Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “What if we get ’em on the way to gin,” War Haskew asked. “Bide our time.”

  They decided to discuss it later, though Lev hated to wait. He said he hadn’t killed anybody in a long time.

  Mack, Floyd, and the three Norris boys drew to the end of the harvest in late October. At midday on the last day of the month Mack stood at the full wagon, a thing like pride filling his lungs.

  “You can go on back,” Floyd told him. “We’ll get the short rows.”

  Mack lingered. Not knowing why. “Good-bye,” he said.

  But Floyd had walked off, toward his house. From where he stood, Mack could see the mound where the man’s wife was buried. The cross stuck at its head a simple limb, two little branches trimmed into arms. He took off his hat in respect and saw he’d sweated the band through. He looked toward where the fellow with the naked lady box had appeared. He looked down at his hands, changed now to the hands of a man, a killer’s hands but also the hands of a pardoner, Bit Owen alive and out in the world somewhere. In a week he would be sixteen years old. He put the hat back on and turned toward the store.

  INTO THE BREECH

  November 1898

  I

  ON BUSINESS IN COFFEEVILLE, Waite went up the steps at McCorquodale’s. The storeowner’s son, Carlos, stood a few feet inside the door with a broom over a little circle of dust, ash, and other debris he’d swept up. When Waite opened the door the wind came in past his legs and again when he closed it.

  “Sorry,” Waite said, nodding at the dust. “But it sure is a blustery one today. Reckon it’s fixing to come a rain.”

  Carlos wore a pristine white apron. “It’s okay,” he said, corralling the dust again.

  Waite paused. “When you leave for college?”

  “After the busy season,” the boy answered. “I was supposed to go in August but Daddy needed me here.”

  Waite nodded but thought it odd. McCorquodale insisted on overseeing every operation of his store and his tenant farms as closely as possible. He had Obbie, a colored man, working here in the store with him and another few fellows on the payroll. Didn’t seem like he needed Carlos at all, not enough to keep him out of school, anyhow. All Waite had ever seen the boy do was sweep.

  “Your daddy,” Waite asked him. “He here?”

  “He’s in the office.”

  Waite went down the length of the aisle to the glass door, where he could see McCorquodale, bent over his desk and swatting at a fly. He knocked on the door and McCorquodale glanced up and waved him in. He sat behind a rolltop desk with its pigeonholes bulging with papers and receipts. Waite’s office was neat, in fact it had become a joke with him and Oscar: “Where you keep the possum turds?” Oscar would ask, popping his head in. “Filed under O,” Waite would respond. “O?” Oscar would say. “For what?” “For Oscar.”

  Waite stepped into the office and closed the door behind him and then leaned against it and folded his arms and waited. McCorquodale was listing figures in his long green ledger and held up a finger so Waite wouldn’t speak and lose him his place. It looked like a hell of a lot of numbers. Must equal a hell of a lot of money. When the storekeeper came to the end of a column, he put down his pencil, took off his glasses, and gave Waite his attention. “Afternoon, Sheriff.”

  “McCorquodale,” Waite said. “I won’t keep you, just wanted to see what you mean to do about Joe Anderson’s widow.”

  “Do about her.”

  “Yeah. Their cotton was just about ready to pick, way I understood it, before the women left. Ought to be about finished now. Gone to market.”

  “Just about all picked, all right.” McCorquodale noticed a slip of paper on the floor by his chair and reached for it. He put his glasses back on and frowned as if trying to place it. The fly flew across his desk and he flipped a backhanded hand at it.

  “Well?” Waite leaned against the door. “I reckon what I’m asking you is whether or not they’ll get their share of the money, now that it’s all picked. Looked like a pretty good crop.”

  McCorquodale was bothered by the paper. Then he seemed to remember that Waite was there. “What? Oh, no, Sheriff. The way I structure my contracts with liens is if the borrower or his beneficiaries leave in the middle of the season they forfeit their part of the gross. It’s standard.”

  “These seem like nonstandard circumstances, though,” Waite said. “Anderson being killed and all.”

