Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “You’re lucky,” Waite told him as he struggled. “It missed the artery.”

  “Don’t feel lucky,” the man gritted through his teeth.

  “Find him a bottle,” Waite told Oscar, then he ordered two onlookers to the porch to drag Bedsole down, away from the flames. They wrapped bandannas around their faces against the thick boiling smoke and mounted the steps. Waite watched each take one of Bedsole’s ankles and begin to pull, watched one man back-stagger to the ground as the leg he’d grabbed came loose at the knee. The man looked at the bare ragged calf in his hands like a stick of wood—the foot still socked and shoed—then flung it to the side and gaped at Waite. The other man let go the foot he held and bent; Waite thought he might be sick. Then he saw him grabbing at the blood-slick paper from Bedsole’s pockets.

  “It’s banknotes,” he called.

  “You son-of-a-bitch,” Waite said, climbing the steps himself and pushing the fellow off the porch. The man sprawled in the dirt, got up glaring at Waite, and mounted his horse and rode off after the others. Oscar ascended the steps and he and Waite squinted against the heat, staring at the body. Fingers and half-fingers were strewn about him and a piece of an ear lay by his head and his chest was collapsed in. He had no face, just a mass of bone and hair and gore. Chips of what must have been his brain. His remaining foot had four holes in the sole of its shoe. Blood was everywhere, they were standing in it, such a quantity as Waite had never seen, bright red lung blood and nearly black gut blood and all reds between. It had begun to bake and bubble from the heat, the odor causing Oscar to gag. He fumbled for his handkerchief and held it to his mouth.

  Then shooting, from inside the store. Oscar leapt off the porch but Waite knew it was just the ammunition stock. He came down the steps unbuttoning his coat.

  War Haskew ran with limbs snatching at his clothing. Bullets bit into trees to the left of him and to the right, made perfect circles through leaves he’d just passed. He saw an uprooted tree and slid down behind it and shot empty his magazine as fast as his arms and the lever would work. Whoever was chasing him took cover, and for a moment after he fired his last the woods were very quiet. Then he heard their horses. Saw a mane, a mouthful of teeth. He got up and ran again, fumbling for cartridges as he went. Something cracked, the stock of his rifle splintered. They were in front of him, too. He couldn’t tell the men from the trees. His rifle was sticky. He looked at his hand, covered in blood. He unstuck it from the stock and held it up. Through the palm. He turned to the west, the direction he’d come from. Horses. Smoke. He heard more shots and leaves raised from the ground around him.

  They found Kirk James hiding in a loblolly pine. He had a rifle and yelled if they’d let him climb down and stay alive he’d not fire at them. He said he wanted a trial. He said he was an American. He looked about them as twenty or so horses surrounded the bottom of the tree.

  “I can take one or two of you with me,” he called, aiming down. “I done picked you out,” he said.

  Several men were backing up, craning their necks, trying to get a good view. Someone said it was a coon hunt.

  “Why ain’t he shot at us?” a man asked.

  “He ain’t got his gun,” another fellow reckoned. “Or he’s out of lead.”

  They closed in.

  Then Kirk shot. Claudius Thompson sat upright on his horse and looked stricken.

  “Brother,” Virgil said.

  Claudius fell backward off the horse and lay dead.

  “I told you,” Kirk called.

  Now the men below were kicking their horses and firing into the trees. Pine needles and branches falling around them. Above, Kirk closed one eye and licked his tongue out of his mouth and leveled his rifle on Virgil Thompson. Virgil Thompson fell.

  A sound then like firecrackers and the air filling with smoke. More pine needles falling and limbs, then a rifle clattered down and landed barrel-first in the soft dirt and stayed upright. A shoe fell.

  They used dogs to find William. They set them loose and watched them disappear into a dark alcove beneath a pine tree split in half by some long-ago wind. They sent in three young volunteers, all nineteen years of age, to follow him through vinework clever as wire and understory so thick their clothes soon hung shredded from their bleeding limbs. A few hundred yards into the chase, William shot one of the dogs when it got close. Then he shot the other. The three pursuers, now reduced to their knees and half blind from briar and branch, spotted him scrambling away on his knees. They shot and he shot back and they exchanged gunfire for half an hour from a distance of forty feet until both sides were empty. William knew he was lucky they never thought to spread out and cross-fire him. He thought if he could make the other side he might get out alive.

