Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  The dead man lay unmoved on his belly. Mack took him by one loose ankle and lifted the leg, surprisingly heavy, and began to drag him over the court. By the time he’d gotten to the edge of the woods he felt faint and realized he’d been holding his breath. He let the foot fall and turned away from Owen and bent, hands on his knees, light-headed. Before anyone from the porch could see him he recovered and took the same foot and pulled the man into the bushes. On the porch the men had broken out cigars and were lighting them with a piece of kindling.

  Mack set to rolling Owen down the sharp ravine, an easier job than pulling him overland. Twice the old man became wedged on trunks, but Mack dislodged him with his foot and soon Owen lay beside his grave.

  Here was the time to say words over the dead body. Mack had only had a couple of dealings with Bit Owen but had found him pleasant enough—once years ago at this very store on a croquet Saturday he’d given Mack a four-point buck horn he’d found on the riverbed, and when Mack had asked about the tiny craters eaten in its side the old man had explained how mice and other small varmints got nourishment from the horn, how if left alone in the leaves where he’d found it it would’ve soon been gone entirely, eaten away.

  Mack tried to recall an appropriate Bible verse to recite but could only remember the one about how everything had its time. A time to gather stones. To throw them away. To die. He repeated what he could remember of the list quietly, worrying that his voice might drift uphill, but the sentiments seemed empty and unfit for quoting over a body. A time for everything. What did that mean? He tried to think of something else.

  No words came, though, so he picked up the shovel and wedged it beneath Owen and levered him into the hole, muddy at the bottom. He landed faceup, one arm flopping over, his mouth open but his eyes shut. Glad for that, Mack peered at him. He didn’t look dead in the near dark, he might’ve been asleep. You could even see a slight movement there on his chest. Tooch had said that often dead men move. Their tallywhackers get hard. A foot might twitch, a finger curl.

  As he shoveled dirt into the grave the green clouds of evergreen trees and the gray poles of sycamore trunks began to recede, night accruing around his feet like floodwaters and seeping up the hill. He always felt trapped by darkness when it came. Before it grew to where he couldn’t see he climbed the bank and went through the croquet court and to the porch and between the laughing, drunk men and into the store for a lantern.

  “You ain’t buried him yet?” Lev said. “You must’ve had a little romp with him first, eh?”

  They all laughed, William the hardest.

  As Mack filled the lantern with oil he could hear Lev telling one about a man he knew who used to like to corpulate with dead girls. Couldn’t ever get him a live one, this fellow was so ugly. Not even a whore, there wasn’t enough money minted. There was even a couple of dead girls that had tried to get up and crawl off in the middle of it, Lev said, and the men laughed. Encouraged, Lev said the fellow used to attend funerals of girls and when the mourners left he’d go after the dirt while it was still manageable, and when the girl was, too. “Once they legs freeze up,” he said, “you got a hell of a time spreading ’em.”

  “You ought to know,” War Haskew said, and they all laughed.

  Back at the bottom by the grave, something was wrong. A hand had come unburied. Mack watched it, his bowels going cold as if Owen’s ghost had passed through him. He looked back up toward the top where trees silhouetted against the last dying glow of the sky had assumed ghoulish forms, outreached arms, bony fingers. Laughter trickled down. He looked back into the grave, holding the lantern over it, and saw that the hand had moved again.

  Its fingers opened. They closed.

  He caught his breath as the arm rose, bending at the elbow, and the other one unearthed itself, too, and soon both were clawing at the mud covering Bit Owen’s face, which emerged thick-lipped and black with muck. He coughed and spat. Rubbed his eyes with the heels of both hands and sat up, flinging mud from his fingers.

  “Lord,” Mack whispered, feeling for the handle of the shovel where he’d stood it.

  Owen opened and closed his mouth. He turned his head and put both hands to his throat as if to choke himself. Then he saw Mack and recognition dawned in his eyes.

  “Boy,” he croaked. “Help me on up out of here.”

  Mack slowly shook his head. He felt tethered between the lantern and the spade, his ability to hold things aloft his only reason for being.

