Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  Another shot. The dog stopped barking.

  Mack rose, still aiming. He’d swallowed his tobacco and nausea surged in his chest, his mouth full of hot spit, eyes burning wet. Overhead, the chimney belched a spray of embers that circled in the night. He took two steps back, blinking, lowering the gun, couldn’t catch his breath. Then William’s hoot-owl call echoed in the trees and Mack turned, uncocking the sixteen-gauge, gagging, keeping low, holding his arm up and puking under it while he ran.

  Later he wouldn’t remember getting there, but when he finally caught up with Lev and William they were at the meeting point, squatting by the creek in the bottom of a hollow a mile south of Tooch’s store, a respectable fire going despite the weather, washing the ash off their faces and laughing. The resin on Lev’s boot bubbled with heat, a smell of burning sugar.

  His face, scrubbed clean, looked orange in the firelight when he stood to meet Mack. “The hell took you so long to hollow, boy? We’d about decided you lost your nerve and run home to the widow.”

  “Just going quiet and careful,” he said, trying to catch his breath, “like Tooch told me to.” He dug out his handkerchief and bent and wet it in the creek and began to rub the ashes from his cheeks.

  Lev glared at him. “My goddamn legs near went to cramping from waiting,” he said.

  William, hatless, hair slick with sweat, wiped the back of his neck with a cloth. “Hell, Lev, you got the son-of-a-bitch, plus half his damn tar collector boxes. Let Macky alone.”

  Lev stared at William, but finally he started to laugh. “Shit,” he said, underhanding Mack a jug of whiskey, “after I got old McCorquodale your damn big brother here takes it on hisself to perform some justice on that old loudmouth hound dog.”

  William was smiling. “Couldn’t let you do all the shooting, could I?”

  Mack hefted the jug and unstoppered it, and later, at Tooch’s, drunk, he’d listen as Lev told the story over and over, how he waited until Ernest McCorquodale, clutching a cloth dinner napkin in his hand, stepped onto his front porch before he fired the first time, how McCorquodale’s wife, who’d followed him out holding a lantern, got winged, too, how that first spray of shot got McCorquodale in the chest, gut, and neck, and burst the lantern, how its flames set his shirt on fire. His wife fled inside clutching her arm. McCorquodale, still standing, stepped back to the left and leaned against the wall of the house, patting at his sleeve. Lev fired again and McCorquodale spun around, slinging sparks, before toppling. He lay burning. Then William shot. The dog fell, crawled in a circle, lay still.

  III

  Half drunk, and with Carlos McCorquodale sitting on the horse behind him, Waite trotted at a good clip down Court Street, yellow lamplights flaring in the windows, silhouettes of heads looking out, the people indoors catching on that something was amiss. Carlos, gulping for air and clutching at the cramp in his side, had said his daddy got shot on the porch. That somebody just pulled the trigger and ran off and now his daddy was dead. He’d jumped onto one of their horses and ridden after Waite but the horse had thrown him a mile from Grove Hill and he’d run the rest of the way.

  Behind him the boy shuddered like he was cold and Waite realized that Carlos was crying.

  They rode past the blacksmith’s shop and Simmons’s dry goods store with its green shutters pulled to and a holly wreath on the door. It had rained earlier and King kicked up crescents of mud and slid a little, then caught his footing and nickered softly in protest. Waite leaned forward and patted the horse’s neck and tried to think of some comfort to offer the boy behind him, that maybe his daddy wasn’t dead after all, that the doctor could perhaps mend his wounds, often a lot of blood meant nothing, looked worse than it was. But the boy had said Oscar sent for him, and if Oscar said McCorquodale was dead, he was dead.

  When they were half a mile from McCorquodale’s, slowing at a turn in the road, Carlos slipped off King’s back and stood in the dirt. Waite reined the horse up and turned in the saddle. The boy watched him.

  “Carlos?”

  “I’ll walk on up in a bit.”

  Waite looked toward the tall dark shroud of trees to the left of them, to the right. “Might still be chancy out here.”

  “Go on ahead, Sheriff,” the boy said. “Please?”

  “You’ll follow me?”

  “Yessir. I’ll be on.”

