Hardcastle (39 page)

Music thought such a tactic was no way to win men over, but no one in squatterville seemed to take his advice. Even Regus merely shrugged and said, “Hit’s the way she always goes. The union will get only so many, and the others ain’t gonna come out with ye. Ye can be satisfied of that. Hit always comes down to fightin and ill feeling. Ain’t nothin to do now but hold what we got, make hit hard for the scabs to pull their shifts, and cost ole Kenton Hardcastle as much money as we can. And it’s a-costin him, don’t ye worry. Look at all them mine guards he’s got workin around the clock. Ha, mine guards don’t come cheap; it costs good money to hire sons a bitches, always has. Sure,” Regus said, “we’re a-doin way the hell better than I ever thought we would.”

But Music had misgivings. It was plain that an unspoken set of rules had grown up from the first day on the picket line, but he didn’t know how long they would last. From the beginning, main street belonged to the union men, and mine guards and the sheriff’s deputies did not venture into it, nor did the union men set foot on Hardcastle property. Also, from the first day, the men on the picket line badgered and harassed the mine guards and deputies, but except for Cawood Burnside, they did not answer back, choosing to keep a grim silence and earn their money without doing anything that would provoke a shooting. Cawood, however, was sensitive over the beating Music had given him, and once or twice when he was goaded sufficiently about that, Grady had to restrain him. And though, for the most part, everyone’s behavior seemed to have grown as predictable and formal as a dance, tensions were growing. Every day the miners still working for Hardcastle got rougher treatment, and although neither Music nor Regus ever laid a hand on anyone, or took part in badgering the guards, one day, Music suspected, some knuckle-head was bound to go too far, and everyone would be drawn in to what followed.

But for the time being, at least, there was no great trouble. The weather held good, there was no sickness, spirits were high, and every soul in squatterville had something to eat. An older miner named Lewis Short had been put in charge of the stores. He had a partially crippled arm and not a tooth in his head, but the people liked and trusted him for his even temper and good humor, although they didn’t like seeing him send the evicted blacks off with their gunnysacks heavy. But when they came trudging around and down the ridge from the Bear Paw, he never turned them away empty-handed. “They went for the union just like us,” he’d say. “They ain’t scabbin agin us, and nuthin I ever heard about a nigger makes me think he don’t get as hungry as a white man. I’m gonna see nobody don’t get more than his proper share,” he’d say, “fer if’n I don’t, the time will come soon when an ole sproutin tater will look as good as a cured ham.”

Indeed, for the time being, squatterville’s luck was pretty good; and, on some level or other, Music was almost content. Nearly every afternoon Merlee came up from Elkin to see him, and they took walks up the mountain, or sat about in Ella’s kitchen, or sought a private place to make love. So it was hard not to feel blessed. And when he wasn’t on the picket line or with Merlee, he labored to make a serviceable plow out of the rusty plow point he’d discovered in the barn. He’d found two young hickories just the right size, and he cut, soaked, bent, and bound them to cure into handles. He’d made a singletree, and after a great deal of scouting, he had found a locust big enough to make the beam.

One day when Merlee didn’t come, he cut it down and dragged a section to the barn and began to rough it out. It was good to work with an ax and drawknife and auger and to have the sweet-smelling chips and shavings collect around his feet. It was a little like writing a letter to his family, which he could not do. They would know nothing of unions and gun thugs. They wouldn’t understand any struggle that set him against sheriffs and the law. But working on the plow in the barn—abandoned once more to the cow and him—setting his hand to something plain and useful, made him feel almost as if he had written and explained.

He worked very late and felt particularly good, and after supper when he was in the kitchen with Ella and Regus, it was a fine surprise to have Merlee knock on the door and appear, come to show him the dress she had made, at last, from the material he’d bought her. She looked like a young girl dressed up to go to a party, and compared to the drab and ragged women of squatterville, she was so pretty that none of the three of them could speak. Even Regus was stunned and unable to tease as it was his habit to do. Finally, an awed, faraway smile on her face, Ella said, “Why, Merlee, child, ye look like a picture stepped out of a book in this sorry place.” And she did, Music thought, at least down to her shoes, which were so walked over, worn out, and altogether wrong beside the dress, they were funny, although he hadn’t the slightest urge to laugh. “Sit ye down, child,” Ella said, “and I’ll fix ye a sup of broth.”

