Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  Drake asked Norris to proceed to the chair. He rose. He wore patched overalls and had to be told to remove his hat. After he’d been sworn in Drake asked him if he knew Ernest McCorquodale.

  Norris folded his thin arms, slouching in the chair.

  From the bench, the judge said, “Answer the question, Mr. Norris.”

  “Y’all know goddamn well I know him.”

  The judge slammed his gavel and the pair of eyeglasses he’d set on the desk rattled. “You’ll not blaspheme in this court, Mr. Norris. One more cussword and I’ll hold you in contempt.”

  “You’ll hold me in contempt.”

  Waite lowered his head and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He had Norris’s pistol in his pocket and very quietly removed it and ejected the cylinder and shook the cartridges (there were only four) into his fist.

  The judge was glaring at Norris, then looked over at Oscar, who shook his head.

  “Just proceed then, Mr. Drake,” the judge said.

  “Thank you, Your Honor.” To Norris: “Did you borrow money from Mr. McCorquodale to finance your cotton crop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You heard Mr. McCorquodale’s testimony, did you not?”

  “I heard his lies.”

  “Hold on, Your Honor. I’m not interested in this man’s accusations. If lies were told, this proceeding will find them out.”

  “Right,” the judge said. “Mr. Norris, you’ll answer the questions without casting aspersions on Mr. McCorquodale’s honor.”

  “Aspersions,” Norris spat. He looked over at McCorquodale.

  “Do you know what ‘aspersions’ means?” Drake asked.

  “I can figure it out.”

  “What His Honor means is that—”

  “I said I can figure it out.”

  “Then I’ll just repeat my question from before. You heard Mr. McCorquodale’s testimony, didn’t you?”

  “I done said I did.”

  “You heard him state, under oath, Mr. Norris, that you never paid him the lien on your cotton crop.”

  “I heard it.”

  “Heard him say that whenever he takes a payment of any kind, from anybody, he always writes them a receipt, and his employees—one of which is willing to testify, if we need him—are instructed to write receipts, too. Can you, then, produce a receipt as evidence of your claim?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “Cause he never give me one.”

  “Never give you one, you say?” Drake turned dramatically to the gallery of faces who’d come to watch the hearing. “Most of us in this room have done business with Ernest McCorquodale, walked in his store out in Coffeeville and bought some groceries or a bridle or”—he winked—“a pinch of snuff. So let me ask y’all a question: Have any y’all ever had a business transaction with Ernest or any of his hired help, large or small, when you did not receive a receipt?”

  The people exchanged glances. But nobody said they hadn’t.

  “I’ve got an exhibit here,” the lawyer said, going to his table and opening a satchel and emptying forth dozens of slips of paper. He took a handful from the pile and raised them toward the ceiling, two or three floating from the bunch and landing on the floor. “I’m something of a pack rat,” he said. “Never throw anything away, as you can see. Drives the little lady crazy.”

  Laughter.

  “But all these here are receipts from Ernest McCorquodale’s store. Here’s one, let’s see, pair of brogans, August 4, 1889, half a dollar. Half a dollar?” He feigned indignation. “Well, nobody ever said old Ernest’s merchandise was cheap.”

  More laughter, even McCorquodale’s chin moved in a subdued grin.

  “Here’s another one, dated last March, for five pounds of flour and a bag of sugar. That must’ve been when my luscious Darlene was making me a red velvet birthday cake.” He patted his suspendered belly. “Probably a lot of receipts in here for sugar and flour.”

  Even the judge chuckled this time. In the back of the room, Waite watched Norris. It had crossed his mind the man might bring in another pistol.

  “But,” Drake said to Norris, holding the slips of paper before his face, “you claim you never got a receipt from Mr. McCorquodale.”

  Norris, seemingly unperturbed, said, “Would it be okay, Judge, if I was to say my side of the story? Or is this slick here gone keep on pulling his fancy parlor tricks?”

  The judge nodded. “Go ahead, Mr. Norris. Let’s hear what you have to say. Is this okay with you, Counsel?”

