Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “Their pennies go elsewhere.”

  In your pocket, the peddler had thought. He’d taken the rest of McCorquodale’s order and left, heading toward Bedsole’s store in New Prospect, which he was more than a little concerned about—the peddler who usually ran this route had disappeared, inventory, wagon, mule, and all, a few months ago. One of this peddler’s assignments—his boss had said—was to see what he could dig up about the mystery. The local justice of the peace—a Mr. Hill—had been informed by letter and he’d written back saying the fellow hadn’t come through there at all—he’d asked around and no one had seen hide nor hair. The peddler wasn’t surprised. The whole damn area had itself a reputation of being lawless, so more likely than not the peddler’s predecessor had fallen prey to highwaymen, his inventory scattered to the four winds.

  But now the fellow on the good horse had drawn close. The peddler raised a hand in greeting, the fellow raised one back.

  They stopped, facing each other in the road, then the man moved his horse aside in what the peddler took as a show of manners and came alongside the wagon. He was handsome, early thirties, in possession of all his teeth. He had a good smile and a haircut that looked paid for. A shaved face. He wore a sturdy green denim shirt with fine gold stitching and silver buttons, the kind of detail the peddler always noticed. Fine leather boots, a matching leather belt. His saddle had been well-oiled, too, the stock of the rifle in its scabbard unnicked. A well-tended firearm. Here sat a gentleman who might covet a box wherein a naked Matilda reclined on a chaise longue.

  “Afternoon, friend,” the peddler said, doffing his hat.

  “Afternoon yourself,” the fellow replied, his hands folded over the pommel of his saddle, fine calfskin gloves on his hands.

  “Lovely today,” the peddler said, glancing up to give the sky its cursory credit.

  “Lovely,” the man agreed. “How’s it feel under that umbrella there?”

  “The sun bringeth up the cotton,” he said, “but also redness of the skin. I prefer it under here.” If the fellow wanted an umbrella, there were half a dozen boxed ones back there beneath a crate of shovels. For eighty extra cents the peddler could even rig an attachment to a saddle.

  The man’s horse shivered and lifted its tail and large cubes of green-black shit began to tumble out. The peddler envied such solidity. If the well-dressed man noticed what occupied his horse, however, he had the manners not to show it. The turds hit the road in dull thuds.

  “Say,” the peddler said, casting a glance behind him, “would you be interested in a…shall we say…exotic item? Mister…?”

  The man didn’t say his name. “What sort of item?”

  The peddler tapped the box on the seat beside him. “Inside this peculiar-looking paraphernalia resides something of exquisite beauty and rare charm. A lady, shall we say, of the evening. I call her Matilda but you can call her anything you’d like.”

  “Say there’s a picture of a lady in there?”

  “You’re a careful listener, I can tell.”

  With such good manners, such good clothes and such neat hair and upon that fine horse, the man would have money in his pockets. The peddler envisioned him riding away in his finery, face upturned and the box to his eyes, the naked woman reclining for him forever, or until he traded the box to another peddler for another exotic item. Such was the world that made sense to this peddler, good men purchasing quality merchandise and him making a fair percentage.

  His bowels churgled, the horse turned its head.

  The man’s face changed. “Was that you?”

  Which disappointed the peddler. The polite thing to do was ignore it.

  “My stomach,” the peddler admitted, “is not well. Please excuse me.”

  Burning with shame and the sale in jeopardy, he hopped down from the wagon, palming a corncob. In his haste he forgot the shotgun and the little strongbox under the seat. He stepped around the horse and slipped into a grove of pine trees with his pants half down and shat what felt like hot water. When he came back onto the road, the man was sitting in the wagon seat beneath the umbrella with the box held to his face, his features in shadow. He was grinning.

  “Normally,” the peddler said from the road, “I charge a penny for a look. Which is, of course, deducted from the price.”

  “How much?” he asked, still looking into the box.

  The peddler’s favorite question. “For you? One silver dollar.”

  “Since we’re gone be partners,” the fellow said, “I should know such things.”

  “Partners?”

  “Ardy Grant,” he said, lowering the box. “Pleased to meet you.”

