Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  He paused and drank from his Coca-Cola and ashed his cigarette. “Now this Chang had him a pet bird, though, a crow he’d trained to say things in Chinese—”

  “You can’t train no crow to talk,” Oscar said.

  “You can a California crow. They call ’em ravens out there. Maybe it’s a different kind, hell. But this one used to perch on Chang’s little yellow head and recite cusswords it heard in the bar. It was real quick to skedaddle, though, cause ever once in a while somebody would get drunk and take a shot at it.”

  Waite listened idly and gazed across the street to the barbershop, the stairs beside it leading to the dentist’s office.

  Grant was saying he and his buddy had sobered up a day or two after cutting Chang’s hair, and were soon off on a scouting trip—their job was to survey new tracts of government land for the L & N—when one night, out of the dark autumn sky, a rattlesnake drops into their camp. Nearly bites Ardy on his foot before he kicks it in the fire, where they let it cook and then eat the better part of the meat. They’d been drinking some and didn’t get to questioning the snake’s heavenly origins until the next day when Ardy’s buddy says, “Say, where do you reckon that dang rattler come from last evening?” Ardy stops and puzzles over it a bit. Perhaps it fell from a tree, he says. Perhaps some trickster threw it.

  It remained a mystery to them, but since they’d both seen stranger happenings they continued on up toward Oregon. That night, though they’d camped far away from any tree, another snake dropped down between them, this time a fat black cottonmouth. Mad as hell, too. They shot it to pieces, a little spooked, and to get shed of the willies they opened a bottle of bourbon. Soon they’d forgotten about the snake and were swapping tales, and they proceeded to get even drunker. Then, boom, another snake drops. It lands on Ardy’s buddy’s hat, right in the brim, starts rattling its tail. They were too wary to try anything for fear of triggering the snake, which went to buzzing every time Ardy’s buddy moved. Ardy peeps in and sees that it’s a big long timber rattler, so there’s nothing to do but wait.

  Finally, hours later, Ardy’s pal goes a little crazy and says he’ll by god put a stop to it. He unholsters his six-shooter and points it at his hat. He’s crying and his hand is shaking and, being generally a poor aim, he shoots himself through the forehead.

  Ardy sits there, stunned. His buddy topples over and the snake slides off the hat brim and crawls away.

  Then, from the sky, there occurred some strange words, words he couldn’t understand. At first he thought it was a demon speaking in tongues, but finally he realized it was Chinese he’d been hearing, that that damn Chinaman’s bird was up there, zigging and zagging in the dark. Ardy starts to hop about and point and yell how it was the other guy, the dead fellow, who’d cut off Chang’s little ponytail. Then he gets on his knees and apologizes to the sky for a solid hour. Once in a while something else sails down out of the air: a bullfrog, a big rat, four or five moles, a gopher turtle, a tarantula. About dawn, as he’s yelled himself hoarse and is about half loony from dodging falling creatures, one more thing drops out of the sky. It’s the shape of a snake, and Ardy sees it hurtling toward him. Coming right for his head. He just closes his eyes, stretches out his arms, and hollers, “O take me, Lord Jesus!”

  “The thing lands right across the bridge of my nose,” Grant said, touching his nose, “and stays there. I shut my eyes and wait for the fangs to go in, holding my breath, but nothing happens. The snake just lays there. It’s a little biddy one, so I figure it’s a coral snake this time, or a ground rattler. Finally, I get up the nerve to open one eye. What I see, though, don’t resemble a snake at all, it’s real fuzzy. Then I open up the other eye—”

  “It’s the dern ponytail,” Oscar said.

  Several of the men started to laugh.

  “True story,” Grant said.

  Everyone declared the tale a hoax, until Grant hopped up from his chair and excused himself past Waite and bobbed down the steps to where his good-looking mare was tied. He got something from his saddle purse and came back. They all saw it was a small weave of gray, brittle hair. He tossed it to Oscar.

  “It’s horsehair,” the judge proclaimed, bringing it to his nose, and the hair was handed man to man and its authenticity debated until Waite caught Oscar’s eye and motioned him across the street.