  “Absolutely, Your Honor, by all means.” He waved his handful of paper slips at the audience and shook his head comically and got another, smaller laugh. Crossed the room and sat down, dabbing his forehead with a handkerchief.

  Norris waited until the room had grown very quiet before he began to talk. Outside, a dog barked.

  “I come up to McCorquodale’s to pay him. It was raining. Cold. I give him his wad of money and watched him count it. He said he’d write me up a paper the next day and have a nigger run it out to me. Well, I never seen no nigger, all I seen was that sheriff yonder saying they’s gone foreclose on me if I didn’t pay up.”

  The judge took five minutes to find in favor of McCorquodale. Norris stood up and was told to sit back down. He did. He was told he had thirty days from the date of the original court order to either pay McCorquodale his money or to vacate his farm.

  “And when I say ‘vacate,’” the judge said, “I’d advise you to vacate the county as well.”

  Norris turned before the judge had completed this statement and found Waite’s eyes and stared into them until the sheriff glanced away. The cartridges in his hand had grown so hot he wondered if they might not discharge.

  II

  On his birthday, Mack lay on his back on a burlap bag underneath the wagon, greasing its axle, surely God’s nastiest work. He could see the mare’s legs at the front, she would lift a hoof now and then and stamp and nicker, the air vivid and strangely lit around them with the energy of a coming storm. He lay on his side looking out at how the color of things seemed a shade wrong, as if light had somehow come too quickly at dawn and caught the earth unawares. Leaves not yet stripped by the late-fall chill rasped on their limbs and fallen ones scraped over the croquet court, through or around the wickets and over the road into the picked field which seemed in the strange light a place where thousands of men had bled and died. He’d heard if you stood on certain battlefields you could sense the deaths that had occurred there, the way the widow could feel a ghost in a room. Perhaps in killing a man you began to see this otherworldly light on a more regular basis, perhaps the soles of your feet became conductors of supernatural energy and you drew the death upward through your bones.

  Around the corner someone walked up the steps. He heard footsteps over the porch. Then he heard the door open and simultaneously the bell. But it wasn’t somebody going in; Tooch had come out.

  “Howdy, Floyd,” Tooch said. “You want to come in or just stand out here on the porch.”

  Floyd said, “Well.”

  The door opened again as they went inside. Mack slid out from under the wagon and pulled himself up using its sideboards.

  Finished, he wiped his hands and sealed the grease keg, rolled it to its spot by the anvil. He used the horse to back the wagon into its place and unharnessed her, led her to the stall at the rear of the shed. He brushed her down, trying to calm her, her hair bristling as the first invisible rain side-wound its way under the shed and wet his cheeks and the backs of his hands. He told the mare she’d be fine and scratched her withers and set a bucket of oats before her and closed the stall door.

  He paused on the porch before going in. Earlier in the afternoon Tooch had handed Mack his pocketknife and instructed him to sharpen both blades without saying why, though Mack had suspected the reason. As the storm gathered out beyond the trees across the field, he’d spent an hour on the porch steps oiling the knife and cleaning it with a chamois, and t
hen with a new flintrock from the box under the counter he’d given it an edge like no knife had ever seen, had held it against the graying sky and imagined it could slice a rock like a potato, cut a rifle barrel into washers.

  Inside he saw Floyd talking quietly to Tooch in the back. Both men looked at him as the bell rang but he’d learned to go about his work as if unaware of the presence of other people. He strained to hear what they were saying but heard nothing except the breath of their whispers.

  Half an hour later, though he hadn’t been told to, he started counting buttons in the corner where the mail desk was. The rain fell hard now, a steady patter with intermittent gusts against the window like water slung from a bucket. The store had grown dark as the storm and night both came on, the only light the dull throb from the stove and the yellow cast of a lantern on the counter. As he counted, Mack looked out where trees and the road and the field of stalks bared by lightning seemed yet another shade of unnaturalness, a glimpse into some nether place or the setting of a dream. When he saw a soaked Lev James dismounting his waterlogged mule in such a glimpse, both Lev and the mule seemed to belong in that place, and when a second burst caught him ascending the stairs holding his coat closed at his throat, Lev looked up and saw Mack watching him, and the boy’s nape hair rose electrically as if he’d been touched by a ghost.