  “Just pass me down the handle of your shovel, then, and I’ll pull myself out.” Owen held his arms up. “Ain’t nobody got to know. I’ll hightail it out of here. The county, I mean. You won’t ever have to tell a soul. You can go on cover up the hole. Hell, I’ll even help you, soon’s I catch my breath.”

  He tried to get to his feet but collapsed onto his knees. “Lord, that were a close call,” he said. “Them old boys up yonder so drunk they can’t even hang a fellow. You figure it’d be second nature to ’em.”

  He tried again to get to his hands and knees and looked up, a pained glaze in his eyes. “Reckon I shat myself,” he said. “Ain’t right a boy to smell a man like this. I was in the War and fought brave, captured two Yanks once. Hand me that shovel, now, will you?”

  Mack looked to the top of the hollow. Their laughter floated down. From where he stood he could see the shape of the hanging tree. He had buried others down here, too—another bootlegger, the peddler Lev had killed. Sometimes, digging, he would uncover the hand or face of a previous corpse.

  “Come on, honey,” Bit Owen croaked from the bottom of the grave. “Pull me out. I’m fixing to catch my death.” He bent over and retched. He threw up. His underwear was black with mud. “I’m a vile creature today,” he said, wiping a string of vomit from his chin. “Yet I reckon a man spared the fires of hell ought not yammer on about the terms of his salvation, eh?” He smiled. Rose to a kneeling position, hands on his thighs. “Why, I declare if I ain’t feeling some better now. Being near ’bout dead ain’t so different than a regular old hangover, I reckon.”

  The lantern had grown heavy. Mack lowered his arm and the sphere of light around them shrank. Below, Owen had gone to coughing again. Mack looked to the top of the ridge. Someone belched enormously and it echoed. When he looked back, the image of Owen trying to stand, using the pale elbows of root protruding from the side of the grave for leverage brought to mind a knee-baby pulling itself up on anything it could cling to. He’d seen so many babies, going as he had in his childhood with the widow to deliver them, babies born alive, babies born dead.

  Finally Owen gained his feet, steadied himself against the sides of the hole.

  “You made it a deep one, didn’t you, boy?” He ran a finger along the edge. “This here’s prime workmanship. You got you a future as a gravedigger, I’ll tell you that. As a man fixing to be raised up from the dead I can vouchsafe for the work you do, boy.”

  Mack’s legs lost their sand and he knelt, still clinging to the shovel handle and the lantern.

  Owen was trying to climb out, holding up his hand for Mack to help him.

  “I can’t,” Mack said. “If I let you go, you’ll come back. You’ll come back and they’ll know.”

  The old man coughed and rubbed his throat, his elbows on the side of the grave. “Naw, boy, I ain’t coming back. Hell. Who’d show they face after this?”

  Mack looked to the top of the ridge. No one was coming. He looked back down at the old man. Then reached and took Bit Owen’s hands in his and bracing his feet against the ridges of magnolia roots, nearly getting pulled in himself, wrenched the man up out of the mud in a foul embrace. For a moment the two of them lay side by side, panting.

  Owen sat up. “I’d like my shoes back,” he said. “I can’t fathom this harsh ground without ’em.”

  Mack shook his head. “Go on. Now. Else they’ll kill us both.”

  Bit nodded, a hand at his throat. “I see your point, boy. I done been hanged once today. That ought
to ’bout do it.”

  Mack looked to the top of the hill, figuring to see Tooch’s silhouette there. But he saw nothing, and when he looked back toward Bit, the old man had vanished. Mack bent and began to shovel furiously, watching the top of the hollow.

  V

  With the locals deep in their harvest and the peddler acting as guide, Ardy Grant spent a few days learning the landscape of Mitcham Beat and hearing its gossip, the biggest news of which was, of course, the night riders operating hereabouts.

  He heard of buildings burned, people threatened, dogs killed. Shots fired into windows, wells poisoned, fences pulled down. Heard what they’d done to the colored folks’ church. How they’d ambushed Joe Anderson.

