by Tom Franklin
She said, “This here is the real world, Billy Waite. It’s my real world. As real a world as I ever spent a night in.”
The baby had quieted and he looked down, it was watching him.
“He’s cute,” Waite said.
“He’s sick,” the widow said, adjusting the blanket.
“It’s cold in here,” he said, standing. “You want me to bring in some firewood? I’ll stoke us up a good one.”
“I don’t want a fire,” she said.
The widow had told Mack how babies, in the womb, come to know their father’s voices. She’d told him of occasions where babies turned—you could see the ripple of it below the skin of the mother’s belly—when their fathers spoke. That in some cases, once the baby is out in the air, it will move its head toward its father at the first words he says. Now Mack thought of this as he fixed on the sheriff’s voice, turning his head in the nest his arms made to hear the muffled words.
“Would you just let me be, Billy Waite?”
“You ain’t cold?” his voice answered.
“I’m always cold,” the widow’s voice said.
“Just let me get us a good one going here.”
Very slowly, Mack moved his head up. She’d had him climb into the fireplace and worm his way into the chimney, a thing that had seemed impossible but somehow had worked. A patch of night sky showed at the top, a place less black than everything else he could see, but an impossible distance away. He tried to picture how tall the chimney was, seen from outside, and couldn’t.
“Do what?” Waite’s muffled voice said.
“—Hell-at-the-Breech,” she said.
He listened, here was the story the widow told.
How her two God-sent adopted sons William and Macky had, yes, killed Arch Bedsole in August of eighteen and ninety-seven. In a bungled robbery attempt. A child’s foolish idea of fun. She knew of it through her own gift of knowing, knew the second Arch’s life passed from his lips and nostrils into the strangely chilly air of August on that night so long ago. She’d sat straight up in bed. Felt a stabbing pain in her back, between her shoulder blades. Her boys were not under their covers, she said. They were nowhere in the house or around the house. Such a night filled with dark she couldn’t see her own hand before her eyes, but still she lurched out with her cane and an oil lamp, to find what horror awaited her.
For she had already put together that it had been her boys who’d done the deed. She’d known they left at night, yes, they were boys. She herself had been young once. She remembered the first boy she’d set her hat for, she was fifteen, and how the two of them used to meet in a falling-apart barn on the outskirts of a town Waite wouldn’t have heard of in Tennessee, used to stand smooching with a stall between them, for she’d been told that if their hips touched she would become with child. Oh, had it been so, she said, had that sweet boy possessed such magic hips that touching them to hers would have seeded her and they would have never seen this place, that the life she’d lived would have been another life entirely, even with her as the mother of a bastard, of a hundred bastards, but not the mother of killers.
“You see, Billy Waite,” she said, “I thought they’d just gone out to see Annie, and I knew they didn’t have the money she cost, so I figured they’d just outrun their lust, or swim it away dog-paddling over the river, or use Onan’s solution. Never did I dream they’d try to become robbers, and that the man they’d try to rob would be Arch.”
For she had heard them coming, she said, on their way home from the killing, and she’d doused her lamp and stood in the dark road so close to them she felt their wind as they passed, hearing enough of their talk to know one of them had become a murderer. Once they’d gone on out of hearing she relit the lamp and started her journey, finding at last a little blood on the road, and following its drops like a hunter trailing his deer, until finally she saw the light from the fire. It was the cabin where Tooch had been born and been living and it was on fire and in the light the fire gave she saw Arch Bedsole’s bloody body lying dead and Tooch sitting on the ground holding the white-handled pistol Arch had always carried when he traveled.
She approached him. He didn’t look up until her shadow blocked him from the fire.
Granny, he said, for he was one of hers, too.
Tooch, she said.
He said, You knew he was dead, didn’t you?
Yes, Tooch. I did.
You always did know the strangest facts, Granny.
How was he killed?
He looked up at her. He said, I expect you know that already. Don’t you?
