Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  Uncle Ed owned the store then, had felled the trees with a crosscut saw twenty years before, and aided by Quincy Senior had muled them out and fitted the staggered corner logs and mortared them with mud and raw cotton, had stacked and mortared the flat chimney stones and nailed up the store-bought shingles and laid the milled floorboards perfectly level. He had borrowed two hundred dollars from a man in Coffeeville to finance his stock and had struggled but survived, had gotten along well with the peddlers who clanged up in their wagons.

  Good days to be a nephew, better days to be a son. While Tooch always felt loved by his aunt and uncle and secure enough in their care, there were differences between the way he and Arch were treated. There was Christmas, when Tooch’s stocking was mismatched with the other children’s, crocheted from different, cheaper yarn, his name not stitched in red letters like Arch’s and the girls’. And Arch’s harmonica would be fancier than Tooch’s, Arch’s apple bigger, his orange softer. When the boys were twelve and the encyclopedia set came in the mail, Arch got to crowbar open the heavy wooden box, Arch got to lift out the first book and unwrap the brown paper, to page through the S volume, to trace his finger over the drawings of a cobra, of an anaconda, a python. Somehow, whenever he wanted to read one, Tooch felt compelled to ask if he might take a volume from the cherrywood rack by the mantel.

  When the boys stole a plug of tobacco from the store Tooch got his licks first, behind the barn, Ed holding his head down and slinging the leather strap so hard his hat flew off. Dismissed, Tooch limped dry-eyed around the corner past the spikes of a harrow and nodded to Arch, who nodded back in passing and went to get his own whipping. Crouching in the barn, peering between the slits in the boards, Tooch counted each lick Arch got, unsurprised when his cousin got half the stripes he did, delivered with half the fury.

  Perhaps, added to other minor and boyish mischiefs, it was the stolen tobacco that convinced Ed to split the pair up, not let them come together to the store where they’d both been working. Now they were fifteen, done with school, and Ed sat Tooch down on a March evening after supper when everybody else had gone to a church meeting where there was supposed to be fried chicken and baseball. “Boy,” Uncle Ed said, “it’s come time for you to earn your keep in our family. We do consider you a part of us, like a son,” he said, “but there ain’t enough to keep a pair of young ones busy in the store and that’s how come I’ve decided to lend you out to Isom Walker. He needs a hand with his crop, and he’ll pay you a good wage, which I expect you’ll be glad to contribute to the family that raised you.”

  Tooch agreed. Like a son.

  “You’re a good boy,” Ed said. “Your aunt and me know it—there ain’t a speck of your daddy in you.”

  For four years after that, Tooch was a cotton farmer’s hired hand. Because the Walker place was four miles away, Walker and Uncle Ed had agreed that Tooch should bunk in the tack room in Walker’s barn or, if it were cold, on the floor beside the fireplace in the house. He would spend weekends at home, and never see a dime of the money he earned.

  Those were days, Tooch said, to be forgotten, meals with Walker and his pious wife, Bible readings around the table; the path he wore in the grass from the back door to the barn; the udders he pulled in the morning; the shit-speckled eggs he gathered; the earth he plowed and fertilizer he slung and seeds he planted, staring at the fly-ridden haunches of Walker’s cantankerous mule; learning to watch the sky for signs of its disposition; entering a cotton field at first light and leaving at dark; bent over hoeing, bent over picking; the too-quick days at home with his uncle, aunt, and cousins; borrowing one encyclopedia volume a week and reading it by candlelight in the barn, exploring the world a letter at a time. Isom Walker was a man who called boys “Son” and Tooch hated this, had begun to imagine that he was no one’s son, not Walker’s, not Ed Bedsole’s, not even his own father’s. One evening he heard Mrs. Walker read from the Bible of the prodigal. Tooch was no prodigal, for if he left there would be no father to regret his absence.

