Hardcastle (9 page)

“That’s Momma’s strongest word,” Regus said. “She don’t throw it around.” He handed the pistol to Music holding it by the barrel. “But I don’t know that this here is such a grand idea as it seemed,” Regus said. “Reckon you can make it shoot?”

“Jesus Christ,” Music said as he took it, “must weigh five pounds.” He turned it over and over in his hands, looking at it. “I don’t know,” he said. “I think so.”

For the next hour or so he and Regus discussed, dismantled, and cleaned it. Music thought the balls should be patched but could find no patching material in the musette bag. Regus had seen his father shoot the pistol when he was a boy, and didn’t remember him using any sort of cloth, but his memory of the time was very dim. Still, when Music set one of the .44 balls atop a cylinder, he could see there would be no room for a patch. Finally, after they thought they understood the gun’s operation, they took it and all the paraphernalia outside, Fetlock weaving in and out of their legs and dancing in excitement at the mere sight and smell of a gun. Music poured the slightly lumpy black powder from the flask into each cylinder, leaving only enough room for the ball. He placed the first ball atop the cylinder, centered the sprue, and rammed the ball home with the levered plunger beneath the barrel. The ball was enough larger than the chamber that seating it sheared off a thin ring of lead. “You’re right,” Music said, showing him; “for certain there ain’t room for a patch.”

When Music had the pistol fully loaded and capped, Regus found an empty sardine tin in the trash heap below the barn. With great flourish and ceremony he set it upright against the mud bank below the outhouse, stepped off twenty-five paces, and said, “Well, see what you can do.”

“Go ahead,” Music said, offering him the pistol.

Regus didn’t even look at it. Instead, his eyes lit with humor, he looked at Music, cut himself a chew of tobacco, and bit it off the blade of his pocketknife. He tucked the quid in his cheek and said, “I think the feller that loaded that goddam horse pistol ort to have to shoot her,” and he stepped back and stuck his fingers in his ears. In the loud, flat voice of a deaf man he said, “I ain’t so sure she won’t blow up,” and spat an amber stream of tobacco juice out before him.

Somewhat uneasily Music sat down, cocked the hammer, rested his elbows on his knees, and holding the pistol with both hands, took careful aim. He squeezed the trigger. The hammer fell, but the gun did not fire. “Shit,” he said, “no good, damn percussion cap.”

“Aire you goan shoot that cannon er not?” Regus shouted behind him.

“It didn’t shoot,” Music said.

“What?” Regus shouted.

“It didn’t go off,” Music shouted.

He cocked the hammer again, steadied himself, took aim, and pulled the trigger; and this time the pistol bucked and roared, and when the smoke cleared, they saw a very large hole in the mud four inches above and two inches to the right of the sardine can.

“Whooee!” Regus shouted.

Behind the barn, Fetlock began a croupy baying.

Music fired again and there was a second hole two inches from the first.

“Whooee!” Regus shouted.

Fetlock came around the barn, drew up by the corncrib, and looking from one of them to the other, confused but happy, bayed again and again, his front feet bouncing off the ground each time he gave tongue.

Ella Bone even appeared for a moment on the dogtrot, shading her eyes with her hand to look at them, before, shaking her head, she went back into the kitchen.

Music recocked the piece and fired a third time, and the pistol thundered like a cannon. Flame and smoke fanned out before him, and the recoil flung his arms over his head, nearly knocking him over backwards.

“Hot damn!” Regus shouted behind him. “Aire ye hurt, Bill Music?”

Music rocked forward again on his buttocks, and his feet came to rest on the ground. Regus hurried up beside him while Music turned the pistol carefully this way and that in his hands, looking at it as though it might decide to fire again, willy-nilly. Nothing, however, appeared to be wrong with it.

“Did she blow up?” Regus said.

“I don’t know,” Music said, still inspecting it at arm’s length as though it were a deadly serpent; “I don’t think so.” His ears were ringing so badly he could scarcely hear; and his trigger finger, which he had just discovered was burned black, was beginning to hurt. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “Kicked like hell.”

“Look,” Regus said and pointed through the thinning smoke, and Music saw a third hole in the bank in line with the first two, and yet a fourth hole three feet further to the right.