He looked at her, then at the fire behind her. He said, I was inside reading one of them old encyclopedia books Arch got when he was little. He let me borry it. I was just setting there puzzling over some of them real big trees they got in California when I heard a noise outside. I blew out the lamp and got my rifle. When I went out, though, I couldn’t see a thing. Did you ever see as black a night as this, Granny? So I went back in and lit the lamp again and come back out. That’s when I seen him. Arch. He was coming through the yard. Bloody. I dropped the lamp, I guess, and run to him. Didn’t see how the lamp had caught the porch on fire.
She watched him. He sat, his face orange in the firelight, his hair slick with sweat from the heat of it and blood already dry on his shirt. He gestured with the pistol.
By the time I thought to try and put out the fire it’d gone too far, he said. And Arch was dead. I could tell cause the fire lit him up. Showed the bubbles in his chest had done stopped popping. That’s how come I knew him to be dead. I drug him over away from it and just been setting here wondering what to do.
“Did he say anything?” Waite asked.
“Yeah. He said something.”
“What?”
You know that yourself, Granny, Tooch said. You know who killed him. Or you wouldn’t be here.
That’s not true, she said.
But it was.
“And the truth, Billy Waite, is this. I don’t know if he said it was Macky that did the killing or if it was me that said it. And as I think of it more and more, which I find myself doing these days and nights, I find myself believing it was Tooch got me to say it, that when Arch got there he didn’t have no idea who it was shot him and that Tooch Bedsole, black heart of his be cursed, tricked me into telling him what he didn’t know. But there lay Arch Bedsole, dead. Shot twice. Once in the back, once in the chest.”
What do you intend to do about my boys? she asked Tooch.
He thought for a long while. He kept throwing pieces of grass and leaves into the fire. Then he said, You know what.
I want to hear it from your mouth, Tooch.
No you don’t.
Tooch.
Kill them, he said. It’s my duty. I got to avenge my cousin.
You always hated him, she said.
Tooch stared at her. Yes, sir, he said. You always knew the strangest facts, Granny.
Part of the roof caved in. Something in the fire popped.
From her skirts she raised the pistol she’d always had. You won’t kill my boys on this night, Tooch Bedsole, she said.
He looked up, into the barrel of the gun.
He stood slowly, the body of Arch lying between them. She held the pistol out, tried not to let it shake. Her finger touched the trigger. All she had to do was pull it. Pull it and go home and get her boys, bring them back and have them toss Tooch’s body into the fire. Hell could come early for him.
I can’t let you kill my children, she said.
Granny, Tooch said, I’m one of your children, too. Ain’t I? And this here dead cousin is another one. And so are most of the men and women who’re starving in these cotton fields and hollows. We’re all your children. You ain’t gone shoot one of us, are you, Granny?
He raised his hand toward the pistol.
How you gone shoot me, Granny, who was orphaned, too, left by his own daddy and give to a sharecropper’s life in the fields?
He stepped over the body. Stepped over it. She gasped at the callousness of the act, and as she did, his hand gently took the pistol from her. He uncocked it and ejected its cylinder and shook the cartridges out onto the ground where they glowed in the firelight. Then he handed the pistol back.
Kill them, he repeated. Myself. I ain’t got much of a choice. Everbody loved Arch.
But why, Tooch? Why kill them? she pled. They’re just young, stupid boys. It was a mistake. They meant to be robbers. They had no idea it was Arch they were trying to steal from. Why would you ruin not just two but three lives, for you’d ruin mine, too, you’d end it, just because of two stupid boys? They’re all I’ve got, Tooch.
But his face was implacable in the light of the fire as it raged behind her and consumed the wood of the house and the skin of the deer on the walls and the wasp nests in the eaves and the dry mortar between the logs. The squat piece of wood used for a table and the R encyclopedia. Her back grew hot and she moved away from the fire with her dress smoking and continued to plead for her boys’ lives, following him as he moved around the yard looking for things to throw in the fire. She offered him all the money she had, offered him her house, her old mule, her services in whatever capacity he would use. Were she younger she would have lifted her dress and offered herself.
To kill them would be such a waste, she begged, when they have so much to give.
What do they have to offer me? he asked.