  By the time the boys were nineteen, Arch was managing the store while his father oversaw the four or five farms he owned or had a stake in, and soon the Bedsole Mercantile sign over the porch saw added, in neat white letters, MR. R. ARCHIE “ARCH” BEDSOLE, MANAGER. He had a knack for dealing with people, could remember their names and the names of their children, names of their mules, whether they’d want a nip of the busthead whiskey he kept in the back. He knew without being asked when to palm a fellow the brown-wrapped contraceptive devices he kept under the counter, or a woman a can of tuberose snuff. He even treated black folks with respect, understanding that to thrive his store had to serve them, too, and though they knew to come to the back door to place their orders, he extended them the same credit as he did his white customers, and knew each of their names as well.

  Soon, with his father’s blessing, he’d opened the post office in the store, a small cubicle he built just inside the door, and he’d read letters—the mail was delivered from Coffeeville twice a week—to those who couldn’t read; people trusted him because he wouldn’t speak of the content of their letters, be it good news or bad. In the post office he also had a stack of the thick, richly illustrated catalogs of Sears Roebuck and Company, J. H. Whitney, E. Butterick, Montgomery Ward. You could page through and order from these, so Bedsole’s Mercantile became everyone’s link to the larger world.

  Arch served cheese and crackers for a nickel, oysters and crackers for a dime. To foster goodwill in the community, he ordered from Sears Roebuck the croquet set that the hamlet would embrace for the next decade.

  “And me?” Tooch said, setting his jug on his knee. “I quit working for Walker to work my own place. Sharecropping for Uncle Ed first, and then for Arch. Ten years of it,” he said. Then he said, “You know where I was the night Arch got killed?”

  Mack did, but asked, “Where?”

  “Sitting in that same damn shack, same one my momma had died in. Reading the R encyclopedia. Reading about them redwood trees they got out in California. You ever heard of ’em?”

  He said he hadn’t.

  “Wasn’t nothing in that shack but a half-ass bed that’d give your back the cramps. Not even a table for my lamp. Had to go out fetch me a piece of pinewood for a table, saw off the ends. And ever night I’d sit there on the bed and read. Arch would lend me them encyclopedias, one at a time. They was still his books. Only difference was we was grown up.

  “Night he died I’d been looking at that picture of them redwoods, and at my little wood table. Thinking how some trees out in California is so big a man can stand in the roots and get his picture drawn, and then there’s little loblolly pines in Mitcham Beat gets cut up and used as furniture. You know what I mean?”

  “I reckon.”

  “All my life, boy, I envied Arch.” He looked at Mack. “This ain’t general knowledge. Fact is, what I’m telling you is something nobody knows but two people, one of ’em’s me, and the other one—Arch—is in the ground.” He got up from the bench and stood weaving, the boards groaning beneath his weight. The lantern inside had gone out and the cotton before them, washed in starlight, looked blue. Tooch stepped unevenly over the porch and leaned on a corner post and let it guide him to sitting. In the dark his shoulder brushed Mack’s. Tooch’s hot whiskey breath burned over him. “If you’re gone work for me, Mack,” he said, “I’m gone have to trust you. Can I trust you, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Yes sir, what?”

  “You can trust me. I won’t tell nobody what you’re saying.”

  “If you do, you know what will happen, don’t you?”

  The skin on the back of his neck tingled. “You’ll kill me.”

  “There you go. I wouldn’t want to. But if you betray me, you ain’t giving me no choice, are you? You got to be as honest with me as a preacher is with God or Jesus or whoever. You got that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “It can’t be no secrets between us. I me
an I don’t want to know if you have a dirty thought or shit your britches, but if it’s something big comes up, you damn well better let me hear of it even before you put it in a prayer and aim it at Glory. You got me, boy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  For a time neither spoke and Mack thought Tooch might’ve passed out. His breath came even and deep. But then he said, “Part of me was glad when Arch died. You know why?”

  Mack thought. “It gave you a shot.”

  “It did, didn’t it.”

  Mack looked at Tooch. “That set of books has one missing. The R one.”

  Tooch nodded. “Burned up with the cabin. Night Arch died. Redwood tree picture and all.”