As though the dress were even able to subdue her and make her shy, Merlee didn’t protest as she usually would have done.

“Hit’s a pity and a shame they’s all this nonsense a-goin on. You youngins ort to be goin out to a dance,” Ella said, setting the cup of broth on the table before Merlee and laying her hand for a moment on the crown of Merlee’s head. “Hit ain’t right,” she said, “and it aggravates me to think about it.”

“It’s the purtiest dress I ever had on my back,” Merlee said, looking straight into Music’s eyes.

“Well, I should hope so,” Ella said. Abruptly she poked Music on the arm. “Can’t you say nothin a’tall, boy?” she asked him.

Music shook his head.

“I don’t know, but I’ll declare if it don’t seem young men are even goofier than they was in my day,” she said, with such exasperation that all of them were released from the spell of Merlee’s dress and began to laugh. “Now, I forget myself,” Ella said and laid the back of her hand fondly against Music’s cheek. “I didn’t mean to shame you by speakin out of turn.”

Regus shook his head and guffawed. “You gettin in deeper all the time, Momma,” he said. “Cain’t nobody call back the shot when they’ve done already hit the target.”

“You hush,” Ella said.

“I’d just as lief you didn’t call the rest of us goofy just because of Bill Music, though,” he said.

“Hush up,” Ella said. “I won’t have this youngin picked on in my house.”

Regus sputtered and laughed and wiped his eyes. “I’m a-gettin outta here,” he said, “while I can still remember who said what,” and he got up and went out upon the dogtrot, scratching the back of his neck and giggling to himself.

“Now, I got some mendin to do,” Ella said, “if you two young folks will pardon me.” And she went off into her room and left them too.

But Regus and Ella might have stayed for all that transpired between them. They did not even touch or, for the longest time, speak. Still, never before in his life had he accepted or returned a woman’s gaze for so many long minutes. It was the most intimate time he had ever spent with her, and he would have wanted no one present.

“Hit was foolish, I guess, to sneak out against the curfew when I could have come on up tomorrow in the daylight,” Merlee said.

“I’ll see you home safe,” Music said.

“I just this evenin finished hit, and I wanted you to see how elegant it made up,” she said and smoothed the material under her hand as gently as though it might break, as though it didn’t belong to her and never would. “I never sewed such tiny stitches in all my life.”

He shook his head and smiled. “I can’t even see them,” he said.

He didn’t know how many shots were fired; maybe fifteen, maybe twenty. He heard two or three
whick
into the wood of the house before he could get to Merlee and drag her down to the floor. The volley was very brief, with many reports overlapping, which meant there had to be two or three people pulling triggers. Unscathed, Ella appeared in the kitchen, and Music told them both to stay inside and bolted out upon the dogtrot just as a stick of dynamite went off somewhere along the first line of tents, and then a second stick went off perhaps thirty yards to the north in the ditch. “Don’t move from this house,” he told the women and dashed down the hill toward Silk Stocking Row and Easy Street, where shouts and cries and weeping had begun.

Miraculously, only one person had been killed, a young man who had had part of his skull blown away; although Glen Dunbar’s wife had been shot through the calf of her leg, and a small boy through the elbow. Neither stick of dynamite had hurt anyone. The first had landed almost directly beneath a ragged, stuffed couch belonging to Lewis Short and sitting a few feet in front of his tent. The explosion sent part of the couch through the front flap, missing the first pole but hitting the rear one and collapsing the tent on those inside. The next-biggest piece came back to earth between Easy Street and Silk Stocking Row, but wood and hunks of cotton batting were everywhere. The second stick of dynamite had done no damage at all. Music suspected that some goon had lit it and then had to get rid of it even though the car or truck, or whatever he had been riding in, had passed squatterville by.

No one had gotten a good look at the vehicle, for the man on guard had been talking to a friend and neither of them heard it coming until just before it appeared from behind the line of scrub maple along the road. Its headlights had been off and the goons in it, or on it, had started shooting the moment it was clear of the slash, so he and his buddy only had time to dive to the ground and try to get behind anything they could find for cover.

