by Tom Franklin
The widow was gazing at him, sun through the window lighting her skin so she seemed almost to glow.
“I recall that rainy night y’all come to me,” she said. “William just a knee-baby and you—” She touched his cheek. “You wasn’t no bigger than a kitten. ’Bout half dead. Couldn’t hardly kick your little legs, just about couldn’t find you in that natty blanket.”
A story he’d heard often, growing up. Their father dying in a fire and the mother, badly burned, getting them outside. The smoke had alerted a neighbor who brought the boys to the widow.
Now, with each telling of the tale the widow would say how she nearly cried at finally—after delivering two hundred babies—having two of her own. Joy quickly gone, though, when she saw how near death Mack was: her mad footrace to a nearby farm where there was a milk cow, the white-haired Negro man looking down at Mack and saying, That thing ain’t gone live the night.
“But you did,” the widow would conclude each time she repeated the story. “Thank the Lord, you did.”
They sat awhile longer.
“I reckon I’ll get a few things,” she said, “since I done walked all this way on my tired old legs.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He stood.
She held her hand out and for a moment he didn’t know what she wanted. Then took her fingers and she let him pull her gently up, her weight no more than lifting a coat from a chair. She began padding along the aisles as he followed, collecting in the nest of his long arms the things she handed behind her without looking at him, a bag of coffee, a pound of sugar, a box of matches, he felt the bitter tug of nostalgia and wondered if she did, too, and then understood by the way she focused so intently on each item, inspecting each package as if for clues to some puzzle, her squint perhaps the thinnest shield for tears, that yes, indeed, she felt it. She passed him back two pounds of flour, a box of salt, four tins of snuff, a half-gallon jug of molasses. He wondered where she’d done her shopping in the past year, if she’d gone all the way to Coffeeville, how she’d gotten there, if she caught a ride or had someone else pick up her things; he knew he could ask her but speaking seemed inappropriate now, he couldn’t quite say why.
Not until he was wrapping her things and silently toting the prices did he realize he’d have to charge her—Tooch didn’t allow credit. As she watched his nimble hands tie string around the brown paper, he knew she was doing her own mental addition, as she had when Arch had been here behind the counter and Mack and William stood on the other side with her, licking the peppermint sticks the storekeeper would have given them. Arch never charged her. The enormity of Mack’s crime of murder settled on him again—again he understood that in killing Arch Bedsole he had killed a part of each life the man had affected.
“Macky?”
His hands paused. “Yes, ma’am?”
“I’ll keep one of those snuffs out. For the walk home.”
He didn’t know what to say except, “It’s a dollar eighteen, Granny.”
For the longest time she looked up at him, past the mound of her goods, wrapped in brown paper and tied in coarse string. He’d become so proficient at packing things, salt in with flour, coffee with sugar. The paper folded precisely. The string so tight no grain could fall out.
She said nothing. She turned and began walking down the aisle toward the door. The goods she’d picked left there before him.
“Granny,” he said.
Without looking at him the widow went out the door and over the porch as the bell hardly jingled. She carefully descended the steps and walked with her cane into the muddy road.
Then Mack was fumbling, his arms full, running over the floorboards and dropping and going back for a package, grabbing from a wooden box an empty flour sack saved for a hood and dumping her groceries into it, bursting through the door with the bell ringing out over the cotton. The old woman turned, her cane upraised as if he’d attack her. He foisted the bag upon her, not even looking to see what might or might not have been in her eyes.
Back inside, he watched her drag the flour sack away, through the dirt, his forehead against the window, breath misting the glass, until the cotton closed around her.
Half an hour later he heard Tooch trundle up in the wagon. He looked out the window and saw him hop down from the seat.
“Boy,” Tooch called as he came in the door, the bell ringing. “How’s business?”
Mack had been at the button box. “Slow,” he said, not looking up.
“Anybody come in?”
“Just Granny.”
Tooch pulled off his gloves and laid them on the counter. “What she buy?”
