Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “Why?”

  “Yeah. Why’d you let Bit go?”

  Mack remembered the cabin remains behind him and realized that on their way here, he and Waite must have crossed the spot where Mack had shot Arch. Followed the selfsame route Arch had as he bled, the night he’d crawled all the way to Tooch’s. All the way here. Such a long way to come, bleeding. To die in your cousin’s arms.

  “I wanted to even things up,” Mack said.

  Waite looked at him. “What’s that mean?”

  Mack’s face was hidden within the folds of his blanket, and he began to talk, to tell a long story of a very dark night, where two boys played at being bandits, not with the intention to hurt or kill, just wanting to get some money so they could visit a whore. A story of a man on a horse and an old pistol firing—almost of its own desire—and of the horse fleeing riderless into the night. The two boys standing side by side over a dead body, having crossed a ditch into a world edged in black, framed by a hood. The story took him a long time to tell, and by the time he was done the small animal was back, scratching at the wall.

  Waite said, “You killed Arch Bedsole.”

  His memory raced back to the day he’d visited the boys at the widow’s cabin, a year ago. Mack saying, “It wasn’t me.” Of his visit to Mack at the store and the boy hiding. He knew it was true. “Who else knows?”

  “Just William.”

  “The widow don’t know?”

  “I don’t believe so. I used to think Tooch did. That he was keeping me on at the store to kill me when he figured the time was right. But he never did do it. Then he let me in his alliance.”

  “You’re a member?”

  “I didn’t kill nobody else, though.”

  Waite felt dead tired. “So you figured if you let Bit go, the scales would be in balance.”

  “I hoped.”

  “Well, maybe one set of scales is,” Waite said. “But there’s another set.”

  The blanket had felt, as Mack talked, like the hood of Hell-at-the-Breech. No one knew you, you were invisible, you could do or say anything in your heart and there would be no repercussions. His confession had flowed so easily from the darkness, like something freed from the deep, bouldered molars of gravity, something air-filled sucked up into the light from the bottom of a river. All this time when he had waited, expected, almost hoped to get caught, he’d begun to feel as though someone had dug a hole in his belly, shoveled out his insides as if trying to make a grave of him, as though the shell remaining was nothing more than a tunnel to channel cold air from that world to this. As if the boy who had killed Arch Bedsole had walked off that night and not returned, that what remained was a place marker where a boy should be.

  But now the Macky Burke he had been so long ago seemed to reenter this cold, cowled body, to kick into its legs and shrug into its shoulders and reach into its arms like a coat, to fit his own head into its head and peer with his eyes from its eyes into a land, again, of the living, and he was living in it, glad now to flex his fingers and hear the minute, gravelly pops the bones made, glad to fill his lungs with fog.

  He parted the blanket and pushed it down around his shoulders. He’d never again hide his face, he thought. If they led him handcuffed up the steps of a gallows, he would not allow them to douse him with a hood. He would take note of the bright earth as it was swept away. He would not have the last thing he saw be darkness.

  The sheriff opened his eyes. They looked at each other. Waite felt betrayed. But he felt something else, too. As a child he had once stolen a silver dollar from the church collection plate. No one had seen him or caught him. He had the coin in his pocket even as the plate made its way down the row and to the next row behind his back and on down the row and to the one behind that all the way to the back of the church and into the hands of those who’d count it. And those men never knew as they dipped their fingers in and removed the money and stacked it that the plate was one coin light. He had gotten away cleanly. Yet almost immediately he’d felt the guilt. His conscience heavy as iron. At home he’d hidden the coin in a pair of socks. He’d tried to forget it all week. But sometimes he would withdraw it from the socks and turn it in his hand. He took it outside one afternoon to a pond and reared his arm back to throw it in. But he didn’t. Come the next Sunday, he slipped the dollar back in the plate. It made a loud clank but nobody looked. His father and mother faced the pulpit, singing “Higher Ground.” Yet because Waite hadn’t been punished, he continued to suffer, and home later, the weight of his conscience a drowning thing, he’d gone tearfully to his father and told him the whole story. His father had smiled and said, “You’ll not be punished, son, as I reckon you’ve suffered enough.”

