Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  Here, in years before, was when Mack and William had joined him. The widow, too. They’d needed money and Floyd had promised them a penny for each two pounds they picked. So they’d all worked, the boys lolling in the heat, slapping at bugs, tearing loose the damnable cotton and bagging it, the widow keeping a close eye on them, saying, “Don’t get too hot, go rest in the shade,” but never a minute’s rest for her, or for Floyd’s wife, or for Floyd either, small and lost in the haze of the field, directly below the sun, picking and picking and picking and picking his cotton. The fingers of his two quick hands darting among the leaves, two quick hands the color and feel of a reptile’s belly, quick-striking fingers with blunt black nails and big knuckles.

  The eyes under the strip of shade from Floyd’s hat were a marvel to Mack for the emotion that wasn’t shown there, as if those eyes were twin puddles reflecting a blank sky. Or no sky. Floyd Norris bent and creeping along the rows of his field, fingers opening and closing, feeding and feeding and feeding and feeding the long heavy dirty sack clinging to his left shoulder, growing thicker and thicker in increments as small as seconds but as quick as seconds, too, which become minutes which become hours, then days, weeks, months: bolls of cotton accruing as surely as time ticked on, time not felt as it passed him by but which he must have sensed only after it was gone and left was nothing but repercussion and consequence and the memory of possibility. The hope of money.

  Floyd Norris was said to be able to pick nearly three hundred pounds of cotton by himself, three hundred pounds from when he stepped into the field at dawn to when he stepped out long after the sun had scalded the western sky and vanished. He went into a kind of trance, ignored his wife when she called for him to kill a copperhead or whip one of the straying boys. When she led the three of them from the field at blistering noon for dinner, Floyd alone remained, fingers picking and eyes dead, his bag round and rounder and leaving in its wake a smooth, deepening smear of dirt. Then his hunched shoulders would rise and he walked stiffly, stretching his back, to the wagon, pouring out the contents of his bag with no sense of pride or achievement, just flapping the bag empty and hopping down, rolling his head side to side, uncapping the water barrel and lowering his blank face in and drinking like a dog. Chewing a cold biscuit. Then back, where he would be when his family came hurrying out, the mother carrying the baby and chattering to the boys who cast slant-eyed looks at each other, plots taking root in their brains, dirt clods to be thrown, big caterpillars to be put down a shirt collar as the mother scolded them and implored Floyd to take a switch to one boy or the whole brood, but Floyd’s eyes registering nothing, his fingers reaching and picking.

  When they neared Floyd’s easternmost field he slipped into the woods and Mack followed silently. They slowed and went very quietly, Mack understanding they were sneaking up on someone. He knew Floyd hadn’t joined the core group of the alliance because of his family. Now Mack wondered who they were fixing to ambush and wondered where Floyd’s gun was.

  At the edge of the woods they looked out over a half-picked field, the wagon on the far side tiny in the shimmering heat. Floyd strained to see and Mack followed his eyes. Finally they both saw the three blond-headed boys.

  “Goddammit,” Floyd growled.

  The boys weren’t picking. They were bent in the field doing something else. Keeping low, Floyd left the woods—snapping a branch the size of his thumb from an oak sapling—and crept along an unpicked row, through it and then into another. After a moment, Mack followed, dread kindling in his belly. Soon he and Floyd had reached the boys, who appeared to be torturing an injured rabbit.

  One of them looked up when Floyd rose from the cotton. The others followed his gaze. They stood in unison, the youngest already crying, unhitching their identical tattered overalls. They turned and let the clothes fall, revealing their red backs, their naked bottoms.

  Floyd looked at Mack.

  “Get you a bag off that wagon,” he said, pointing with the switch. “Start over yonder.”

  Mack obeyed, hurrying so as not to hear the whipping, the boys’ cries.

  He’d never been more tired when he emptied his last bag, the moon yellowing its low corner of the sky and a few early dull stars showing. His arms were so tired they felt numb, and his fingers were bloody, they ached when he flexed them. Still, he helped Floyd’s boys empty their bags, too, as they slogged in, none speaking or looking at him, switch stripes on their shoulders, necks.

