Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “It’s a wretched place,” the judge said, “this world. I see it myself, all too often. Those country fellows are such ruffians. It’s a harsh life, judging others.”

  “It don’t have to be so, sir,” Ardy said. “We just need the right men in office. That’s our only chance.”

  “May I inquire,” the judge said, leaning closer, “as to your plans, now that you’re home?”

  “Home,” he repeated. “Well, being as my experience is with the law, I was hoping Sheriff Waite might need a hand somehow. I could clean up in the jailhouse, or be a clerk…”

  “We can do better than that,” Oscar said. “Let me see what I can do. I have a little influence with our sturdy sheriff.” He winked. “We’re first cousins, you know.”

  During supper Ardy charmed Mrs. York and endured stories about his mother, and when he left at just past nine he was whistling. He rode back to Mr. Carter’s dusty house and sat amid cobwebs on the upper balcony drinking from a bottle of good sour mash whiskey and marveling at the strands of fate, where they began and where they ended. He recalled Waite asking if he’d killed his stepfather. Recalled his mother’s handwriting. A black girl he’d raped in Minnesota and the little accountant he’d shot in the throat in Memphis. Recalled a good cut of beef he’d had in New Orleans, recalled a book he’d read and how he’d cheated a Dallas lawyer out of the fine Colt Peacemaker heavy now in its holster against his ribs. He recalled a hotel burning and a magic show, recalled and recalled and recalled and recalled, all beneath a dark-speckled sky where just before he passed out drunk he saw a star falling and told himself that not too far from now he’d be sheriff of Clarke County.

  Oscar York found Ardy at the Cunningham Hotel dining room a week later and asked to speak to him in private; in the judge’s office, the door shut, he listened to Oscar say how Billy Waite didn’t want a deputy. Waite was getting older, though, and he needed help worse than ever.

  “For some reason,” the judge said, “he’s biased against you. Do you know why?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Well. He won’t say why or why not, he just ain’t receptive to the idea. Or heck, maybe it ain’t even you. He don’t want anybody, really. Figures he can handle it all.”

  Then the judge stood, poured them coffee, and began to tell him about the goings-on in the place called Mitcham Beat. How everyone out there had an alibi. “Heck,” the judge said, “if this bunch had been in the Garden of Eden, the woman would’ve had ’em testify she’d never even seen the serpent and we’d all still be nekkid and the Good Book would’ve ended in Genesis.” He drummed his fingers on his desktop. “How would you handle that bunch, if you were sheriff?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t want to say too much about that,” he said. “It might sound disrespectful. To Sheriff Waite. If I was to question his methods. But let me offer you a deal, Judge.” He took out his tobacco and papers and began to construct a cigarette, giving himself a moment to think. “Sup-pose,” he said, “I ride out yonder wearing another of my hats. As a private detective. I did some of that work in Billings, Montana. Learned from the best there, fellow named Chip Hurdle. You ever hear of him, Judge? Well, it don’t matter. Point is, he taught me all he knew about detective work.” Ardy struggled not to grin—the true Chip Hurdle had been a man whose wife had died while he was on a trip to buy goats; when the women of the community went to prepare her for burial and removed her dress and underthings they’d found her to be a man. Hurdle, on his return to Billings, had been hanged.

  The judge tapped his chin. “What would you do, as a detective?”

  “Nothing illegal, of course. Just ride out there and sniff around. Don’t none of ’em know me, and so I might be able to dig up the facts that the sheriff ain’t been able to find.”

  “They’re pretty tight-lipped. Clannish. Plus they’re dangerous.”

  “Well, Judge, I’ve got some experience in getting people to betray their selves. Trapping ’em in their own deceit. And not to brag,” he said, pulling back his lapel to reveal the butt of his pistol, “but I ain’t too worried about a little danger.”

