Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “Isaiah Walker,” she called. “Get on out here.”

  Three short-haired yellow dogs kept her at the edge of the yard while she waited, her neck still throbbing from the crick in it. She watched the windows, curtains pulled, for a sign of movement. She looked over at their well, its bucket and rope, longing for a sup of water, but it wouldn’t do for her to drink here. “Isaiah Walker,” she called again, remembering how, on their first night in the area, E.J. had horsewhipped Walker for not getting his mule off the road fast enough. Though the preacher had kicked and pulled the mule’s halter until his hands were bloody, E.J. had muttered that a nigger’s mule ought to have as much respect for its betters as the nigger himself. He’d snatched the wagon’s brake and drawn from its holder the stiff whip. She’d hoped it was the mule he meant to hit, but it hadn’t been.

  The dogs were inching toward her, hackles flashing over their backs, taking their courage from each other, smelling the blood on her hands, her dress. She wished she’d brought a stick with her. She’d even left her Bible this time, saw it in her mind’s eye as it lay splayed open on the porch with the wind paging it. She hadn’t eaten since they’d brought Clay back, and for a moment she thought she might faint in this nigger man’s yard. But she wouldn’t leave.

  She stamped at the dogs and they stopped their approach but kept barking. Still, it must have been half an hour before Walker’s door finally opened, the dogs never having stopped. She lowered her hand from her neck. The reverend came out fastening his suspenders and put a toothpick in his mouth. He looked up at the sky as if seeking rain. A man entirely bald of hair but with a long white beard and white eyebrows and small rifle-barrel eyes. He whistled at the dogs but they ignored him and ignored him when he called them by name.

  She thought it proper for him to come down and meet her, but he never left the porch.

  “This how you treat white folks?” she croaked at him.

  “I know you,” he said at last. “Heard why you here, too. And you might try tell me the Lord God, He expect me to forgive. But I been in there praying since you first step in my yard, Missus Freemont, since them dogs first start they racket, and I been intent on listen what God say. But He ain’t say nothing ’bout me saying no words over your boy soul. If He wanted me to, He’d a said so. Might be them dogs stop barking. That would tell me. The Lord, He ain’t never been shy ’bout telling me what to do and I ain’t never been shy ’bout listening.”

  But she had turned away before he’d finished and by the time the dogs stopped their noise she had rounded a curve and gone up a hill and then sat in the road and then lay in it.

  Lay in it thinking of her past life, of her farmer father, widowed and quick to punish, overburdened with his failing tobacco farm and seven children, she the second oldest and a dreamer of daydreams, possessed he said by the demon Sloth. Of the narrow-shouldered, handsome man coming horseback seemingly from between the round mountains she’d seen and not seen all her life, galloping she thought right down out of the broad purple sky onto her father’s property. The young man taking one look at her and campaigning and working and coercing and at last trading her father that fine black mare for a battered wagon, a pair of mules, and a thin eighteen-year-old wife glad to see someplace new. Of crossing steaming green Tennessee in the wagon, of clear cool rainless nights with the canvas top drawn aside, lying shoulder to shoulder with her husband, the sky huge and intense overhead, stars winking past on their distant, pretold trajectories, the mules braying down by the creek where they were staked and she falling asleep smelling their dying fire, his arms around her.

  E.J. Ezekiel Jeremiah. No living person knows what them letters stands for but you, he’d said.

  Ezekiel, she’d repeated. Jeremiah.

  Out of the wagon to jump across the state line (which he’d drawn in the dirt with his shoe), laughing, holding hands, and going south through so much Alabama she thought it must spread all the way from heaven to hell. Slate mountains gave way to flatland and swamp to red clay hills, and they ferried a wide river dead as glass then bumped over dry stony roads atop the buckboard pulled by the two thinning mules. Then the oldest mule had died: within two months of their wedding.

  E.J. not saying anything for a long time, staring at the carcass where it lay in the field, hands on his hips, his back to her; and then saying why the hell didn’t she tell him her daddy was trading a bum mule.