  Waite nodded and jobbed the horse’s ribs and left Carlos in the moonlit road.

  Oscar stood on the steps waiting for him, holding that big gold pocket watch of his in one hand, as if marking how long it took Waite to arrive. In his other hand he had a Colt pistol. His sleeves were rolled up and his white shirtfront had blood on it. His graying hair, normally combed back very carefully, hung over his forehead. He descended the steps into the yard, breath smoking in the chill air, and held Waite’s horse by the bridle while his cousin dismounted. Waite took the reins and, businesslike, tied them to the post. He looked around, light cast from the windows of the big house lay flickering, elongated squares over the yard. When he faced his cousin, Oscar wore a determined look. “I told you,” he said.

  Waite let this go. “What we got?”

  “You need some coffee? Sober you up?”

  “Don’t push me, Oscar.”

  “A goddern bushwhacking’s what we got, Billy.” He motioned with his head and stalked along the front of the porch and around the corner. Waite followed him through the high wet grass out past the pear tree, into a dark pocket of night. There was something white on the ground and Waite stared at it for a moment before realizing it was a dog. He knelt and touched its cold throat with his knuckles.

  “They shot the dog?”

  “Yeah. I drug him over here, get him outta the way.”

  Waite looked off into the night. “Why in the hell would they do that?”

  “They probably hit it by accident. I’m more concerned, Billy, with the fact that they shot Ernest.”

  Waite had blood on his fingers, he wiped his hand front and back on the grass before standing.

  “I swear,” Oscar said. “On his own porch. With his wife standing right beside him. My sister, Billy.” Oscar looked down at the gun in his hand and scratched his head. He cast his eyes toward the darkness masking the trees across the road. “They were right over yonder,” he said, pointing with the pistol. “Just waiting. Goddern bushwhackers.”

  “You were here,” Waite said, “right? When it happened?”

  Oscar nodded.

  “Tell me about it.”

  They’d been eating supper. Oscar sat at one end of the table, Ernest at the other, going on about that bunch out in New Prospect, how it wasn’t safe for anybody since they shot Joe Anderson, when the dog started to bark. The girls chattering about a dance coming up. Dog keeps barking. Ernest says, “Damn,” and slams down his fork and gets up out of his chair and goes to see what the racket means, pulling his napkin from his collar. Been in a foul mood all night, even forgot to say the blessing. Ulrica had to remind him. Ernest goes on out through the front door and stands on the porch for a minute, yells, “Who’s out here?,” then Ulrica gets up and follows him out, bringing a kerosine lamp, saying, “What is it, Ernest?”

  “I swear to God,” Oscar said, “I just thought it was a dang fox or coon or something. Why I didn’t go with him. I should’ve known, though. It was bound to happen.”

  “Go on,” Waite said.

  When Oscar heard the first shot, he jumped up from the table and ordered everyone to the floor. The girls hollering, covering their ears with their hands. Colored maid yelps and disappears. Oscar’s wife, Lucinda, faints. Ulrica comes running back inside, clutching her forearm, blood on her dress, spurting between her fingers. Screaming bloody murder. Oscar scoots over the floor on his knees and elbows and pulls her down, puts his hand over her mouth to hush her up. His pistol is in his coat in the foyer by the front door, and he crawls that way, yelling for everybody to stay down. Another shot, and quickly another, and now it’s quiet. H
e reaches the foyer and pulls down his coat, rack and all, gets his gun out. Raises up over the windowsill and sees Ernest lying there in the dark, shirtsleeve on fire. Puddle of black spreading under him.

  “What time?”

  He considered. “Hadn’t been dark too long. Half hour?”

  After a few moments, Oscar sighed. “You going to get him, right?”

