The Long Home (23 page)

The curious altered time of three o’clock in the morning. Pearl sat watching Hardin and the girl. Hardin was as near drunk as he ever seemed to get and he kept feeding the girl whiskey and Coke from his glass. She was watching with a sense of apprehension, a sense of things slipping away from her. Hardin leaned to the girl’s ear and whispered something low and then he laughed softly to himself and cupped her breast with a palm. The girl shook her head from side to side. She was tugging at Hardin’s hand. “Quit it,” she said. Hardin released her breast. He put both elbows on the scarred tabletop and studied the girl’s face with an almost clinical detachment. Her eyes looked drowsy and vague, her face had a slack sleeprobbed look.

Finally Pearl said, “That girl ain’t used to drinkin.”

“Then it’s high time she learned.”

“What else you been teachin her? To be a whore?”

“From what I hear she ort to be givin me lessons.”

“I won’t have you messin her up no worse than what you already have.”

“Say you won’t? Live half your life with your legs spread and come on to me like a preacher? Shit. What you want and what you get don’t always make a set,” Hardin said. “But it’s late and I had a hard night and more of one still to go and I don’t need you yammerin at me like a Goddamned watchdog. And you a fine one to talk about drinkin. Stumblin around like a fat sow on your sourmash.”

There was a strange anticipatory air about Hardin, a mood she had come to recognize down through the years, though she had never understood or articulated it, as if he dwelt from time to time in some world where everything was heightened, the sounds clearer, the colors brighter and richer, as if he moved briefly through a world of hallucinatory marvels. As if he were never fully alive save when he was nearing the edge.

A moment of insight touched her. “You aim to kill old man Oliver and burn him out, don’t you?” I heard some of what that law said.”

“You hear ever damn thing that ain’t nothin to you,” Hardin said. “Slippin and spyin around. I think by God you’re goin crazy, and I just may have to put you away too. You gettin a little loose at the lip to suit me. Sullin up and pouting around like your little feelins is hurt. Givin away enough whiskey to float a Goddamn motorboat. If you’d just get your ass in bed it’d suit me fine.”

He turned abruptly toward the girl, seeming by the mere motion of his head to deny Pearl’s very existence. He put his hand on the girl’s left breast.

“You wantin to kill him. You look forward to it.”

Hardin didn’t reply. His yellow eyes were halfclosed. He stroked Amber Rose’s breast, massaged it gently with a slow, circular motion of his palm. She raised her eyes to his but she didn’t resist. Hardin’s motions were slow and deliberate, like motions seen underwater. Her face looked young and very pretty and suddenly Hardin saw past the young woman’s face to the features of the child he had seen long ago throwing rocks at Thomas Hovington’s chickens and he thought for a moment on the curious circuitry of things but he did not dwell on it.

“What’s the matter with her? What did you give her?”

“I ain’t give her nothin yet but I may here in a minute if I can get your fat ass out of the room long enough.”

“You can get it further than that,” Pearl said. “I’ve stood all I can stand. It’s took me long enough but I’ve got a bait of you. I’m buyin me a bus ticket as long as my arm and I’m ridin till it’s used up and that’s where I’m gettin off. And I’m takin Rose with me.”

“The hell you are.”

“She’s my daughter and I’m takin her.”

“Daughter, hell. Sows don’t have daughters. They have pigs and them pigs grow up to be other sows.”

“I always done what you said no matter how dirty you done me. All I ever asked was you to leave Rose alone. You promised me you would.”

“Then I guess I lied,” Hardin said. He arose, stood for a moment leaning unsteadily against the table. He looked at the gold wristwatch. “But I reckon she’ll keep. I got things to do.”

He crossed the room and went through the bedroom door. When he came back he was carrying the rifle slung under his arm and he went out into the night.

About what he guessed was four o’clock in the morning Oliver saw the Packard go up the road toward town and he arose in confusion. He’d expected Hardin on foot, but there was no mistaking the Packard’s taillights. He was waiting for it to stop but it did not stop. He was still watching the fleeing taillights when the shotgun fired and he leapt and spilled cold coffee down his shirtfront but he didn’t feel it. He felt a surging of adrenaline sing in his blood and there as a metallic taste like canker in the back of his mouth. He went scrambling awkwardly down the ladder.

Oliver came up the steps to the back porch in a sort of stumbling lope. His breath was coming hard and ragged. There was an enormous hole in the screendoor. The center brace, shotriddled, hung by a shard of screen wire. He looked all about the porch, puzzled. What the hell now, he thought. Could he have made it in before the gun went off? No way in hell, he told himself. He felt a momentary stab of superstitious fear: Was the son of a bitch real, was he flesh and blood? All there was beyond the exploded screen was darkness.