  Waite looked at Mack Burke. A child’s face. The night calling of the owl had continued and the boy’s eyes were up, seeking the bird. Waite tried to imagine a judge—it would be Oscar—sentencing him. Hanging him. And Waite would be the one to pull the hood over his face and to catch him if his knees gave way. His would be the last face the boy saw and the boy’s face would forever stay with Waite as had each one he’d hooded.

  “I got to take you in,” he said.

  Macky nodded. “I know you do, Mr. Billy.” He blinked. “You reckon they’ll hang me?”

  He shrugged, a lie. “Depends on the judge, I reckon.”

  “Judge York?”

  “Depends.”

  They sat looking across at each other. Then Waite turned his gaze to the darkness outside. He had more questions and began phrasing them to himself. But when he looked back at Macky Burke, the boy had fallen asleep, his neck bent and head on his shoulder at an impossible angle like a baby’s head would be and Waite understood that this was the best sleep he’d had since pulling the trigger of his dead daddy’s pistol and killing a good man.

  Waite didn’t sleep, it seemed a thing he’d never do again.

  When dawn came, hours later, he had to shake Macky awake, but within minutes they were up and walking, Waite glad to get some blood pumping through his legs and arms, which felt like pieces of wood. He’d considered going east and circumventing the beat altogether, but that would take days. He handcuffed the boy to dissuade any thoughts of escape and followed him with his rifle in one hand and King’s rein in the other as they crept out of the woods. He’d never been so tired, raw-feeling around his eyes. The road was unsafe, he reckoned, in case Oscar sent out scouts or posted guards, so he and Mack doubled up on the horse and walked through woods when there were woods available and then loped over the naked fields as Waite eyed the horizon for any movement, glad now for the fog.

  Finally they struck a patch of forest along a road and Waite knew they’d be covered better now, though the dewy woods were a chore to navigate with two of them on a surly horse. The fog hung from trees like bedsheets out to dry and now Waite longed for the sun to emerge and burn it away. The boy walked ahead of him and King followed behind, so ill-tempered that Waite worried he might take a notion to charge up and bite a hunk out of the back of his neck.

  Old boy, he thought, I promise you that if we get out of here, I won’t bring you back.

  VII

  William Burke and War Haskew spent the afternoon drinking whiskey while sitting on a pair of pine stumps along War’s back acres, watching their breath race away on the brisk wind, discussing the recently come-of-age daughter of a farmer named Jed Finch. War claimed he’d gotten a finger halfway inside her, a fact William disputed as an outright lie. But since the topic had come up, they decided to meander over to visit Annie.

  When they arrived, the dog didn’t commence to barking as it normally did but neither took this as anything worrisome and climbed the steps. The fact that War would go first hadn’t even been discussed, it was simply the way of things, as he was older and William’s employer, so William sat on the edge of the porch. War tossed him the jug and rapped on the door with his rifle barrel. He rapped louder when she didn’t answer. When she still didn’t say anything, and her dog didn
’t either, they went inside looking for her.

  Three hours later War drew his buckboard up along the front of Tooch’s store.

  He came out.

  “Where the hell’s Annie?” War called.

  Tooch tilted his head. “Say what?”

  “Annie. We just went over yonder fixing to get serviced, but she ain’t there. Dog ain’t neither.”

  They got down from the wagon and War tossed Tooch a sugar bag with eye and mouth holes cut in it.

  “What the hell’s this?” Tooch asked.

  “We found it at Annie’s,” William said.

  Tooch looked at it.

  War said, “That ain’t all. She’d shot at somebody, too. But the place was quiet as a damn graveyard.”

  Tooch glanced to the left, empty road, and to the right, the same. Over the cotton field just trees. “Looks like somebody’s trying to make it look like we killed her.”

  “Where’s Macky?” William asked.