  McCorquodale looked up. He leaned back thoughtfully in his chair. “Well, I reckon if there was a fellow that, say, killed somebody, shot ’em in the head, say, but he had him a real, real good reason, you’d let him go. Sort of bend the rules?” He paused. Then said, “No, you wouldn’t, and I can’t either. Fact is, I had to find me some colored folks to pick that crop. Last minute. Had to leave here and deal with a mess I ought not to have had to deal with. Pay a bunch of folks I ought not have to. And pay ’em higher wages than usual, too, cause they had me over a barrel and was afraid to go out there near where that thing happened to the colored church. Wound up sending two of my overseers to guard ’em with rifles. Got ’em out there right now. Where you think all that money’s coming from?”

  “It just seems like you could deduct them costs out of their end. Give ’em something, at least. That woman lost her husband. Them girls their daddy.”

  “Way I see it, Sheriff, if you’d done your job in the first place and run that gang off, then Anderson never would’ve been killed, and we wouldn’t even be having this discussion.”

  Waite came off the door. “Okay,” he said. “But since you feel so doggone ready to tell me how to do my job, let me tell you how you might ought to start doing yours. You might ought to go a little easy on folks, especially with the times being so tight.”

  “Is that right? Is that how I ought to comport myself?”

  “Just some advice, Ernest.” He turned to go.

  “Wait,” the storeowner said. “I got one for you, since you’re here. Floyd Norris. He’s delinquent. I’ve already swore out the papers, they’ll be in your office tomorrow or the next day.”

  Waite couldn’t believe it. For a moment he didn’t know what to say. Then he said, “Sure thing. Yeah, I’ll go foreclose on him. Run another family off. Fellow lost his wife and had to farm his baby out. Yeah, I’ll go out there and boot him off his property.”

  McCorquodale took off his glasses again. “Sheriff,” he said, “you might think I’m the villain here, but I’m not. I’m just a businessman, trying to get by. Working within the boundaries of the laws you’re supposed to protect. I got my own debts—”

  But Waite had gone, slamming the door so hard the glass in it shook.

  He sat half drunk on his porch holding his pistol in one hand and a dead cigar in the other. A bottle of bourbon beside his chair leg. Sue Alma came out for the third time and stood looking down on him.

  “Billy.

  “Billy.”

  She stood a moment longer. He knew she was worried past her anger. She didn’t allow drinking in her house or on her porch or even, hell, within her sight, and here he was doing it right out where the neighbors could see. She’d always known he did it on occasion but they’d had a quiet understanding that he’d keep it hidden and she’d pretend not to know. Some men had women they visited, he had his liquor.

  “Billy.”

  He looked at the small table beside his chair, at the sealed paper smudged from his pocket that he should have already delivered to Floyd Norris but had put off now for two days. Put off. A thing he’d never before done all the years he’d been pinned to his badge. His goddamn badge. Its weight inside his coat was a thing he’d grown accustomed to, a thing he wasn’t aware of—like some internal organ going about its silent duty. And like some dutiful organ it operated a part of him, did for him certain things he’d not have otherwise done. As if his conscience had become grown about the badge and shaped around it like trees he’d seen with bark grown over metal signs nailed to their trunks, the sign as much
a part of the tree as leaf or root.

  “Billy,” she said.

  He put the cigar in his pocket and reached down beside him and picked up the bottle and drank from it. Sue Alma put her hand over her mouth and made a noise not among her regular noises, a sort of hurt gasp, and turned and went inside. She didn’t slam the door. Was that the first time he’d raised a bottle directly in front of her? He looked back at the door. He supposed so. You’d think a man would care about such a milestone, when you insult your wife perhaps to the point of never being able to uninsult her. The truth was he could have raised his hand and slapped her across the face and she’d have been hurt less than she was by his brazen whiskey drinking. Yet he didn’t give a good goddamn anymore. His coat hung by the door with the badge pinned inside it, and now, for the first time in his career as a sheriff, he could feel the metal as an organ gone bad, liver mossy or kidneys hardened, heart flattened out and its rivers of blood dammed off.

  He took another drink.