Inside he struck a match on his thumbnail, unglobed the lamp, conscious of the smell of cordite, of other smells, a coarse odor of raw whiskey, an almost animal smell of perspiration, then the room filled up with yellow coaloil-smelling light. At length Oliver turned.

Hardin was hunkered against the far wall. He had the 30-30 cradled between his knees, barrel drawn up against his chest. The yellow goat’s eyes were not blank, the old man saw, still holding the lampglobe, but worse than blank, like nothing, like holes poked in a mockup face through which you could catch a glimpse of a sere and lifeless yellow landscape.

“I seen that done once before,” Hardin said. “All the same you’re a slick old bastard. But a man comes up on a house with the front door barred and the windows nailed shut it kindly give him a peculiar feelin when he sees the back door standin wide open. And a feller goes through another man’s door straight on in the middle of the night is tryin to get in good with the undertaker.”

“How’d you—”

“I poked it back with a stick and it’s a damn good thing I did. What you ort t’ve done was to’ve stretched you a string across the door about ankle high and tied it to the trigger. That way I’d ’ve pushed the door back with a stick then eased on in thinkin I had it made and you’d’ve had kindly an unpleasant surprise for me. As it is you’ve kindly shit your nest, ain’t you?”

Oliver’s mouth tasted dry. “What I ort to have done was to laid out in the brush and shot you in the back a long time ago.”

Hardin got up. “Well, you didn’t,” he said. He sounded amused, almost jovial, as if his nearness to death had made him more alive. “You didn’t and you won’t because your ass is mine now. You tried to kill me and it didn’t come off and the way I see it that’s the first lick. The next one’s mine. That the way it looks to you?”

“The first lick come a long time ago.”

“This is between me and you.”

“No. The truth is it ain’t. At one time it might’ve been but you can’t let well enough alone. You have to try to drag that boy into the same river of shit you swim in and when he won’t you hire him halfkilled. You can’t even do it yourself.”

Oliver globed the lamp and the room brightened perceptibly. He could feel the reassuring weight of the pistol dragging down his jumper pocket and he shifted his balance and turned that side slightly away from Hardin toward the window.

“I reckon you get to do the talkin,” he said. “You got all the high cards.”

“Yes I have,” Hardin agreed. “And I’m about to lay out my hand. I been slackin off, easin up, givin all you cocksuckers too much rope. I ort to’ve klled young Winer instead of tryin to teach him a lesson. But once a fool ain’t always a fool. I’ll put him where his daddy sleeps when I finish with you.”

He turned a wrist toward better light, glanced at the time. “I’m just tryin to figure if I got to do this quick or I got time to play with you a little. You been needlin me pretty steady here lately and I’d like to sort of even the score. But I see I ain’t. I reckon I’ll have to content myself with this.”

He abruptly crossed the floor in two or three strides and hit Oliver savagely alongside the neck with his fist. The old man went sideways in crazy, teetering steps, then his knees unhinged and he fell against the wall and slid down. Bitter hot bile rose in his throat and he thought for a moment he was going to vomit but he fought it down. He had fallen on the gun and his hip hurt but there was an almost exquisite pleasure to this pain.

Hardin had approached and stood spraddlelegged over him. “You all right?” he asked with mock concern.

“I’ve done somethin to my hip,” the old man said thickly. “I may have broken it.”

“Likely you have,” Hardin agreed. “A old man’s bones is brittle. I’ll fix you up with Dr. Feelgood here directly and you won’t feel a thing.”

Oliver shifted his position and rubbed his hip. He was wondering how good the light was, how drunk Hardin was, how sure he was of himself. He slid his hand into the jumper pocket. When he clasped the cold bone grip of the pistol it was like shaking hands with an old friend.

“Help me up,” he said.

“You don’t need up. You’ve wound up what string you had and this is where you was when it played out.”

“Help me up so I can lean agin the wall. I don’t want to die on my back like a snake you rocked to death.”

“All right,” Hardin said expansively. “Even if you was a snake I believe I’ve about pulled your teeth.”

He tilted the rifle against the wall and Oliver lifted his left hand toward Hardin and Hardin grasped it. Oliver fired the first shot through the denim and the concussion was enormous in the small room, showering them with splinters and flakes of flourpaste and dead spiders. Even at this range the shot was high and slammed into the loft and he withdrew the piece and fired again. Hardin’s face was slack with wonder. He’d thrown up a hand as if he might bat away the bullets with flesh and bone and two fingers disappeared in a pink mist of blood and bonemeal. He was still clasping Oliver’s hand. When he finally hit Hardin in the chest Hardin was abruptly jerked from his grip like some lost soul to floodwaters. “Oh let me,” he was saying when the fourth bullet struck him but Oliver never found out what he wanted. Hardin got up even with the dark hole charred in his face and then he fell heavily back.

