Hardcastle (6 page)

“Hit’s all right,” Regus said, but he was looking at Music, his eyes grey as dawn. “I expect you’ll read to Ella outten her Bible now,” he said.

Music took the Bible up. “What part would you like to hear, missus?”

The woman stood at the stove with her hands folded into her apron. “I’d like hit if ye’d begin at the start,” she said.

Regus got up, stepped into the front room, and reappeared at once with a rocking chair, which he placed just inside the door by the woodbox. “Set yourself down, Momma,” he said.

Music half turned from the table so as to catch the light from a kerosene lamp in the windowsill, and slowly and with great care, he began. “‘In the beginning,’” he read, “‘God created the heaven and the earth.’”

“Amen,” the woman whispered and rocked herself, her eyes closed in concentration.

“‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.’”

“Amen,” she said.

He read to the end of the second chapter of Genesis and stumbled only over the names of the rivers flowing out of Eden and one or two other words. At the beginning of the third chapter of Genesis, she stopped him. “That’ll do,” she said, “that’ll do handsomely. You read s’purty and s’fine; but if ye’d just as soon, I’ll not hear of the serpent this evenin.”

Music closed the Bible and gave it to her, and she held it against her breast. “I never had a finer supper, missus,” he told her. “I’m obliged to you.”

“I wasn’t studyin company,” she said, but her voice was far away.

“Well,” Regus said, “if I ain’t to go coon huntin like I’d started, I reckon hit’s time to bed down.”

“That room ain’t fittin,” the woman said, letting the Bible sink to her lap, her voice once again strong.

“They’s a tick in there,” Regus said, “a tight roof. Hit’ll serve as well as airey haystack.”

The woman did not speak further. She looked reproachfully in the direction of Regus’s shoe tops, got up, and went into the front room. She returned at once with a heavy quilt and gave it to Music, who had gotten up with Regus. “I’m grateful,” Music said.

Outside on the dogtrot, Regus took the lantern hanging on a peg by the kitchen door, lit it, and handed it to Music. “Ye’ll be shet in,” Regus said. He wiped his forefinger back and forth under his nose. “I ain’t so quick to ken a fellow as Momma,” he said. “I’ll need to think ye over.” He looked embarrassed. Even in the lamplight Music could see the flush creeping up his neck toward his ears. “I nailed the winders shet, and I’m goan wedge a prop agin yer door.” He spat off the end of the dogtrot, his ears red. “I’ll let ye out come mornin and carry ye acrost the county line.” For a moment neither of them spoke. “Hold on,” Regus said. He went into the back room across the dogtrot and came out with a chamber pot, which he handed to Music. He picked up what appeared to be a rail lifted from a fence. “Twon’t be airey way out but one,” he said, “and that’s over me.”

Music lifted the latch and went in the room. Regus shut the door behind him. The rail thumped against it and squawked tight. Music raised the lantern and looked at the strings of leather britches beans, apple snits, and rings of dried pumpkin hung from the low rafters. Against the front wall there were small, straw-filled bins of potatoes, onions, turnips, and carrots. There was no furniture in the room, but on the floor in the northwest corner there was a tick discolored with ancient stains. He dropped his quilt upon it, set his lantern and chamber pot on the floor, and stood for a moment considering the quality of his luck. “Jesus,” he said, puzzling over being captured, questioned, fed, asked to read from the Bible, and, finally, penned. He didn’t know if he should be grateful or mad. “Jesus,” he muttered, and sat down on the tick, noisy with dry cornshucks. He gazed stupidly at his feet and tried to puzzle it all out, but his mind refused to work. After a moment, more asleep than awake, he took off his shoes, rolled his coat for a pillow, turned the wick down on the lantern, and blew out the weak rim of flame. He lay back against the rustle and crackle of cornshucks and covered himself with the quilt. “Hellkatoot,” he whispered.

4

A JOB

HE WOKE THINKING he was watching a red-tailed hawk, harried by crows, barrel-rolling over the ridge behind his father’s house. The crows dived at it in odd, dead silence while the long, piercing whistle of the hawk drew him out of sleep; yet the moment he opened his eyes he knew where he was, even before the sound faded. It wasn’t a train. A steam whistle from the coal camp back in Elkin, he guessed. He shifted on the cornshuck tick, surprised to feel none of the stiffness that plagued him when he’d slept on the ground or in a boxcar. He felt good, well fed, rested, as though all he needed to restore him was a single meal and one night in a house.

