A vendor in a purple hat leaned through a fold in the canvas. “Lookin’ mighty sick there, old boy. Come on in, I got what suits yah n’ cures what ails yah.” Sonny raised his gruff but soft voice enough to inquire about the cost of an elixir that promised to quell his aches and pains. “Can’t do nothin’ in that way for yah,” said the raconteur. He scanned his wares and grabbed a small green bottle from the bottom of a nearby crate. “Try this here, a gift from me to you,” he said, eyeing Sonny as he drank it. Sonny swallowed most the contents of the bottle in his first desperate swig, his face wretched, and he nearly folded himself in half as he spit up in the dirt. The vendor roared with laughter. “That there is the finest Indian tapeworm killer this side of paradise. Fit to put them Connecticut Kickapoo crooks right out the business!”
Sonny hobbled away, furious as he hacked the bitter burn from his throat. He’d not had a drink for hours, his skull ached, and the earth grew dim. He thought it best to get on while he still could and find a place to nap. He only needed to kill a few hours before meeting with his friend Andridge later that night. Sonny and Andridge had fought together in the war. They helped each other survive, even lay wounded side by side, and kept each other company while they healed and waited to be discharged. There was no one on this smoking earth that Sonny Bayne trusted more than Andridge Sampson.
His sons, Sherman and Abner Bayne, held court at the local tavern singing Irish ditties and soldiering hymns for nickels and free drinks. Business was best on holidays and when the fairs began. They sold their act on the fact that they were twins, not identical, of course, but they told people they were and made it work. The Tawny Twins, the bill read, sing any song from Tralee to Tennessee. A nickel for one, a dime for three, a round of ale enthusiastically imbibed by we. Too-ra-loo, too-ra-lee, let us sing a song for thee!
The brothers had bushy hair and wide, garrulous smiles. Their arms were round and heavy, muscles built after they took over the family farm from their father. In the years following the war, Sonny could not bear physical labor due to his injuries and the land fell into disrepair. Andridge had sent over two black farmhands to assist, but the soil had gone to seed and the crops suffered one ailment after another, burning in summer droughts and dying beneath drifts of winter snow. The boys heaved dead crops out of the ground and replanted new ones. They hoped the rows would spring to life each new year, but it never took, as though the land itself had shut down. When Sherman and Abner came of age, the land too slowly came back to life. They drove the wedge plow and cut the field back to the timber line and together walked the rows with their hobbled father as he explained the cycle of the harvest.
The tavern rang with jubilant cheers as Sherman and Abner finished their last song and toasted their mugs in celebration. Sherman let out a yell, then laid a sloppy kiss on Margerie, the black-haired maven he was promised to marry. She anchored an arm around Sherman and the other around Abner, who tensed the muscles in his neck and smiled sheepishly as she swung her tight body between them.
“Y’all see that Crescent Hotel fixing to open in Eureka Springs?” Margerie asked. “My, does it look luxurious! We should go this summer. It’s been so hot, they got them health baths with that good water. Wouldn’t that be just fine? You could save up here. Between that and harvest, I reckon we could afford it. How about it, Sherman. Want to take me?”
“I sure like the idea of you bathing all right,” he said. “Don’t know how you plan on getting down there, though. Those railroad boys are refusing to work again.”
“I thought that was only Missouri,” she said.
“From what I hear it’s the whole MKT line, any track that some bitch Gould owns. The lines that ain’t shut down been targeted for attack. Tracks been heaped with rocks and hammered to hell. Yesterday I read they done blowed up the Pine Bluff switch house.”
Sherman swigged his mug and laughed from his belly. Margerie turned her attention to Abner, pressing her chest against the broad of his back. “Abe will take me—won’t you, Abe?”