The cold winter constellations spun on, even paler with the advent of dawn. It was very cold and the night seemed absolutely still. With the passing hours a gray, lusterless light began to suffuse the world. In the east a pale band of paler gray paled further still. Shapes began to accrue from out of shadow and here a star winked out and was no more. Another, the stars were folding. Far in the east and the last one burned like a point of white fire and vanished and rose slowly and washed the bare blue trees. The world gleamed in its shroud of frost. A mist crept down from the pit and hung there shifting bluely in the wan light.

After a time out of the sound of creaking leather and jangling metal an old stifflegged man appeared leading a horse. The breaths of man and horse plumed in the bitter air like smoke. A rope was knotted into the tracechains and what kept the rope tautened was a man dragged splaylegged across the frozen whorls of earth. The old man did not so much as glance at the house. Man and horse and the curious burden vanished alike in the thick brush shrouding the pit spectral and revenantial and insubstantial as something that might never have been. They were in there for some time, then only the old man and the horse came back out and went back the way they had come.

At length a yellow dog came stealthily up out of the woods and watched the house before approaching it warily. It paced the perimeter of the yard and paused and lay on its belly watching the house as if it expected someone to come out and stone it away. When no one did it arose boldly and crossed to the rear of the house and began to forage in the garbage can by the back stoop. The can tilted, fell, rattled on the frozen ground. After it fed the dog raised its head scenting the air and its hackles rose uneasily and it moved covertly toward the bordering woods and vanished into them.

Early Sunday morning the jailer unlocked the door to the bullpen and motioned to Winer. “The governor called,” he said. “Your pardon come through at the last minute.”

“What about me?” Chessor wanted to know.

“They just left word to let Winer out. They ain’t set your bond yet and I doubt they’s a man in the county can go it when they do.”

“Well, hellfire.”

The town locked in Sunday quietude, a city under siege. He walked on listening to his footfalls, his discolored reflection pacing him in storefront glass like a maltreated familiar. De Vries’s cabstand was the only place open and it was here that Winer heard the news.

“Where did you hear that?”

“Hell, it’s all over town. I heard it so much I don’t even remember where I first heard it.”

“And they know it’s Pa?”

“What I heard they ain’t no doubt about it and now they sayin old man Oliver seen it done and kept quiet all these years. They say Bellwhether’s gone after a warrant now. Murder one, and I hope the son of a bitch gets the electric chair.”

“Does Hardin know?”

“If he don’t he’s the only one. I seen that black Packard go through about daylight. He may be a lost ball in the high weeds.”

“Somebody’s givin me a runaround.”

“Well, it’s not me,” de Vries said. “I’ll tell you anything I can.”

“Where’s he at then?”

“Who? Bellwether?”

“Hellfire. My pa. What’d they do with him?”

“Well, it was just a skull was all. What I heard they sent it off to them scientists. I guess to see who it was and all. I reckon Bellwether and Oliver was waitin to see for sure it was him before they told you about it.”

“Sent it off,” Winer said in wonder. He turned and opened the door and went through it.

“Hey, I thought you wanted a cab,” de Vries called but Winer had already gone from sight.

Winer walked down to the Snowwhite and cornered there and went through an alley past the garbagestrewn back doors of merchants and exited by the General Cafe. He seemed unaware of where he was and such Sunday faces as he met he did not acknowledge. He crossed the street against the light and went on across the bare courthouse yard and up the wide steps to the double door. It was locked. He descended the steps and went around to the side. He peered through the darkened glass to an invisible interior. He pushed against them but these doors were locked as well. He sat on the concrete stairs to wait. A cold wind sang off the stone coping and bore scraps of dirty paper before it. He had no coat and after a time he began to shiver and he got up. The temperature was falling.

The house when he found it was guarded by two stone lions but theirs was a fallen grandeur. Their whitewashed flesh peeled away in great slashes of plaster and they watched this transgressor with a blind ferocity, their eyes impacted with grime. Winer passed between them down a worn path of faded brick leached into the earth to the wooden doorsteps. The house was a nondescript white frame needing a coat of paint. A knocker mounted in a gargoyle’s face hinted the same dubious parentage as the stone lions. He knocked and waited.

He had turned away to go when the door opened.

“Yes?”