  IV

  Mack had spent the day digging a grave, it lay at the foot of the hollow behind the store, an inch of water accumulated among the white roots snaking its bottom. He’d been in it to his shoulders, spading dirt out, when Tooch’s shadow fell over him. For a moment he expected the impact of a bullet but kept digging.

  “That’s fine, Mack,” Tooch said, and offered down a hand to help him out. They stood looking at the square sides. “Damn, but you’re a hard worker, boy. Go on up there and take a rest.”

  Now, exhausted, he sat on the porch watching a crow bury a pecan in the croquet court. Nobody had shown much interest in the game lately. Mack missed playing, pictured, as he watched the crow, different shots he’d made. He’d always heard crows were canny, but now, seeing this one peck at the dirt, he doubted it. This fool bird had not only chosen the hardest ground in the county—the court pressed flat and smooth by years of feet and shoes, people chasing their croquet balls from arch to arch, post to post—but had elected to do its hiding in plain sight of Mack.

  The crow paused and looked sideways toward the north road and jerked its head and looked again through the other eye, then took a few running steps and sprang into the air without the pecan, climbing quickly, circling the store and giving its hoarse, nasal calls before alighting in the oak tree in the back corner of the yard. Mack squinted down the road. Someone was coming.

  He saw Lev James first, the long black beard he braided into a pair of pigtails hanging down along his once-blue shirt that was so sweaty it had gone black and seemed as attached to his body as a second skin. He was leading a mule, and in his right hand held his twelve-gauge shotgun by its twin barrels with the stock on his shoulder, a deceptive fashion of toting the gun designed to look as if he weren’t ready for a fight. But Lev James was always ready for a fight.

  Mack recalled the longest croquet game ever played in the beat. Several years before, during the laying-out period, the weather good and everyone’s spirits high, there’d been a gathering at the store. A Saturday evening. The game began with six of the men who’d been drinking freely from the whiskey Arch had provided. There were three teams, Tooch and Lev James, who were first cousins; the Smith Brothers, Huz and Buz; and a pair of Scottish fellows from across the river—five of them, all brothers, had come in looking for whiskey and been invited to stay.

  The game began with the men lagging for the order of play, shooting their different-colored balls at the end post. People gathered at the boundary to watch, including Arch’s father, Ed. He’d have played himself but his legs were already failing—he sat in his rolling chair and smoked his pipe and sipped from his jug. The teammates consulted one another and Ed before every shot, often taking ten, fifteen minutes to decide on the best strategy, another few minutes to discuss the lay of the land and where to hit the ball, and so on. With six players, the game stretched into the evening and the night, Arch bringing lanterns from the store, boys—including Mack and William—recruited to hold the lanterns to light the court.

  In the game’s sixth hour, just after nine o’clock, one of the Stewart brothers hit Lev James’s red ball in a long, curving, lucky shot. The Scot let out a cock-a-doodle-doo, his cry of victory, which Lev had heard a few times too often. Wagers had been made on the game’s outcome, and Lev had bet one of them ten dollars. “You want
to go on pay me now,” the fellow asked Lev, who brooded and whispered something to Tooch.

  The Stewart who’d hit Lev’s ball hurried to it, placed his own green ball next to it, put his boot over his ball and knocked Lev’s red one clear across the court, out of bounds, just missing Ed’s chair wheel, and into the shed beside the store where the ball rolled underneath the building. Stewart crowed again and did a little dance, the whiskey working. Arch had stepped in by now, whispering to one of the brothers that it wasn’t prudent to anger a drunk Lev James, or even a sober one. But the Stewarts were Scots and didn’t listen.

  Lev sent Mack under the store after his ball, and by the time he’d found it and come back out covered in dirt and spiderweb, the fight had started. Men where cheering as Lev and the Scot rolled in the dust, upsetting a table on which sat a half-eaten pound cake, rolling beneath a wagon and upsetting the mule team so that they dragged the wagon, its brake set, into the cotton field.