As if he had gone to sleep only a moment before, the question of his luck still haunted his thoughts, but it seemed suddenly clear to him that, in the small but important matters which kept a man from day to day, he did have luck, good luck. He merely did not have it on a grand scale. He would not go home driving a car and wearing a fine suit of clothes, but afoot, ragged, and possessing only the simple luck that had kept him. Still, if a man could learn to be content with that, where was the blame?

Across the dogtrot he heard sounds. The household was awake. He sat up, eyed the chamber pot distastefully, and decided to knock on the door to be let out. He put on his shoes, got up to try the latch, and found the door opened easily onto the breezeway. The dog was curled outside and, by way of greeting, raised his head and gave Music a huge, whining yawn, stretching his jaws, vapor rising from the ridged roof of his mouth and long curling tongue in the morning air. “Fetlock, is it?” Music asked him, and the dog sneezed and thumped his tail against the floor. “You son of a bitch,” Music told him and stepped off the end of the breezeway, making for the outhouse, but just at that moment the kitchen door opened and Ella Bone appeared. “I thought I heard ye,” she said. She waved him away. “Go on about yer business. I’ll set ye out some wash water.” She disappeared back into the kitchen before he could thank her.

There had been a frost, as he’d expected, and the metallic smell of it was still in the air, although the grass and earth were rimed with white only in the lee of the house and corncrib where the sun had not yet reached. His breath steamed before him, and the sun warmed his shoulders.

The rank outhouse had a catalogue in it and a rusted bucket half full of corncobs. The smell and look of it were as familiar to him as his childhood, and he considered it for a moment in the light of the distances he had traveled, the cities he had seen and dwelt in, and almost without rancor he began to laugh.

When he approached the house again, he saw that a flour-sack towel, a cake of homemade lye soap, and a smoking pan of hot water had been laid out for him on the simple shelf beneath the kitchen window. He rolled his sleeves and washed his hands and face and the back of his neck, scrubbing so vigorously and with such great pleasure he did not hear Regus come up behind him.

“Would ye like the use of a razor then?” Regus said, and Music turned, but his eyes were bleared and burning with lye soap and he could scarcely see.

“If it wouldn’t trouble you,” he said. “I left mine in a pawnshop out in Dodge City.”

Regus bobbed his head and went up on the dogtrot carrying a bucket of milk.

In order not to waste the use of soap and hot water, Music thought better of merely washing his face and hands and stripped off his shirt and undershirt and bathed his chest and arms, which smoked too in the cold air. Regus brought out a razor, cup, and brush and hung a leather strop for him from a hook at the end of the rough shelf. He left the things without a word and went back into the kitchen. There was a shard of mirror propped in the window frame, and Music squinted into it as he lathered, scarcely recognizing the wild-looking face covered with better than a quarter inch of stubble which stared back at him. No goddamned wonder they shut you up, he told himself. His shirt and undershirt were rancid and offensive when he put them on again, but there was no help for it. He cleaned the razor, stropped it, and dashed out his water.

“I’m obliged to you,” he told the woman when he carried the basin and shaving things back inside.

“Well,” Ella said, “you look a sight better. Lay em yonder,” she said, motioning toward the sideboard. “Just got the milk strained, and Regus stepped down to the springhouse with it. Set ye down to breakfast. Regus’ll be on back ere you get yer chair pulled up.”

He put the shaving things on the sideboard. “Missus,” he said, “you’ve got no call to feed me again. I could run a week on that supper last night.”

She caught up the hem of the ragged apron tied about her waist and used it to open the oven door and take out a pan of biscuits. “Set up to the table. I’ll not have ye hungry in this house, nor hear the contrary.”

Music did as she bid him, and in a moment she put a plate before him with biscuits, eggs, and a slab of bacon on it. “Eat them victuals, son,” she said, and he found it easy to accommodate her, for his appetite was fierce, as though it had taken no more than supper the night before to reestablish the habit of eating. She set a cracked, lidless tureen of gravy and a second plate of food on the table just as Regus’s heavy footsteps sounded upon the dogtrot. He came in and, all in one motion it seemed, set his bucket on the sideboard, pulled his chair up to the table, and covered his biscuits and eggs with gravy until his plate was swimming in it. “If it won’t fer gravy,” Regus said apologetically, “a lot of little babies would have died.”