  Waite folded his arms. It was colder now, a little fog in the air. A whippoorwill cried from the tree overhead and Waite looked up at the stars, breeze on his cheeks, remembering when he and Oscar were young and Oscar’s daddy had told him to shoot a little stray dog that had taken up under their house, mangy gray mongrel that shivered all the time and bared its teeth, but out of what seemed to young Waite something other than meanness. Fear, maybe. But Oscar’s daddy (he was a lawyer) thought it might have the rabies, besides it was wild, he said. He handed Oscar a giant dragoon pistol and told him to lead the dog off and shoot it. Waite went with him, remembered now how they got to their knees and called the dog. How old was Oscar? Nine? Ten? He’d stuck the gun in his belt like a sword—nearly pulled his pants down it was so heavy; the barrel fell even with his calf—and they coaxed the dog in sweet chirping voices but finally had to get a big hambone from the house and use it to entice the stray from where it hid trembling under the back steps. When it came out it pissed on itself, and soon, with drool strung from its chittering lips, it was following them out beyond the livery and past a pen of mares and one bluish jackass that brayed at them and showed its yellow teeth and flexed the skin of its hips against the giant black horseflies.

  Oscar said, “Well?”

  “I guess I am.”

  “You want me to roust some fellows, go with you?”

  Waite shook his head. “No, a mob’s the last thing we need now. We go riding in there showing force and we’ll have a damn shooting war on our hands, in their territory.”

  Oscar watched him. “We got that already.”

  A noise to their left and Oscar’s gun arm flew up.

  “It’s just me,” said Carlos.

  He rode hard through the fields. Angling for secrecy, he veered off the road and found a back trail he’d discovered on the previous trip, let King follow it while he dozed in the saddle. There were dreams, unusual for him. A house burning. His own? His father, dead thirty years, off to the side on a bicycle, watching.

  When he woke, the horse had stopped and was rubbing its head against the mossy side of a sweet gum, the land slanting sharply down. Trickle of a creek in the bottom of the hollow.

  Didn’t take long to realize he was lost—for him a rarity—and soon he’d wasted an hour prodding King along a series of steep slippery slopes, ducking low branches, breaking sodden spiderwebs with his chin. “Last time I trust a horse,” he muttered, swatting King gently on the mane. With each misstep of the animal he felt each of his years in his lower back, and twice he dismounted to piss but when he stood waiting he couldn’t.

  Lord, but he could use a drink.

  After another hour he still hadn’t found his landmark, a large fallen oak tree which some yokels tried to saw in two and from which you could now see half the crosscut saw protruding, the handle long ago snapped off for its wood or the screws in it or just yanked off out of frustration. Were it his own mistake, he’d have hammered the saw into oblivion, not showing anyone his own failure, a log unhalved. He’d begun to think someone had done exactly that, though, or moved the whole log, and he dismounted and stood on the spongy ground with his hands on his hips. He could see his breath and King’s. Finally he began to lead the horse, pull him, more than once tripping on a rock and nearly losing his grip and fighting to keep the animal calm, King blowing and fretting and rolling his eyes, as if there were rattlesnakes clicking about. Waite, now very cross, stumbled into bushes, nicking his cheeks and throat, and soon his boots were caked with mud and his coat soaked from rain pelting him from trees, as if each damn pine limb cupped a jawful of cold spit just for him.

  “Crazy,” he muttered, and King whinnied in agreement.

  The stray dog young Oscar had shot all those years ago haunted Waite as he walked, how it just followed them ignorantly to its appointment with death, patches of scratched-bloody skin showing, the way its hide looked like it had shrunk and could no longer hold the dog inside it, ribs you could count, the way it trembled like it couldn’t get warm, the way its tail wagged as it followed them, the dog with no idea of what was coming. Boys with no idea either. Waite could tell that Oscar felt important, like a grown-up, a man in charge of shooting a dog, carrying a pistol nearly as big as he was. Despite himself, Waite had had to admit there was something to it. Can I carry the gun? he’d finally asked.

  Nope, Oscar said, Daddy give it to me. I’m the boss.

  Where you gone shoot it? Waite asked.

  Just round that bend yonder.

  I meant which part of the dog.

  In the head, Oscar said. Gone pop it right ’tween the eyes.

  Why don’t you aim for the heart? Waite asked.

  Where’s the dang heart at?

  Shoulder, stupid.

