Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “You making it all right?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How old are you, Carlos?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Seventeen.” Waite rubbed his chin, the stiff whiskers. “My daddy got killed when I was fourteen,” he said. “Threw from a mule’s back at the blacksmith’s. Hit his head on an anvil. Just went to sleep and kept sleeping.”

  Carlos didn’t say anything.

  “I sure wanted to kill that damn mule,” Waite said. “Tell you that.”

  “Did you? Kill it?”

  Waite bent and picked up a smooth pebble from the step. “No, no. Wouldn’t have been practical. I remembered something, though, ’bout that mule, during Daddy’s wake. When I was in bed one night that old sack of bones got outta the barn, trotted over to the house and poked her fool head in me and my brother’s window and brayed to high heaven. My brother, name was Butch, he come off the mattress ’bout four feet, and I just about wet the bed. Butchy, he had a short fuse on him, he rolled straight outta bed, went to the rack and grabbed Daddy’s twelve-gauge shotgun. Runs down the hall.” Waite was smiling at the memory. “Momma run out and stopped him, said, ‘What you gone do with that shotgun, boy?’ and Butchy says to her, says, ‘I’m gone shoot that damn mule’s what.’ Momma turns around and yells at Daddy, ‘Do something!’ and Daddy, he’s still laying in bed, says, ‘Hell no. Let him shoot the son-of-a-bitch.’”

  Carlos smiled, too.

  “If Butch had shot him that night, Daddy’d lived a lot longer. But you can’t do that.” He thumped the pebble into the yard. “Can’t think if I’d a done this or that, something else might’ve happened. You’ll drive yourself crazy like that. Fact is, things happen and nobody knows why.”

  They sat, looking out at the road. The doctor’s wagon had left tracks in the mud.

  “Carlos,” he said, “did you see or hear anything that might give me an edge on this business?”

  The boy shook his head. “It was that Floyd Norris, Sheriff,” he said.

  “That seems to be the going opinion,” Waite admitted. He folded his hands on his knees. “And one thing I’ve learned after being a sheriff for this long is that usually the man who seems guilty is. Usually, but not every time. Sometimes, just every once in a while, the things that seem obvious are too obvious. Now we all know why Norris might’ve had reason to pull the trigger. Your daddy foreclosing on him. Putting him and his family out. What I need you to do for me, though, is to try and think of anybody else might’ve had a strong reason to shoot your daddy.”

  “I been trying,” the boy said. “Daddy, he keeps, used to keep, his business quiet. Didn’t ever let none of us have much to do with it.”

  “Not even you?”

  “I guess I was the one he said the most to. Which wasn’t much. Or maybe Uncle Oscar. Never told Momma a thing. Always said the Lord God intended the world for them that wears pants.”

  “It’s a fact you can get places faster in a pair of britches,” Waite said. “Tell you what. Why don’t you and me go on over to your daddy’s store and take us a look at his records and papers. Might be something we can use over yonder.”

  Oscar came out, rifle in his hand. He eased the door shut behind him. “I believe I’ll go with y’all, if that’s okay.”

  “How is she?”

  “Asleep. Poor thing.”

  When they arrived at the store, Obbie, the middle-aged black man who clerked for McCorquodale stood on the steps waiting, holding a lunch pail. He was the only black man Waite knew who wore glasses.

  “Morning, Sheriff,” he said. “Good morning, Mr. Carlos, Judge York, sir.”

  “Morning,” Waite said. Carlos nodded to him.

  Oscar climbed down from the wagon. “You doing okay, Obbie?”

  “Yessir, thank you, sure am.”

  Oscar nodded and went up the steps and searched his pockets for the key and found one and tried it and unlocked the door. He went in and Carlos followed, his head lowered.

  “How you today, Sheriff?” The clerk came down the steps and took the horse’s bridle and held it as Waite climbed down from the buggy, moving his gun belt so it wouldn’t catch on the brake lever.

  “Listen,” Waite said, looking down the street, “Mr. McCorquodale’s been shot.”

  “Shot? What you mean, Sheriff?”

  “He’s dead.”