  He was told lesser tales, too, and he found it odd how the people unburdened themselves of these details to him and the peddler, for he knew how secretive these country folks were. He knew because his mother and father had themselves been from the country—not from out here in Mitcham Beat, not from anywhere, really, just itinerant farmers, a couple who traveled year by year until they found a spot and a well-off man who’d front them money and supplies—a mule, seeds, fertilizer, tools, and a place to live—in exchange for their labor, clearing, plowing, planting, cutting, picking, carting to market. They might stay one season or two but always his father would run astray of the landowner or the law and they’d leave in the middle of the night owing money.

  They’d fled one spring to a place near Grove Hill when Ardy was three years old, a time of which he had no memory, the family arriving on foot with nothing except the clothes they wore and a few belongings his father carried while his mother carried Ardy. They stopped at the edge of a field beside a shack with wide gaping spaces between the planks that made up its walls, most of the shingles blown away. His father, the story went, had left, gone to find food or work or both. They never saw him alive again. The owner of the shack and the land around it brought him back, dead, that evening. The man had shot him for a thief, having surprised him at his, the landowner’s, smokehouse, where Ardy’s father was trying—the landowner claimed—to steal a ham.

  Ardy’s mother was an attractive woman, with a good figure and eyes so green people would pause when they saw her. Who knew what thoughts she’d had and in what order they’d come, or how she had reordered them, to allow her to marry—six months later—the very man who’d killed her husband. So Ardy had grown up in this father-killer’s house, though he didn’t know it then. He called the man Mr. Carter, as did his mother, and the two of them wore finer clothes and had enough food and slept in the flickering heat of Mr. Carter’s fireplaces, one in each large, high-ceilinged room of his two-story house. Picture molding along the ceilings and portraits of his father and mother and gray-haired uncles hanging on the walls.

  Mr. Carter was a perfectly decent man, though distant. He might go a week without giving Ardy a look, or a month without speaking to him. He often would give instructions through his wife to her son—“Tell the boy to bring in wood”—and Ardy would rise without having to hear them again, from his mother. At meals they’d eat quietly, no one speaking save Mr. Carter saying grace, always asking God’s blessings on himself, his land, his tenants, and finally his wife, but never on Ardy, who as a child began to imagine himself ignored by God, for how could a being as large and faraway as God see him if Mr. Carter did not?

  Yet each night, after each omission, when Carter had gone to one of his farms to talk with his tenants, Ardy’s mother would be in the boy’s room an hour, two, and he came to understand her affections as intercessions to God, for each night she would clutch him and pray on her knees by his bed, ask in a panicked whisper for God to please please please watch over her little Ardy, her hands squeezing the skin of his forearms so hard they’d leave marks, her eyes shut so tightly she seemed in pain. He watched her during these hissed prayers—her face lost its beauty in concentration—and he divined that she must suspect God of not listening to her; similarly, he understood from Carter’s quiet confidence as he prayed at the supper table that it was him whom God heard.

  What to think, then, of a boy brought up outside the circumference of God’s vision? He didn’t know that this was not the way other families lived until, older, he befriended a boy who not only informed him of how strange the Carter household was, but also told him what everyone else knew: that Mr. Carter had killed Ardy’s real daddy. When he asked his mother about this after one of her prayers, she’d grabbed his arm and scratched blood from it in her fervor. “Don’t you ever mention that again. Ever.” And so he hadn’t.

  And if he wasn’t able to satisfy his wonder at why his mother had married her husband’s murderer, he never wondered why he, Ardy, at age sixteen, killed Mr. Carter. Why he walked up behind his stepfather as he bent down into their well, trying to untangle the bucket Ardy had secretly tangled, and knelt and grasped the man’s ankles and tumped him in. Carter fell headlong with a girl’s cry and landed in the water far below. But once there, he never moved. When they pulled him out they found his neck broken.

  Sheriff Waite came. He led Ardy down the back path and out of sight of the house and they stood facing each other in the dim shadows of white oak branches and Waite set his right hand on the butt of his pistol and said, “Son, did you kill your stepfather?”

  Ardy said, “No. I did not.” He said, “Why would I kill him?”

  Waite studied him. Peered into his eyes, green as his mother’s. “Do you know how your real daddy died?”

  “Mr. Carter shot him.”

  Again Waite studied him. “How’d you find that out?”

  “Everbody knows it.”