“Seems to have shot twice, someway,” Music said and cautiously looked at the open end of the cylinder. At first it appeared all the chambers were empty. “Great God,” he said, “I think the son of a bitch emptied itself.” But then he saw that there was one charge remaining. Fetlock came up, low to the ground and trembling, his whining scarcely distinguishable from the ringing in Music’s ears. “Christ,” Music said, “it’s like a cannon full of grapeshot, for God’s sake. Here.” He handed it to Regus. “There’s one chamber still charged; you shoot the son of a bitch!” Delicately, at arm’s length, they passed the pistol from hand to hand.

Regus chewed on his quid of tobacco and turned the pistol inquisitively this way and that, inspecting it. “I don’t know as I’m curious,” he said.

Music shook his left hand as though he were drying it of water and sucked his burned trigger finger for a moment. “Hell,” he said, “it can’t shoot but once now; there ain’t but one load left in it.”

“Yawl didn’t grease it, didya?” Ella Bone shouted from the dogtrot, and they both turned to look at her where she stood, her hand shading her eyes. They looked at each other.

“Grease it where?” Regus asked. “Didn’t know we wuz supposed to grease it.”

“I reckon they’s lots of things you don’t know,” Ella Bone said and went back into the kitchen.

“I think we need to have a talk with Momma,” Regus said. “It was her daddy used to carry the contrary thing.”

Music sucked his burned trigger finger. “Empty the son of a bitch and we will. I’m nearly deaf as it is.”

“Well,” Regus said uncertainly, “stand back.”

Music stood back and stuck his fingers in his ears, and Regus cocked the pistol and brought it slowly down on the sardine can. Music, standing to the side, saw the hammer fall, but nothing happened. He took his fingers out of his ears and said, “Cock her again; it’s the next chamber that’s loaded.”

Regus made his knees wobble. “This here piece could make a man gun-shy,” he said, but in the same smooth, mechanical motion he cocked the hammer and brought the pistol to bear on the sardine can, which, when the pistol spouted smoke and flame, went sailing over the top edge of the bank.

“I took a little Kentucky windage on it,” Regus said apologetically, “since you seemed to be shooting a mite high and to the right.”

Still, when they retrieved the can from the field above the bank, they found it virtually unscathed, the ball merely having brushed its bottom edge. They set it again where it had been before and went in to talk to Ella, who, it turned out, knew all sorts of things they didn’t know. Her father had put a layer of cornmeal down on the powder before seating the balls and had put a layer of hog lard over the tops of the balls after they had been seated in the chambers, all in order to keep more than one chamber from going off at a time. The lard alone was good enough in cold weather, Ella explained, but when it was hot, the lard would sometimes melt and run out, and therefore wouldn’t work. Music sucked his trigger finger and listened closely. The cornmeal, Ella said, worked in any weather. Finally, with an edge of disgust in her voice, she said, “Let me see the abominable thing, for I disremember it.”

Regus handed it over obediently.

Ella took it, raised the hammer to half-cock, and rotated the cylinder. “Yep,” she said, “I ken the problem now. Wouldn’t load but five shots in this here one. They’s some that have little notches to rest the nose of the hammer in betwixt the nipples, but this here one ain’t so sure. Ye’ll want to let the hammer rest on the empty chamber; otherwise a hard knock might jest set her off.”

Regus looked at Music and raised his eyebrows. His mother gave him back the pistol.

“I thank you, ma’am,” Music told her.

“Hmph,” the woman said, “if I thought the two of ye wouldn’t shoot up the place, ner yer feet, ner lose an eye, ye’d have no word from me.”

Somewhat humbled, the two of them found that, thereafter, the pistol practice went much better. Music discovered that, one out of three shots, he could hit the sardine tin, and that blasting powder, crushed with a spoon against the bottom of a saucer, worked as well as the powder in the flask. Only the green, corroded percussion caps could not be made dependable; and without much hope they set out to Valle Crucis for others.

But at the Farmers’ Hardware store off the courthouse square a clerk knelt behind the counter and rummaged far back on a dusty shelf to set tin after tin of percussion caps before them. He passed the tins over his shoulder, blowing the dust from the top of each as he found it. There were caps of many sizes, including two tins of size thirteen, which fit the old Walker Colt perfectly. Even though the tins contained one hundred caps apiece, they bought them both, as well as ten pounds of lead, which, including the new shirt and tobacco, put Music a dollar and twelve cents in debt.