  Lev stomped inside in a swirl of wind, unloosing his overall straps, water puddling beneath him. Without even looking at Mack he unbuttoned his coat and peeled it off, hung it on the coatrack to dry.

  “I swear,” he said, “it’s done run out of cats and dogs and now it’s raining jackasses and bulls.”

  The others, all equally wet, arrived soon after, except for Massey Underwood, who was still missing. What early talk there was concerned the storm. Mack stayed at his post by the door.

  Within half an hour it was time. William sat on a sugar crate by the apple barrel, trying to get a cigarette built from his wet papers and tobacco. War Haskew was beside him drying his Remington lever action with an oiled rag, whistling “The Rose of Alabama,” and tapping his foot—he seemed the only man whose temper hadn’t been fouled by the weather. Huz Smith sat in a chair by the stove and his brother leaned against the counter, smoking a cigarette. Lev paced the aisles. Tooch came from behind the counter, lifting the movable section and ducking a little, holding the clay jug marked with a crude drawing of a cottonmouth. He tossed it to Kirk who unplugged the cork and took a goodly snort and passed it along to William with the cork dangling from its string.

  Tooch passed the stove and bent to stoke the coals with the Yankee sword he kept for that purpose, a tradition begun long ago by Arch. He returned the sword to its corner, straightening in time to catch the jug William pitched to him. He hefted the weight of it, then got a cup from a peg on the wall and poured a shot. He sipped it, turned.

  “We got us a guest tonight,” he said. “As y’all have noticed. Welcome back, Floyd.”

  All eyes went to the back of the room, following Tooch’s gaze. Floyd, his hat in his hands before him, came forward. Lev scowled at him as if the man’s dry clothes were an insult. Someone tossed Floyd the jug and he set it atop his bent arm with his thumb hooked in the thumbhole and raised it and drank.

  “Obliged,” he said.

  “Get you another drink,” Tooch told him, and he did.

  Chairs and stools were scooted back so Floyd could join the circle around the woodstove.

  “Floyd’s told me a tale tonight,” Tooch said, “that I want y’all to hear. And then I want us to decide what we ought to do.” He nodded to the small farmer.

  Floyd took another mighty swig and in a quiet voice began telling how they all knew he’d had a good and longstanding business relationship with Ernest McCorquodale—going on five years—and though there’d been ups and downs, it had more or less been a good arrangement. But now, he said, looking at the floor, something had happened.

  McCorquodale, he said, was using the law to cast him off the land. Evict him.

  “It was a week ago,” he said. He reached into his overalls pocket and withdrew a corncob pipe and placed the empty stem in his mouth, began to chew on it. “Was a rainy night. Nothing like this here one, though. But my lien was due and I figured if I didn’t go on in and pay the son-of-a-bitch, he’d start compounding my damn interest. I walked over to Coffeeville and went to his door and knocked and he opened it and said, ‘You go to the back,’ and slammed the door in my face.”

  “He sent you to the back?” War Haskew asked.

  “Course he did,” said Lev. “Like a goddamn nigger.”

  “Finish your story,” Tooch said.

  Mack listened as Floyd told how he kicked through the mud around the house and waited by the back door for a minute, two, three, his coat heavy with rain and a rivulet falling off the brim of his hat, Floyd at the back steps, waiting until McCorquodale finally opens the door and without even saying Good evening just sticks out his hand. Floyd offers up the sheaf of soaked bills, the whole of the debt, and McCorquodale takes it and steps back out of the weather and closes the screen door. He licks his thumb and counts the notes and counts them again, Floyd waiting in the rain all the while. Satisfied it’s all there, McCorquodale says through the screen how he doesn’t have any receipts here, they’re at the store, and he’ll get Floyd one as soon as he can. Then he shuts the door. Floyd stands for a moment, waiting, then gathers the folds of his coat at his neck and turns and walks home.