“Few groceries. Nothing much.”
He took the money box from underneath the counter, opened it.
“We’ll just tack another week to your time here,” he said. “What you think of that.”
His boots creaking over the boards, Tooch walked to the post office nook at the front end of the counter, went behind the partition, and squinted at Mack through the letter slots.
The boy reached for another handful of buttons.
“Go on out yonder and unload that wagon,” Tooch said. “I don’t pay you to count buttons.”
You don’t pay me at all, he thought.
“I heard that,” Tooch said.
They kept the whiskey in a deep rectangular hole in the ground under several removable floorboards in the back of the store—a hiding place Tooch had devised and Mack had dug. Now Mack used a knife to prize up the board ends and set them carefully along the wall. He pulled the tarp off and struck a match and peered down into the darkness: often a rat, possum, or other creature would have crawled beneath the store and fallen into the hole, which was about the size of a grave, and been unable to get out. Nothing there today but a spiderweb in the corner. Black widow. He hopped in and used a match to shrivel it up like a raisin, then climbed out brushing off his hands. He made several trips outside and returned each time carrying four jugs. By the time he’d gotten the two dozen stored, thrown a tarp over them, and replaced the boards, Tooch was already into the jug he’d kept out.
The hour of dusk—what the widow used to call candle-lighting—was the worst time at the store for Mack. Days would be filled with chores and tasks, hurrying here and there and merchandise forever in his hands, conversations with whoever came to the store, and children dashing up the aisles and more often than not three or four men on the porch trading lies. But then at five Tooch would collect his ledgers and climb the ladder into his loft room, and Mack, alone, would go out to the porch.
Tonight the sun had fallen behind the trees across the field and the land beyond it seemed afire, light flickering in the folds. Mack sat on the edge of the porch and swatted at mosquitoes and watched the night’s advance and whittled on a knot of wood. Now and again he’d hang his head and spit between his knees into the same spot in the dirt, a kind of project of his, the ground there concave and forever wet-looking, as in ghost stories the widow had told of murder sites where blood could never be scrubbed away, blood that would come back even after you removed the stained boards and replaced them with new ones, or dug up the bloodied dirt and refilled it with dirt altogether different. He leaned again and spat and thought how much blood this land had seen and how much more it was yet to see. Wondered how much it could take before it had had enough and started giving blood back.
These were lonely nights but tonight was especially so as it was a year since Arch’s death. To rid himself of the memory Mack cast about for another thought and settled on one of the times he and William had risen from their bed, already dressed and with their plot in mind, kicked the sheets aside, and swung their feet onto the floor, tunneling their socked toes into their shoes and struggling with the laces in the dark. Soon they were on the road, the dog ordered back. It was two miles to the river and they ran all the way, scarcely a word passing between them.
I love her, Mack had thought those many, many nights ago as his feet pounded the road beneath him,
and he wondered now as the horizon grew orange if he did love her, if you could love somebody you’d never spoken to, love a woman you’d seen only by spying through her window at night. He thought you must be able to, surely this thing lodged in his chest even now had to have a name.
The boys would stop at the soft muddy edge of the river and cling to vines to catch their breath and wait, listening to the dark murmuring water dragging its ageless fingers along the banks and its belly over the gauzy bottom, the sploop of a fish stabbing the surface, cry of some night bird. In the glowing strand of river and the sky itself they could see stars and their constellations. The Big Dipper. The little one.
It would take a few minutes to locate the old canoe they’d hidden, to tear it from its mooring of vine and shrub and flip it over—both of them stopping once as something large and very close slurped from the bank to their right—but soon they would be kneeling in the boat’s wet bottom and paddling in long practiced strokes, Mack watching the shape of his brother as he bent with the work of propelling them toward the other side, where her lamplit windows were visible as they pulled the canoe ashore.
