Hardcastle (18 page)

“Do you ever hear from your wife?” Music asked.

“No,” Regus said, “not
from
her, but we’ve heard
of
her. Wasn’t long after she left I found out from one of her woman friends in the camp that she had a sister in Cincinnati. And after her husband threatened to kill that poor woman, and after I swore with my hand on her Bible that I wasn’t gonna go off and drag her back, the woman told me how to send word to the sister, and I did and said I’d take my wife back if she’d consent to come; but I reckon she’d made up her mind all right, or anyway that’s what the sister wrote and told us. I still send money—for the youngins, don’t ye know—to the sister, and ever once in a great while she’ll send us some word. Momma begged about it until I wrote and asked for pictures of the boys, and two year ago, which I reckon was the last time we heard from Cincinnati, sure enough, we got us a picture of them, all dressed up nice and settin together on a sorta swing that’s made to look like a half-moon. Stars hanging down around them. Shoot,” Regus said and shook his head and grinned, “they looked real nice, and I expect that picture, which must have come from one of them fancy photographer places, was right dear to pay for.”

Music looked out the window of the Model T. Jesus, he thought, Jesus Christ.

Regus laughed. “I expect if you’d been around when Vera ran off—Vera was her name—I would have sent all kinds of letters. Lord knows, many a time I thought of things I wanted to tell her, but hit took me near about all day to write some little ole no-account letter. Vera, though, she could read and write as good as airey schoolteacher you’d want to see. She was just gifted in that direction, I reckon. I was ever a little shy around her because of that. I nearly didn’t write her a’tall on that account, but I thought to myself, if she was so good at readin, then she could make out the few things I scratched down well enough. Still, never did tell her about my name though,” Regus said and laughed. “I reckon hit’s both of us held somethin back, after all.”

Jesus Christ, Music thought.

On the left they passed Mink Slide, and around the curve on the right, the Elkin school, where, as always, a ballgame was being played in the schoolyard. Distractedly Music was aware of the loud, woolly-headed boys and the little groups of shy, quiet girls, all in their ragged, hand-me-down clothes, but he did not see which one of them threw the rock that clanged against the side of the truck. He was so startled he nearly dropped the mason jar of liquor. “Christ!” he said.

Regus merely grinned, gave his head a slight jerk to one side, and sucked his teeth as though he were clucking to a mule.

“Even the kids are gunning for us,” Music said and went on then to tell Regus how the one-armed man had behaved and what he had said, when twice before he’d been down to buy whiskey wearing both his badge and gun and had had no trouble.

Regus frowned, and, for once, there was no humor at all lurking anywhere in his face. They drove on through town, across the tilted plank bridge over the Switch, and stopped beside the powerhouse, where Regus shut the Model T down, and with a dying shudder it ceased to run. Regus sat looking through the vertical, grimy windshield, his large, chapped hands folded over the steering wheel. “That gal of yours, that Merlee Taylor,” he said, still without the slightest trace of humor. “Ye’ll have no trouble beatin my time with Vera. Merlee,” he said, “she ain’t never had nuthin.” And then, as though he hadn’t at all changed subjects, or as though he were merely finishing a thought he’d had earlier even though the time for it was past, he said, “I think we’ve got trouble. I suspicioned it at Mink Slide. Niggers ain’t quite learned how to lie as good as white folks.”

10

THE FIRST SHOT FIRED

USUALLY WHEN HE stretched himself upon the hard little bunk, the noise of the power plant sung him to sleep and nothing disturbed him until Regus came and gave him a nudge to wake him for his shift. Big Cigar or Too Sweet scraping a coal scoop across the cement floor, flinging coal into the furnace, or clanging its iron doors shut, was no more to him than rain on the roof. But this night he could not sleep. Ella Bone had given him a haircut, and his neck was still a little chafed where she had scraped away at it with a razor, and he was wearing a new shirt she had made him which was still stiff with sizing, but his problem was not there. He did not require comfort in order to sleep.