  “Ain’t that young fellow something?” Oscar said, still chuckling, as they walked toward his office. He carried his Winchester as before.

  “He is,” Waite agreed, “something.”

  They stepped around a pile of horse shit and Waite glanced up the street for the boy from the livery whose responsibility it was to clean up such messes.

  “You thought any more about giving him a job?” Oscar asked as they turned the corner.

  “Not really. I been a little on the busy side.”

  “That’s exactly why you need him.”

  They walked east on Court Street, past the watering trough, to the courthouse, a small white building with green shutters and a covered porch; a fence surrounded it to keep pigs out, and King stood inside beneath a large sugarberry with his neck stretched through the rails grazing on what grass he could reach. The shutters were opened, which meant the county solicitor was in. Part of the building had burned a few years ago and some of the wood was still black. They mounted the steps of the stile and descended on the other side of the fence, crossed the yard, and went up the porch steps. Oscar held the front door for Waite and followed him into the hall. The circuit judge’s office was shut—he was fifteen miles south, in the town of Jackson—but the county solicitor, an owlish man in his early thirties with his glasses pushed up on his forehead, sat behind his desk frowning at a writ and wanted Oscar’s opinion. The judge said, “Later,” and he and Waite went into his office and Oscar shut the door.

  Leaning his rifle beside the tall coatrack, he motioned for Waite to sit and walked behind his desk and sat in his ornate office chair. It had come on a steamboat from Mobile and before that on a ship from Paris, France. On the underside of its seat a French woodworker had carved in his name and the date. If you knew what to look for you might catch Oscar’s left hand straying down and fondling the wood beside his thigh, running his fingers over the craftsman’s name as if he were reading Braille. Oscar indulged in the finest objects for his office—the house was his wife’s domain, but here, this room was his. He glanced at the cherrywood clock against the wall and folded his pink hands. He crossed his legs. Behind him stood a shelf of large, leather-bound volumes of law, gold lettering on their spines that Waite, without his glasses, couldn’t read.

  “Well, first off,” Waite said, “I wish you’d not put ideas in Sue Alma’s head. All your meddling’s doing is slowing things down and making it awful quiet over at the house.”

  Oscar tilted back his chair. “I just worry about you, is all, cousin. You get killed out on one of your jaunts, it might be a week before we figure it out and send somebody to get you. By then they’ll have buried you in some godforsaken hole and I’ll have to go to the trouble of finding a new sheriff.”

  “Ain’t that what you want anyway? Get your man Grant in my office so he can tell stories?”

  Oscar smiled. “Maybe. It’d sure be nice to have a fellow I could boss some.”

  “Also,” Waite said. “Since I’m fussing at you, I wish you’d leave that Winchester at home. You ain’t setting a good example around here. It’s starting to look like the Yankees is fixing to invade, way everbody’s toting a damn cannon.”

  “Billy, I’m just protecting myself. We all are.”

  “You gone get yourself shot, is all.” He jerked a thumb behind him. “For one thing, you can’t hit nothing, never could. For another, you don’t bring a rifle into a place with you and leave it halfway across the room. You’re supposed to keep it nearby, in case a country fellow comes in shooting.”

  “I take your point.” Oscar got up and fetched the Winchester and stood it beside his chair. “Hap
py?” He sat back down.

  “Yeah. I’ll sleep better now.”

  “So if you’re done chiding me, maybe you can tell me what you dug up in the wilderness.”

  Waite recounted what he’d found in Mitcham Beat, in effect nothing, and concluded with his trip to Lawyer Drake’s office and the old woman witnessing the sale.

  “Heck,” Oscar said. “They all sound guilty, even the Gates woman. Not talking to you, that’s obstruction of justice right there.”

  “You’re gone need a bigger jail if you want me to bring in the whole beat.”

  “This Tooch character,” Oscar said. “What you make of him?”

  “I think he’s neck deep in it, is what I think.”

  “Why don’t you start by running him in?”

  “There ain’t enough to go on, Osk. He’s smart. Made it all good and legal. But I do believe the Widow Gates knows a lot more than she’s letting on.”

  “How come? You and her’s always got along. Why ain’t she confiding to you?”