He approached the door. He was facing a young woman a few years older than himself. She stood waiting, smoothed a wing of brown hair back from her brow. She had a plain, honest face, her eyes were a soft brown, he thought the way a fawn’s eyes must look: there was a curious quality of vulnerability about them, as if they ever sought out the thing that would hurt her.

“I was just looking for Sheriff Bellwether.”

“I’m sorry, he’s not here right now. Is there any way I could help you?”

“Do you know here he is?”

“He left for Franklin early this morning to see Judge Larkin. I’m not sure when he’ll be back.”

“Well.”

“Will you come in? Is it something important you wanted to see him about?”

“I just wanted to see him a minute.”

Something he was not aware of in his face touched her, for she stood aside and opened the door wider. “Come on in,” she said. “I was just about to have a cup of coffee. Would you care for a cup?”

“I need to be getting on,” Winer said but he stepped into the room. She brought him black, steaming coffee in a thin china cup and he drank it sitting awkwardly on the edge of the sofa. He looked about the austere room. There was a makeshift quality about it but it was very clean. A young Bellwether tinted pink watched from a gilt oval frame on the wall, an overseas cap tilted rakishly over his right eyebrow. The woman looked up from her sewing and Winer was watching her.

“Did he say what he wanted to see Franklin judge about?”

“I’m sorry, he didn’t.” She smiled. “My husband keeps his business to himself.”

He set the halfful cup aside. “Thank you for the coffee,” he said. “I’ll be getting on.”

“He’ll be back after a while. You could leave a message with me. I’ll see he gets it.”

“No,” Winer said, getting up. “I’ll leave it somewhere else.”

She looked at him strangely with her tremulous brown eyes and he knew she’d misunderstood him. “It’s just something I can’t talk about,” he said. “Thank you for the coffee.” He turned and went on out the door. She made to call to him but thought better of it.

He went down the walk to the edge of the street and paused by the blind lions. He rested a moment on a stone shoulder so cold it might have been cast from ice. Displaced beast from climes to the north, strange twilit sunless worlds.

An old grief that should have long ago been allayed by time abruptly twisted in him like a knife. A grief ten years gone, by now the debris of time should have buried it. Ten years. Ten years who knew where and all the spoken words of denunciation. A bitter redemption touched him, a sense of faith fulfilled, but there was no satisfaction in being right, he would gladly have been proven wrong could events be altered. He turned with blurred vision and went on up the street. She watched from a window. When he was out of sight the curtain fell to.

Along about midmorning a taxicab arrived at Hardin’s. It stopped in the yard, idling white puffs of exhaust into the cold air, and Jiminiz got out. He moved stiffly as if his joints did not function properly. His face was swollen and discolored. He slammed the door to and stood studying the unsmoking chimney of the house bemusedly. The driver got out as well. The driver was a wizened, ferretfaced man with quick black eyes that darted uneasily about the yard. He wore a leather changepurse on his belt and he made change for the bill Jiminiz gave him. He got back into the idling car and turned it and went back the way he had come.

Jiminiz went around back to the long beerjoint and was there only a minute or two before he came back and mounted the porch. He knocked at the front door, waited. He leaned against the doorjamb smoking and when knocking harder brought no response he turned the knob and went in.

Directly he came back out. He went across the yard again to the rear and paused by the litter of papers and cans on the earth studying the frozen ground. Something seemed to catch his eye, for he leaned forward hands on knees then straightened and went toward the pit and vanished into the bracken.

He was running awkwardly when he came out of the brush. He ran on to the hardpan of the road and slowed to a fast walk. A hundred feet or so down the road he halted and stood still and seemed to be listening to some far-off sound. He looked down the red road. He looked back toward the bleak, still house and studied the slatecolored sky. Nameless winter birds foraged the ruined garden and watched him with hard agate eyes. They took wing and flew patternlessly above him. He went back to the house and went in leaving the door ajar. He came out carrying a nickleplated pistol in his right hand and a cigarbox in his left. He paused a moment on the stoop. He pocketed the pistol and opened the cigar box. It was full of money. He began to count it, leafing hurriedly through it, then he gave it up and went back onto the road. This time he didn’t look back.

The day drew on. It had not warmed as the day progressed nor had the frost melted. The sun grew more remote and obscure. At its zenith it was no more than an orb of heatless light above the glade. A bank of pale clouds arose in the west and ascended the heavens and beyond them the sky looked dark and threatening. A wind arose. It teased such dead leaves as remained on the trees and sang eerily in the loose tin on the barn. The stallion whinnied from the barnlot and came pacing down the length of barbed-wire fence, its hooves ringing on mire frozen hard as stone. The day grew darker yet. The sun vanished. The wind carried chill on its knife edge and a few pellets of sleet rattled on the tin like birdshot. The sleet fell and lay unmelting in the stony whorls of ice, a wind from the pit blew scraps of paper like dirty snow.