  Floyd brought his last bag to the wagon and set it down. He hitched his mule to the wagon and they followed it as he drove it to the cotton house two fields over. They weighed the cotton as they stored it, the boys asleep standing up.

  “You can go on back to Tooch’s,” Floyd said to Mack when they’d finished. “Be here just ’fore light tomorrow.”

  Tooch was waiting on the porch smoking a cigar when he dragged up. “How was it?”

  Mack told him about the boys and the rabbit, the whipping they’d gotten.

  “Floyd’s in a bad way these days,” Tooch said, pointing to the step.

  Mack sat. “How come?”

  “His wife died yesterday. That’s how come he needs another hand.”

  Mack was too tired to be shocked. He remembered her, though, a shapeless woman with enormous breasts. Remembered the story of her third-oldest baby being born. The widow had told him, said Floyd’s wife was in labor for more than a day, seemed the baby would never come, as if it knew what kind of life lay waiting and wanted no part of it. It was harvest time and Floyd had picked the whole day and come home expecting the baby to be swaddled and suckling, but when he found the woman still sweating in the bed inside her mosquito netting he just glared at her. It’s a slow one, Floyd, the widow had said. I reckon, he’d answered. That whole night, too, the labor lingered, and in the morning as Floyd came in from the porch where he and the other two boys had slept to avoid her moans he gave her a savage look. What the hell, he said, and the widow said, You can’t never tell what calendar a baby will keep. Go on out, Floyd said, and get you a sup of water. She did, casting a look at the woman who had her eyes now on Floyd, and in a minute Floyd came back outside without looking at her and walked on to the field to start his day of picking. The widow went inside and, she swore, within half an hour the baby was crowning.

  “How’d she die?” Mack asked.

  “Just keeled over in the field,” Tooch said.

  Mack leaned his head against the porch post. He couldn’t move his arms. In seconds he was asleep.

  Some time later, Tooch’s voice woke him. “You’d best get something to eat and sleep in your bed. You got another day tomorrow, and another one after that.”

  August ended slowly and September began slowly. Alfred told Mack how their mother had collapsed mid-row, how Floyd had noticed her not working and stalked over and stared down at her and knelt, placing a hand on her chest, then lowered his ear to her lips as if she might tell him the secret of how to leave. Then he’d put his flat hands against the ground and crouched there for a time as bugs shot around his face and crows quarked and cawed in the sky and gathered in the trees along the limbs, watching like they knew what had happened, knew it all along. Then Floyd had pushed himself upright, and without looking at her again, he’d left her lying where she’d fallen while the three boys sat around her, plucking at her dress, picking bugs off her tongue, the baby at the end of its row wailing until Alfred sent Arnold after it. Floyd told the youngest boy to watch the baby and the others to keep picking and he himself picked, too. When dark fell and Floyd had emptied his bag the final time and helped the boys with theirs he went to her at last and lifted her in his arms and carried her into their house (the boys following, Alfred trying to shush the screaming baby) and dressed her in her other dress, the white one she’d got married in, and washed the dirt from her face, hands, elbows, feet. He’d gone outside and dug a hole behind the house and climbed down in it with her for a long time. The boys dared one another to go have a look,
but none would, and then a hand appeared at the lip of the grave and another and their father’s red eyes appeared. He’d told them to go to sleep—their momma was gone—and he’d carried the baby off. They hadn’t seen it since.

  “Where you reckon he took it?” Mack asked. They’d met at the wagon and were emptying their bags, keeping an eye on Floyd’s bobbing hat in a distant row.

  “Reckon he killed it,” Alfred said.

  He looked at the blond boy. “Killed it,” he repeated.

  Alfred cast an eye toward the field. “He’s watching.”

  Mack had thought loneliness meant working in Tooch’s store, but true loneliness seemed to grow alongside the cotton here as he crept from plant to plant on his knees, pulling one boll and then another, the sun so hot the dirt seemed like ash taken from a glowing fireplace. His fingers had been torn at the nails at first by the cotton shells but now they’d callused over and his hands seemed new to him, tough as the bottoms of his feet in summer, when no child in Mitcham Beat wore shoes.