She never slept, it seemed like. Annie. Each of the times they’d gone to spy her windows were lit, her shadow passing. Sometimes they’d stay till near dawn, dozing and waking in the chill air and then a frantic dash home. Sometimes there would be men inside Annie’s cabin, their large silhouettes alongside her smaller one. Or sometimes two or three fellows on the porch, drinking and cursing and kicking the wall to hurry the occupied one.
Only once had William and Mack seen her refuse a man, who’d begun to yell and threaten her and pound the door until she opened it and backed him across the porch and down the steps with a sawed-off shotgun. They’d elbowed themselves deeper in the weeds as the thwarted man grumbled and stalked around the house, cursing at her and throwing rocks onto her tin roof, once passing within a yard of where Mack lay, a smell of immense body odor and woodsmoke and whiskey. The fellow had finally given up and left, but only after he’d done a thing that shocked them both, dropping his trousers and, his white buttocks shining in the light of the moon, working his arm and shuddering and spending himself right on the side of the house.
Another night a chair leg had come through her window, and a man’s loud voice had roared, then smacks of someone being hit and her shouting. Then a gunshot. Mack followed William through the tall wet weeds to the porch, but when the door burst open they dove sideways—William left, Mack right—and rolled beneath the porch and watched a shirtless man tumble down the steps bawling, his hands over his crotch. He got to his feet and fell again, the blood on his hands and thighs black in the moonlight. “You’ve done me!” he yelled. Overhead, the boys heard her weight on the boards as she came to the edge of the porch. “Get on home, dog,” she said, and they heard a shotgun snap shut, heard its hammer click back. The man scrabbled away while Mack and William watched, and after a few long minutes Annie had gone back inside.
They’d never found out what had happened to the man, but Annie had been back in business a month later when they’d gone again and crouched in the tall weeds with the river gurgling behind them and the sky spitting its stars overhead.
Now Annie worked for Tooch, though Mack didn’t know if Annie owed him money, too, or if Tooch had simply made an agreement with her. These days, if you wanted to be with her, you had to come see Tooch, get the password. Otherwise, Annie wouldn’t let you in, and everyone had heard about her sawed-off sixteen-gauge.
Mack looked down. He’d whittled his knot nearly away.
Behind him the door opened and Tooch came out. He stood holding his jug and put his right hand in the small of his back and stretched.
“You get them bridles oiled?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“Tomorrow first thing get going on washing them clothes.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tooch stood a moment longer, then turned and sat on the bench and uncorked his jug. He hooked his thumb in the thumbhole and hefted the whiskey in the crook of his bent arm and drank, his throat pumping, then rested the jug on his knee. For a time they sat watching softly burning fire-flies and the wicks of stars, the only other light a glow from the lantern behind them in the store. After a while, Tooch said, “Did you know me and Arch was the same age?”
Mack didn’t know whether to answer, so he waited.
“Same age,” Tooch went on, “grew up in the same house, went to school together. But time we turned twenty, Arch was running the store. He was a landlord, postmaster, beat supervisor, and fixing to be a politician. And me, I wasn’t nothing but a sharecropper.”
They sat, then Mack asked, “How come?”
Tooch paused and took another drink, and Mack feared he’d asked the wrong thing, but abruptly Tooch began to tell how his mother had died delivering him, how the Widow Gates couldn’t stop the bleeding, and by the time the Coffeeville doctor came in his wagon blood had soaked through the mattress to the ground under the bed. But Tooch—his given name was Quincy, after his father—had lived. He was taken by the widow to his father’s brother’s house where he stayed for three years. Perhaps those times were good, Tooch said he couldn’t remember now. His uncle Ed and aunt Clarabel had their own children, three girls and the new baby boy, Arch, who’d been delivered by the Widow Gates four months before Tooch had, without a hitch.
“Without a hitch,” Tooch repeated.
He and Arch had slept together in the same crib, nursed at the same mother’s breast. When he turned three, Ed and Clarabel Bedsole decided little Quincy should return to his own father’s house. Quincy Senior had had enough time to recover from his sadness, they felt, though the blue of loss about him could color a room.