  Ardy Grant woke, unable to move and only seeing from one eye, the other seeming to be gone. Above was a high white sky imposed with branches and pine needles that waved in a breeze. He heard buzzing. Faraway gunshots. He blinked as a fly crawled onto his eyeball. He tried to remember who’d shot him. Or why. He couldn’t. Then he did: Sheriff Waite, for whom he felt nothing. He realized he wasn’t afraid, and this relieved him. He had no sense of smell. He seemed to have no hands or fingers either. No feet. He was dimly aware of his teeth and felt very thirsty, that was all. He’d be okay, he thought. There would just be some waiting.

  A shadow fell across his face and he opened his eye again. It could have been a minute or a day. It was somebody he didn’t remember seeing before, a freckle-cheeked boy about ten years old and with yellow hair that looked like it’d been cut with a dull flintrock. He had a filthy face and there were two other boys with him. The first one bent and blew a fly out of Ardy’s eye. Reached down and tapped his cheek.

  “Can you feel this here?”

  Ardy tried to say with his eye that he couldn’t.

  “They done killed you good,” the boy said. He shook his head, though not sadly, and disappeared for a moment and said, as if from far away, “I’m jabbing my knife in your leg. Can you not feel it? Wait. This here one’s going in real real deep. Up…to the handle almost. I expect that thing I’m hitting there is your bone.”

  He appeared again in Ardy’s sphere of vision with a grin. Time seemed to have gone by, for now the sky was darker.

  “Look,” the blond boy said, dangling a bloody thing before Ardy’s face. “This is your pecker. I sawed it off.” He held it so it dripped blood in Ardy’s eye, which closed of its own accord.

  The next time he opened his eye he saw a faintly fuzzy field of stars. A dog appeared, sudden, breathy. It seemed to be licking his cheek.

  Then a shout and torchlight and the blond boys were back, giggling. They were dragging him. Later they formed a circle around him and crept close, taking turns doing things to his body and describing the things they were doing. He understood what it meant to be a boy, for he’d been one himself a long time ago, and wished he were one of these boys here, now, with such a perfect victim as himself.

  He’d forgotten his name and the next time he opened his eye he’d forgotten what it meant to be a boy and all of his memories were washed clear and he was nothing more than the skyful of stars he saw and face after grinning face streaked in blood as they appeared and made their strange sounds, and as the sky shrank and darkened at its edges his eye closed and opened and closed and the noise grew suddenly louder before it disappeared altogether.

  Mack hid. He hid the evening through in the shell of a log he’d wallowed into. He knew that if he were to move too suddenly the whole casing would collapse about him in shingles and powder and the thousands of mites and ants hibernating in the log would be set loose in his hair and clothes and to a winter climate they’d never known. He tried to remember something but could think of nothing to focus on. Then he thought of the well. The one outside the widow’s house. How it smelled of sulfur and the way the water was so cold. How he and William used to submerge their whole heads into it and come up blue-faced and gasping, their hair flat on their hea
ds and eyes blinking. How breathless they’d been.

  He opened his eyes to the familiar circle outside his log. He could see a long way, perhaps fifty yards. The log—he hadn’t noticed what kind of tree it was when he’d forced his way in, scooping out wet, then drier, then dry rotted wood like fine yellow dirt—lay at the bottom of a hollow. It seemed to have fallen from somewhere higher and rolled to here. He imagined the ground shaking as it hit. He imagined the lightning or huge wind that had knocked it down, or the men who’d bent together on either end of their crosscut saw and pulled and pulled in a rhythmic tug-of-war as sweat flew from their chins and elbows while the blade ate its way in until they had to attack it with axes and cut on the other side and stop and peer up at the huge thing rising into higher clouds of forest; in spring or summer they wouldn’t have been able to see the top and who could have said but they were hacking away at a joist that held up the very sky above.