  The black man’s eyes grew wide and he shook his head. “It’s bad, bad times,” he said.

  Waite nodded. “Well. You can go on about your normal chores, I guess,” he said. “Open up, business as usual. From what I knew of McCorquodale, it’s what he’d a wanted.”

  Waite went in, down the length of the counter, to the glassed office in back, where Oscar was seated behind a desk, going through the ledger, Carlos watching him.

  Passing a barrel, Waite picked up a big red apple and looked it over for bruises or wormholes and polished it against his shirtsleeve. He stopped in the office door and leaned against the wall and kept polishing the apple. Behind him the black man was opening the front door, already talking to a customer, repeating the news of McCorquodale’s death. Bad, bad times.

  “Son of a gun,” Oscar said.

  Waite was about to bite into the apple. “Find something?”

  A cry from the back room brought them all running. The black man was staring at a place in the wall where several boards had been removed. Someone had broken in.

  Waite’s head hurt. It was the day following McCorquodale’s funeral and he’d drunk too much and not slept well. Now he watched his cousin behind his office desk and the drained-looking boy facing him.

  “There’s no easy way to tell your mother what must be said,” Oscar told Carlos. “Your family is broke. Your daddy’s business has been in some serious jeopardy for a number of years now, and now that he’s gone his debtors are about to rush his estate like a pack of starved hound dogs. We don’t even know how much cash was taken from the safe, though we can harbor a guess it was substantial, since it held a lot of cotton money. Your daddy, he never did trust banks.”

  Oscar didn’t look at Waite, who leaned against the window ledge, the sunlight warm on his shoulders. The judge had a way of doing that, of making you feel like you weren’t in a room.

  Waite glanced behind him, out the window to the street. A pair of black men moved off the sidewalk for a white lady to pass. She ignored them, they her, a simple and daily transaction. Waite rubbed his temples. Life went on beyond the glass, didn’t it? No matter how devastating a blow a boy is dealt, like Carlos’s daddy getting shot and the news of the family’s finances, the clock keeps ticking and the world outside the window is the same world it was before you lost everything.

  “I’ve been puzzling over this,” Oscar went on, watching Carlos. “And it seems to me the only solution is to sell your house. You can auction off some of the things inside—that piano, for one—and with the store’s inventory, that should about even things up. Leave y’all enough to get a smaller place. I’m willing, if you and your mother want me, to come in as a partner on the store.”

  The boy sat in the chair across from his uncle, dressed in a suit and a bow tie, a hat in his lap.

  Grow on up, Carlos, Waite thought. Your childhood’s ended.

  The office was too warm with the fire going. Waite pushed off the ledge and crossed the room to the rack by the door and removed his coat, cartridges clicking in the pocket, and hung it up by Oscar’s and went back to the ledge.

  “But that’s not the only reason I asked you here today,” Oscar told Carlos. The judge rose and went to the window and looked out past Waite’s shoulder, Carlos behind him. “I’ve been thinking on what we’re gone do about your daddy’s murder. Been talking to Billy about it, too.”

  Waite rubbed the bridge of his nose. He and Oscar had gone over McCorquodale’s ledgers carefully, looking for a sum that might reflect the money Norris had paid. They’d found nothing. Which Oscar said proved it. Waite said i
t proved no such thing. He said how much of his—Oscar’s—dealings did Oscar record on paper and Oscar said every blessed one. Then you’re rare, Waite had said.

  Oscar turned and faced the boy. “Your daddy, he did foreclose on a few farms in the past. He believed, as I do, that there’s a certain order to how men should be regarded. Men like your father and I, we have a responsibility to the working landholders. We have to keep a grip on what little was left to us by the northerners. We have to cling to it, to cleave, as the Good Book says. And these country fellows, they have to be watched and treated a certain way. You can’t give them charity or they’ll come to depend on it. And those who lose their farms due to bad business choices, or bad luck, or just general sorriness, well, your father and I both believe that they’re better off going someplace else.”