  Mack held his lantern high, and presently he and the others became aware that it wasn’t a fight so much as a massacre, that it had been a while since the Stewart fellow had landed a punch or even given any indication that he was still breathing. What remained was Lev James hitting, kicking, elbowing, kneeing, choking, eye-gouging, hair-pulling, scratching and biting the other, finally using a croquet post to beat him. All this within two or three minutes. A pair of Stewart brothers fled to their mules to fetch pistols but Tooch had already fetched his and held them back, said let the winner be decided fair.

  What’s fair about this? one of the Scots cried, but the fight was let to continue.

  No one doubted that Lev would have killed him, and that Tooch would have watched it happen, but Arch said it had gone far enough. So Tooch told the Stewarts they were welcome to break it up, but that if they used guns or knives he’d shoot them. Two of the Scots grabbed Lev by the legs and two under his arms and the fight came apart. Lev flung himself loose and began to laugh; his opponent lay unmoving. The Stewarts hoisted their brother across his mule and left.

  The game continued with the Stewarts’ balls removed, and Lev and Tooch beat Huz and Buz Smith just after midnight.

  The story didn’t end there, though. There was a ferry at the time that carried news—in addition to people, horses, wagons, and goods—over the river. Several weeks later the ferryman bore the news that one of the Stewart brothers had turned up dead from a broken neck. Thrown from his horse. A couple of months after the funeral another died when his house burned. The kerosine lamp must’ve exploded, one theory went. Half a year later the third got it, snakebite, twice—they found him in a bedroll with the pair of copperheads curled around his cold feet. A few months after that another drowned when his skiff capsized. But now people had begun to view it differently; they waited for news of another deceased Stewart the way one might wait to hear who the next governor would be.

  The last brother, the one who’d fought Lev, had grown scared. He’d been said to have lost an eye to one of Lev’s thumbs and, because of a badly set break, limped with his right leg. The end of a finger was missing, bitten off. He had scars on his face and a perpetual tremble in his hands from the blows to his head—the list went on and on, growing each time the story was told. He’d holed up in his house, the ferryman reported, armed with all the guns of his dead brothers. He was waiting for Lev and Tooch. But they never came. He waited some more. They still didn’t show up. So, unable to sleep, he became mad with fear. His wife took the children and fled, left him peering out the windows, firing at anything that moved.

  Now the procession coming to the store had grown close and Mack noticed who sat with his wrists bound behind Lev on the mule’s back—Bit Owen, a bootlegger. The man for whom the grave lay waiting.

  Following the mule, War Haskew was limping, his pants leg bloody below the left knee. War was a good-looking man, straight white teeth, clean-shaven, good head of yellow hair. Kirk James walked along beside him, carrying both men’s shotguns. Kirk, older than Lev by a few years, looked nothing like his brother. Where Lev was a thick root of a man, corded and gnarled, Kirk was a tiny wisp of a fellow. Scant. Five feet, three inches. Thin arms and legs and a thin trunk. Humped-over shoulders and large ears and an ax blade of a nose—as boys, William and Mack had called him the Buzzard. Kirk and Lev were sons of a prostitute, most of her children fathered by different men. One had left her with Lev in her womb, another with Kirk. They had other brothers and sisters, too, some nearby, some they’d never see again. Rumor held that Lev and Kirk had hanged her for being a whore.

  Finally, behind everyone else, walked Mack’s brother, William, dragging a dirty blanket on which lay several gallon jugs of bootleg whiskey. He looked up and saw Mack on the porch and grinned and lifted a hand.

  The procession of mule and men stopped in front of Mack where he stood, Bit Owen’s cut-up face down, his shoulders pulled back by his bound hands. The men lined up facing the porch.

  “Boy,” Lev ordered, “fetch us Tooch.”

  “Yes, sir,” he said, turning for the door.

  Tooch stood there already, looking at his men through the rusty screen. He came out. “Here he sits,” Tooch said, flicking a dismissive hand at Owen, “the man who would refuse our offer. Who would rather be friendly with the high sheriff than with his own kind.”

  Mack edged along the wall toward the side of the porch.

  Tooch had turned his attention to War Haskew, who favored his bloody leg. “He get you, War?”

  “Just a skritch,” Haskew said. “It ain’t much.”