  In his mind it was him and William smiling at each other from the ends of the saw. Their faces red as blood as they pull the blade in deeper, the tree creaking and its high branches clicking and leaves murmuring. He slept.

  When he woke it was night and he rose from the log with its crumbs and sections falling away from him. He shook himself and brushed grit from his eyes. His shoulder, stiff and sore, had stopped bleeding. He looked up at the stars through the trees and knew he was only a mile from home and began to trot.

  When he whistled his low whistle the dog was up instantly and off the porch, over the yard and ecstatically licking his bloody face. She hadn’t barked, yet the widow knew he was there as he’d known she would. Gradually, candles were snuffed in the windows, lamps blown out one at a time, the house darkening, and soon the door swung open and he could feel her standing there. He was at the end of a long journey that had begun with the three of them: killer, old woman, dog.

  And baby now. She held it.

  “Well?” she called.

  With the dog at his thigh he hurried over the moonlit yard, ascended the steps, and looked down at her.

  “Your face,” she said. She saw his shoulder. “You’re hurt.”

  “Granny,” he whispered. “Tooch is dead. They shot him. They kept shooting him.”

  She lowered her head. “Child, I know it,” she said. “Now get on in here.”

  Inside, she had him sit in a chair by the window while she put the baby in a crib made from stove wood and interwoven vines. She moved over the floor and poked about in a box, opening bottles and smelling them. She’d begun to make a potion when she stopped. She crossed the room in the darkness, so light on her feet the boards spoke nothing of her passing, and disappeared into her bedroom. When she returned she handed him a bottle of bonded whiskey. At the look on his face, she said, “Among your biggest flaws, Macky Burke, is that things in the world continue to surprise you.”

  His chair received enough moonlight for her doctoring, her hands ministering to his shoulder first, then his cuts and scrapes, as he gulped from the bottle for the pain.

  “They got Huz, too.”

  “Don’t drink that all.”

  She dabbed the gash below his eye—he had no idea where he got it—with a poultice she’d made from eggs and something brown she’d crumbled up. It smelled like dog shit and burned.

  “You know that, don’t you. That they got Huz. And Tooch.”

  She nodded.

  “They shot him a thousand times.”

  His eyes stung. Not for Tooch, or Huz, or anybody else, but for himself. For the loss of her fingers on his wounds. For the loss of the things she crumbled, for the loss of her biscuits, loss of her mystery. How long since she’d touched his face?

  “Hush, boy,” she said. “Leave the crying to that baby over yonder.”

  “I can’t,” he said, his shoulders shaking, “it’s just another flaw, Granny.”

  “I reckon so.” She wiped his tears away with her facecloth. “You’re just eat up with ’em, ain’t you?”

  “Granny?”

  “What?”

  “Is William dead?”

  She began putting things back in the box. “Not yet.”

  Later he wouldn’t remember going to his old room and falling asleep, and hadn’t planned to do so, but he woke some hours further in the night with a start, in his bed, which smelled exactly the same, of lye soap. Feather mattress, feather pillow. He was stiff, the skin around his trunk feeling as if it’d been pulled nearly off. When he moved, such pain flared in his shoulder he almost blacked out. It passed soon enough, though, and with great care he sat up, hugging himself, and leaned to peer out into the black of the night. He raised the window and smelled the sulfur the wind carried.

  His shoulder had loosened up, so he stood, rubbing his torso. Dizzy with the effort, he steadied himself against the wall until the feeling had passed, then willed his left leg to move, and the other to do likewise, and soon he’d made it into the front room, his eyes adjusting.

  She sat without rocking in her rocking chair, looking outside, hands folded in her lap. The baby’s breathing in the crib by her chair.

  “A house cat,” she said. “If you’re ever of a mind to get me a present, I think I’d like a house cat.”

  “Granny,” he told her, “if I live through the night, I’ll get you a dozen house cats.”

  “Just the one, boy. Just the one.”