  They sat. Tooch took another drink from his jug. “You never did know your daddy, either, did you?”

  “No, sir. This knife,” he said, holding it where Tooch could see its blade glowing in the starlight, “used to be his. The widow, she give me it and his old pistol and give William his shotgun.”

  Tooch sat holding his jug on his knee. A far-off dog’s bark cut through the air. Tooch waited for it to drift away. “You tell me one,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “A story. You tell one.”

  “I don’t know any.”

  “What about growing up. With the widow. That old woman’s gotta be worth a thousand stories. She was the one drawed us all from our momma’s wounds. Reckon she’s seen us all nekkid, ain’t she. Gives a woman a certain advantage.”

  Mack looked up at the stars. He did know a story.

  “I used to have the asthma,” he said. “Real bad. The widow told me when I was a baby I like to died from it about twice a week. I’d turn all blue. My face. Lips. Couldn’t breathe a lick. She had to tote me around the room, holding me just about upside down, she said. Said she got no sleep at all first year of my life.

  “When I was older it was better. During the day it’d be okay. Long as I didn’t run or get too hot or breathe too much dust. We used to play mumbly-peg, me and William. By the steps. But at dark it always come. The widow said the night air did it. Just about time the moon came up I’d start a wheezing. And I’d sit up all night, wouldn’t lay down cause I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t go to sleep. Just sat there wheezing.

  “But the widow, she’d stay up with me, all night. Said she was glad to, said she felt like she’d slept near ’bout her whole life away before she got us. She’d let me sip sugared whiskey, and she’d sip it, too, sometimes. And we’d talk. She’d tell me all sorts of things, about being a little girl in Tennessee. About the ocean, which she seen one time. What all the things in the woods are. Mushrooms and what leaves you can use for curing sick people. Told about her husband, who got killed in the War. Said they hung him from a trestle near Pea Ridge, Arkansas.

  “Thing is, I didn’t half listen, I was just trying to breathe. But her voice, it helped me. Something I could ride on, get me from one breath to the next. I remember how we used to listen outside. Birds. Bugs. She’d say, ‘You hear that one?’ and I’d say, ‘Yes ma’am,’ and she’d say, ‘That’s a katydid. And that one?’ and I’d say I did, and she’d say, ‘That’s a whippoorwill.’ All the time rubbing this hot stuff she made into my chest and wiping my head with a warm rag and feeding me that sugared whiskey.”

  He had stopped whittling. He said, “There was this bantam rooster this old colored fellow had. Lived about a mile off, to the east. At night we’d always listen for the rooster to crow. When we heard it, the widow would say, ‘It’s almost morning. You can breathe now, child.’ And I knew I’d be able to sleep.”

  “What happened?” Tooch asked. He belched. “You breathe fine now. Don’t need me in there all night, babying you.”

  “Well, it’s the strange part of the story,” he said. “It was Arch. One day when me and her and William went to the store, Arch told her he’d read how this little biddy special kind of dog from Mexico would take the asthma out of a person’s body. You got one of the dogs and let it sleep with whoever had the asthma, and after a spell the asthma would be gone.”

  Tooch snorted.

  “About a month later, when we went to the store, Arch said he had a surprise for us. He put a box up on the counter there. We looked in and it was the ugliest little rat of a dog you ever saw. He said it was a Chihuahua. A yellow thing with big eyes and ears. The widow started crying. Might’ve been the only time we ever saw her cry. She hugged Arch. We went on home and she held the dog to my chest all night. I remember I could feel his heart beating. Smell his breath, smelled like fish.

  “I hated to do it,” Mack said. “Hated to give my sickness to this little innocent dog, but if you’d spent so many nights drowning—not able to get no air, you’d do it, too. She wouldn’t let us name him. Said no use getting fond of him. This went on for weeks, I guess, until the dog started getting sick.”

  “You lying.”

  “No I ain’t. It started getting all jittery. You’d hear it cough, too. These little coughs. And it quit eating, and if you wasn’t careful it’d bite you. Then one morning I woke up and it was dead. Stiff. Little spot of blood on my shirt. The widow made me face north and cough into some green tobacco leaves and bury the dog wrapped in the leaves.”