  For days and mostly in silence they paralleled a lonely railroad until it just stopped and there were nigger men hammering alongside white ones and the ring of metal on metal and tents speckling the horizon and octoroon whores hanging their stockings on what looked to be a traveling gallows.

  For two months he laid cross-ties and flirted (and more) with the whores. Then they departed on a Sunday at dawn when he was still drunk from the night. She had a high fever and from inside her hot lolling head it seemed they were slipping off the land, ever south into an ooze of mud.

  Then clabber-trap railroad or river towns on the landscape, she expecting a baby and sick each afternoon, staying with the wagon and reading in her Bible while he walked in or rode aback the remaining mule to find a game of blackjack or stud and coming out more often than not with less money than he’d gone in with, her little dowry smaller and smaller and then things traded, the iron skillet from her grandmother for groceries and her uncle’s fiddle, which she could play a little, for cartridges. E.J. had begun to sleep with the Colt by his head and his arms around his coat, the wagon always covered at night now, as if he’d deny her the stars. Waking one morning to a world shelled in bright snow and that evening giving birth to the squalling boy they called Clay, after her father who, despite herself, she missed.

  Where we going? she’d asked and he’d said, To a place I know of.

  Which was here. The cabin that belonged to Travis Bolton. Who lived in a large house four miles away and who killed E.J. for a ham and then said she and Clay could stay on in the cabin, if they wanted to, and not pay rent, and pick cotton for him when harvest time came.

  Some thoughtful part of her knew it was killing E.J. that had let Travis Bolton hear God’s call. That made him do whatever a man did, within his heart and without—papers, vows—to become a preacher of the gospel. She imagined him a man of extravagant gestures, who when he gave himself to Christ gave fully and so not only allowed her and her boy to work and live on his land, in his house, but did more. On the coldest days she might find a gutted doe laid across the wood that had once been a fence at the edge of the property. Or a plucked turkey at Christmas. Not a month after E.J. had been committed to the earth by Brother Hill, a milk cow had shown up with the Bolton brand on it. She’d waited for Mr. Bolton or his hand Marcus Eady to come claim it, but after a day and a night no one had and so she’d sheltered it in the lean-to back of the house. Aware she could be called a thief, she’d wrapped Clay in E.J.’s coat (buckshot holes still in it) and carried him to the Bolton place. Instinct sent her to the back door where a nigger woman eyed her down a broad nose and went fetched Mrs. Bolton, who told her Mr. Bolton meant for her to use the cow so that the boy might have milk. And while part of Bess understood certain things about Travis Bolton’s choices, there was another part of her, too, a listening, observing part, and this part discerned that Mrs. Bolton disapproved of and disagreed with her husband’s decision to let the squatters stay out there in the cabin. To let them pick cotton alongside the other hired hands and tenant farmers, to pay them for the work of two people even though she was a sorry picker at first and Clay did little work at all in his early years. On nights in the cabin’s bed with Clay asleep against her body, Bess imagined arguments between the Boltons, imagined them in such detail that she herself could hardly believe Mr. Bolton would let those people stay in their house, bleed them of milk and meat and money. Bess’s own father would never have let squatters settle in one of his tenant houses, had in fact run off families in worse shape than Bess’s—if you could call her and Clay a family.
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  She and Mrs. Bolton had only met the one time, when the woman had said, “Mr. Bolton means for you to have the cow,” and then shut the door. Bess had turned and called Clay, who was squatted by a toy horse carved from wood, and told him they were going home.

  When she woke, she knew God had spoken to her through Jesus Christ. In a dream, He had appeared before her in the road with a new wagon and team of strong yellow oxen behind Him, not moving, and He had knelt and pushed back the hair from her eyes and lifted her chin in His fingers. She couldn’t see His face for the sun was too bright, but she could look on His boots and did, fine chocolate leather stitched with gold thread and no dust to mar them. She heard Him say, Walk, witness what man can do if I live in his heart.

  She rose, brushing away sand from her cheek, shaking sand from her dress, and started toward Coffeeville.

