Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “Waite wants him alive,” Oscar said. He had red-rimmed eyes and wore a blanket around his shoulders and had been drinking all night. Two of the men lifted William and hung him over a horse.

  When Waite arrived later in the morning they stood William up and leaned him against the wall inside the covered bridge, which they’d used as a barracks for the night. One of the boy’s eyes was swollen shut from a boot kick, the other half of his face yellowed and blued and misshapen—somebody said he looked like an anvil—his dirt coating muddied by his own oozing blood. Waite said for Oscar and the rest to give the two of them a moment, and the men faded back.

  “William Burke,” he said once they were alone.

  Hearing his name seemed to register on the boy. He raised his head. He tilted it like a puppy.

  “Mr. Billy? Is that you? I can’t see too good.”

  Teeth gone. His gums a bloody pulp.

  “It’s me, William.”

  “They gone hang me?”

  “They are.”

  He lowered his head. “Reckon you ain’t got no choice.”

  “No. You took up with the wrong bunch, boy.”

  “Tell the widow I’m sorry.”

  “She knows it.”

  “Where’s Macky?”

  Waite looked at the bridge’s opening. The men lurking there skulked away.

  “He’s safe.”

  “He is?”

  “Yeah. He’ll be okay.”

  “I’m proud for him. He never did do nothing anyway. Not on purpose, no way. Rest of us, we, we—”

  He seemed to forget what words to use and began to sink against the wall.

  Waite walked out into the light feeling absolutely nothing and told Oscar they’d better go on hang him soon or there wouldn’t be anything left to hang. Two men dragged him out by loose strands of rope. Waite said if they didn’t want him to whip their asses they’d pick the boy up and carry him. They did. Waite didn’t watch the rest.

  He got his horse and adjusted the saddle and mounted up. Oscar was at his hip.

  “Billy.”

  He offered up a bottle, just a slosh in the bottom.

  Waite took the whiskey and finished it. He threw the empty bottle down the bank and spurred King on and left his cousin the judge standing in the shadow of the bridge. He pushed the horse to a gallop, the wind lifted his hair from his scalp. Within an hour the road had opened out, fields on both sides and the lightest sprinkle of cold rain.

  He’d slowed to a walk when he rounded a bend in the road and encountered a curious sight: a buckboard wagon drawn by a pair of oxen with six stout black men walking alongside it and an old white-haired black man driving it. The wagon had a grand piano on it, festooned with rope and chain, but still each bump from the road chorded the piano’s strings, a sound not music but something else, a thundering, roiling, muffled noise, the very voice of violence. He guided the horse around them without telling them that Lev James, the piano’s new owner, was dead.

  He knew that this war was over for him, but for the others, it would reach its smoke into the next century. Hell’s breech had opened, and the closing, when it came, would come slowly. Years into the future the merchants of Grove Hill and Coffeeville would regard the trees and the shadows painted between the trees as places where ambushers would lie in wait, and for a time longer than Waite would live to see, the children of Mitcham Beat would be warned, If you ever hear hooves, and the creak of good saddle leather, you’d better run hide, for the mob’s come back.

  King, aware they were going toward Grove Hill, began to trot, the fields on both sides of them gray as the sky. As he rode, Waite hoped that Sue Alma would be home when he got there and would listen to all the things he had to say to her. That she’d have coffee on. He hoped Johnny-Earl would court, love, and marry the nurse who’d fixed his arm and that they would visit at Christmas. Before long he’d begun to nod in the saddle, his last waking thought a wish that the future would let him hold a baby boy named Billy Waite, who would grow to manhood and obey and endure the laws of man, who could survive the world the world was becoming.