  In the evening, at Tooch’s, it occurred to him.

  “That baby,” he said, “it’s at the widow’s.”

  Tooch grinned at him. “You been replaced.”

  While picking cotton, he might go two hours without seeing Floyd or one of the boys, or he might empty his bag alongside Arnold or Alvin or Alfred, or Floyd himself, might wait for Floyd to dunk his head in the water barrel on the back of the wagon or might dunk his head alone. The boys got a whipping or two a week, usually for playing when they should be working, and the cracks of Floyd’s switch and the yelps that followed became another sound to ignore, nothing more or less than the buzz of a grasshopper, the nervous dry-rattling tail of a garter snake against leaves, the constant trill of birds. The days melted together and the nights were forgotten as he walked to the store in a trance to find Tooch waiting alone on the porch or with Lev or War Haskew and William or Huz and Buz. Tooch had begun having a meal waiting for him on the counter, beans in a tin plate or biscuits smeared with jelly, oyster crackers, and sardines from cans. At night his sleep was that of the dead, or the unborn.

  Except for a curious and disturbing event that occurred on an afternoon when Floyd was picking in a field around the bend and the boys were hidden in their rows, penitent after yet another whipping, little happened to remember those days of work.

  Mack had just reached the end of a row, his bag nearly full, cutting into his shoulder, when he looked up and saw a man standing in the shade watching him. In a land of overalls, brogans, and dirt-black straw hats, here was a fellow in good trousers and leather chaps, a fine chambray shirt and a new-looking fedora. He wore a strange rig for his gun, a holster around his body, and held folded over his forearm a duster jacket. His face was hidden in shadow.

  “Hidy,” he said.

  “Hidy,” Mack answered. He unlooped the sack from his neck and stood up, enjoying the stretch.

  “What’s your name?” the man asked.

  He said it. Then thought he shouldn’t have.

  “You the boy works over at the store?”

  He nodded.

  “How come he’s got you doing this nigger work?”

  Mack shrugged and came closer so he could see his face. While the man was nice-looking and clean-shaven, something in his green eyes seemed worrisome. Mack knew revenue agents came occasionally to look for stills.

  “I wouldn’t work out here,” the man said.

  “Everybody picks this time of year,” Mack replied.

  “What about your boss? Toochie?”

  It was funny hearing his name in that variation. Mack nearly grinned.

  The man saw it. “Toochie Coochie,” he sang.

  Mack tried not to smile. He looked away.

  “You wanna see something?” the man whispered. He looked around as if the bolls wore ears. He took the coat off his forearm where a wooden box had been hidden. He beckoned Mack close and let him look in a black hole. Inside he saw a picture of a woman with no clothes. Having gone on many of the widow’s midwife’s trips, Mack had seen breasts and even the hairy spot from which babies entered the world, but this, now, this was something altogether different. It was like she was there for him. In a dark room, she lay upon a frilly couch of some sort, with her right knee upraised and her hips tilted slightly toward the front so you could see the dark patch under her little belly. You could see both breasts, too, large and with perfect round nipples. Flowers around her. She—

  The man snatched it away and sunlight filled Mack’s eyes. He squinted.

  “You tell me what I want to know,” the man said, “and you can look again.”

  He wanted to look again. Worse than anything. “What you want?”

  “I want to know when your little gang’s meeting next. I want you to tell me what Toochie Coochie’s planning.”

  Mack said, “Who are you? You a revenue man?”

  He grinned. “I’m the devil, boy. And you better tell me what I want, else I’ll snatch you down to hell.” And with that he grabbed Mack’s crotch and squeezed. He gasped and collapsed in the dirt. The man fell on top of him and took Mack by the throat and began to strangle him. Mack grappled with his wrists but the other’s grip was iron-hard. He tried to knee the fellow in the balls as William had once taught him but couldn’t move his legs for his opponent’s leg, which was pinning them. All the while he was being choked harder and harder and felt himself beginning to grow faint. Then, suddenly, he could breathe. The man was gone as if whipped away on a wind. Mack opened his eyes.