Music helped Regus and Glen Dunbar get Glen’s wife and the boy who had been shot into the truck so that they could be taken to the mine doctor in Valle Crucis, and since the mine doctor was also the county coroner, they wrapped the dead young man in a blanket and laid him in the truck bed as well, Glen Dunbar standing over him with Regus’s shotgun in his hands and his eyes round and vague as the eyes of a child who had been wakened from a deep sleep.

When Music had posted an armed guard on the road fifty yards on either side of squatterville and seen to it that two other guards were armed and waiting among the tents, he went back to the house. “There’s one dead and two hurt,” he told the women. “Regus is taking them into Valle Crucis.”

“Sweet Lord,” Ella said. “You see this child safe home, and I’ll go down and see if I can help.”

“No,” Music said, “you stay in this house till I get back,” and he took Merlee’s hand and they hurried away.

Just before they reached the hardscrabble path that ran beside her shack, they stopped a moment to hold each other. “If I didn’t have little Anna Mae and Aunt Sylvie to look after, I’d make ye run off with me; I’d make ye run away from this awful place. I know I could,” Merlee said. “I could make ye.”

“Yes, you could,” he said and held her while she trembled.

“So you’ll know me, hit’s not a day I don’t plan to do it even so.” Abruptly then, she drew his face down, kissed him, and ran away.

Long before he got to Regus’s pasture on his way back, he could hear the mother of the young man who had been killed. It was a sound that raised the hairs on the back of his neck, for if he hadn’t known otherwise, he wouldn’t have thought such keening could come from a human throat. And on and on and on it went.

He had given orders to shoot the hell out of any vehicle that approached with its lights off, but because of the woman’s screaming, and because he did not quite trust the road guard not to shoot Regus when he returned, he took the place of the man guarding the road from Valle Crucis.

23

BURYING

WHEN THE NEXT morning finally arrived, damp and cold and hiding the tops of mountains in clouds, the citizens of squatterville could not decide what should be done. One or two of the men wanted to go back down on the picket line to show the goons nothing had changed. The angry young miner with the consumptive wife said he, by God, had blasting powder and he knew some of the other men did too, and if he went into Hardcastle Coal Company, it wouldn’t be to stand in a picket line; it would be to show some sons a bitches what last night’s raid had fetched them. There was a great deal of argument and counterargument until someone suggested that folks had been shot and dynamited and one person killed, after all, and somebody ought to stand up in the sheriff’s face and demand some justice. The angry young miner hooted. Some of the others jeered and laughed bitterly. The suggestion seemed to satisfy no one; and yet, at last, four men were chosen to drive to Valle Crucis and confront Sheriff Hub Farthing while the rest stayed behind to clean up the damage and protect the camp. Regus and Music were to go, together with Glen Dunbar and Charles Tucker, the father of the dead young man. Tucker had not spoken a word to anyone all morning, but he went into his tent, scraped off his whiskers, put on a collarless white shirt and his Sunday suit, and climbed into the truck bed. Music rode into town beside him, trying not to look at the man’s haggard face, nicked from shaving, or his eyes, which seemed somehow burned out, as though his wife’s terrible grief had eaten through them like acid.

Regus had left his pistols with other men back in squatterville, but he had the gall to carry his shotgun with him right into the courthouse and the sheriff’s office. “When yer dealin with curs,” he’d told them, “you need something they can see and appreciate.” Still, out of some wisdom Music was not quite sure he understood, Hub Farthing chose not to see it.

“I’m sure hit ain’t news, but we come to tell you that the folks livin on my property was shot up and dynamited last night,” Regus said. “Two was hurt and one was killed.”

“Yes,” Farthing said with perfect calm, “the coroner called me up. He tells me you were not willing to give the body up to the mortician, which means you ain’t got a permit to bury.”

“We come to see what ye’ve done and who ye’ve arrested for murder,” Regus said.

The sheriff leaned back in his chair and shook his head as though in disbelief, as though surprised by their stupidity. “Now what in God’s name makes you think you can curse and beat honest miners, who ain’t after a thing but to get to work in the mornin, without gettin some of yer own medicine back?” The sheriff let out a short bark of laughter. “Them nigger strikers down at the Bear Paw got shot at and dynamited last night too, but at least they had the good sense not to come draggin in here to me when they know damned well they brought it on themselves.”