like shit when I started it, but if you’re faithful it’ll grow on you.”

  “That ain’t gone ever grow on me,” Mack said. “Gimme some more.”

  “Naw, you go back in the store drunk and Tooch’ll skin us both.” William leaned back against a tree, and Mack’s chest and the muscles that stretched up into his neck ached with longing for how things used to be, the two of them fishing in the creek or playing croquet with the widow watching and Arch alive and up on the porch giving one of his speeches.

  “You ever see the widow?” William asked.

  “He won’t let me. Do you?”

  “Yeah. I go have supper with her on Sunday evenings.”

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Fine.”

  “She ever mention me?”

  William shook his head. “I believe she’s trying to put you out of her mind. How’s Tooch treat you?”

  “Okay, I reckon.”

  “You reckon.”

  He shrugged.

  “He hit you?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the worst thing he does?”

  He thought. “Makes me count buttons.”

  “Do what?”

  “He has this box full of about a thousand buttons. Whenever he leaves he takes some of the buttons with him in his pocket. I have to count the ones left and tell him how many’s gone. He says it keeps me from going out and getting into mischief.”

  “Well, good luck to him.”

  William drank again and laughed.

  “Sometimes I dream about him,” Mack said. “’Bout him coming after me. Using a ax, or a knot of kindling wood. This one time it was a shovel.”

  “Hell, boy. You always did have a active mind. I remember them dreams you used to have. Bears chasing you, and you ain’t ever even seen a damn bear. All that reading you do. You read in his books any?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “There’s your problem. You let them words in and you’re in a peck of trouble. Best to keep your mind occupied with other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Work.” He smiled. “Whores.”

  “You seen her?” Annie.

  “Seen her? Macky boy, I done screwed her.”

  “You ain’t.”

  “Oh, I have. More’n once, too.”

  “Is it like we used to talk about?”

  “You wanna find out?”

  He nodded.

  “Then you best forget this Arch business and keep your mind on your work. I been trying to talk ’em into letting you join up.”

  Mack said, “I don’t know that I want to.”

  “Boy,” William said, “you ain’t got the sense God give a toadstool. You so worried ’bout Arch you ain’t thinking clear. If there’s a storm, where’s the safest place to be?”

  “In the house?”

  “No, not in the damn house. And not in the barn, neither, Macky. Safest place is in the eye of the storm. Now Tooch is got some big ideas, and we gone need some new blood to do all the things he’s talking about doing.”

  “What things?”

  “Hell, I can’t tell you, boy. We took a vow. All of us. And if anybody breaks it, they gets killed.”

  As August drew near, Mack sensed something big in the gang’s workings; the laying-by season gave those who grew cotton a few weeks of respite from their normal tedious days and so the men congregated almost daily at the store. They’d sit along the bench and on the edge of the porch and tell stories and laugh, eating venison or beef and passing a jug. Mack went about his chores but noticed in them all a change, and not just that their clothes had improved, the usual threadbare overalls more patch than original material now strangely gone, replaced by wool britches and chambray shirts, new hats, their brogans new and shiny except for Lev, who couldn’t find a pair to fit his large feet. Many had upgraded their firearms, too, William no longer toting their dead daddy’s old shotgun but a new Parker twelve-gauge double barrel with twin hammers and a blue sheen about its metal.

  The gun had come in the mail, packed in straw and paper in a long wooden box. Sorting through the letters and packages, Mack had seen his brother’s name on the box. Later in the day William came to the store and found Mack in the shed shoveling horse shit.

  “I get any mail?” he asked.

  “A long box,” Mack replied, not looking up.

  William had already gone, though, clomping up the stairs and slamming the door.

  He and Tooch came out later and stood in the road examining the shotgun, Tooch pointing out its excellent features and congratulating William on such a fine choice of firepower. With Mack kneeling and watching through the slats of the parked wagon, William unbreeched his new gun and accepted from Tooch two shells from a new box. He snapped it closed, a sound so quiet Mack barely heard it, and raised it to his shoulder. He aimed for a long time, Mack peering to see what he’d shoot.

  There was a blue jay thirty or so yards away on a fence, and when William shot, the bird exploded in a mist of blue and white feathers as the gun’s echo died out in the oak trees.

  Mack had finished mucking out the horse’s stall when William snuck up behind him and poked the gun in his back. “Surrender,” he said. He let Mack hold the twelve-gauge and break it open, two brass-capped red shells rising an inch out of its breech. It had intricate checkering on its pistol grip stock and two triggers. Mack raised it to his shoulder and eyed down the barrels.

  His brother moved in close behind him, as if offering instruction.

  “I been chose,” he whispered.

  “For what?” At the other end of the shotgun Mack sighted a mockingbird that had just landed in a pine tree, then lowered the gun.