  Arnold walked out of the cotton and watched Mack struggling to get up. The pain had gone to a dull ache in the bowl of his belly, trickled down his thighs.

  “I’m gone tell Daddy you taking a nap,” the boy said.

  Mack coughed and his eyes watered. He felt his sore neck and thought of Bit Owen. He sucked air down his burned throat and looked at the ragged child before him. “You tell him,” he wheezed, “and I’ll break your little neck.”

  Afterward he would watch the ends of rows and the dark spaces between trees, but it would be several weeks before he saw the devil again.

  One night when he walked back to the store all of them were on the porch, except Massey Underwood, who no one had seen in weeks. As Mack approached, they fell silent and watched him. A few gun barrels inching his way. He felt a blush liven his cheeks and forgot his fatigue. For the first time since the man showed him the box and choked him his brain seemed there for a reason.

  He climbed the steps.

  Kirk looked at him, amusement in his eyes.

  “Tooch give you a promotion?” he asked, and the men laughed.

  Mack made his way through the cigar smoke and the odor of whiskey. Before he could go in the store, Tooch said, “Get your victuals, boy, and bring ’em out here.”

  He was too thrilled to eat the food on his plate as he sat down beside William, who elbowed him and winked, then plucked a sardine off the plate and swallowed it and soon had finished them all. When the jug came round, Mack took it and drank. William was right, it had grown on him.

  They were discussing Underwood’s strange disappearance. The Smith brothers and War Haskew had borrowed Floyd Norris’s hounds and let them get a snootful of one of Massey’s shirts. “Damn thing was so ripe,” War said, “I could’ve tracked him by it.” The dogs had gone to an old barn and circled around inside it, then headed out toward a pond over on the back part of Massey’s property and bounded off into the water to their shoulders and stood howling. The men couldn’t see into the pond because of its thick coat of algae. They tried wading in but it got real deep real quick.

  Then the talk turned to a bullfrog they’d encountered on the bank. “Big as a damn washpot,” War Haskew said. “Buz here stobbed at him with a stick and, I swear, the frog bit the stick.”

  “It didn’t,” William said.

  “Tell ’em,” War said.

  “Damnedest thing I ever seen,” Huz said.

  “Let’s
finish talking about Massey,” Tooch said, “before we start discussing the size of frogs.”

  “You think he got so corned he stumbled off in that pond?” War asked. “The damn goop’s so thick he’d have to dig down in it to drown.”

  “He could just be off on another one of his drunks,” Huz said. “It won’t be the first time. When he gets a notion to drink hard he likes to be off in the woods, nobody around to interrupt him.”

  Buz was shaking his head. He looked at his brother and wiggled his shoulders, moved his hands as if he were pulling in an invisible rope and then flattened them out and lowered them slowly down along his belly, hips, thighs. Raised his eyebrows.

  “What’s he saying?” Tooch asked.

  “Says old Massey’s at the bottom of that pond, all right. Says them hound dogs of Norris’s is smarter than any of y’all.”

  They looked at one another.

  “The widow says if you fire a cannon over a body of water, a corpse will rise,” William said.

  Huz said, “Where you keep your cannons, Tooch?”

  “Hell,” War Haskew said. “Maybe that damn frog et him.”

  The jug came Mack’s way and he took a drink and passed it on.

  The next order of business, Tooch said, if they were done talking about Massey, was that some imported niggers were picking Joe Anderson’s field and two white fellows were overseeing it on horseback—guards armed with rifles. Lev thought they should ambush the horsemen and scare the niggers off. Send a message back to town.

  “Be hard to ambush ’em,” Tooch said. “That’s what they’ll be expecting. I done been over there watching ’em. No matter how hot it gets, they stay out in the middle of the field. Don’t sit on their horses, neither. Just huddle in the middle of the niggers, like it’s the niggers doing the protecting. Be a hard shot to make, and once you miss, the jig’s up.”

  “Then we won’t miss,” Lev said.