Ella Bone had taken him over like a son, scolded him, fussed over him, sewed and cooked for him, and no doubt prayed over his soul, but it wasn’t quite that either that kept him open-eyed, looking at the sooty underside of the corrugated iron roof over his bunk. Still he mulled his account with her: the shingles he had rived out and stacked in the barn to dry, enough to repair the rotting north side of the barn, the roof of the corncrib, and the springhouse; the morning milking he’d taken over from Regus; other chores. Regus was not a farmer, no matter that it was Ella’s ambition to make him one. He milked down his shirt cuffs, into his shoe tops, and here and there around the bucket. He tried, did Regus, and he got two-thirds of the milk in the pail, but he made the cow nervous, and she would step around and switch about, and he never got all she had to give. Much of that would turn her dry. He’d showed Regus how to build rabbit gums, and they had set out four of them around the place and had caught a rabbit or two. “Don’t they dress out just the prettiest, nicest things,” Ella had said, “without no shot in em and all?” He’d found a bee tree, and he was going to get Regus a gum of bees, so that they might have honey. Not that any of that would make up for the way they had taken him in. No, nor was it what kept him awake, although he had mulled it over like an unpaid debt.

Too Sweet haunted the edge of his vision, bending over the belt to the turbine, an oilcan hanging from the end of his slender, limp arm.

But he was thinking about a time when he was seventeen and had hired out to help a man do his haying. He was thinking about the man’s daughter, who would come to the fields where they sweated and swung their scythes, carrying two oak buckets of cool spring water with gourd dippers floating in them. A gangly, slue-footed, not quite pretty girl, who, while he drank and watched her over the edge of the dipper, had scooped her hand into one of the buckets and ladled water against her collarbones, which dampened her thin dress from the inside so that it clung to the slope of her breasts. “Whee, hit’s a hot one though, ain’t it?” she’d said, and as though it made sense or were somehow important, went on in a teasing voice to ask: “Ain’t you the one that broke my brother’s nose down at the Shulls Mills school some years ago?” “Yes,” he’d said. “Ha,” she’d said, “ain’t nobody err deserved it more.” And her father, standing some distance away, long and tall as a scarecrow, his widow’s hump bent over the stoning of his scythe, said, “Pass that water on around, gal!”

And was it the next day or the one after when it was making up to rain and her father and the other two hired hands had taken a load of hay on to the barn to make sure of getting in that much, anyway, and left him cutting along the fringe of the woods, that she sneaked up behind him and dashed water on his back and caused him to start and kick his leg out and cut himself? She had laughed at the antic and his clipped curse. The cut across his shin had been shallow, and only the stinging of sweat and chaff made him hoist his britches leg to look. “I never meant you no hurt,” she said. “Let me see.” “Didn’t get me much,” he said. “Let me see,” she said, but he told her he wasn’t hurt, which was nearly true. “I just meant a little prank,” she said. “That’s all right,” he said. “I just come down to see you. Them others won’t be back for near a half hour; they’re a-pitchin up into the loft.”

He had begun to swing his scythe again, sliding his right foot forward as he swung the scythe around to the left, sliding his left foot forward as he swung the scythe back for the next stroke, even his breathing somehow locked into the rhythm. “I expect they won’t be back for better than a half hour,” she said, and when he made no reply, she said, “You ain’t real smart, are ye?”

It wasn’t that he hadn’t begun to suspect her meaning; he just didn’t quite know what to do, or anyway, what to do first. But he was not a total fool and didn’t plan to be taken for one. He turned toward her and leaned on the top curve of his blade. “I reckon I ain’t the smartest fellow around,” he said, blushing to the roots of his hair, “but if you’re aimin to give lessons, I’ll try to be handy.”

“Ha,” she said, “you come on into the shade.”

When the big, cloud-colored Percheron plodded back down to the edge of the field with the hired hands and her father riding the wagon, he was back at work.

“Son,” her father said, giving his head a shake and wrapping the reins around the stanchion, “don’t appear you broke a sweat while we was gone.”

He feared, unless he could think of a way to prevent it, the man would guess what he’d been up to. “Had a little accident,” he said and raised his britches leg to show the folded crease of flesh across his shin, where, since it was so hot perhaps, the blood still oozed. He was thankful that it looked much worse than it was.

“Lord God, son,” the man said, “how did ye get yore leg out ahead of you like that? You get on to the house and let the missus look to it.”

“It’s not so bad,” he said. “I’d just as lief work.”

“You climb up in this wagon,” the man said. “I ain’t a-sendin ye home with lockjaw.”