  CODA

  I thought I was done writing about the Mitcham War, but shortly after my Hell at the Breech book tour ended, I was sitting on the front porch of our house in Oxford, Mississippi, reading. Maybe smoking a good cigar. The phone rang, and I answered. The woman on the other end introduced herself as Kathryn Tucker Windham. I knew immediately who she was—I’d first read her books about Alabama ghosts way back in the fourth grade, and I was thrilled to hear from her. She was calling, she said, to thank me for writing the story of the Mitcham war. “I always wanted to write that book,” she told me, “but I’m glad you did it.” Then she said she had another Mitcham Beat story to tell me. I listened, growing more and more excited as she talked, already beginning to take notes.

  The story that follows isn’t exactly what she told me, of course. I’ve taken a lot of liberties. And it’s not a comment on, or a prologue or epilogue to, Hell at the Breech, either, though Sheriff Waite makes an appearance. “Christians” is simply a short story set in the same county, roughly ten years before the novel takes place. It’s about the same tensions, though, and about the same tough, resilient kind of person it took to survive such times.

  I’d like to dedicate “Christians” to Kathryn Tucker Windham, for telling me the story, and to all the great Alabama storytellers.

  CHRISTIANS

  1887

  A Short Story

  IT WAS AUGUST, so she had to bury him quick. Soon she would be able to smell him, a thing she didn’t know if she could endure—not the live, biting odor he brought in from a day in the fields but a mixture of turned earth and rot, an odor she associated with decaying possum and coon carcasses, the bowl of a turtle she’d overturned as a girl and then tumbled away from, vomiting at the soup of maggots pulsing inside.

  It was late afternoon. He lay on his back on the porch, covered by a sheet soaked across the torso with blood, the sheet mapped with flies and more coming, as many flies as she’d seen gathered in one place, a revival of them, death calling like the Holy Spirit. In her left hand she held his hat, which the two men had thrown to the ground after they’d rolled him off the wagon, the impact setting him to bleeding afresh.

  She hadn’t wailed at the sight. Hadn’t flung herself on the body or swiped her fingernails at their implacable faces as they watched, the two of them, one young, one old. She hadn’t even put her hand over her mouth.

  They told her they’d kept his gun. Said they meant to give it to the sheriff. Said like father like son.

  “Leave,” is all she’d said.

  And she herself had dragged him up the steps, holding him under his arms. She herself had draped him with their spare bed sheet and turned her rocking chair east to face him and sit rocking. The bloodstain had quit spreading and she gazed past him—past the corpse of him and its continents of flies—to the outreaching cotton so stark and white in the sun she could barely look at it, cotton she’d have to pick herself now that her son was dead.

  Sheriff Waite came. He got down off his horse and left the reins hanging and stood in the yard. He studied the drag marks, the stained dirt. His green eyes followed the marks and paused at the blood on the plank steps and the gritty line of blood smeared across the porch. He watched the boy under the sheet for nearly a minute before he moved his eyes—it seemed such an effort for him to look at country folks—to her face. In the past she’d always had trouble meeting town men’s eyes, the lust there or the judgment, but now she sat rocking and staring back at him as though she understood a secret about him not even his wife knew. His hand went up toward his nose, an unconscious gesture, as if he’d cover it, but he must’ve considered it improper or disrespectful—despite the dead being a sharecropper—for he lowered the hand and cleared his throat.

  “Missus Freemont.”

  “It was that Glaine Bolton,” she said. “Him and Marcus Eady.”

 
Waite stepped closer to the porch. Behind him his tall handsome horse had sweat tracks leading down through the dust caked on its coat. It wiggled its long head and blinked and sighed at the heat, flicked the skin of its back so that the saddle moved and moved the rifle standing in its scabbard.

  “I know who it was,” Waite said. “They done already come talked to me. Caught me over at Coffeeville.” He moved his hand again, as if he didn’t know what to do with it without the weight of a gun in it. “How I was able to get here so quick.”

  She folded her arms despite the heat, nestled her sweating breasts between them.

  “They give me his pistol,” Waite said, but she didn’t see it on him. “It’s not in the best working order. I can doctor it up a little before I give it back to you.”