  The sheriff looked at him and he looked back, and Ardy knew then that Waite had guessed the truth, but that he could never prove it. Which meant Ardy had won. After a while he said, “Can I go?”

  His mother and he inherited everything, and she began to sell plots of Carter’s land and the houses on the land. She kept the money in the Grove Hill bank. One night Ardy came in from riding Carter’s horse, which he’d claimed as his own, and found her beside the fire, rocking. She looked at him in the half-light. She’d taken to drinking a glass of buttermilk before bed and was now turning the glass in her hands. He couldn’t see her face and didn’t think she could see his. “Did you push him in?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “Because he killed my daddy.”

  “You didn’t even know your daddy.” Her voice stayed even. “And there wasn’t anything that I put into you that would make you do such a thing. Your doing such a thing was something else. Something you got on your own.”

  “Maybe I got it from him.”

  “From who?”

  “Daddy.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Maybe you did.”

  And they’d never spoken of Carter again. His mother lived in comfort and didn’t remarry and took rail trips to New York and the Gulf Coast, and Ardy left at age twenty with a pocketful of money to see the west from the back of his horse. When he learned she’d died he came home. Ten years had gone by and here he was, a different man altogether. Riding a new horse, he’d looked over the Carter land, what little she hadn’t sold, and understood that he felt nothing about her passing. He rode into Grove Hill to see how much money there was and found she’d spent most of it or given it away to the Methodist church, left only the house and enough for her own funeral. He didn’t care.

  Billy Waite had grown thinner in his absence, tiny red veins over his cheekbones and his nose larger, redder, and when Ardy encountered the sheriff on the millinery porch his fourth or fifth day back he saw in the old man’s eyes that Waite still believed Ardy had killed Carter.

  “Well,” Waite said. He folded his arms, a buggy rattled past on the street behind him. “You’re back.”

  “Yep.”

  “What you plan to do?”

  “Ain’t got no plans, really.”

  The old man exhaled, his breath stan
k. “Would you do me the favor, then, of leaving? Take what time you need to settle whatever needs to be settled, but then go. Go.”

  Ardy smiled. “I ain’t yet sure what I’ll do, Sheriff. But I thank you for your opinion.”

  The old man walked off, porch boards sighing under his weight.

  A week later Ardy ran into Judge Oscar York in the barbershop, a towel over his face and the tall bespectacled barber drawing his straight razor over the leather strop.

  “Judge,” Ardy said.

  Oscar reached and took away the steaming rag, his cheeks red from the heat. He looked puzzled for a moment, then his face changed.

  “Why, Ardy Grant,” he said. “You’re back.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Son,” the judge said, now getting up out of the chair but still wearing the barber’s smock. “I was so sorry about your mother’s passing. We always loved to hear her tales of the great white north. Did you know I gave the eulogy? She and my Lucinda were like peas in a pod. Two of ’em drunk so much tea the Chinese should’ve put up statues of ’em.”

  “I was sad not to have been here,” Ardy said, wondering briefly what his mother would have told them to explain his absence. “Bit by the travel bug myself, I reckon,” he said, then relaxed as the kind-eyed judge nodded. He should have known she’d never air any ugly family business. That she’d only speak well of him.

  “Well, a fellow needs to do that,” said the judge. “Travel. Broaden his horizons. Myself, I went up to Tuscaloosa for college. Left a boy and come back a man.” He winked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How old are you now, Ardy?”

  “Thirty, sir.”

  They chatted as Oscar sat back into the chair and got his shave, the judge asking if he thought he might stay in Grove Hill and Ardy deciding the moment he said it that yes, he would. The idea of Waite’s suspicions excited him. A moment later he’d accepted an invitation to the York house for supper, and by the time the crickets had warmed up their singing and the cicadas theirs, he and the judge were sipping lemonade on the judge’s porch with a small wicker table between them, Ardy telling stories from California and Idaho. Montana. As he talked he heard himself telling how he’d worked as a deputy in Wyoming, making up stories of captured outlaws or putting himself into the roles of others. He even pretended great sadness at the “only man” he’d had to kill, a younger fellow than he, he said, but (lowering his voice) a rapist and therefore not fit to live.