  A whippoorwill called, one answered.

  Tooch said, “You expect me to believe that?”

  Mack took a deep, deep breath. Held it. Let it go.

  Tooch smiled but Mack had grown silent. Gazing at the moon just cresting the tree line over the field, he wondered if it was the same moon from those breathless nights or a different moon traveling the same path. Perhaps a new moon passed each night, launched from an endless supply, or—he frowned—a limited one, like a boy throwing rock after rock after rock across a pond. Soon the rocks would run out or his arm would tire or suppertime would call him away and the pond would see no more rocks overhead. Or some highwayman might come out of the edge of the woods with a knife and steal behind the boy and pull his head back by the hair until the skin of his neck grew taut and slice open his throat and let him fall, the rocks dribbling from his fist.

  “That old woman babying you all night made you soft,” Tooch said.

  “I reckon.”

  Mack kept watching the moon.

  “That Arch,” Tooch said, “he always give too much charity.”

  “I can breathe, cause of that charity.”

  Tooch took another drink from his jug. “Well, it’s a goddamn shame somebody shot him, ain’t it, boy.”

  Then, using the post, he clambered up and staggered inside.

  III

  A buckboard wagon clanked over the knoll, sunlight glinting from a hundred hanging tools, pans, pots, funnels, dippers, buckets, the peddler hunched in the seat beneath a yellow umbrella, shucking a piece of charred corn and then peeling off the dry silk a strand at a time and flicking it from his fingers. Once he’d nibbled the kernels away he dropped the cob around his feet where several others lay in the dust, for use later when his liquid bowels let go, as they did several times a day, usually with the damn corn kernels still intact. More than once he’d leapt from the wagon fumbling with his pants—which he’d begun wearing unfastened—just getting them down in time. Done, he’d swirl a cob among his chapped nether regions, grinding what few teeth there were left in his gums, then he’d rise and pull up his britches as he hurried after the wagon, the mule never having stopped walking, the peddler imagining clusters of cornstalks springing up irregularly behind him, a fertilized trail all over Southwest Alabama.

  Because he trusted men on good horses, he never thought to pick up the sawed-off shotgun, charged and propped beside his seat, when he saw the stranger coming from the other way on the fine-looking dun. He swiped a hand across his beard to free it of corn pellets and pushed his derby hat back on his head. You never knew when you’d make a sale, and this wagon beneath him had in its stores about everything a human being could use, an inventory he could name from adze to yoke. There wasn’t an item on the wagon
including the wagon or the mule pulling it or the new plow shoes on the peddler’s feet—a gift from his sister—he wouldn’t sell for the right price, including the wooden box on the seat beside him, a gift from a rounder out of New Orleans. Inside the box a pretty woman reclined on an ornate chaise longue—a naked woman, everything bared. The peddler had been calling her Matilda.

  He had departed McCorquodale’s store in Coffeeville two days prior, and though he’d stopped at a number of farms and shown the box to the skinny men, none had had the cent it cost to have a gander. The last person to view it had been stodgy old McCorquodale. Frowning, the storekeep had held it up to the window light in his store, as the peddler had instructed, and gazed in for a reasonable amount of time, and then lowered the box.

  “Let that boy get him a eyeful,” the peddler had suggested, noticing the boy called Carlos where he stood at the end of an aisle in his store apron.

  “He don’t need to poison his brainpan with such as this,” McCorquodale said. “I’d seen that when I was his age, I would’ve become warped in a way no man could unwarp.”

  “Do him good,” the peddler said. “Education. It’s among the things you can’t take from a fellow. Heritage, blood, common sense—” He had several more in his list, but McCorquodale interrupted.

  “I’ll educate my son my own way,” he said. “We’ll not be needing this viewing device and I’ll thank you to put it out of my sight.”

  “Your gentleman customers might pay a good penny to see such as she,” the peddler said.