The widow paused. A plan took shape in her mind. It appeared there fully formed, a gift she thought from the devil, she nearly swooned from the brilliant desperate weight of it.
Tooch, she said. Oh, oh, listen…
And she put forth the plan. The last words to flow from Arch’s dying lips were that men from town ambushed and shot him to keep him out of the election. This would start a war, with the right man as its general. With the right man, the farmers in Mitcham Beat could be rallied, could be set to task to raise arms against their oppressors. A change could occur….
For a long while Tooch was silent. The fire unfurled flags of smoke and ember into the night. He got up and went to the edge of the burning house and unfastened his pants and urinated into the flames in plain sight of her, urinated for a long time, steam rising around his feet, then shook himself off and came back fastening his pants. He looked down at her, she up at him.
Tell me more, he said.
They sat side by side, on a log Tooch dragged over, facing the fire. Arch lay behind them, eyes to the sky, as if seeing the future revealed.
“Together,” she told Waite, “we talked all night. Together, we were conceiving Hell.”
For a long time Waite sat. The baby had gone back to sleep and the only sound in the room was the creak of her rocking chair as she moved forward and back.
“How did Tooch get the store?” Waite asked at last.
“We used the Bible. Rebekah tricking Isaac. I was nursing Ed Bedsole as his time of dying came, and Ed was out of his mind. Tooch dressed in Arch’s clothes and hat, and they looked enough alike, and sounded enough alike, that Ed signed everything Tooch set before him, he thought he was talking to Arch again. In a lawyer’s office I lied, God forgive me, and said that Ed Bedsole had been of sound mind when he sold the store to Tooch. Tooch could’ve got all the Bedsole farms, too, but he didn’t want nothing to do with cotton. All he wanted was that store.”
For a long time there was nothing but silence. There was a murderer in a chimney and a woman telling all the dark things locked so long in her heart to keep the murderer alive.
“Billy,” she said.
“What?”
“There’s another thing.”
He waited. Mack waited, too.
“When I got home it was near ’bout dawn. I found the boys in their beds. William was asleep and Macky was pretending to be. I wanted to see who’d done it so I looked at their guns. William’s, the sixteen-gauge shotgun, hadn’t been shot. It was Macky’s pistol. I knew how many bullets he had in it. Bullets were so costly I knew of each one and had taught them thrift in the use of such things. He’d only shot one time.”
Waite said, “Didn’t you say Arch had been shot twice?”
“Yes. He was. Once through the back, from the back. That one came out the front. The other one was in his chest. From the front.”
“What are you saying, Mrs. Gates?” Waite asked.
“This. The truth is, I think Arch wasn’t shot the first time in such a way to kill him, for there wasn’t so much blood after all. I think he was shot through the shoulder or side or some other place. I think he come up on Tooch and Tooch saw an opportunity and took it and shot his own cousin. And then I think he took that lantern and flung it at the house and stood watching it burn.”
Mack imagined the widow, sitting motionless in her chair by the window, moonlight falling onto her deeply lined face, her eyes black holes under her glowing white hair, her tiny hands holding the baby that was sleeping in her lap. Then she said, “The reason I made my Macky leave tonight, Billy Waite, is that I’ve come to hate him in the last year. Hate him for taking himself and his brother away from me. For the things he’s made me do, lies he’s made me say. The only way I’ve lived these last months is by lying and hating.”
The baby stirred in her lap; it coughed. An arm raised out of the blanket and a tiny hand opened its tiny fingers. It seemed to be reaching for something and, not finding it, began to cry. The old woman ignored it and stared at Waite. Then she said, “I’ve said all I can say. Will you leave now, Sheriff?”
He had sat so long on the hearth he could barely move. The house had grown colder now and outside the earth had fallen quiet. He flexed his hands and stood, grimacing at the pain down his leg. He looked at the old woman and wondered if she were lying or telling the truth. Behind him a trickle of soot fell from the chimney.
He gazed into the mouth of the fireplace, not seeing her raise the pistol from the blanket on her lap. The baby’s hand reached for it but she aimed it out farther.