  “Well, if it come down to it, I think she’d choose her country friends over me, but my guess is Tooch is threatening her in some way. He’s got that poor boy working there like a damn slave and scared out of his wits. And the old lady, well, I believe she may be going a little daft.”

  Oscar stood up, walked around his desk, and looked out the window. “Billy, your one problem’s always been that you just too slow. Thinking too much. Sometimes you got to strike first.” He clapped his hands, loud in the hot, still room. “I’ll get whatever papers you need and you can bring in this Bedsole and keep him locked up. If he’s out of the picture maybe that old woman and the boy will talk.”

  Waite stood up, too. “Oscar, I’ve already said—”

  “—don’t tell you how to do your job. I know. But it ain’t gone be long before somebody else gets killed. Them fellows may think they’ve got it rigged so they’re above the law, Billy. But they ain’t. If they’re playing this way, we got to play this way, too. This ain’t something I say often, and I wouldn’t say it to anybody but you, but it might be time to step around the law a little bit.”

  II

  A row of ripe apples lay along a section of the polished counter that ran the length of Bedsole’s store. Early sunlight from the pair of tall unshuttered glass windows lit the floorboards and shadowed the cracks between them, glint of nail heads in their immaculate lines.

  Bent over the apple barrel and pleasantly dizzy from the aroma, Mack fished out the remaining fruit and laid them at the end of the row on the countertop. As usual, these from the bottom had gone mealy, flattened on one side, like the soft spot on a baby’s head, and he placed them in a straight line in a separate row. Then he went backward along the counter, lifting and turning each apple, checking for cuts, bruises, wormholes. Half a dozen failed the inspection and he cradled these in his arms and carried them all to the wooden box by the back door. He set them down gently, not wanting to damage them further. There were other “nigger boxes” here, too—stale bread, uneven cakes of cheese that were more mold than cheese, bags of flour the cockroaches had burrowed into—but because there hadn’t been a black person at the store in months, the only person eating from the boxes had been Mack himself.

  He rolled up his sleeves and paused at the water barrel he filled each morning, removed its lid, and dipped himself a cupful, drank, then poured the rest down the neck of his shirt. He hung the cup back on its nail and walked to the rear of the store and ducked through the low door into the small storage room where his bed was—sheet and blanket tucked at the corners—and took the can of leather oil from a shelf. On a rack across from the bed stood a dozen shotguns and rifles, boxes of cartridges and shells beneath on a narrow shelf and a jumble of pistols in a drawer covered by an oiled cloth.

  He pulled the door shut and walked to where the tack hung. Hooking a short milking stool with his foot, he settled down and crossed his legs at the ankles. An hour passed, the sun as it set filling the window, illuminating the boards leading to the back door. Tooch would close the shutters, but Mack liked the way the light revealed how full of tiny spinning particles the air was, like water swirling with sediment. You could sneeze into the air and see the sneeze diffuse. You could shake pollen from the shoulders of your jacket and watch it hover.

  He’d oiled all the bridles and most of the harnesses when the cowbell over the front door clanked. He looked up to see the Widow Gates walk in, her thin hair in a bonnet.

  He was stunned to see her, she hadn’t come to the store in a year.

  Beneath her long gray skirt and the men’s pants, she wore a pair of men’s brogans, given to her from a small-footed farmer as payment for a baby she’d delivered. People paid her in everything from work on her house to skinned rabbits to fresh eggs and milk. The only thing she didn’t get was money. It suited her fine.

  “Hey, Granny,” Mack said, setting the oil down next to a bridle and wiping his fingers on a rag from his back pocket. He stood.

  “I didn’t see his wagon,” she said.

  “He’s out at Lev’s.”

  “Getting whiskey, I imagine.”

  He looked away. “No, ma’am. Just delivering some fertilizer.”

  “Macky Burke,” she said, coming toward him with her cane, “when you lie to protect women from the things other men do, it means you’re deep in the ruts of turning into a man yourself.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I thank you.”

  “It ain’t a compliment.”

