Hardcastle (40 page)

“What we do, we do in broad daylight,” Regus said. “We ain’t attacked no women and children. We ain’t shot nobody and we ain’t throwed no dynamite. Hit’s murderin night riders we come to talk about, and how ye aim to deal with em.”

“That’s what I’m tellin you,” the sheriff said. “I can’t look after no red, Russia-loving troublemakers who go around beatin up honest workin men, and I wouldn’t if I could. However,” he said and knitted his fingers across his belly, “I reckon I done you one favor by tellin that foreign Zigerelli son of a bitch that, one way or another, messing with the good folk of Switch County would get him killed. That’s right, I happened to come along and find him lying out beside his car in the ditch, and whipped good he was too; and I told that dumb foreigner just what I’m tellin you: the people of Switch County are honest, hardworking, God-fearing people who won’t put up with a bunch of Reds stirrin up trouble and ill feelin.” Hub Farthing leaned forward and tapped his desk with his forefinger. “Yes, and I told him if any decent member of this community or any officer of the law got killed as a result of his seditious troublemaking, I’d see to it that he was hung. The syndicalism law backs me up on that, and I quoted him chapter and verse. So if you ain’t seen that little son of a bitch for a while, I reckon you can thank me for that much help anyway.”

Sheriff Hub Farthing leaned back again and knitted his fingers over his belly. “So there won’t be no misunderstanding and you’ll be clear on it, that same law applies to you,” he said. He looked them up and down. “You people are outlaws as far as I’m concerned,” he said. “And outlaws don’t come to a sheriff and ask to be protected.” He hocked and spat in the waste can beside his desk. “As far as I know,” he said, “no decent human being has yet been seriously hurt by your—”

With a deliberate, stiff dignity, as though it had never occurred to him that someone might try to stop him, Charles Tucker brushed Dunbar aside and took hold of Regus’s shotgun.

Music caught him in a bear hug from behind and pinned his arms. But even with such an advantage, he found himself being flung into walls and doorjambs as he tried to get him outside. Oddly, even Tucker’s bursts of strength seemed to come only now and again and with a stubborn deliberateness. And through it all he did not utter a sound of any kind, although Music grunted and swore and talked without ceasing, trying to calm him down. But he was calm enough already; he was merely determined, which was another matter, Music knew.

When at last he got Tucker outside, he didn’t know what to do with him. He was afraid to let him go. People passing by stopped to stare and point while Music asked over and over again, “Are you all right? Are you all right now?” and squeezed the man against his chest.

“Turn me aloose,” Tucker finally said; and, finally, Music did so, fearing what would happen. But the man only stood where he was and gazed across the courthouse square and far away.

“Are you all right?” Music asked him again.

“Yes,” he said, “yes, I’m all right,” and he began to walk away.

Music watched him climb into the bed of the Model T and wondered if he could trust him to stay there, but it didn’t matter, for Regus came down the courthouse steps in the next moment.

“Well?” Music said.

Regus looked at the solitary figure waiting in the bed of his truck, dark and still as a scorched fence post in a burned-over field. Then, distracted by the onlookers who seemed to find someone in a miner’s cap armed with a shotgun as curious as they had found Music’s earlier struggle, Regus eyed them until they dispersed nervously and went on about their business. “Less us git on home,” Regus said, “or somebody will have to grab me in a minute.”

But Regus told him later what had gone on in the sheriff’s office after he’d fought Tucker through the door. The sheriff had threatened them all with charges of criminal syndicalism and made it sound as though they could be arrested and charged for provoking others to murder them. And that had provoked Regus to make some threats of his own. Regus had told the sheriff to warn all the scabs and goons he was in bed with that any car or truck coming by squatterville at night with its lights out would be shot off the goddamned road; and to warn Kenton Hardcastle that Regus Patoff Bone didn’t fancy having his house shot up, and if it ever happened again, he was going to count the bullet holes and multiply by two before he returned the goddamned favor. Finally Regus had told the sheriff that any trespasser spied on Bone property was going to be treated like a murdering night rider and shot out of his boots.

They were sitting on the front edge of the dogtrot when Regus told him what had happened, Regus leaning forward resting his forearms on his knees, his hands folded before him. “So,” he said, “I reckon it’s done got mean.” His shoulders were hung forward as though he were weary, and he pursed his lips and made a long, breathy, almost inaudible whistle. After a moment he got out his plug of tobacco and his knife and cut himself a chew.