  The dragoon had been too heavy for Oscar’s arm, so he’d used both hands, and when he’d fired at the stray dog, aiming, Waite supposed, for its heart, he hit its hip instead. The dog’s back half collapsed as if something below had snatched it down. It barked, almost a girl’s scream, and began to scramble in circles, dragging its limp hind legs, leaving a jagged design of blood in the dirt, bloody dirt caking on its skin. Oscar shot again one-handed and in a panic and missed by a yard, the gun recoiling nearly straight up, then he fired again and missed again, the dog righting its course and dragging its nonworking half under a fence and into a cotton field in full brilliant bloom. Mute, the cousins marked the stray’s progress through the field by the movement of the bolls and the shrieking of the dog. Their halfhearted attempt at tracking—bright red splotches on the white cotton—had lasted only a few minutes, to the other side of the field, the edge of the woods, and they’d given up and never seen the dog again. Oscar had made Waite promise never to tell, and he never had.

  He finally fell upon some luck and found himself on a narrow wagon trail, grass growing calf-high in the middle of deep muddy ruts. Then the oak, the saw, which he approached and touched, grateful. His thumb came away gritty with rust. For a time he waited to catch his breath, then climbed back into the saddle, leaning forward to whisper to the horse, stroking his long wet cheek. Such a good sport, King. Should’ve brought some sugar cubes or carrots. And why didn’t he bring a damn bottle? What a comfort it would be now. But he’d be crazy to drink out here. He took off his hat and slung the water from it and replaced it and rode on with his hand on the stock of the Marlin in its saddle sock.

  The land was more familiar now, even by moonlight, and soon two barking dogs pricked the horse’s ears and Waite clucked his tongue and in a short while they were loping through field upon field of harvested cotton, wind rattling through the stalks, then topping a rise and in the middle of yet another field was the darkened hulk of Norris’s cabin. The stars and the moon were high and white, casting the homestead in a dim, surreal glow. A pair of outbuildings to the west, places to hide. Waite slid the rifle out and levered a round into the chamber.

  In front of the porch now, blocking the sheds with the house, he called, “Floyd Norris! Come on out here.”

  It wasn’t Norris who appeared from underneath the house but two dogs, silently, racing out and leaping at him on the horse. Waite kicked at them and fired in the air, driving them back beneath the porch.

  Only now did he form into word and image what he was about to do, though he’d known it since Carlos came panting to his porch. As soon as Floyd Norris stepped out the door, Waite would raise his rifle and aim at the man’s chest and pull the trigger. Then he’d ratchet the lever with the gun still at his shoulder and before the ejected casing hit the ground he’d shoot again, and he would repeat the process until the g
un was empty if that was what it took to drop him.

  He waited, the dogs howling.

  There was always a chance it would be a fair kill, that Norris might come out shooting, proving his guilt, or that he might take off running, but Waite reckoned that chance a slim one. To use his office in this way, as he had once before, as that of official assassin, troubled him, but Oscar was right. At times you had to step around the law.

  But nothing happened. Floyd Norris didn’t walk out peaceful or charge out firing or come sailing off the roof Indian-like with a knife.

  Waite said Hell quietly. He dismounted, one-handing the Marlin, and stood with his fingers in the horse’s mane. “Easy,” he whispered to King. To himself. He didn’t dare light his lantern and give Norris a clear shot at him, thinking it as likely as not that the farmer was laid up with a jug in the bracken behind him. Or in one of the sheds. Couldn’t blame the man for that, you could smell the place clear out here. He’d heard about Norris’s wife, dying in the field, but couldn’t recall if he’d ever laid eyes on her.

  Waite rocked from one foot to the other, back aching, the rifle in his left hand, and listened. He walked the length of the house, the dogs pacing him under the porch, he could hear them growling.

  He was about to circle to the rear to bust in the back when a door creaked. Waite swung the rifle over as a small hand appeared, fingers splayed.

  “Daddy ain’t here,” a boy’s voice said.

  Waite kept his rifle on the hand. “Come on out,” he called. He wouldn’t put it past Floyd Norris to use his children as a diversion.

  “Daddy said us weren’t to leave the house.”

  “If you don’t, I’ll come in and get you.”

  One of the boys appeared, his face brown with dirt, followed by the other two, each a little shorter than the one before him, probably all less than a year apart. All thin. The oldest two wore identical filthy pairs of overalls. Ratty shirts, no shoes. The youngest wore only a long shirt, he was grinding his fists into his eyes, half asleep.