  She tapped his elbow with the end of her cane and inspected him. In the months he’d been working for Tooch, he’d grown to nearly six feet in his socks. At night his bones hurt, which Tooch said meant he was still growing. He had long rangy arms and legs, a huge Adam’s apple and a dusting of reddish freckles over his cheekbones.

  Embarrassed in her lingering gaze, he looked out the window at the tall cotton plants, the bolls long out of their green shells. A flock of grackles flew out of the low sun, turned in the sky, and descended on the huge live oak at the far edge of the field.

  “Lord,” she said, poking his ribs with her cane, “he ain’t giving you enough to eat, not to keep up with your sprouting, is he?”

  “I believe he thinks I’m growing to spite him.”

  “At least he gives you these nice things to wear.” She rubbed the sleeve of his shirt between her fingers. Then let go and opened her knapsack. “I brought you something.”

  She took out four hard-boiled eggs, already peeled, wrapped in waxed paper. He ate them as quickly as she offered them, barely chewing.

  “Slow down. You don’t want no salt?”

  He swallowed. “He counts the grains.”

  After the eggs she produced for him half a dozen buttermilk biscuits smeared with her homemade muscadine jam, and after that a piece of dew-berry pie. When he finished—they’d sat by now, in the two rocking chairs by the windows—she gathered the hem of her skirt in her fingers and dabbed his cheeks and lips.

  She hadn’t taken her eyes off him. “You seen your brother?”

  He belched. “He come by the other day.”

  “How’d he look? He ain’t come by the house in pert near a month. Living like a goat in that man’s barn.”

  “Same as always. He bought him a new gun.”

  She turned to the window.

  He didn’t know what to say. He’d lived with her most of his life, three miles from here, his world her tiny yard and the hollows and ridges beyond, the slow creek behind the house at the bottom of the gully. He’d seen few other places—Coffeeville half a dozen times and Grove Hill once—but mostly just the widow’s yard and the woods around it and the houses they’d visited when she went to deliver a baby. This store and the croquet court outside.

  He remembered it all fondly. In those days the children played first, and then the young men, and finally the adult men, who’d competed in teams of two, matches likely to take three hours apiece, before each shot a discussion
of strategy, the men in pairs whispering behind their hands as if life and death existed in the lay of the balls. Those days had usually ended with Arch donning his church coat and mounting the porch to a scattering of applause and giving a speech. Mack remembered the crowd sitting or standing before the porch and Arch up there, wiping the back of his neck with a handkerchief, shifting from foot to foot as if the porch were hot, while below him the sharecroppers listened, the men sipping the whiskey Arch had supplied, the women knitting or tending babies, Mack and William and other boys back on the court, playing their own invented version of croquet which involved knocking the balls as far away as possible—even beyond the mallet’s length boundary around the court, sometimes under the store, other times across the road into the cotton or into the woods, down the hollow to the creek. Then the long walk home, tired, full, the widow singing softly and holding Mack’s hand in one of hers and William’s in the other, her happiness something he could feel humming on his skin.

  Then—and even now—he had little notion of other places. He had never seen mountains or the sea, and while the widow had mentioned to him and William in passing the Smoky Mountains she’d grown up ignoring—to her, mountains were nothing but things that blocked the sky—she’d spoken differently of the ocean, which she had visited only once, as a child after a long rail trip, spoken of the water’s wide curving vista and its eternity of beaches: this sixty years after seeing it, as she rocked on the porch, a mess of unshelled butter beans in her apron, Mack and William squatting beside the bottom step playing mumbly-peg in the dirt with their dead father’s jackknife, early bats twittering in the last red rags of sky, lightning bugs blinking at the edge of twilight. Those had been hot, still nights when there had descended upon the little yard a disquiet, something Mack felt in his nerves but thought the old woman sensed, too, for after she had described the way the unending foamy waves of the Gulf of Mexico came lapping in and wet your feet, dispensing all manner of alien things—pulsing jellyfish and translucent stiff-legged crabs and tiny white clamshells that burrowed within seconds into sand wet and reflective as glass—she would fall into a silence heavy with meaning and edged with sad yearning, the kind of mood a child recognizes and is thrilled by, the first ginger tug of your older self, a kind of undertow.