“Well, we’ll have to put on more guards, I guess,” Music said. “But we can still break ole Kenton Hardcastle down. We can still get a union in here.”

Regus looked down on squatterville, his forehead wrinkled thoughtfully, and he shook his head.

“Pretty soon we’ll need to get some more supplies someway, so we can hold out. We done it once, and I expect we can figure a way again,” Music said.

“I ain’t sure it would matter,” Regus said. “Ain’t no tellin how much money a man like Hardcastle’s got or can lay his hands on. For sure he won’t never run out of poor, dumb stiffs to dig his coal. Ha,” he said and shook his head sadly, “they’s just too many; it’s what Kentucky’s got most of, and every other state too, I reckon. Nawh,” Regus said. “We can strike him and we can fight him, but we can’t make him hire us.” Regus rubbed the palms of his hands together and looked at Music, his eyes wrinkling at the corners. “Since hit nearly always comes down to that, you’d think we’d learn after a while, wouldn’t ye now?”

Music said nothing.

“But, hell, maybe that don’t matter either,” Regus said, rubbing his palms slowly together. “Once the fightin starts, hit’s a little like two roosters facin off over a chicken yard; ye forget what ye wanted before long and just get down to the peckin and spurrin.”

They sat on the dogtrot and looked down upon squatterville, the tents, the trodden earth, the brown winter grass, all shades of sepia under the grey sky; and Music felt an unbidden, unwilling love crowd into his chest, as well as a stubborn, deep resentment against Hardcastle and all the forces he could muster. There were people gathered around the tent where the young man had been killed, from which the Tucker woman’s voice, ragged and soft now, yet rose from time to time to cry out or moan. And Charles Tucker stood by, still wearing his dark, baggy suit.

Men were digging a grave in the little cemetery at the top of Regus’s pasture, from which, now and again, the clink of a pick or shovel striking a stone would reach the dogtrot. Music had learned the body of the young man had been washed, dressed in his finest, and sewn into a canvas shroud, but that Charles Tucker had been persuaded to take the shoes from his son’s feet at the very last minute, since they were only a few months old and the boy’s mother had all but walked out of her own. It would be a sin, the neighbors told him, to bury such good shoes in the ground in the middle of winter when his wife could put them to use. A man came into the world without shoes, they told him, and surely the Lord God, born in a manger, would understand a miner’s son leaving without them.

Music hadn’t seen the body, but he had a picture of the boy in his head: all dressed up, his hair tamed and combed just so, and his big feet ridiculously white and bare. He rolled himself a cigarette and lit it, and then almost immediately snapped it away. “I reckon I’ll go up and help with the digging,” he said.

Regus merely nodded.

When the preacher returned, he would read over the body, so there was no ceremony in the little graveyard. The boy’s mother was not present; she had collapsed at the bottom edge of the pasture and had been carried back to her tent. The rest of them, standing awkwardly and stiffly about the cemetery, seemed to know the young man’s death was indiscriminate—even if his mother did not—a random, deadly hit among all the shots fired and dynamite thrown, and therefore senseless and stupefying and outside the province of things to be mourned. Even Charles Tucker seemed to know that. But if the woman had been there, it would have been different. She knew something else, which Music had heard the night before in her screams. Fate had singled her out among all the others and willfully chosen to tear her son from her, and she would have taught them to grieve.

Lewis Short came up to Music after the grave was covered over to tell him that one of the families had decided to move out. And it was true. The father and mother and two daughters—everyone except the little boy who had been shot through the elbow—had tied up such belongings as they could carry and were about to leave that very moment and on foot. The man’s brother owned a little ragtag farm better than forty miles away, and they intended to walk.

“The hell, you say,” Regus told him. “If yer bent on leavin, help me load what ye own in the truck, and I’ll carry ye.”

“I’m obliged,” the man said, “but it’s not a goon in Switch County that don’t know that truck, and I’m feared …” The man looked at his feet. “… I’m feared the missus couldn’t take bein shot at no more.”

“God damn you for runnin out,” the angry young miner said, but the man paid him no attention, except to color around the neck and ears.