  Tooch folded the sugar bag. “I was gone ask y’all if y’all had seen him.”

  War and William looked at each other, then back at Tooch. “It’s something happening,” he said. “Let’s get everbody together.”

  He sent a worried William after the Smiths in War’s wagon and War after Lev and Kirk on the horse. It was well past dark when War and Kirk came riding up double, and even later when William returned with Huz and Buz in the back of the buckboard.

  From the porch, Tooch asked, “Where’s Lev?”

  “Went to a auction in Coffeeville,” Kirk said. “Ain’t seen him since.”

  “We figured he’d of showed up here by now,” War added.

  Tooch removed his hat. “I think we can count him out,” he said. “If they didn’t shoot him they got him in jail.”

  William interrupted. “Did Macky get back?”

  Tooch shook his head.

  Inside, they stood along the front windows looking out into the darkness as a heavy fog began to accrue around the store, hooding it in white. Each man except Tooch held a rifle as if he expected some enemy to stitch itself together from the elements of night and fog and line up in the street, one for each of the six members of Hell-at-the-Breech, his double from some nether place, perhaps even wearing a hood to mask the ghoulish face beneath. No one spoke. No one voiced the possibility of coincidence or reasonable explanation. When a voice did come it was Tooch’s.

  “Two teams,” he said. “War, you and Kirk and William go east and make the loop. Come on back round sunup. Huz, you and Buz go west toward town. Stay near the road. When you get to the bridge, turn around and come on back.”

  “What we looking for?” William asked.

  Buz pointed outside and then tapped himself near his right eye.

  Everyone looked at Huz. “He says we’ll know it when we see it.”

  Tooch told them to get whatever they wanted to eat from the shelves. Said go back and stock up on ammo and, hell, get another pistol if they felt inspired to. This might be big, he said. Or it might be nothing. But be ready. Each man did as told, going into Mack’s room, selecting from the Colts in the drawer beneath the rack and stuffing their pockets with boxes of cartridges, William leaving the room last and pausing to notice his brother’s neatly made bed.

  On the porch Tooch bade them a somber farewell and watched them descend the steps in a line, then he went back inside, closing the door softly behind him. William, Kirk, and War waved to the Smith brothers who waved in return and the two teams went on foot in opposite directions, into the fog, into the darkness.

  HOOVES, AND THE CREAK OF GOOD LEATHER

  November 29 and 30, 1898

  AT FIVE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING, the posse assembled at the First Methodist Church of Grove Hill. The men numbered forty-seven with fifty-two horses and ponies and half a dozen pack mules already laden. Many of the company wore heavy coats and pants and high riding boots.

  Inside the church, standing below the pulpit, Oscar York wrote their names and the names of their wives, or mothers if they were young or unmarried, in his neat script in a numbered column on a legal pad. A half-dozen disappointed boys under the age of eighteen were congratulated for their sense of civic duty but sent home, a fight breaking out as they shuffled down the road. Ardy Grant went about checking each man’s weapon, breeching shotguns or single-shot rifles and peering down the barrels and evaluating the actions of repeating rifles. At six-fifteen the group adjourned to the hotel for a quickly set-up breakfast with Oscar and all the rest removing their hats as the Methodist preacher offered a prayer for their guidance and safety. Their mercy. When they’d eaten and pulled their napkins from their collars and loaded their firearms, they posed for a photograph in front of the store, then mounted up and walked their horses and ponies down the street like a parade as boys and old men and women and children watched quietly.

  Once out of town they pushed the horses to a lope. Among the group was a pair of white-bearded veterans surnamed Thompson, who’d dressed in their gray Confederate uniforms and wore swords along their legs. One had an arm missing, the sleeve pinned into the pocket of his coat. Both smoked apple-wood pipes. There was the lawyer Harry Drake in a grass-colored duck coat and railroad hat, the undertaker and his two lanky sons and the newspaper editor’s assistant who planned to write a story about the events—he’d already begun to collect statements, jotting them down in his notebook.