  “A raid,” William said.

  He turned up the following Sunday and whistled for Mack where he was feeding the horse in the shed; a glance behind him, Mack hurried over the croquet court brushing hay from his arms. They sat in the line
of shadow a tall pine cast, William holding the jug he never seemed without, his head hung. He took a long swig and looked up at Mack through his hair. There was something different about his eyes. “I was there,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Joe Anderson.”

  Mack glanced toward the store. “You killed him?”

  “Hell, no, I didn’t kill him.” He brushed at something on his pants leg. “Lev did.”

  He began to tell how Lev had shot Anderson, then cut his throat with the man’s own Barlow knife, and how after he died Lev sat down beside the body poking its foot, which gave at the ankle. How Lev asked, “What you reckon it’s like, being dead?” How he said, “Seeing his eyes? It give me a thought. You reckon somebody’s blood is where they life is stored? I mean, you can take off a fellow’s arm at the shoulder and he might live two dozen year or more with a stump, long as you stop the blood. Same with a leg. I knew a old fellow lost his leg just above the kneecap in the War, used to hobble about with a crutch under his arm. Said he woke up one night and got outta bed, plumb forgot he didn’t have but one leg, and fell right over. Said he wished they’d a kept it when they sawed it off so he could be buried all in one piece. You can pack such a thing in salt. The leg I believe he said was in Georgia.”

  How Lev had taken the dead man’s booted toe between his fingers and shaken it almost tenderly, the way you’d wake a sleeping friend. Then how he blinked, his trance over, and said, “Hey, them’s nice boots, ain’t they? God dog,” and began tugging them off.

  The boys sat on the ground with sunlight through the leaves dappling their arms and legs. Both looked up when a hummingbird buzzed past and Mack remembered that William had once told him how after they’re cast from the nest hummingbirds never land, that they spend their entire lives darting through the air. When Mack had asked the widow if this were true, she’d laughed and said, Nonsense, how could a thing never stop moving?

  “It had to be done,” William said, tracing a finger around the mouth hole on the jug. “We give him ever chance to join with us. He was a stubborn old jackass.”

  Mack nodded. Then looked up. “I been thinking I’d best join up, too, if they ask me.”

  “I been telling you,” William said.

  DIRTY WORK

  August to October 1898

  I

  WAITE SAT AT THE DINNER TABLE enduring his wife’s silence, which said much more to him than her usual chatter. The clock struck noon in the next room and he listened as its metal cogs and wheels realigned, a sound he’d come to think of as the sound of time itself. He always heard the old clock if he was home; no matter if he was on the porch or even asleep, he’d hear the sliding noises of metal on metal and the pendulum clicking and feel a comfort at things working in the order they were supposed to.

  Sue leaned over him now and ladled beans onto his plate and poured a stream of thin gravy onto his mashed potatoes. He raised his fork and mixed it in, tines ringing on the plate. The consistency of the gravy irritated him—she knew he liked it thick—but bringing it up would prompt her to air the thing she was mad about, whatever it was. So he kept quiet, hoping he’d get out of the house before she spoke up; then he could work late and come home after she’d gone to bed and, if he played it right, get up and be gone before she rose the next day. Get breakfast at the hotel where they never cared about things more weighty than the weather.

  He’d spent the previous night in Bit’s cabin hoping his friend would return with a jug, hearing each sound outside as the sound of a foot snapping a twig, crackling over leaves. An hour before dawn he was in a nervous froth and had left and found King as jittery as he was, probably wild dogs in the area. The ride home was long and jarring, a jumpy horse beneath a jumpy rider. He’d arrived at midmorning to find a letter from Johnny-Earl. Addressed to him but Sue had already opened it. He slammed his gunbelt on the rolltop desk and the cat had sprung away and regarded him from the back of the sofa as if he were a man who didn’t belong in a parlor.

  After a bath and a change of clothes—Sue hovering around him silently, bringing in more heated water and frowning at how his shirt smelled of smoke and sweat—he sat in the parlor and read and reread Johnny-Earl’s letter while she made dinner. The boy had broken his arm felling a water oak and had met a nice nurse at the doctor’s office where they’d taken him to have it set. Waite wondered about the idea of more grandchildren—he had five by his three daughters—and in his mind had been composing a return letter to him.

  But it would be a while before he got the luxury of writing back. He had two days’ business to attend and half a day to do it in. If only—Sue sat down across from him, not making eye contact—he could get away before she got into it. She put her napkin in her lap, folded her hands, and waited. He waited for a moment until he remembered to say grace, which he cleared his throat and said, same prayer he’d given for forty years, blessing the food and his wife and children and grandchildren each by name.

  He ate quickly while she forked a single bean at a time into her mouth. He was almost done, had decided not to get seconds or dessert though he wasn’t yet full, when she said, “The judge came by.”