  “They’ll be coming,” he said.

  “He’ll come. I’ve been hoping he’ll wait until the sun’s up.”

  “I’d best go, then.”

  In the half dark, he couldn’t see her expression. He limped across the room and stood next to her. Wanted to touch her face. Wanted her to touch him. Her hand came up then, as if independent of her will, and took his and pressed it against her cheek, the skin warm and as soft as a blanket made from cotton.

  “Granny,” he said. “I’m sorry for all that’s happened.”

  “Hush, boy,” she said, squeezing his fingers so hard it hurt. “Listen,” she said. The dog began to bark.

  “He ain’t gone wait till light,” she said.

  William crawled through endless darkness. He shut his eyes to keep things from poking in them and when he’d stop to rest and open them the night seemed even darker than the darkness inside his head. He could hear behind him the men chasing him, though he knew they had run out of bullets, same as him. His thoughts were jumbled with past violence, buildings ablaze and gunshots, Joe Anderson’s throat blooming red and how his shirt had darkened below his jaw. The colored family they’d pulled from their burning house and made watch as the fire raged. He shook his head to clear it and kept going in the direction that felt west.

  Waite left King standing alone in the yard and swung down out of the saddle and stood waiting, light-headed from lack of sleep. The widow’s dog came to the edge of the porch. It had been barking and now the bark faded to a low growl. The moon so bright overhead it threw shadows: the horse’s, Waite’s own bent length as he crossed the yard in slow steps. He levered a round into the rifle and heard a cartridge land in the grass, a live one, he knew—he’d already levered the rifle. He took a breath and walked up the steps, the dog slinking aside with its ears flat, head low, the growl a question now, his a familiar odor here. He tried the leather latch, unlocked, and opened the door. It was darker within the house than without and he stood waiting neither in nor out until the outline of the old woman rocking by the far window, holding a baby in her lap, was clear to him.

  “Is he here?” he asked. He stepped inside.

  “No, he ain’t.”

  He closed the door quietly behind him. “I know he come here, Mrs. Gates, cause there wasn’t no place else for him to go.”

  “He did come here,” she said, rocking, “and I made him leave.”

  “Why would you do that?” He went along the wall. “That seems a little out of character for you.”

  “What do you know of character, Billy Waite?”

  After a quick search of the h
ouse, he stopped by the hearth where he’d sat on his other visits when they’d talked inside. When the weather was cold. He eased himself down onto the stones. “Mrs. Gates,” he said, “my character’s been called into question more since Arch Bedsole got shot than it ever has my whole life. I don’t exactly know how that come about, but this whole mess has been a bad dream for me. For you, too, I know. It seems to me that we’re the two innocents brought into this war.”

  “If you consider yourself innocent, then you’re either almighty holy or almighty lost.”

  “Lost,” he said. “I’d put a nickel on lost.”

  She looked at him. The baby coughed.

  Because he could think of nothing to say or do, he laid the rifle over his knees and took a cigar from his side coat pocket and bit off the end and spat it into the fireplace behind him. He scratched a match over the stones and touched the match to the cigar until it flared. He held the match and in its light watched the widow as she rocked, her attention now on the baby. It started to squall and she sang quietly to it, a tune he didn’t know. He wanted to talk to her but had no idea what to say. He reached behind him and ashed his cigar in the fireplace, though there wasn’t enough yet to ash. The baby kept crying.

  “You mind some light?” he asked.

  She kept singing.

  He found a stub of candle on a table and with the end of his cigar lit it. He carried the candle over to her and knelt before her, looking up into her blue eyes.

  “I want you to tell me, Granny, if you know where that boy is. If you do, I promise you I’ll take him safely to jail. I done been through too much to let that mob have him now.” He didn’t want to say this next thing, but he did. “He told me it was him that killed Arch Bedsole. So now I got to arrest him, just to ask him questions, try to sort all this out. It’s gone be hell once I get back in the real world, where people expect answers for actions. There’ll be folks down from Montgomery, too, I expect. The governor’s office.”