Abner gazed into his beer, embarrassed by her flirtation, angry that his brother’s insistence on calling him Abe had spread to Margerie. When they were young, other boys hurled taunts at him, like Abe, Abe, he love them slaves, labeling him a turncoat for bearing the namesake of Lincoln. Abner was big and slow and easy to pick on, but when Sherman stood at his brother’s side they were near impossible to beat in a fight. Abner begrudged accepting his brother’s help, knowing full well that it came with the price of Sherman tormenting him whenever he wanted. Abner grew to size and beat half the schoolyard, with his brother’s help, and eventually they stopped regarding him as easy prey. Taunts and name-calling faded until no one called him Abe anymore. No one except Sherman.
He charged outside and basked in night air far cooler than the humid tavern. He lit half a cigar, leaned against the outside of the pub, and closed his eyes.
“Kind of night that makes blood boil,” a soft voice said.
Abner opened his eyes to see their family friend Andridge approaching him in the alley. “Hey there, Mr. Sampson. Boy, you just appeared out of nowhere.”
“How else does someone appear?”
The entire time Abner had known him, Andridge Sampson was preoccupied with truths, both evident and hidden, but Abner thought he merely spoke about commonplace things in a round-about way. His father called him the local philosopher.
“Speaking of boiling blood,” said Abner, leering through the window. “I’m sick of my brother needling me all the time,” he said. “I ain’t too trustful of his girl Margerie, neither. Since she come around he’s been meaner than ever. I wish she would just go away, but he’s probably going to marry her. To be honest with you, Mr. Sampson, I can’t stand the thought of her bein’ family.”
Andridge lit himself a pipe and glanced down the alley at the crowded street, then motioned for Abner to listen close. “What if I was to make you privy to a rarified bit of information that could help you with your little problem?” he proposed.
In consideration, Abner never wanted to see Margerie again, and he wanted his old brother back, but he also did not want to cause any trouble. If anything were to happen, he could not bear being the cause of it. “All right, Mr. Sampson,” he said, reticent. “What do you know?”
“Cute little Margerie in there has been laying with your father. She and Sonny been at it for the last two months, if I may be sure.” Andridge watched the hope drain from Abner’s eyes as he fell behind the murky gray cloud, speechless.
Andridge had another secret, one he would not dare speak or let see the light of day. He lusted after young Margerie, too, and wished for nothing more than to confess his love to her. Being a man of cunning and intelligence, Andridge hatched a plan that would kill two birds with one stone, as the saying goes. He had known the twins since birth and was acutely aware of Sherman’s propensity for anger. Abner, plain as he was, would tell his brother about his fiancée’s infidelity and Sherman would confront his father in a drunken rage, removing him from the equation, while simultaneously ending their relationship. With Sherman and Sonny out of the way, Andridge would have a clear path to Margerie’s crooked heart.
Abner waited until later that night to tell Sherman the terrible news. Margerie had left soon after he went back inside, so he got incredibly drunk with his brother and sang one late-night round, doing everything he could to suppress the expansive sadness swelling within. He had thought poorly of his brother’s betrothal to Margerie, but learning he was right to have suspected her only felt worse and he condemned himself for ever thinking such an awful thought. He wished he never mentioned anything about it to begin with. He suffered the impression that his harping, negative castigations had somehow assisted her betrayal and brought it into their lives. Though it had nothing to do with him, Abner languished under the guilt until he could take it no more.
Drunkard shapes faded into languorous chatter and the humid weather of the barroom. Abner crossed his forear
ms on the bar and looked over at his brother, whose forehead snapped down then rose back up, eyes half shut. There was no easy recourse, so Abner said it out loud just as Andridge had, more or less out of nowhere. A geyser of anger rushed through Sherman. Previously limber, he grew stiff with rage and swiped his beer clear off the counter as the last drunks in the barroom cheered. He gripped the sides of his face until hatred boiled through his eyes, then helped himself to his feet on his brother’s broad shoulder.
“Where is he,” he mumbled. “Where is our father?”
Abner had no answer and turned away as Sherman’s fist smashed into his cheek. “Tell me now or I swear I’ll do it again,” he slurred.