  She waited, and his face seemed to become all lines as he got himself ready to say out loud what she knew already. That there would be no justice. Not the kind she wanted, anyway. Since it was so easy now, she looked at him, reckoning him in his late forties. If she hadn’t been so brimming with hate, she’d have still considered him fine-looking, even all these years later. His shirt fit well at the shoulders, his pants snug at the hips. He was skinnier than before. One thing she noticed was that his fingers weren’t scarred from cotton, where nail met skin, the way hers and her son’s were. Had been.

  “You see,” he began, “it’s pretty generally known where your boy was going.” He flapped a hand at her son. “When they stopped him.”

  “Stopped him? That’s what you call what they done?”

  “Yes’m.”

  She waited.

  “He was going to shoot Glaine’s daddy.”

  She waited. She realized she’d quit rocking and pushed at the porch boards with her bare feet until she was moving again, whisper of wind on the back of her neck, beneath her bun of brown hair. She heard her breath going in and out of her nose.

  Waite suddenly took off his hat, not out of manners, she reckoned, but to occupy the hands determined to betray him with movement. He began to examine the brim, the leather band sweated through, then turned it over and looked into the dark crown shaped by his head. “Way I hear it,” he said, “is your boy and Travis Bolton had some words at the Coffeeville Methodist last week. I wasn’t there, see. I’d been serving a warrant down in Jackson.” When Waite came forward she heard his holster creak. He set a foot on the bottom step, careful not to touch the dark brown dried blood, and bent at the waist and rested his elbows on his knee, still intent on the hat. “But I got me a long memory, Missus Freemont. And the thing I told you back then, well, it still stands.”

  Bess had a long memory, too.

  She’d been sixteen years younger. Sixteen years younger and almost asleep when that first wagon had rattled up outside. She’d risen from where she’d been kneeling before the hearth, half in prayer, half for warmth. Another cold December day had passed, she remembered, rain coming, or snow. It was dark out, windy at intervals, the rocking chair on the porch tapping against the front wall. A pair of sweet potatoes on the rocks before her all the food they had left.

  A horse nickered. She pulled her shawl around her shoulders and held it at her throat. Clay, two years old then, had been asleep under a quilt on the floor beside her. Now he got up.

  “Stay here, boy,” she told him, resting a hand on top of his head. He wore a tattered shirt and pants given by church women from the last county they’d lived in, just over a week before. Barefooted, he stood shivering with his back to the fire, hands behind him, the way his father liked to stand.

  On the porch, she pulled the latch closed behind her and peered into the weakly starred night. Movement. Then a lantern raised and a man in a duster coat and derby hat seemed to form out of the fabric of darkness. He wore a beard and spectacles that reflected the light he held above him.

  “Would you tell me your name, Miss?” he asked her.

  She said it, her knuckles cold at her throat. She heard the door open behind her and stepped in front of it to shield Clay.

  “This is my land you’re on,” the man said, “and that’s one of my tenant houses y’all are camped out in.”

  Bess felt relief. He’s only here about the property.

  “My husband,” she said. “He ain’t home.”

  “Miss,” the man said, “I believe I know that.”

  Fear again. She came forward on the porch, boards loose beneath her feet, and stopped on the first step. The horse shook its head and stamped against the cold. “Easy,” the man whispered. He set the brake and stepped from the seat into the back of the wagon, holding the lantern aloft. He bent and began pushing something heavy. Bess came down the first step. Behind her, Clay slipped out the door.

  The man climbed from the tailgate of the wagon and took a few steps toward her. He was shorter than she was, even with his hat and in his boots. Now she could see his eyes.

  “My name is Mister Bolton,” he said. “Could you walk over here, Miss?”

  She seemed unable to move. The dirt was cold, her toes numb. He waited a moment, gazing past her at Clay. Then he looked down, shaking his head. He came toward her and she recoiled as if he might hit her, but he only placed a gloved hand on her back and pushed her forward, not roughly but firmly. They went that way to the wagon, where she looked in and, in the light of his lantern, saw her husband.