  On his first two nights in Mitcham Beat, near the end of August, he and the peddler had parked the wagon in someone’s yard along about sundown; they’d be waiting as the family trudged in from a day’s cotton picking. The farmers spent the evening listening to Ardy’s stories and then he asked gently into the goings-on of the region, learning all he could about it, its people. He never pried, just let the details collect and a picture form.

  On the fourth night they parked the wagon by an empty corncrib at the edge of a field, no house in sight. Ardy told the peddler to hobble the horse and mule and he sat back and raised the box and peered in—but because it was dark he couldn’t see her and tossed the box aside.

  Later he watched while the peddler entered the cornfield and stripped ears right from the stalks and peeled, desilked, and skewered them with a sharpened stick and roasted them over a fire. It smelled good so he did the same. The peddler had a case of bourbon out of which Ardy took a bottle and drank from while listening to whippoorwills and owls.

  “Them’s a dollar,” the peddler said, pointing to the whiskey.

  “Put it on my account.”

  They sat.

  “What the hell you expect to find out here, anyway?” the peddler asked.

  “None of your business,” Ardy said.

  “I thought we was partners.”

  “Consider me a silent partner.” Ardy stretched his boots toward the coals and put his hands behind his neck. “Tell you this, hoss. Sooner I find out what I’m looking for, sooner our partnership will be dissolved.”

  The peddler thought about that one. “We should go speak to a man called Massey Underwood,” he said. “This here’s his corn.”

  Ardy repeated the name. “What makes you think he’ll tell us anything new?”

  “Well, he’s said to drink to excess, a great topic among the churches. You take one of those bottles and give him a few swigs…”

  “We’ll go see him tomorrow.”

  The peddler rose so suddenly Ardy’s reflexes pulled his pistol. Then he lowered it, seeing the man’s pale face.

  “Your bowels?”

  He nodded.

  Ardy flicked his hand toward the trees at the edge of the field. “Go on.”

  The peddler dashed off, unfastening his pants.

  A few moments later his voice called from the darkness. “You reckon you could toss me a couple of them gnawed-over cobs?”

  The next day the two of them found Massey Underwood forking hay from his barn floor into a wagon. His house, visible through a sparse vegetable patch, was little more than a hodgepodge of leaning boards held up by stacks of rocks and roofed by rusty tin. Underwood came out with his hay fork in one hand and a long-barreled pistol in the other. He wore a pair of wretched overalls and no shirt underneath. A droopy thing on his long narrow head that once might’ve been a hat.

  Side by side on the wagon’s seat, the peddler and Ardy Grant waved, Ardy’s horse tied behind the wagon. Underwood lifted the fork in return to their greeting and walked out to meet them, stuffing the pistol into the back of his britches.

  “What’s the news of the outer world, friend?” he asked the peddler.

  “Ask this here fellow,” the peddler said.

  Underwood’s skin exuded alcohol, you could get drunk just standing downwind of him. Ardy reached between his legs and when he came up with the bottle he was facing the barrel of Underwood’s pistol.

  “I ain’t that drunk,” he said.

  “Whoa, hoss,” Ardy said, raising his hands, the whiskey in the left. “Just a little busthead here.”

  Underwood smiled and put the gun away. “Sorry, boys. I’m a little jumpy these days.” He stabbed the hay fork into the ground.

  “It is hard times,” Ardy said. He tossed the bottle down.

  Underwood caught it in both hands. “Who’s this generous young fellow?” he as
ked, leaning against the peddler’s wagon, prizing the cork out.

  “My partner,” the surly peddler said.

  “You don’t say.” Underwood screwed off the cap and sniffed the top, his eyes watering. “That’s some sweet-smelling shit.” He licked his lips and smacked them and drank.

  “Fact is,” Ardy said, “the company both him and me represents is sending one of us supervisors out with each of our representatives. Just to get a sense of the country.”

  Underwood finished his swig. “A mighty good idea,” he said, catching his breath. He took another deep belt and recapped the bottle and returned it to the peddler.

  Ardy said, “Would you mind if we took a little of your time, asked you a few questions?”