  He didn’t know what time he’d passed out in the chair, but when he woke dawn was breaking and his pistol lay in the yard. His neck ached and his head, when he moved it, throbbed. He got up slowly, ignoring the empty bottle, and retrieved the gun and went inside. Sue had slept in her clothes on the couch by the window. First time for that, too. Her face gray and etched with the lines from the rough damask upholstery. The very least he could do was go back outside and pick up the bottle and carry it across the road and throw it in the bushes.

  This Saturday, most of the cotton picked, was a big ginning day and a day when the rural folks rode into Grove Hill, wagons clogging intersections and the streets growing foul with horse and mule shit. Rain had made it worse, muddying everything, and industrious merchants had lain boards across the side roads in an attempt to keep the mud contained. A failing effort. One clerk had unscrewed the head from a push broom and affixed it upside down to his porch floor so folks could kick the stiff bristles to get the mud out of their soles before entering his store.

  With his coat collar turned up, Waite walked his horse along the street, nodding to men and touching the brim of his hat to ladies. At the south end of town there was a long line of wagons backed up with farmers white and black standing and talking and occasionally bending to spit as the gin ginned. For a long while there was a halt while a belt was replaced with several white farmers observing and offering advice to the black man who went about his work politely, stopping to consider each nugget of advice and even to try a thing suggested, only, in the end, to go back to his own way of doing what he’d done dozens of times before, the gin soon back to work and the wagon line advancing slowly in the light rain.

  Two fellows approached Waite where he sat looking down from the saddle. He thought he knew them but couldn’t place their names.

  “Sheriff,” the first said. He kept popping his suspenders. They looked new.

  “Morning, gentlemen,” Waite said.

  “That son-of-a-bitch,” the second man said. “You better go check his scales.”

  “The scales is fine,” Waite said.

  The men looked at each other and then turned and went back through the mud to their wagons. They said something to another farmer who looked at Waite and shook his head. He knew he smelled like whiskey. He wished he could just sit on a porch with Bit not talking and waiting for noon when he could drink again.

  It thundered and he looked up.

  After a few minutes he judged everything in order and worked his way back through the maze of wagons to the hotel. He dismounted, held on to a post, and tried to scrape his boots clean one at a time. A buggy went past behind him, too fast, and flung water onto his shoulders. He turned in a rage to dress down the person but they’d gone by already, a man with a woman at his side, both looking happy. Waite’s rage left him, taking with it his energy, and he sagged against the post. His head continued to throb but the fact of it was he wanted another drink. He looked at his pocket watch. Ten-thirty. He had a bottle in his locked drawer back at his office and headed that way.

  Halfway down the sidewalk he came face-to-face with Floyd Norris, his three boys in tow. They were barefooted, high-stepping in the mud, their feet enormous clay molds. Norris looked away from Waite’s eyes and would have gone on past but the sheriff said, “Norris. You got a minute?”

  He stopped and waited, looking off down the street. Each boy held a peppermint stick, their points licked sharp as ice picks.

  “I got a paper for you,” Waite said, glad he’d thought to bring it this morning. Give it to him now, make sure he understood it, and go to his office and get that drink. He handed it to the farmer who took it and folded it and placed it in his pocket.

  “Can you read?” he asked Norris.

  The farmer looked down at his boys. “Y’all go on to the corner yonder and wait.”

  They slurped on down the sidewalk. The littlest one looked back at Waite with his peppermint stick in his mouth and waved. Waite thought, quite simply, that the world was a terrible place.

  “Can you read, Norris?” Waite asked again.

  “Just go on tell me what it says,” the farmer said. He was looking across the street at a window display of toy wooden blocks with letters on them.

  “Says you’re to appear in court for not paying McCorquodale his lien money.”

  The farmer blinked. “I paid him once,” he said. “He wants me to pay again?”

  “Well. I don’t know the fine print, but it says you ain’t paid. He swore it out.”

  Norris gritted his teeth. “He’s a goddamn liar.”

  Waite nodded down the sidewalk so that Norris would see the black family, six children holding a rope along behind their daddy, coming up. Norris ignored them and they passed him and went on.