“Anyhow,” the man said, “won’t nobody bother us, we bein afoot. We’ll git there tomorrow or the day after, and I reckon my brother won’t be so likely to turn us away and us a-walkin.” He shook hands with Regus and Music and some of the others, but the angry young miner would not shake his hand. “I reckon anybody that wants hit, can have what we’ve left. God knows,” he said, looking toward his tent and the few possessions in and around it, “hit ain’t nothin there that’s fitten noway.”

“Yer a coward to let Hardcastle run ye! Ye know that!” the angry young miner said, but the man only nodded to him and to the rest of them as though he’d been wished a safe journey, and he ushered his family into the road.

“Hell,” another man said, as the family strung out along the highway toward Valle Crucis, “I reckon I’d leave myself if I had airey place to go.”

“Well, God damn you too then!” the young miner said.

“Yer a-missin a good chance to keep yer mouth shut,” Charles Tucker said calmly, not even turning to look at the young miner, but watching the family’s slow progress north, all of them carrying bundles except the little boy, who carried only his ruined arm, thick with bandages, strapped to his chest.

24

THE MINERS COME HOME
FROM CHICAGO

IT RAINED STEADILY, a cold rain that kept Music’s teeth chattering despite the piece of canvas he clutched about his head and shoulders like a shawl. Crouched in the slash beside the road, he didn’t even have to ask himself what he would do if a car approached with its lights out. Exactly when his uncertainty about such things had left him, he didn’t know, but it was gone. If night riders came, he would draw the Walker Colt and, providing his powder was still dry, show them, by God, its ancient thunder and lightning.

But no night riders appeared. The rain rattled against his leaking canvas shawl, the muscles in his legs cramped, and periodic waves of tremors shook him when they pleased. Perhaps because he’d had no sleep the night before, long stretches of time passed when there wasn’t a single thought in his head. He was awake, his eyes were open, but it was as though the stations of his brain could only note the dark road and his chilled, unstable flesh.

After what seemed like hours, he tried to make himself a cigarette, but his fingers, all puckers and wrinkles, were numb, and he tore the cigarette paper and sprinkled his britches and damp hands with clinging flakes of tobacco. He warmed his hands in his armpits, dried them as well as he could on his shirt front, and tried again, producing, finally, a loose creation which he tucked into the corner of his mouth. His matches were damp too, and the heads of three or four of them crumbled against his thumbnail before he found one that snapped and flared. He lit his cigarette and in the light of the match checked the time on Regus’s pocket watch. Almost an hour and a half to go, but hellkatoot, he told himself, that was nearly nothing. It wasn’t as if he couldn’t do it. He took a drag on the cigarette and a terrific seizure of shaking rattled his bones.

It occurred to him that if there were gun thugs about, they might have seen the flare of his match, might, at that very moment, be taking a bead on the glowing coal of his cigarette beneath the hood of canvas, but it was a consideration that lacked the power to disturb him. Almost as if he were taking their side in the matter, he muttered, “You better hit me with the first shot,” and smoked stubbornly until the cigarette grew so short it burned his lips and he had to spit it out. It was as though he were out of patience and had lost all ability to discriminate. Perhaps standing by the fresh grave had done it; perhaps wrestling Charles Tucker from the courthouse, which made twice, by his count, he’d kept some poor son of a bitch from shooting the sheriff or vice versa; perhaps it was watching the family set out to walk forty miles to kinfolk who likely wouldn’t be able to support them any more than they could turn them away. He didn’t know exactly what had put him in his present mood, but he felt as if all things had lost their power to signify, and doing one thing was no better or worse than doing another. It seemed to him that, in a proper world, all things ought to signify. But in this one, the one he knew, who could stand it? Not him.

His teeth rattled. His flesh seemed bound to shake loose from his bones. He stared down the road, and it was a long time later when he managed to strike another match and read by Regus’s pocket watch that his three hours of guarding the road were more than over. To his surprise, his legs nearly refused to raise him up or carry him. They felt like posts, like brass pipes, and they jarred him when he walked. Even his feet were clumsy and had a great deal of trouble accommodating the uneven ground. Still, as unwilling as the cold machinery of his body was, it brought him into the huddled shelters of squatterville, where he stuck his head into Lewis Short’s tent. He could make out nothing in the damp, fetid space inside, but it didn’t matter, for somewhere among the shifting sounds of sleep, Lewis’s voice said softly, “All right,” and Music backed out into the far colder outside air to wait.