He did as he was told, but as the man reined the big horse around, Music said, “It’s not deep and it bled out clean. I just stumbled at the wrong time, is all.”

“Well,” the man said, “I’m shamed for thinkin you lazy. Hit’s nearly time to quit anyhow. You clean it up and get a clean rag around it and get Mrs. Glenn to give you a glass of lemonade.”

So at the house he got a clean rag from Mrs. Glenn and washed and dressed the cut himself in order not to give himself away, and sat on the porch in the shade and drank a glass of lemonade, the girl paying no more attention to him than if he were a barn cat.

In a little it began to rain and the others came in. Mr. Glenn stood on the porch and watched it come down. “Well, son,” he said, “maybe we’ll cut no more tomorrow, but if hit dries off, will ye be able to work the day following?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Hit must be four mile to yer daddy’s place; I expect I’d better ride ye home in the wagon.”

“No need,” he said, “I didn’t cut myself deep,” and over the man’s protests, he hooked his scythe over his shoulder and walked, and walked back that night as he had told the girl he might, and she met him in the barn. And there had been a dozen such nights over the summer, until she found herself a serious beau, which he was not, and threw him over. So.

He had puzzled more than once about how it was that Thelma Glenn and her brother, Russell, had both, in their separate ways, blooded him. There had been a time before Russell had up and left home, back when they were twelve and thirteen, he had fought the boy nearly every day, although he had never understood why Russell seemed to think that was necessary. He’d clearly whipped the Glenn boy only once, the last time; and even so, Russell was having the best of that fight too until he pulled a cheap pocketknife from somewhere and stabbed Music in the face with it. He had no notion what made Russell do it and him winning; he would never have thought to do the same. The blade had gone through his upper lip and wedged between his canine tooth and the front one next to it and broken off. But it was like getting a shot of pure power, for he had bucked the bigger boy off his chest in a fury and broken his nose and had to be dragged off him, still fighting. Both of them had been delivered up to an ancient country doctor, each as bloody as the other, but Russell had been easier to fix. The point of the cheap knife had broken off even with Music’s gum and could not be drawn out, and so had to be pushed on through and taken out the back side, and his lip had to be stitched inside and out. Perhaps, he thought, Russell had known he would later deflower his sister. But no, that could not be possible, and anyway it had been the other way around. Someone had been with the sister long before he had.

Lord God, the warm, sweet center of her had taken hold of him like a hand, and for years after, thoughts of her would come suddenly upon him and make him burn.

And then there had been that redheaded woman in Chicago whose husband was off on the lakes, being a merchant marine. She was a wild one, wanting it done to her every which way while she yelled and took on and beat him with her fists. He never did get used to her and her odd ways; she would not take off her clothes, not any of them, or allow him to take off his, preferring to have them pulled and stretched aside. So.

Too Sweet, a white rag tied around his brow, swung the grating furnace doors open and shoveled in the coal, the scoop scraping the cement and swishing when the coal left it for the glowing innards of the furnace.

The child had gotten better. Whether through his doctoring or not, he couldn’t say, but her fever had gone and her breathing had grown easier. He thought the poultice had loosened the congestion in her chest, and there was no doubt that the whiskey and honey had helped her sleep, or that she liked it, he thought, for she would take all she was given without the smallest wince or shudder. But she had lost her shyness of him too, which unmanned him.

Often now, when he came to visit, she would crawl to him and catch his britches leg in her tiny fists and pull herself up to stand at his knee, where she seemed to study him with her round, solemn eyes. “Miss Anna Mae Taylor,” he would say, “and how are you?” But if she could speak, she would not do so. She would merely study him owlishly, swaying at his knee until she lost her balance completely and sat down with a thump. He knew nothing about babies, never having been around any, and he didn’t know exactly what the child required of him. In fact, he was no better off with her mother. Nothing in his experience seemed to serve him. As the baby had grown less shy of him, Merlee had moved in the opposite direction. She was no longer harsh and insulting, but now and again she grew unaccountably quiet or seemed embarrassed for reasons he couldn’t make out. He thought of himself as a man of some experience. He was not a virgin, after all. But when he looked for what he knew about women, nothing of value surfaced. He’d gone to a whorehouse once in Chicago. Would have gone more if he’d had the money. Still, but for that, the women he’d had anything to do with seemed to him merely to have come into season. Him being more or less handy at the time.