Abner knew his brother would hit him ten more times if that was what it took, so he told him that he had heard they left the fair together. He agonized over the implications of what he was about to say, then admitted there was a possibility that they were back at the house. Sherman charged through the last of the crowd out of the tavern, beating the dirt of the thoroughfare through a gauntlet of straw torches.
The beautiful White Lillie removed the last of her targets from the shooting gallery. The fire eater soaked his iron rods in a steaming vat. Comics flipped cards with the girls from the peep show and the ominous fakirs, dry-skinned and road-weary, leant a hand loading ponies and prairie dogs into stacks of wire cages. Abner chased Sherman among the attractions and the cluttered alleyways that let out behind the tents. After a brief pursuit, he realized he had lost him. Abner paced around, frantic, until he was able to garner a horse from a local stable owner on the promise that he return it by morning or pay double the rate.
He rode up to the house and found his brother’s horse tied up out front. The coarse, drunken throes of Sherman’s voice carried inside the house, and Abner ran in but stopped outside the bedroom, deflated by his realization that there was nothing to be done. His brother had always been in command and his anger had no equal. Even if he wanted to intervene, he knew in his heart that when the time came he would do nothing more than shrink in quietude and make sure he stayed out of the way, just as he always did.
Sonny and Margerie were bare in bed, heads propped against the dasher as they cowered back from Sherman towering in the doorway. His father held out his arms, begging Sherman to come to his senses.
“How could you do this to me?” he asked. “You are my father, my flesh and blood.”
“I am weak, son. The booze got me. I don’t even know why I do the things I do anymore. I am sorry, you have to forgive me, please—”
“Shut up. I am sick of hearing about weakness. Weak this, weak that, this world ain’t for no weak,” he yelled.
Margerie covered herself with the sheet, but reasoned it was nothing both of them had not seen, so she let the white fabric fall from the flesh of her nipples, revealing her chest.
Sherman turned his attention to her. “You just go around to anyone that will have you now, that it?” He shook in a crying, maniacal fit. “I loved you, Margerie. Truly, I did.”
Margerie erupted with laughter. “Could you be more pathetic? I would have had to put all three of you Baynes together to get one real man.” She rose naked from the bed and began to slip her legs through her undergarments.
Abner peeked inside the doorway, stared at Margerie’s breasts, down her lean stomach to her black tuft, then looked away. When she tried to step past Sherman to reach for her blouse, he pulled her by her arm and punched her in the back of the head. Sonny struggled out of bed but Sherman kicked him back down and threw Margerie on top of him. Ravenous, Sherman scanned the room until he fixed on the kerosene lamp flickering on the dresser. He picked it up, the base full of yellow viscous. He sloshed the fuel back and forth and raised the lamp, casting its light toward the bed.
“You two will lay together for the rest of eternity,” he said, calm and distant as he threw the lamp across the room. Margerie screamed and Sherman watched as his father wrapped his arms around her. Glass smashed on the wall above their heads and a ball of fire exploded in a brilliant flash of light. The flaming oil leapt along the wall and rained down on Margerie and Sonny. They scrambled flaming from the bed, but Sherman kicked them back down and stood over them until their screams softened and the roar of the fire took hold. The two bodies twisted and flailed, skin burned white to red, bodies charred to black, until the corpses condensed into an indiscernible ball of flesh.
The fire quickly spread from the bodies to the burning bed and climbed up the ceiling with frightening speed. Surrounding air was sucked into the fire, daring Abner to draw one last scalding breath as he ran into the room and dragged his brother out. Sherman did not resist. He fell catatonic as Abner hugged him around the chest and dragged him out the front door of the smoke-filled house and laid him in the grass.
From the yard, Abner watched the back of the house seep out waves of white smoke before it was eaten by the roaring flames. Sherman had got to his feet and staggered toward the woods by the roadside. Abner went after him but stopped when he heard a horse galloping over the hill and saw Andridge Sampson emerge from the dark, entranced by the spectacle of fire. The house calved apart under spires of flame. Andridge rode up as close as he could get and came to a stop, cradled in his saddle.