“I’ve heard that,” Music said and laughed and took some gravy himself.

But it was as if the two of them could think of nothing further to say, for they gave over at once to silence and eating. Nor did Ella speak. Yet somehow an awkward prelude to speaking seemed to grow in the room. Music could sense it so strongly that by the time the two of them had finished and Ella had replenished the coffee in their chipped enameled cups, his ears had grown warm with it.

At last Regus cleared his throat, and after a moment said, “Momma’s got the gift of prophecy in her dreams.” His neck was rosy, but his voice was calm and even and his eyes were perfectly serious, as though he were delivering a speech he had practiced. “She’s stronger with the Lord than most folks,” he said and ran his finger back and forth under his nose. “She says you are to stay with us.”

Music looked at the woman by the stove, her hands rolled into her apron, her head tilted to one side after her fashion. Her face was without expression and she offered no word. Hellkatoot, he thought, what sort of hocus-pocus is this?

“Momma ain’t often wrong with it,” Regus went on, “only once in a great while.”

“Hit ain’t never the dream ner prophecy that’s wrong,” Ella said. “Hit’s just that I don’t, ever time, ken the proper meaning.”

“I think I’d best get on to Virginia,” Music said after a moment, “but I thank you.”

“Tain’t no thanks due us,” she said. “Hit’s only that the dream said otherwise.”

“Well,” Regus said and raised his brows, “well, I said I’d carry ye outten the county, and so I will; but if you want to pull some time as a mine guard, I can get ye in. I’ll not try to fool with you that it’s airey sort of proper job, for hit’s not.” He propped his elbows on the table and held the enameled coffee cup between his large, chapped hands. His expression was serious for a moment before his eyes seemed to flash with a sudden humor. “Still yet,” he said, “the pay’s all right, three dollars a day, and you can draw it in money or clacker as ye choose.” He sucked his teeth and turned to look at the woman, although he continued to speak to Music. “But if you’d just as lief go to Virginy, I’ll carry ye acrost the county line, and Momma will have to read another feller into her dream.”

Ella Bone gave no sign, but merely took their plates from the table and set them in the dishpan.

“What’s this clacker?” Music asked, as if it were the only question he was capable of, as if his decision rested on the answer.

“Why hit’s scrip,” Regus said and laughed. “I beg yer pardon,” he said, “you done already said you wuz just passin through.” He scratched the back of his tawny head. “Hit’s minted off in Cincinnati, I think it is. You can’t trade on it except at the commissary. Hit don’t sound right a-jinglin in yer pocket, don’t ye know, not like proper money.”

“I guess I’ll hire on,” Music said.

Ella Bone raised her hands as though to deliver a blessing and said, “Praise His name.”

5

HIRING ON AND
SWEARING IN

AS THE MODEL T truck pecked along the highway into Valle Crucis, Music rode with his elbow out the window and a skinny cigarette, more spit and paper than tobacco, hanging from his lips. He felt both wildly happy and a little peculiar. He would have taken any sort of job for three dollars a day and asked no questions; it was only that the woman’s dream bothered him, as though, once again, he had done something half-cocked such as jumping off a highballing freight into the middle of Kansas. Still, he reasoned, he was riding and not walking, fed and not hungry. Clean-shaven, his hair wetted, tamed, and combed, he was even on his way to a high-paying job; and as the Model T pecked and growled through Valle Crucis, past the depot and stores, the hotel and courthouse, he felt almost important, at least until the truck began to growl up a long hill with fine, big, white houses fronting either side of the street. At one, grander even than the others but for worn and faded awnings shading the windows and the huge front porch, and a little peeling paint here and there, Regus pulled up and stopped.

The two of them got out and walked around to the back, where there was a pavilion, a pool with a fountain in the center and many marble benches parked comfortably in the shade of trees and shrubs. Wealth, Music realized, made him nervous; but it didn’t seem to bother Regus, who banged loudly on the door and turned his head to spit when a thin, grouchy-looking colored woman appeared. They had business with Mr. Kenton Hardcastle and she should fetch him, he told her.