  Oscar returned to his chair. “See, Carlos, the thing about it is this. Sometimes the law gets bogged down in itself. What the Britishers call red tape. Bureaucracy. And at those times, it’s the responsibility of good citizens like you and me to follow their conscience. Now since Billy feels like his hands are tied in this business, I’ve gone past him. I’ve had a fellow, what you call a private detective, out in Mitcham Beat for a good while now. At my own expense. He’s gone get us the proof we need to convict not only Floyd Norris but all them night riders.”

  Waite had had enough. He snatched his coat off the rack and left. The hell with Judge York.

  IV

  A gang of schoolboys lay pillowed in their folded arms watching the crowd from under the boards of McCorquodale’s store’s porch.

  “Now give me your attention,” the auctioneer said. “This next item will be of particular interest to you ladies out yonder.” He stood with his sleeves rolled up behind a desk pushed out of the store, its drawers with their heavy brass knobs removed to make it lighter, a claw hammer with the price tag still on it in his left hand so he could bang it like a gavel and declare items sold. After he’d pounded the desk a time or two, Judge Oscar York, grinning at the crowd, had slipped up onto the porch and slid a piece of lumber under the hammer so as not to further damage the desk. The auctioneer nodded and two colored men carried a hall tree out from the store. They set it beside the desk and stepped back and stood side by side, shuffling their large feet.

  “Thank you, boys. Now,” the auctioneer went on, “this here is a genuine hall tree from Ulrica McCorquodale’s own parlor. The upstairs parlor, it says here. And it also says, let’s see, that it come from a gallery down in Mobile. Fine creation, ain’t it?” He paused and rocked back on his heels, gazing at the towering piece. “Now some of y’all might’ve seen it in the McCorquodale house during parties,” he continued, “but I myself never was invited to no parties there, which don’t depreciate the piece none.”

  Laughter.

  The judge, off to the side, seemed frozen in his smile. Billy Waite, behind the crowd, sitting on the back of a wagon peeling an apple, seemed more interested in the apple than the auction. He had a rifle propped beside him.

  “I’m gone open the bidding here at, well, fifteen dollars.”

  York flashed all ten fingers twice.

  “Judge says no, we got to ask twenty for it.”

  “I’ll bid ten,” somebody called from the back and everyone laughed.

  “No, no, it’s twenty, like the judge here says.”

  It went on, the ten-dollar bid stood.

  “The next item on the docket some of y’all have been eyeing for a spell,” the auctioneer said. He left his desk and with the hammer held loosely in his right hand walked to the other side of the porch to the piano, which was covered by a sheet. He pulled the sheet off slowly, then handed it to one of the colored men who didn’t seem sure what to do with it. The piano, highly varnished, shone in the sun.

  “She’s a beaut, ain’t she?” the auctioneer said, and the murmuring crowd agreed. The auctioneer slid the hammer in his back pocket and raised the lid and propped it up. He punched a few of the keys to show they worked.

  “I’m gone ask the Reverend Washington Ethridge to come on up here for a moment, if he will,” the auctioneer said, and the crowd parted to permit a very thin man in work clothes to the front. “Come on up to the porch, Reverend,” the auctioneer said.

  He waved, no, thanks.

  “Well, folks, he’s just gone stay down yonder. Reckon this ain’t his kind of audience, is it? Fact is, was he to come up here, he’d probably get to preaching, wouldn’t he? And I myself find once a week’s enough for me.”

  Ethridge shook a finger at him, grinning.

  “Well, the good reverend wants this piano for his church, and so at the judge’s discretion, we’re gone start the bidding here on this piano at twenty-seven dollars and a half. That’s a bargain, and I happen to know the reverend here’s gone start the bidding. Am I right?”

  “Twenty-seven and six bits,” Ethridge called.

  “Do I hear twenty-eight?” the auctioneer said, putting a dramatic hand to his ear. “No? Going once, going—”

  “Twenty-eight,” somebody yelled. From back of the crowd.

  All looked around. Judge York came up on the lowest step for a better vantage point. Waite had paused in his peeling.

  It was Lev James. He sat aback his mule with one foot tucked under him, a natty blanket for a saddle and a saddlebag behind him. A pistol handle sticking out of his trousers.