  E.J. was dead. His jacket unbuttoned and his shirtfront red with blood. His fingers were squeezed into fists and his head thrown back, mouth opened. His hair covered his eyes.

  “He was stealing from me,” Bolton said. “I seen somebody down in my smokehouse and thought it was a nigger. I yelled at him to stop but he took off running.”

  “Stealing what?” she asked, her voice small.

  “A ham,” Bolton said.

  Bess’s knees began to give way, she grasped the wagon edge. Her shawl fell off and she stood in her thin dress. Bolton steadied her, his arm going around her shoulders. He set the lantern on the floor of the wagon, by E.J.’s boot.

  “I am sorry, Miss,” Bolton said, a hand now at each of her shoulders. “I wish…”

  Clay had appeared behind her, hugging himself, his toes curling in the dirt.

  “Go on in, boy,” she told him. “Now.”

  He didn’t move.

  “Do like your momma says,” Bolton ordered, and Clay turned and ran up the stairs and went inside, pulling the door to.

  Bolton led Bess back to the porch and she slumped on the steps. He retrieved her shawl and hung it across her shoulders.

  “My own blame fault,” he said. “I knew y’all was out here. Just ain’t had time to come see you. Run you off.”

  No longer able to hold back, Bess was sobbing into her hands, which smelled of smoke. Some fraction of her, she knew, was glad E.J. was gone, glad he’d no longer pull them from place to place only to be threatened off at gunpoint by some landowner again and again. No more of the sudden rages or the beatings he gave her or Clay or some bystander. But, she thought, for all his violence, there were the nights he got only half drunk and they slept enmeshed in one another’s limbs, her gown up high where she’d pulled it and his long johns around one ankle. His quiet snoring. The marvelous lightness between her legs and the mattress wet beneath them. There were those nights. And there was the boy, her darling son, who needed a stern hand, a father, even if what he got was one like E.J., prone to temper and meanness when he drank too much whiskey. Where would they go now, she asked herself, the two of them?

  “Miss?” Bolton tugged at his beard.

  She looked up. It had begun to rain, cold drops on her face, in her eyes.

  “You want me to leave him here?” Bolton asked her. “I don’t know what else to do with him. I’ll go fetch the sheriff directly. He’ll ride out tomorrow, I expect.”

  “Yeah,” Bess said. She blinked. “Would you wait…?” She looked toward the window where Clay’s face ducked out of sight.

  “Go on ahead,” he said.

 
Inside, she told the boy to take his quilt into the next room and wait for her.

  When she came out, Bolton was wrestling E.J. to the edge of the wagon. Bess helped him and together they dragged him up the steps.

  “You want to leave him on the porch?” Bolton huffed. “He’ll keep better.”

  “No,” she said. “Inside.”

  He looked doubtful but helped her pull him into the house. They rolled him over on a torn sheet on the floor by the hearth. In the soft flickering firelight, her husband seemed somehow even more dead, a ghost, the way the shadows moved on his still features, his flat nose, the dark hollows under his eyes that Clay would likely have as well. She pushed his hair back. She touched his lower jaw and closed his mouth. Tried to remember the last thing he’d said to her when he left that afternoon but couldn’t. His mouth slowly fell back open, and she put one of the sweet potatoes under his chin as a prop.

  Bolton was gazing around the room, still wearing his gloves, hands on his hips. Abruptly, he walked across the floor and went outside, closing the door behind him. When he came back in, she jumped up and stared at him.

  In one arm he held a bundle.

  “This is the ham,” he said, casting about for somewhere to set it. When nowhere seemed right, he knelt and laid it beside the door. “Reckon it’s paid for.”

  He waited a few moments, his breath misting, then went outside, shutting the door. She heard it latch. Heard the wagon’s brake released and the creak of hinges and the horse whinny and stamp and the wheels click as Mr. Bolton rolled off into the night. She went to the window and outside was only darkness. She turned.