When Winer came he came walking. He came the shortcut across the field and down the branch to the house. He crossed the yard without caution as if he were impervious now to anything the world could do to him. He crossed the porch and pounded on the door and waited. Knocked again. He paused and stood uncertainly. Leaned to a curtained window and shading his eyes peered in, saw only his sepia reflection in opaque glass.

He turned, a gangling figure graceless in the stiff wind. He went down the steps and echoing Jiminiz’s movements or moving in patterns preordained he went around the house and through the strewn garbage and pounded on the back door. No one came. He stood before the raw wood honkytonk with its red brick grouped in banded bundles awaiting a mason who’d never come and he tried the door but it was locked. He walked back to where the Packard was always parked and ran a hand through his wild hair like a cartoon figure miming perplexity and leaned to the frozen ground as if he might divine how long the car had been gone and its destination.

He climbed back onto the porch and tried the door. It opened. He peered into the cloistered dark but some old restraint engendered by his upbringing stayed him from trespass and he pulled the door to with a curious air of finality.

He sat on the stoop a time though he did not expect anyone to return. The sleet had not ceased and it had begun to spit snow. He sat wrapping his knees with his arms and it began to snow harder, the snow intensifying first the border of the far field and obscuring the treeline with a curtain of billowing white. He seemed ill at ease and uncertain as to where he should be and what he should be doing and at length the cold brought him off the steps and into the yard. He went off into the snow turning up his collar against the wind.

At dusk the yellow cur came up from the branch-run and prowled through the garbage without finding anything and it sniffed the air with disquiet and lay down on the earth. The earth was powdered with a thin sheath of white but it was fine, dry snow and it lay in eternally drifting windrows. As dusk drew on the square of yellow light the bedroom window threw deepened and the dog approached and stood in it as if it fostered warmth. It seemed to snow harder when the light fell. At last the dog turned with its tail curled between its legs and followed the scent back to the pit.

Winer had been gone with no luggage save the weight of his father’s knife against his leg and no destination save the memory of Amber Rose saying, “Natchez, Mississippi,” for six months when William Tell Oliver found the first jar of money.

All that spring he had watched the scavengers arriving, a seemingly unending stream of them prowling Hovington’s place, tearing up the floorboards, ripping loose the weatherboarding in splintered shards, prying out the brick beneath the flue until at last it toppled in a rain of mud and broken bricks and soot, all these greedy folk doing more work than they’d ever done before, loath to leave even at night lest another find Hardin’s fortune so that at night he could see their lanterns flitting like fireflies about the glade, flashlights in random isobars of yellow light appearing and disappearing like spirit lights in old ghost tales of his youth or warnings prophesying direr events yet to be.

Silhouetted black and motionless against the sun he watched from the ridge like some strange outrider of life, watcher rather than participant, some ungainly prophet from olden times, leaned on his stick watching with bemused arrogance the turmoil of lesser mortals and it came to him one day that old mad Lyle Hodges had been digging not in the wrong place but at the wrong time, through some peculiar quirk in time he had been digging feverishly and obsessively for fruitjars that would not even be buried for another fifty years.

Checking on a patch of twoprong ginseng growing in the shade of an enormous beech he was struck by an aberration of the land here, some subtle difference in a country he had known all his life. Stooping to where the contour of the slope was altered, he dug with the point of his handcarved stick, knelt at last to withdraw with amused contempt a halfgallon jar of Hardin’s money, heavy with coin, the greasy, wadded bills, strange summer provender laid by for harder times than these.

By the last of August he had found four others. He stored them at first in the pantry behind the old jars of canned goods, ancient cans of muscadine jelly long gone to burgundy sugar. He grew uneasy and pried up floorboards in different rooms, scooped out black loam, consigned the jars to the earth once more. He was a man of a thousand small cautions so he drove a steel stake beside each jar. “If the house burns and I don’t all I’ll have to do is kick through the ashes,” he told himself.

For it’s young Winer’s money, he thought, it is money owed him for a wrong done long ago.

He waited and the year drew on into a hot, dry summer and the empty road baked whitely in the sun. The scavengers didn’t come anymore and tales began to arise about Hovington’s place. It was told cursed, haunted, a barren patch of earth forever luckless. One night a group of boys torched the house and then the honkytonk and the old man watched the hot red glare, the parks cascading upward in the updraft from the pit. The next day he walked gingerly through the hot ashes and the scorched brush to the lip of the abyss. Felt its cool fetid breath. Now there was only the pit, timeless, enigmatic, profoundly alien.