  Waite had been reaching for his glass of tea and stopped, then reached on. She’d always called Oscar by his title and Oscar’s wife called Waite by his—both women proud of their husbands’ positions and each indulging the other. Would the judge like some more pie? Did the sheriff’s new coat fit? Here, though, him and Sue alone, he found it annoying.

  “You mean Oscar?”

  “Yes, Oscar. Of course Oscar.”

  Waite drank and put his glass back. “I’ll see him uptown, I expect.”

  But now he knew the problem, at least. Oscar had been by and obviously mentioned Waite’s going out to Mitcham Beat alone. His cousin had used this tack before, getting at Waite through her. Oscar knew he was thinking of retiring and wanted that damn Ardy Grant to be his deputy until he did, then take over as sheriff.

  He stood up and thanked Sue for the meal and crossed the room and bent to kiss her forehead as she sat stiffly.

  “Don’t wait up,” he said before he shut the kitchen door.

  He went by the courthouse and checked the papers on the sale of Bedsole’s store from Ed Bedsole to Tooch and then walked to the office of the lawyer who’d written the transaction up. His name was Harry Drake. He and Waite had played horseshoes as partners in a few county fairs together and beaten Oscar and his partner for the trophy, a thing his cousin sorely hated and Waite sorely enjoyed. He kept the trophies in his office and pretended to polish them when Oscar stopped by.

  The sale of Bedsole’s store was all straight, according to Drake. He said he hadn’t talked to Ed Bedsole himself—the old man been too sick to travel—but had written up the forms for Tooch.

  “So Ed sold it to him, all legal?”

  “Legal yeah, but you could barely call it a sale.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  Drake tapped the paper on his desk. “Tooch Bedsole paid the sum of one dollar for the whole business, building, inventory, all money owed to it from people’s credit accounts. Even got a horse in the deal.”

  “A dollar?”

  “It’s not that unusual,” Drake said, handing the paper to Waite, “for sales between family members.”

  “How do you know Tooch didn’t force Ed to sign the paper? Was there a witness?”

  “In fact, there was,” Drake said. “That old midwife.”

  “The Widow Gates?” Waite put his glasses on and scanned the page to find her signature—the first time he’d ever seen it.

  “That’s right. She come with Tooch Bedsole.”

  Waite felt betrayed and insulted at once. He wondered why she hadn’t stopped by to speak to him, as she usually did on her infrequent trips to Grove Hill. More than once he’d extended an invitation to her, if she ever needed a bed while in town. And why didn’t she tell him about this when they’d talked yesterday?

  “I t
hank you for your time, Harry,” he said.

  The lawyer stood behind his desk and slung his arm out like he’d thrown a horseshoe. “You ready?”

  Waite grinned. “The judge is still looking for a new partner. We might be playing ourselves.”

  He found Oscar on the porch of the store with several fellows, including Ardy Grant, telling one of his travel stories. Grant was just into his thirties and a good-looking fellow who took a little too much pride in his appearance. Wore a bowler hat and red armbands on his white shirt. White oxford shoes. Couldn’t pass a window glass without pausing to check the set of his hat on his head.

  Now six or seven men sat along the benches listening to Grant, some smoking cigars or pipes, Grant a cigarette, and many an elbow tilting glasses of Coca-Cola back—the store had just installed the town’s first soda fountain. Most of the men wore sidearms, and a couple had rifles against their legs, a trend Waite had noticed since Anderson’s murder. Just asking for somebody to get shot, is all it was doing.

  Waite climbed the steps and folded his arms and leaned on a post to await a chance to get Oscar alone. The men all nodded to him and Grant even paused in his story to tip his hat. Waite nodded back.

  “It was a Chinaman,” Grant continued. “This is in north California,” he added for Waite’s benefit, “couple years back. Now most of these little yellow chinks shave their heads bald but keep these here little biddy pony-tails of hair down their backs.”

  Oscar broke in. “Chinese law requires it,” he said, “if they ever mean to return home.”

  “How in the Sam Hill do you know that?” a banker and war veteran named Claudius Thompson asked.

  “I got me one of those things,” Oscar said. “You might of heard of it. An education?”

  Thompson thumbed his nose and several men laughed.

  Grant paused until they’d quieted down, then went on:

  “Well, this little fellow I’m talking about, he wasn’t going home no time soon, I’ll tell you, cause me and one of my buddies got corned on the Fourth of July in a saloon room, and my buddy snipped that rattail off him. Chinaman was a shoeshiner, little runt named Chang. He got mad as hell at what my buddy done, but he couldn’t do nothing about it. See, Chinamen are maybe a notch above the niggers and the Indians, so all he could do was just wait for it to grow again.”