  “Got a lot of work to get done. Will that bottle be a part of the deal?”

  “No,” the peddler said.

  “What he means,” Ardy said, opening his coat in a way that Underwood didn’t notice, flashing his pistol butt to the peddler, “is that while you and me conduct our interview, he’ll go and take a inventory.” He took the whiskey, gave it to Underwood, and hopped out of the wagon. “Give me that box,” he ordered.

  Underwood collected the fork and walked across the dirt into the shade of the barn.

  The peddler handed down the box with the lady in it. “How much longer we gone be ‘partners’?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  He watched the young man walk to the barn, looking into the box. He climbed down and started poking at things, clanking metal, opening and closing wooden boxes.

  It was cooler in the barn.

  “What you got yonder?” Underwood asked, already squatting in the style of poor country men, knees up by his ears and his arms between them, the bottle on the ground before him. Ardy noticed he’d kept his back to the hay wagon, though, and so he sat down beside him, both facing outward.

  “Have a look.” Ardy pitched the box over.

  Underwood caught it and turned it in his hands.

  “You put your eye against that hole there, and hold the other end up towards the light.”

  Underwood took another swallow and set the bottle in the dirt beside a lantern. Behind him a threadbare mule looked out of an improvised stall, boards nailed together haphazardly. There came on the breeze the odor of pigs. Underwood raised the box with both hands and with his mouth hanging open looked into it for a very long time. When he lowered the box he was grinning.

  “How much you asking for this thing?”

  “It’s a prize,” Ardy said. “To the person who gives us the most helpful information. You consider yourself helpful?”

  “That’s what I’ve been called on more than one occasion,” Underwood said, raising the box again.

  “Then this just might be your lucky day. Now,” Ardy said. “I’m fixing to reach into my coat here, just so you’ll know. Don’t want you pulling that shooter on me again. My bowels can’t take another scare like that one you give me while ago.”

  “Out here you get used to being aimed at,” Underwood’s mouth said under the box.

  Ardy brought out a pair of the peddler’s nickel cigars, put one in his own lips, and offered the other.

  “I will,” Underwood said, lowering the box. “Obliged.” He took the match Ardy offered, too, and struck it on his thumb and soon, smoking, they were talking and swapping the box and whiskey. Each time the bottle came by him, Underwood would say, “Don’t mind if I do,” and he would. Then he’d exchange it for the box and lift it to his eyes and whistle. When the whiskey came to Ardy, he’d fill his mouth but let most of it trickle back into the bottle.

  He began with mundane questions, what all Underwood grew—corn, mainly, he had no head for cotton—what kind of fertilizer he used—geeayner—whether or not he owned his place—he did but had a lease on his crop, the only way a farmer could survive in these strangling times.

  “Enough shop talk now,” Ardy said finally. “Go on tell me about this beat of yours. It’s got itself a reputation, you know.”

  “I reckon it does.”

  “A place that swallers up peddlers. There’s been one of our kind rolled in here never to be seen again. They very nearly didn’t let me come out here. They said I’d be endangering my life.”

  “That what they said?”

  “Them very words.”

  Underwood considered this. He looked in the box as if there were answers there. “How come you was to come, then?”

  Ardy shrugged. “Myself, I kind of admire those old boys. It ain’t a popular opinion where I come from. You can imagine. But I grew up in the country. I know how them damn town folks treat the common farmer. I seen it growing up and I see it in my job. I’m out here fifty weeks of the year, talking to good hardworking people. I ain’t in no office, pulling no strings. Fixing no ballots.” He looked coyly about. “Don’t tell nobody, but if it was up to me, I’d be buying them old boys a drink.”

  Underwood had the bottle turned up. He lowered it. “Tell you what, cowboy. You is.”

  Ardy said, “What you mean?”

  Underwood winked. “You won’t ever get me to repeat it, and if you was to ever squeal it to anybody, I’d kill you. But I trust you, friend, and I’ll tell you this. I’m in Hell-at-the-Breech.”