  She had walked for two hours talking softly to herself when she heard the wagon and stepped from the road into the grass to give way to its berth. The driver, a tall man dressed in a suit, tie, and derby hat, whoaed the mules pulling it and touched the brim of the hat and looked at her with his head tilted. He glanced behind him in the wagon. Then he seemed to arrive at a kind of peace and smiled, said she looked give out, asked her would she like a ride to town. She thanked him and climbed in the back amid children, who frowned at one another at her presence, the haze of flies she’d grown used to. A young one asked was she going to the doctor.

  “No,” she said, “to church.”

  She slept despite the wagon’s bumpy ride and woke only when one of the children wiggled her toe.

  “We here,” the child said.

  Her neck felt better, but still she moved it cautiously when she turned toward the First Methodist Church of Coffeeville, a simple sturdy building painted white and with a row of tall windows along its side, the glasses raised, people sitting in them, their backs to the world, attention focused inside. In front of the building, buggies, horses, and mules stood shaded by pecan branches. Women in hats were unrolling blankets on the lawn that sloped down to the graveyard, itself shaded by magnolias. From out of the windows she heard singing:

  Are you weak and heavy laden?

  Cumbered with a load of care?

  Precious Savior still our refuge,

  Take it to the Lord in prayer.

  The children parted around her and spilled from the wagon, as if glad to be freed of her. The man stood and set the brake, then climbed down. He had a cloth-covered dish in his hand. “Here we are,” he said, and put down his plate which she could smell—chicken, fried—and offered his hand. She took it, warm in hers, and the earth felt firm beneath her feet.

  Tipping his hat, taking up the plate, he began to make his way through the maze of wagons and buggies and up the steps and inside, the door open. She stood waiting. The song ended and another began and more women—too busy to see her—hurried out a side door carrying cakes, and several children ran laughing down the hill, some rolling in the brown grass, and from somewhere a dog barked.

  Two familiar men stepped out the front door, both dressed in dark suits and string ties. They began rolling cigarettes. When the young one noticed her, he pointed with a match in his hand and the other looked and saw her, too. They glanced at one another and began to talk, then Glaine Bolton hurried back inside. Marcus Eady stayed, watching her. His long gray hair swept back beneath his hat, his goatee combed to a point and his cheeks shaved clean. He lit his cigarette. Trailing a hand along the wood of the wall, he moved slowly down the steps and off the side of the porch and along the building beneath the windows, over the dirt toward a line of horses tied to a rail, the stock of a rifle outlined against the white paint of the building. When he got to the horse he began to stroke its mane and speak softly to it, all the while watching her.

  The front door opened and the man who stepped out putting on his hat was Sheriff Waite, wearing a fresh-looking white shirt and thin black suspenders. He stood on the porch with his hands on his hips, looking for her. She was holding on to the side of the wagon to keep from falling, and for a moment Waite seemed to stand beside his own twin, and then they blurred and she blinked them back into a single sheriff.

  He had seen her. He glanced at Marcus Eady and patted the air with his hand to stay the man as he, Waite, came down the steps and through the wagons and buggies and horses and mules, laying his hands across the backs of the skittish animals nearest her to calm them. When he stood over her she came only to the badge that he wore pinned neatly to his shirt, which was stained beneath the arms with sweat. If he had a coat he’d removed it in the heat.

  “Missus Freemont,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  “My boy needs burying,” she said. “The Lord led me here.”

  For a moment, as he looked down at her, Waite held a look in his eyes that doubted that such a Lord existed. What did he see in her face that made his face both dreadful and aggrieved? What a thing she must be, bloodied, rank, listing up from the camp of the dead to here, the sunlit world of the living, framed in God’s view from the sky in startling white cotton. She clung to the wagon’s sideboard and felt her heart beat against it. More people had come onto the porch in their black and white clothes and were watching, stepping down into the churchyard. A woman put her hand over her mouth. Another hid a child’s face. Marcus Eady had drawn his rifle and levered a round into its chamber. Glaine Bolton emerged from the church, moving people aside, and pointed toward Bess and Waite, who reached to steady her. The man last out was the preacher, Travis Bolton. He held his Bible above his eyes to shade them so he might see. He pushed down the arm of his son trying to hold him back and left the boy frowning and came through the people, toward her.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This novel owes a large debt of gratitude to the work of Harvey H. Jackson III, who, in collaboration with Joyce White Burrage and James A. Cox, wrote The Mitcham War of Clarke County, Alabama. Thank you all—I appreciate your encouragement and support.