Home again, the pistol cleaned and loaded, they discovered the problem of the cavalry holster, which, no matter how it was worn, would not permit the pistol to be drawn with the right hand. “Hit was the sword they used in the right hand,” Ella explained as she watched them struggling with it and puzzling over it.

“Well,” Regus said, “hit was yore poppa’s.”

“I don’t care nuthin for hit,” Ella said. She looked at his shoe tops and shook her head. “I reckon you want it rigged up on the chest like yourn,” she said to Regus.

“Would be best,” Regus said.

“God forgive me,” Ella said, “give it here.” And while they heated the bullet mold atop the stove and melted lead in a small tin pot shoved in the firebox, Ella removed the flap of the holster, reversed the belt loop, and measured Music’s chest and shoulders again and again with a little string of rag.

By the time they had sixty or so acceptable, shiny .44 balls cooling on a rag beside the stove, Ella had contrived a shoulder holster of great utility and comfort, even though the sight of it caused Regus to pinch his eyes shut and shake his head with laughter. Since no extra leather or buckles were in the house, Ella had made the necessary straps and hangers from a feed sack patterned with bright blue and pink cornflowers, and to fasten the contrivance together she had used the largest buttons she could find, which happened to be made of yellow glass and were somewhat larger than twenty-five-cent pieces. Even with his coat on, Music looked ridiculous, since a four-inch-wide band of the material circled his middle like an outrageous cummerbund and the huge Walker Colt made a lump beneath his coat as large as if he had strapped a full-grown rabbit to the left side of his chest. Only the butt of the Colt peeking out from beneath his lapel suggested otherwise.

As a consequence, all through supper and even twice during the Bible reading, often without even looking in Music’s direction, Regus would suddenly begin shaking with laughter. When, during the fifth chapter of Genesis, he took a third fit of laughing, Ella raised her hand to silence Music and said, “Son, if ye’ve no respect for the Scriptures, I’d as lief you took yerself off.”

“I’m sorry, Momma, I surely am,” Regus said, but shaking his head and laughing still, he got up and went out upon the dogtrot, closing the door behind him.

When Music had finished the fifth chapter, Ella said, “Son, I reckon I could listen to ye read till the Lord called me home, but ye shouldn’t let me misuse you so.”

“It’s no trouble,” Music said. “My momma used to read the Bible to me and my brothers every night until we got nearly grown.”

“Did she then?” Ella said. “That’s so fine. It’s ever been a sorrow to me that I can’t read the Scriptures for myself. Sometimes I used to open the book and just stare at all the writin thinkin to myself that if I just stared long enough, hit’ud come to me what it meant, don’t ye know.” Ella laughed and sighed. “Did ye ever hear such foolishness?” She threw her hands up as though astounded at her own simplicity. “I do it still yet sometimes. Ain’t got no sense,” she said.

After a moment Music said, “I’d borrow paper and pencil from you if I could. Bein set up here and all makes me think I ought to send my people some word. I guess you sort of remind me of home.”

“Why surely, son,” Ella said, “if I can find any such things.”

“I hate to bother you, missus,” Music said.

“No bother in it,” Ella said. “I know they’s a stub of a pencil around here sommers.” She went off into her room, where Music could hear her rummaging around. “Don’t know as I can find you paper fit to write on though.” Music could hear drawers opening and closing and things rattling around. “Well now, here,” she said, “I don’t see why this won’t serve.”

When she returned, she handed him a chewed red stub of a pencil and a yellowing piece of heavy white paper, which, when he unfolded it, turned out to be something very like a death certificate for someone named Cleveland Edward Bone. After a moment Music saw that it had been issued by a mining company and entitled Ella Cody Bone, as the dead man’s spouse, to receive thirty dollars a month compensation until she remarried or until her death.

“I reckon ye can use the back of it well enough,” Ella Bone was saying.

“No, missus,” Music said, “this is important and you need to keep it.”

“Aww, son,” Ella Bone said, “I know what hit is, and that company has long since gone broke. Hit ain’t worth a thing in this world. You jest mark out the front and write on the back. Hit’s right nice paper.”

But Music would not use it. He found a paper bag instead and cut a square from it with his pocketknife. He felt called upon to say something to her, to thank her for all her help, for taking him in, to console her for the death of her husband nearly ten years before, but she was already busy over the sink with her pots and pans. “You write yer folks and tell em I’m a-feedin ye and keepin ye out of the weather,” she said cheerfully.