  “Morning, Sheriff,” the man said.

  “Good morning,” Waite answered.

  “A goddamn lie,” Norris snapped.

  Some of the children looked back.

  “Well, it ain’t for me to decide,” Waite said. “But if I was you, I’d be there. Else they’ll swear out a warrant for your arrest.”

  Without ever having looked at Waite, Norris walked off. Waite hurried after him and stepped in front of him. Now Norris looked up.

  “Give me your pistol,” Waite said.

  Norris stared at him. “You reckon I’m fixing to ride over to Coffeeville and shoot him?”

  “It’s a damn good possibility,” Waite said, thinking I wouldn’t blame you either. He held out his hand. “Give it to me. You can get it back later. I’ll keep it safe.”

  Norris made a move to step around him and Waite grabbed his shoulder. There was a tussle and they fell together in the street, both facedown in the mud. They struggled briefly while a crowd gathered, no one eager to step in and help and get muddy himself. Waite aware of rolling in shit. Then someone pulled Norris away by his collar. Waite pushed to his feet, hardly able to catch his breath. He slipped and fell again. He got to his knees, heaving. Down the block Norris’s three boys stood watching. Somebody asked Waite was he okay and he nodded, still unable to speak. He held the pistol, by now nothing but a shapeless slug of mud. Norris was furious. He tore from the interloper’s grip and leapt to his feet and flung mud from his fingers. He yelled swearwords at them all. Waite let him.

  “You can,” he panted, “pick this up, later.”

  Waite left them and walked away, not bothering to avoid the mud, his vision darkening at the edges. He thought he might vomit. He saw Oscar standing with Harry Drake beside the livery watching him, their mouths agape. He ignored them.

  The hearing was a week later, at the courthouse. Oscar had recused himself and the circuit judge presided. Waite sat in the second row brooding over the week he’d had, not a word from Oscar, more silence from Sue Alma, and three more good drunks. Somebody had taken a few shots at McCorquodale’s overseers and the black folks picking cotton but nobody had been hurt; McCorquodale had sent more men out and started a petition to get Wait
e fired.

  Twice since then Sue had said she was going to her sister’s and packed, but both times she’d unpacked, crying, and made dinner for him and they’d eaten in silence. He kept waiting for a visit from Oscar, but, thankfully, it hadn’t yet come.

  He sank now in his seat in the courtroom hoping no one would talk to him. An hour ago, Floyd Norris had come to his office and asked, “Can I get my gun back?”

  Waite hadn’t risen from behind his desk. “You can after the hearing’s over.”

  Norris turned as if this were the answer he’d expected and started to walk out.

  Waite said, “Norris.”

  He stopped but didn’t look back.

  “Do yourself a favor in there today,” Waite told him. “Behave. I know you don’t give a damn for the process, but—”

  Now Norris did turn. His eyes were small. “How you know what I give my damns for, Billy Waite? I’m here, ain’t I? Didn’t I come all the way back over here? If I didn’t give a damn for your courtroom do you think I’d be here now?”

  “Well,” Waite said. “I’m sorry if I misjudged you.”

  “You and me both know it won’t be the only misjudging of today, don’t we?”

  After Norris left, Waite got the man’s pistol out of his locked drawer. He’d already cleaned the mud off and oiled its cylinders. Just a plain cheap six-shooter with one of the wooden grips missing.

  The courtroom was crowded and hot but with the chill outside it felt good. Soon the judge came in, a fat man with muttonchops and wearing a hunting coat and hat. The fact was, Waite liked him a lot, had deer hunted with him on occasion. He sat down and removed the hat and took a pair of eyeglasses from his pocket and laid them on the table before him and things commenced. In the witness chair McCorquodale simply said that though Norris had always been a reasonably reliable farmer when it came to business, he hadn’t paid him the money due by the date on the contract. In fact, he was five days late when the papers were filed. He was a lot later now. McCorquodale’s lawyer, Harry Drake, asked a few more questions and McCorquodale answered them. As Norris had no lawyer, the storeowner was excused.