“They’re both dead,” Abner called from his seat on the lawn. Two little fires grew in the tears on Andridge’s face. The burning house claimed the man to whom he owed his life and Margerie, his unrequited love. Their ashes floated from the burning house onto the mane of Andridge’s horse, his shoulders, and the brim of his hat, covering them like fallen snow.
SIXTEEN
DOWNTOWN JASPER MOVED SLOW, the way plants grow. Shop windows were clouded with circular swaths of dried water and the faded awnings of shops hung brittle and listless in the early morning. Walker parked his beat-up truck in a row of empty spots angled in front of Eberle’s feed store, where his oldest friend Rubin Bodine walked to the edge of the clapboard porch and leaned against a post, fatigued.
“Coming from church?” Walker asked him.
“Mhm,” Rubin grumbled. “I’s late, too. Stopped on the way to pick a dead dog out the road. She was a mutt with no tags, awful skinny, must have been out there a while. Reminded me of Lester, sweet boy. That’s just me, taking pity on any old suffering thing.”
“He ain’t suffering no more,” said Walker. “What’d you do with her?”
“Laid her in the back and brought her to the vet to be disposed of proper,” he said.
“Hell of a way to spend a morning,” said Walker.
“Pickin’ up feed for the new hogs.” Rubin nodded toward the store and Walker offered to give him a hand.
As long as Walker had known Rubin, he had an affinity for pigs and kept a stable of them at his house. His father raised them and Rubin grew affection for them at a young age. When he was in his twenties he brought a newborn piglet named Arnold on their tour bus for thirty shows in forty nights. He never failed to remind the boys that by the end of that trip Arnold smelled better than any of them did. Rubin lost six full-grown hogs last winter. Two fell from intestinal rot, four contracted pneumonia—hog cough, as Rubin called it—and died by month’s end. Rubin could not afford to treat them, underwater as he was on account of his own health troubles. He blamed himself not paying them enough care. When the cold let up for a brief spell last January, the ground thawed enough for Walker to head over to the farm and help Rubin bury his oldest. The mound was still there behind the pen. They hauled away the rest in the same truck bed they now tossed a dozen bags of feed into, pausing to rest from the strain.
“Jury’s in,” Walker said between wheezes. “If there’s such a thing as too old, we’re it.”
“Ain’t no such nothin’. We turning over, that’s all.” Rubin took his time back and forth out of the store, finally lifting the last bag of grain over the lip of the tailgate. “Not much else for us to do but keep something else alive,” he said, patting the bag of grain.
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��Watch your kid get married,” Walker added.
Rubin wiped the sweat from his brow with a balled handkerchief, nodding in agreement.
“I’m buying up what ice they got over there at the grocery, now you hop in with me and return the favor,” said Walker.
Rubin hacked up a brutal cough that doubled him over at the knees. Over the years, Walker learned to respect Rubin’s pride by not extending a hand to console him or even ask about his welfare. He just stared down Main Street until he was finished. Rubin cleared his lungs and said, “The worse I feel, the lighter my burden gets.”
Malcolm sat on the edge of his childhood bed twirling a flower he’d plucked from one of the bouquets on the table downstairs before Mary shoved him away. “Elizabeth’s going to come down any minute,” she informed him. “You get gone.” He managed a moment alone upstairs when Harrell poked his head through the open door.
“There you are,” he said. “Listen, before I forget, Russ wanted me to tell you how sorry he was for things getting out of hand the other night.”
Malcolm told him Russ had no need to worry.
“Well, he’s shook up about it. Combine that with drinking and his love of pills and you’ve got two different people. He really is a good guy, just been through a lot. He’s been in freefall since his brother died. I try to be there for him when it hits, but it knocks him near into another dimension. Up is down, black is white—”
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