  “Twenty-eight and two bits?” Ethridge said, looking at Oscar as if he’d been double-crossed.

  “Twenty-nine,” Lev James yelled. He leaned and spat. “Hell, thirty.”

  The judge flung up his hands and turned his back on the crowd. He glared up at the auctioneer, who shrugged.

  “Do I hear thirty-one?”

  “No, you don’t,” the sheriff said. Rifle in hand, he slid down off the wagon, his apple left gleaming on the rail. If he saw the child’s hand reach up and take the apple he didn’t acknowledge it, choosing instead to lock eyes with Lev James, who’d turned on the mule to watch Waite’s approach.

  “Thirty-one,” Lev James said. He smiled at Waite, three yellow teeth showing out of the mass of his dark twin-braided beard.

  “You expect us to take your bid serious, James?” the sheriff said.

  “Not no more seriouser than you expect me to take you.”

  “Oh, believe me, James,” Waite said. “I take you very serious.” He had been holding the rifle one-handed at his side. Now he moved its forearm to his left hand. “You got the money you bidding with,” he said, “or you just here to mess up a nice event?”

  He cast his slanted eyes about, women covering their children, herding them away, men gathering and looking sidelong at one another, mustering courage. “Nice event,” James sneered.

  “So far. Now you go on get out of here.”

  “I got me plenty of money, Billy Waite. And don’t you forget it.”

  Waite raised his rifle, calmly, aiming it at James’s right shoulder. “There’s about fifty witnesses watching,” he said quietly, “and if you go for that gun I’ll drop you here in the mud your goddamn mule’s standing in.”

  James’s eyes flickered over the crowd. His smile had never faded. He held up his hands, slowly. “Won’t let me bid, folks,” he called. “Seems if you from the country and you ride into the big old grand town of Coffeeville, the sheriff here’ll try and run you out.” He reached slowly into his pocket and brought forth a sheaf of paper money. “Looky here, Billy Waite. More than you’ll make in a goddamn month.”

  Waite lowered the rifle.

  James grinned. He looked back toward the auctioneer. “Thirty-five dollars,” he called. “That pianer’s gone look good on my porch.”

  The street Lev rode was fairly deserted, a few parked wagons and buggies, smoke from steamboats on the river visible over the tops of trees. He leaned and spat off the mule’s back and smiled at a chubby lady coming out of a store. She recoiled and went back into the building. He rode dead center down the road, pausing
to spit on the wooden sidewalk. He watched his and the mule’s slow-walking reflection in a storefront window and adjusted his hat, then turned the mule and walked it down the street, past the hotel, its balcony empty. A sign swinging on its chains, what it said he didn’t know.

  He drew the mule to a stop and threw his leg over to dismount. As he landed, though, his foot seemed to buckle beneath him and he collapsed. He sat in the street beneath the mule and looked around for somebody to have seen. No one there.

  He drew his foot to him and examined his boot, the heel that had come off and which lay cupped in the big dirty palm of his hand.

  Limping, he led the mule to the side of the street and looped the reins over a post. He looked up and down the street until he spotted a hanging sign with the picture of a lady’s shoe burned in wood.

  The cobbler, a man named Wilkins, was polishing a pair of brogans when Lev came in. There were racks and racks of shoes and a wall with pairs of socks displayed.

  “Can I do something for you, sir?” Wilkins asked, smiling and setting the shoe on the counter before him. He wore a pair of round spectacles and had a long nose.

  Lev tromped through the store, rising and falling with the uneven height of his shoes. He stopped before the owner and looked down at him, then sat the tattered heel of his boot on the counter between them.

  “I’ll need shoeing,” he said.

  “Of course, Mr….?”

  “You don’t need my name.”

  “Fine. Can I have, er, the rest of this boot?”

  Lev stared for a moment, unsure if he was being teased. He decided not, and bent and removed the muddy boot and set it beside its heel. It all but collapsed from how worn it was, more like cloth than leather.

  “Well, this one’s seen some use,” Wilkins said, looking as if Lev had set a dead possum there.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means you’ve got yourself a dedicated piece of footwear.”

  “Can you fix her or not?”