Of living at home with his father, Tooch said he remembered only the day his father left. The father rising that morning from his sagging bed as he always did, shirtless, his black hair hanging long off the front of his head, hiding his eyes, giving the impression to the boy of a crow’s tail feathers. The father dressed without speaking that day, without looking at his son, fastened each button of his sweat-yellowed shirt, rolled the sleeves to his biceps, pulled on a pair of things so soft from use and age that they seemed little more than piles of dirty cloth until his feet and ankles gave them the upright shape of boots. He took from a peg in one of the wall logs his shapeless hat, and clutching it in his fist walked over the dirt floor, got his rifle from the corner and lifted the piece of rawhide that let up the latch and filled the room with morning, then closed the door behind him, pushing in the rawhide strap so it fell along the inside of the door, locking himself out.
Having gone with the widow to the poorest sharecroppers’ shacks to deliver their babies, Mack, as he whittled, could imagine filthy little Quincy on his pallet on the floor. Could imagine him scratching the lice in his hair, the ringworm on his cheek, the one under his arm. Imagine him thin from worms. Sores on his elbows and knees and flies landing in them until he wipes them away, then they land again.
Mister? Tooch says.
All day he moves around the room waiting for his father to return. He watches the limp rawhide strap and cries softly, then loudly, his cheeks burning from the salt in his tears, his voice going hoarse, until he gags and vomits on his naked legs. He marks the sun’s progress by where the light is strongest between the cracks in the walls. He sleeps on his pallet. When the light is gone he rises, his thighs and ballsack burning from his piss, his bottom pasted with shit. He moves across the dirt, not even bothering to flick at the flies on his head, in his sores, wiping at them only when they get too close to his eyes.
Mack listened and imagined. Tooch peering through the hole over the rawhide strap. A bright night outside, brighter than in the cabin, and the wild dogs he has been hearing have massed in the front yard. Now one leaves the pack and side-walks toward the door, head down, hackles up, eyes gleaming. He sees the black rubbery skin casing its yellow teeth. He hears himself crying and knows this is wha
t has brought these things. He claps a sour hand over his mouth, scattering the flies. There is quiet scratching on the door now, and quick breathing. This goes on for a long time. The dogs begin to howl and yap, circling the cabin, raising their muzzles to the moon as it bores through the clouds and across the map of stars.
That’s all, Tooch said, he remembered of being four years old. He was told that the dogs did not get in. Told that Ed stopped by a day—or was it two days?—later, finding him hiding under the bed, malnourished, in shock. That he didn’t speak for almost a month after Ed and Clarabel took him back in and got the Widow Gates over to doctor him to good health, purge the worms, give him her bitter, leafy medicines and dab at him with poultices to kill the lice and cure the sores. They started calling him Tooch as a nickname. He was told that this came about because in play he would make a pistol of his hand and cock back his thumb and aim it at Arch and say, “I gone tooch you.” The name stuck.
What Tooch remembered after the wild dogs were things that seemed random, chasing lightning bugs with Arch—they are six years old—catching the drifting bugs between clapped hands and shrieking at their glowing skin, chasing more and smearing the jelly on their faces, necks, bare chests, sticky with light. Catching garter snakes, toad frogs, box turtles. Fishing with Uncle Ed and Arch in the pond while water bugs glide over the surface, joined at the feet to their reflections—underbugs, something hovering beneath the sunlit earth like a dark-sided bad dream, forgotten in the light of day but not gone, never gone. Then memories of nights in bed beside deep-sleeping Arch when a dog would howl far away, on a hill in the woods, and Uncle Ed would find Tooch beneath the bed in the morning, his thighs wet from his own piss, and there would follow the jolted trip through the kitchen, his nightshirt clinging to his bottom, out over the rough dirt, steered by Uncle Ed’s hand on his neck, a limb snatched from a passed tree, his legs laced with red welts.