  It’s just gone on too long. These doings. Them people have to know this is a civilized nation and there ain’t no room for their kind of doings.

  I don’t know what to expect once we get out there. I heard they had a whole army of country fellows.

  I wouldn’t want to be them. Against us.

  More than one of the members of the posse had asked about Sheriff Waite’s whereabouts, but Oscar had only said, “He must have gone on in. As a scout.”

  “Won’t we need him?”

  “We’ll likely meet up with him out in the wild. Besides—” He pointed to Ardy Grant. “There’s your next sheriff, gentlemen. He’s been out there already, and already he’s engaged with the enemy. Today he’ll prove his worth.”

  Grant sat on his horse, all eyes upon him. They noticed where blood had soaked through the wounds on his legs. The look etched upon his face one of a man who’d seen things he’d rather not report. “I’ll do my best,” he said, “but I’m honored myself, men, to be riding in the company of Judge York and Lieutenant Virgil Thompson and his brother, Lieutenant Claudius Thompson, who killed Yanks under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest in the War.”

  The brothers nodded.

  “There is no little experience here,” Claudius Thompson said. He filled the bowl of his brother’s pipe with Old Settler tobacco and handed it to the one-armed man and then filled the bowl of his own.

  Oscar and Ardy Grant set the pace in the lead, Grant recommending that the posse travel two by two in a well-spaced line, cavalry style. Behind them the Thompson brothers sat high on an identical pair of fine dappled geldings and behind them rode Drake alongside a quiet barber named Walters.

  “Judge,” Grant said as they slowed for a sharp bend in the road, “you might want to ride back yonder in the middle somewheres. You gone be the first one they shoot at.”

  In his leather saddle coat, riding gloves, and Stetson hat, Oscar York made quite a figure. He wore twin Colt revolvers he’d never fired and carried across his saddle his Winchester bolt action 30.06. His boots were newly shined and his chin freshly shaved. His horse had been groomed.

  “No, by God,” he said. “I’ll lead this troop by example.”

  “Amen, Judge,” said Claudius Thompson.

  The posse galloped over the rutted road, horses cantering and men watchful of the banks of dead ivy and bushes looming on either side of them, but each rider kept his fear contained in his belly and made himself a smaller target in the saddle and pushed his horse a little harder. Presently they passed into a bank of fog and out again and into another. C
hips of mud rising in the air and turning and falling. Dull pounding of the horses’ hooves over the road. When the trees grew sparse and gave way to jagged fields of dead corn and cotton, each man breathed more easily.

  Seven more horses met them within half an hour, men from Dickinson who’d ridden all night. They’d heard of the gathering posse and thought still more men might come the next day.

  Oscar welcomed the new arrivals and they rode on again.

  Within an hour they came upon the homestead of a farmer who’d sharecropped for McCorquodale, a Christian of decent reputation, and stopped in front of the house in a mounted semicircle two rows deep, some of the horses trampling a clothesline with a few shirts hanging, hens scattered and babbling underneath. Several men angled their rifles toward the door as the thin farmer with a crust of beard and filthy overalls and mismatched shoes stepped out with his hands raised.

  Oscar stood in his stirrups with his gloved hands crossed on his pommel and announced their mission to the fellow and told him to fetch a hat and coat if he owned them, said if he had anything to ride he’d best saddle it up, too, and quick-like.

  “I reckon I ought to stay here, sir,” the farmer replied, twitching as a bare-legged child ran from inside the door and grabbed his knees from behind and stood peering out between them with dirty cheeks and sores on his face and arms. A thin woman came out and pulled the child back inside.

  “Wrong,” the judge said. He looked at the men to his left, his right, then back at the sharecropper. “You ain’t got a choice, mister. You’re being recruited to help us stamp out an evil plague that’s eating the soul out of this very land. Land you plant and plow. Your own livelihood. You expect us to come in and do your dirty work? Those rascals out there must be stopped and by God you’ll help us do it. If you refuse, the least that will happen to you is you’ll never farm again in this county.”