  “In what?”

  “That’s our name. It ain’t many folks knows it, neither.”

  Ardy let a moment pass. He said, “I believe you’ve just won yourself that there box, Mr. Underwood.”

  “Go on call me Massey.”

  But when Ardy came out of the barn an hour later he held the box under his arm as he pulled on his gloves. In his back pocket he had Underwood’s pistol. The farmer lay passed out half beneath the wagon, his flat belly expanding and falling, expanding, falling. The bottle beside his head all but empty. Ardy looked out the door—the peddler’s wagon and mule were gone, tracks going east.

  “Why, he ought not to left without saying good-bye,” he said.

  He caught up with the peddler in less than an hour. The firefight was brief and he found a pond green with algae and weighted the body down with a flour sack full of rocks and watched the algae close around the peddler. A hand came back up out of the water as if to make a final point and Ardy worried he might have to wade in and push it down—he entertained the idea of shooting the fingers off one at a time, but abruptly the hand went under, too. For a spell he stayed and watched, air bubbling now and again.

  Just after dark Ardy and his mule, wagon, and horse returned to Underwood’s place and took a set of chains and locks he’d found in the peddler’s stock and fastened them to the snoring man and loaded him, still unconscious, onto the wagon.

  Then he clanked off into the night.

  VI

  On the morning of August twenty-fifth, when there were pools of shadow still on the ground, as if the woods hated to let go of night, Mack was down at the creek stoking the fire under the washpot. Tooch appeared at the top of the hollow and called down for him to come to the store.

  He climbed the hill, rubbing his hands together to clean them of ash, and crossed the croquet court and went up the steps and into the store. He was surprised to find Floyd Norris there with Tooch.

  “Mack,” Tooch said, “much as I hate to, I’m putting you on loan.”

  Mack looked at Floyd who was appraising him, probably remembering the time he’d picked cotton for him before. Mack remembered it, too, as the longest two weeks of his life.

  “Floyd here needs a hand with his harvest,” Tooch said, “and since you’re experienced, as he tells me, you’re elected.”

  Suddenly the wash seemed the work of paradise. But Mack knew better than to complain. “Yes, sir. When do I start?”

  “Now,” Floyd said. He turned to Tooch. “I thank you.”

  “If he don’t work up to your satisfaction,” Tooch said, “just let me know.”

  Floyd nodded and put his hat back on and headed down the aisle toward the door. Tooch was already goin
g up his ladder. Mack looked at his boots disappearing into the ceiling and then at Floyd’s back as it crossed the porch and hurried outside.

  It was a two-mile walk to Floyd Norris’s place and they walked it without talking. Mack dreaded the work. For a cotton farmer it was work most all the time, work that began in late February when you raised the scythe, the mornings still frosty, and destroyed the scuttle of last year’s crop, grimly hacking and raking away the dried scraggle, like shaving a dead man’s cheek. Then, when the March days lengthened, the one-or two-muled breaking of ground, the gut-jarring plowing, bound at the shoulders with traces and following the animal in a circle the shape of the field, laboring toward the center, like being sucked down a drain. After what you hoped was the last frost came the bedding, the funneling of fertilizer down the horn into the dark raised rows, a precise amount measured by eye and eye alone, and then days and days with a hoe, turning the earth back over, the harrowing and planting in conjunction.

  Next the first waiting, perhaps the hardest time of all, maybe five days or maybe two weeks, as allowed by God and the soil and the weather. If a late freeze came, you began again. If not, when an inch of plant showed, came weeks and weeks of cultivating, of barring off, chopping, more hoeing and the repeated, tender sweepings as the plants unfolded delicate as lace handkerchiefs out of the dirt and grew taller as you chopped the weeds away and waited and chopped and waited.

  And then, at last, the laying by, that long six weeks with nothing to do but worry and watch and wait and keep the rows clean, repair tools, roofs, fences. And then the harvest.