  And then, a week later, no sign of anything wrong, when Floyd has taken his boys to town to fit them for shoes, the sheriff stops him and gives him a paper.

  The storm had settled some, the thunder gone, and now the room seemed very quiet. Just a smattering of rain over the roof.

  “How come you didn’t come to us first?” War Haskew asked.

  “I wanted it legal,” Floyd said. “Didn’t want to involve y’all in my business.”

  “But you are now,” Lev said.

  Tooch had lit a cigar. “His business is our business, Lev. He signed our paper, didn’t he? In blood.” He looked at Floyd. “You’re one of us, even though you’ve been on the outside. Till now.”

  “I’ve had it,” Floyd said. “They mean to put me out of my house. Off my land, where I buried—” He stopped and looked toward the front of the store. “Mean to put them young ones out, too. I been on that place near ten years. Done just about broke even. And now—”

  “You’re a hard worker, Floyd,” Tooch said. “Hardest worker in this room. Nobody here will deny that.” He left his stool and stepped between the dark smoky bodies of the grumbling men and went up front behind the counter. When he returned he had a tin of Bull Durham pipe tobacco. He offered it to Floyd.

  “No,” he said. “I thank you, though.”

  Tooch took the man’s wrist, turned his hand over, and set the tin in his hand.

  “I can’t pay for it,” Floyd said, not raising his eyes.

  “You ain’t got to,” Tooch told him.

  Floyd turned the package in his hands. He looked up. “I want to pull the trigger,” he said, his eyes bright in the stovelight. “And then you’ll have somebody else on that list say I was with him. Say we was playing dominoes. Say I won.”

  Tooch narrowed his eyes and pondered it. “No,” he said. “When McCorquodale dies, they’re gone put it on you, so you’ll need a damn solid story. We’ll decide who kills McCorquodale.”

  “I’ll do it,” Lev said. “I hate that son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Is there a fellow from town you don’t hate, Lev?” Huz asked.

  The jug made another round. Floyd loaded the bowl of his pipe and someone handed him a match. He struck it on the side of the stove and got the tobacco glowing, smoke framing his face.

  The rain had paused now and the room was absolutely quiet.

  “We began this organization,” Tooch said, “as a tool to get some revenge for Arch. To get those fat-cat sons-of-bitches in Grove Hill. Well, we been going
slow. Been gathering our wealth. But I propose, fellows, that it’s time we make a big move. A bold one. Announce our intentions.”

  A mumble of assent.

  “We’re gone need some more men, though, ain’t we,” War Haskew said. “If we mean to do that? Especially with Massey gone.”

  “We’ve got two here tonight,” Tooch said, “who’re ready to join us.”

  They all turned to Floyd, who nodded. “I’m ready,” he said. “I ought to done joined up. Y’all knowed my reasons for not but my reasons is changed.”

  “Who’s the other fellow?” Lev asked, and then he and the rest looked to where Mack sat, his hands full of buttons, one by one dropping back into the box.

  “Boy,” Tooch said. “Come here.”

  Mack came over the creaking boards.

  “How old are you, boy?” Tooch asked.

  “I’m sixteen.”

  “As of when?” Lev asked.

  “Just today.”

  War Haskew began to whistle “Happy Birthday,” but no one laughed.

  Lev didn’t look too happy but said nothing further.

  “Your brother’s made a solid case for you,” Tooch said. “He says you’ll behave as you ought to, and from what I’ve seen of your work this past year I believe you’re a sturdy, dependable fellow. Are you prepared to join us?”

  “Yes, sir,” he said.

  “Then it’s time for the swearing-in,” Tooch said.

  The men surrounded Mack and Floyd. Mack felt a hand touch his back, kindly. William. Someone blew out the lantern. Tooch stepped into the circle and faced them. He set down his cup and unfolded the longer blade of the Case pocketknife he kept in his watch pocket and presented it to Mack. He took it without hesitation, would have known it blind among a thousand similar knives. He touched the blade to the tip of the pointing finger of his right hand, not having decided whether a horizontal or vertical cut would be best. A thing he hadn’t even considered.