  “You should’ve came over with us, Bit,” Tooch said. “Now you’ll never again taste your own whiskey.”

  “You won’t neither,” Owen said. “I got a powerful recipe, not written down nowhere.”

  “I believe we can work a goddamn still,” Lev said. He came up the steps and stood beside Tooch, then sat on the edge of the porch and laid his shotgun aside. He had his face painted with ash. “William,” he said, “bring me one of them.” William untied the jugs and carried one to Lev, who unstoppered it and sniffed its mouth. He closed his eyes and his countenance relaxed.

  “Corn base,” he said.

  “Hell, everbody knows that,” Owen said. “I ain’t used taters for years now.”

  Lev closed his eyes, tilted the jug back, and took a mighty swig. He sloshed it in his mouth, held his head back, and let it slide down his throat.

  “You use sugar, don’t you?” Lev said, once he could breathe again. When he opened his eyes they were moist. “Would that be your secret, Bit?”

  Owen looked flustered. “Hell, no,” he said. “They’s more to it than that.”

  Even Mack could tell he was lying.

  “I believe,” Tooch announced, “that we got us a whiskey artist here among us, boys. Hand me that splo, Lev.”

  Lev, meanwhile, began fashioning his rope into a noose, doing it in plain sight of Owen. It had grown darker, the sun dragging its final light over the edge of the fields.

  “The truth,” Owen said, looking at Tooch, “is that I’ve had me a change of heart. Yes, I reckon I have. I’ve decided just now to take up your offer. My gun is yours. My two stills, too. Let us declare battle upon the courthouse, or whoever it is who’s irksome to you.”

  “Your three stills is mine, all right,” Tooch said, “and your gun, too, and so is everthing else we find out in your shack. Your mule there is mine. Your skiff is. Your chickens and the eggs they shit out. If you’d of ever took a wife, she’d be mine to concubine, as the Good Book calls it, and I’d of made her a whore to go along with that other one.”

  “Well, it seems fair,” Owen said. “You bested me, and I’m in your service.”

  “Lev,” Tooch said, and Lev came forward with the noose.

  Mack pressed himself into the wall, not making a sound. This was far more than he had been allowed to witness. His heart convulsed in a strange way—he was fixing to see Bit Owen strung up in the huge oak tree where the crow still sat
, eyeing its half-buried pecan.

  “Mack,” Tooch said. Lev paused. Even Bit Owen looked upon him, for a moment.

  Mack’s ribs constricted with relief and disappointment. He ducked his head as he came forward. “Sir?”

  “Inside with you, boy.”

  He turned, and—glancing one last time at the crow where it sat in the tree—opened the screen door and closed it behind him. He didn’t look back. He went down the aisle to his room. He closed that door, too, and sat down on his bed ticking. Across from him the rifles stood in their rack. He reached for a Winchester Model 94 and took it from its place. He worked its lever, the ratchet sound it made. He aimed it at the ceiling timbers and snapped the hammer, click. Then he flounced back onto his blanket, the gun clutched at his chest.

  Not much later he heard Tooch’s footsteps. He came to the door and opened it without knocking.

  Mack stood up.

  “Here,” he said. “Got a job for you.”

  He felt small following Tooch through the store, over the porch, and down the steps. The men stood around Bit Owen’s body where it lay in its filthy long underwear, his clothes a mucky pile beside the corpse. Lev had taken his shoes, though they were too small, and was unnoosing his neck and others were drinking and passing the jug among them. Mack looked at the dead man, his throat red, the underwear wet and soiled. He pushed his hands into his pockets.

  “Find your spade,” Tooch said, flipping a casual hand at the body. “You know what to do.”

  He nodded and ran to get the shovel from its nail in the shed by the stall where the horse stood back in the shadows. It heard him and came forward, pushing its snout through the boards, showing cubes of yellow teeth.

  At the edge of the hollow Mack slid the shovel headfirst down the ravine, through the dead leaves, where it clattered at the stones along the bottom of the gully. He came back for the body, which lay alone now—the men had gone to the porch and were sitting, drinking, War Haskew telling Tooch the story of the raid and gunfight and Owen’s surrender.