Without looking at her, he walked to the door. “We’ll keep searching for the boy. If he’s got any sense, he’s halfway to Louisiana right now. If he shows hisself, though, it may not go too good for him.”
He turned back to her. If he noticed the pistol aimed at his heart, he didn’t let on. “I’ll bid you good night, Granny Gates.” He spoke loudly, over the squalling baby. “I don’t figure to be back out here bothering you again no time soon.”
He opened the door and stepped out and closed it and stood gazing at the night. The dog watched him with its tail thumping the porch boards. Inside, the baby screamed. Carrying his rifle, he descended the steps and climbed aback his horse and spurred King downhill at a trot, passing the water trough which held within its framed water the moon’s blank face. He looked up at it in its sky of stars, white vapor issued into the air with his every breath.
He rode past field after moonlit field and stopped at the burning store where the roof had collapsed but which still glowed and licked its fire at the sky. He sat watching, embers floating in the air like notes of music, Tooch Bedsole nothing but a pile of cinders shrinking on what remained of the porch. One of the fellows left behind to guard the place wandered over and asked Waite if he had a bottle. He said he didn’t and the fellow walked off. Waite’s face had begun to burn from the heat and King backed up of his own accord but still Waite watched. The chimney had been leaning all the while and with very little fanfare toppled sideways and scattered its glowing stones over wide and varying trajectories. The ground near the store had been dried by the heat and small fires sprang up in the grass around the stones that lay pulsing like fallen pieces of sky. One of the men went over and began stamping them out.
As if released from a spell, Waite rubbed the bridge of his nose and turned King and rode away. He passed beneath tunnels of dark trees, through ink-black fields, and passed the spot where Ardy Grant had been shot. The young man was gone from the road and for a moment Waite worried he mi
ght yet live but then he was dozing in the saddle and didn’t start awake until the horse shied at the scent of blood from Lev James’s dead mule. He passed burning houses where families or what was left of them lay in the yard, but he didn’t stop to see if they were dead or merely sleeping.
The baby had quit its crying by the time Mack worked himself down the chimney and came out legs-first onto the hearth. He sat watching her rock the baby, she staring back at him. His shoulder now sore but manageable. There were things he wanted to tell the widow, yet he didn’t speak. Nor did she. Then he sneezed, and sneezed again, and for a long time he couldn’t stop sneezing until, for fear of setting the baby crying again, he got up and went into his old room. Covered in soot, he stood by the window where outside its glass lay the beginning of a world he would see and see soon. As soon as he would bend and raise the sash, slip through the shutters and into the night. He looked at the backs of his hands. He turned them over and looked at their palms, black, too. He would go in a moment, already a plan forming—work his way to the river, find the old canoe he and William used to paddle over to see Annie, wash the blackness off his skin and go through the yard and up the steps into her house, convince her to accompany him to Louisiana, where they’d get married, live, work, sleep, die.
In the next room the baby coughed. Careful of his shoulder, Mack slid up the glass. His fingers left ash marks on the shutters as he ducked through the window, but no other evidence betrayed his passing; even the dog failed to hear him where she lay sleeping on the porch.
William woke with his cheek against the ground. His teeth chattering. He heard scratching sounds close by and raised his head with a leaf stuck to his cheek like a leech and blood in the ever-deeper lines of his face and saw the three open-jawed men drawing near him like ghouls. One had a hatchet, another a knife. They were grinning.
He began to scrabble away and they thrashed after him. Soon he saw light dimly through the brush and at last he burst forth on the other side of the thicket and bailed off into the cold creek without looking at what lay waiting for him. The men on the opposite side—spaced fifty yards apart—whistled up and down the bank that here he came, and by the time he’d swum over they’d congregated and stood in wait. They dragged him ashore half naked and trembling and weak from blood loss and mummied him in about five pounds of rope. Then watched with wry humor as his three pursuers splashed from the thicket into the water. When the men had swum across, they went after William. They were kicking his crumpled, rope-cocooned form when the others pulled them off.