  For help and advice on the manuscript in various stages, thanks to Monica Berlin, Barry Bradford, Robert Gatewood, William Gay, Hardy Jackson, Michael Knight, Jamie Kornegay, Roy Parvin, Sidney Thompson, and Tim Waller. At William Morrow, thanks to Lisa Gallagher, Michael Morrison, Jen Pooley, Sharyn Rosenblum, and Claire Wachtel, my editor. I also want to thank my agent and friend, Nat Sobel, for his continued faith and his careful reading of the manuscript. Thanks as well to the following institutions, whose generous financial support helped in the writing of this novel: the University of Mississippi, for the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residency; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; Knox College; the MacDowell Colony; the Sewanee Writers’ Conference; the University of the South, for the Tennessee Williams Fellowship in Fiction; and the Stadler Center for Poetry at Bucknell University, for the Philip Roth Residency in Creative Writing. Thanks also to Walt Darring, my first creative writing teacher. And to my parents, Gerald and Betty Franklin, I give thanks for a lifetime of support and love.

  And finally, to my wife, Beth Ann, who read this manuscript many times, in many versions; who aimed her perfect poet’s eye at each line; who listened and counseled; and who always believed, I can only say this: Thank you again, BA, for the things only you know. This book, and my happiness, would not exist without you. More than friends, now and forever.

  About the Author

  TOM FRANKLIN, from Dickinson, Alabama, is the author of the collection of stories Poachers, named as a Best First Book of Fiction by Esquirein 1999 and the winner of a 1999 Edgar Award for its title story. The recipient of a 2001 Guggenheim Fellowship, he has held the John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residency at Ole Miss and the Tennessee Williams Fellowship at Sewanee. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, poet Beth Ann Fennelly, and their young daughter, Claire.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Praise for Hell at the Breech

  “Another literary
knockout…. In Hell at the Breech, Franklin has cleverly woven history and fiction, using detail as a tool to shape his plot. He also makes his characters rise up from the pages as if they were there with you. Along with breathtaking descriptions of Mitcham Beat’s scenery (you can practically feel the cotton buds beneath your fingertips and smell the pine in the air), Franklin does what Harper Lee did in To Kill a Mockingbird; he lets his set of quirky characters run the story while he focuses on the repercussions of his characters’ curiosity and age…. Hell at the Breech is an impressive novel that should catapult Franklin into the big leagues.”

  —USA Today

  “Hell at the Breechis about as riveting a book as has ever been written, from the accidental shot that turns a boy into a man right up to the terrible coming of law into Mitcham Beat. Both violent and just, Sheriff Billy Waite makes a memorable hero.”

  —Lee Smith

  “Franklin evokes time and place with language of eloquence and fire, and his journey through the evils men do leads down the old, dark ways of the heart.”

  —William Gay

  “Clean, unpretentious language laid down in masterly fashion propels Franklin’s reconstruction of impoverished tenant farmers taking the law, or lack thereof, into their own hands at the end of the nineteenth century…. Historical fiction as smooth and relentless as the darkest Elmore Leonard. First-rate.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Hell at the Breech… combines adventure, mystery, Southern saga, and tragedy, delivering a disturbing meditation on murder and its repercussions through time…. Often compared to Faulkner, combines the Nobel laureate’s mastery of evocative language and his fascination with the dark underside of humanity. Franklin’s prose is taut and beautiful…. From the first page, Hell at the Breech is an important novel, one with the potential to change the way the readers see life and death…. A stunning first novel.”