Child of God (12 page)

L
ORD THEY CAUGHT ME, LESTER,
said Kirby.

Caught ye?

I’m on three year probation.

Ballard stared around the little room with its linoleum floor and cheap furniture. Well kiss my ass, he said.

Ain’t it a bitch? I never thought about them bein niggers.

Niggers?

They sent niggers. That’s who I sold to. Sold to em three times. One of em set right there in that chair and drunk a pint. Drunk it and got up and walked out and got in the car. I don’t see how he done it. He might of drove for all I know. They caught everbody. Got old lady Bright up in Cocke County even and she’s been sellin whiskey non stop since fore I was born.

Ballard leaned and spat into a can sitting in the floor. Well fuck it, he said.

I sure would of never thought about them sendin niggers, said Kirby.

B
ALLARD WAS WALKING THE
road near the top of the mountain when the sheriff pulled up behind him in the car. The sheriff told Ballard to put the rifle down but Ballard didn’t move. He stood there by the side of the road straight up and down with the rifle in one hand and he didn’t even turn around to see who’d spoke. The sheriff reached his pistol out the window and cocked it. You could hear very clearly in the cold air the click of the hammer and the click of the hand dropping into the cylinder locking notch. Boy, you better stick it in the ground, the sheriff said.

Ballard stood the butt of the rifle in the road and let go of it. It fell into the roadside bushes.

Turn around.

Now come over here.

Now just stand there a minute.

Now get in here.

Now hold your hands out.

If you leave my rifle there somebody’s goin to get it.

I’ll worry about your goddamned rifle.

B
ALLARD ENTERED THE
store and slammed the iron barred door behind him. The store was empty save for Mr Fox who nodded to this small and harried looking customer. The customer did not nod back. He went along the shelves picking and choosing among the goods, the cans all marshaled with their labels to the front, wrenching holes in their ordered rows and stacking them on the counter in front of the storekeeper. Finally he fetched up in front of the meatcase. Mr Fox rose and donned a white apron, old bloodstains bleached light pink, tied it in the back and approached the meatcase and switched on a light that illuminated rolls of baloney and rounds of cheese and a tray of thin sliced pork chops among the sausages and sousemeat.

Slice me about a half pound of that there baloney, said Ballard.

Mr Fox fetched it out and laid it on the butcher block and took up a knife and began to pare away thin slices. These he doled up one at a time onto a piece of butcherpaper. When he had done he laid down the knife and placed the paper in the scales. He and Ballard watched the needle swing. What else now, said the storekeeper, tying up the package of meat with a string.

Give me some of that there cheese.

He bought a sack of cigarette tobacco and stood there rolling a smoke and nodding at the groceries. Add them up, he said.

The storekeeper figured the merchandise on his scratchpad, sliding the goods from one side of the counter to the other as he went. He raised up and pushed his glasses back with his thumb.

Five dollars and ten cents, he said.

Just put it on the stob for me.

Ballard, when are you goin to pay me?

Well. I can give ye some on it today.

How much on it.

Well. Say three dollars.

The storekeeper was figuring on his pad.

How much do I owe altogether? said Ballard.

Thirty-four dollars and nineteen cents.

Includin this here?

Includin this here.

Well let me just give ye the four dollars and nineteen cents and that’ll leave it thirty even.

The storekeeper looked at Ballard. Ballard, he said, how old are you?

Twenty-seven if it’s any of your business.

Twenty-seven. And in twenty-seven years you’ve managed to accumulate four dollars and nineteen cents?

The storekeeper was figuring on his pad.

Ballard waited. What are you figurin? he asked suspiciously.

Just a minute, said the storekeeper. After a while he raised the pad up and squinted at it. Well, he said. Accordin to my figures, at this rate it’s goin to take a hundred and ninety-four years to pay out the thirty dollars. Ballard, I’m sixty-seven now.

Why that’s crazy.

Of course this is figured if you don’t buy nothin else.

Why that’s crazier’n hell.

Well, I could of made a mistake in the figures. Did you want to check em?

Ballard pushed at the scratchpad the storekeeper was offering him. I don’t want to see that, he said.

Well, what I think I’m goin to do along in here is just try to minimize my losses. So if you’ve got four dollars and nineteen cents why don’t you just get four dollars and nineteen cents’ worth of groceries.

Ballard’s face was twitching.

What did you want to put back? said the storekeeper.

I ain’t puttin a goddamn thing back, said Ballard, laying out the five dollars and slapping down the dime.

T
HE MAN BEHIND THE DESK
had folded his hands in front of him as if about to pray. He gazed at Ballard across the tips of his fingers. Well, he said, if you hadn’t done anything wrong what were you scoutin the bushes for that nobody could find you?

I know how they do ye, Ballard muttered. Thow ye in jail and beat the shit out of ye.

This man ever been mistreated down here, Sheriff?

He knows better than that.

They tell me you cussed deputy Walker.

Well did you?

What are you lookin over there for?

I was just lookin.

Mr Walker’s not goin to tell you what to say.

He might tell me what not to.

Is it true that you burned down Mr Waldrop’s house?

No.

You were living in it at the time that it burned.

That’s a … I wasn’t done it. I’d left out of there a long time fore that.

It was quiet in the room. After a while the man behind the desk lowered his hands and folded them in his lap. Mr Ballard, he said. You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in.

B
ALLARD CROSSED THE
mountain into Blount County one Sunday morning in the early part of February. There is a spring on the side of the mountain that runs from solid stone. Kneeling in the snow among the fairy tracks of birds and deermice Ballard leaned his face to the green water and drank and studied his dishing visage in the pool. He halfway put his hand to the water as if he would touch the face that watched there but then he rose and wiped his mouth and went on through the woods.

Old woods and deep. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them. He passed a windfelled tulip poplar on the mountainside that held aloft in the grip of its roots
two stones the size of fieldwagons, great tablets on which was writ only a tale of vanished seas with ancient shells in cameo and fishes etched in lime. Ballard among gothic treeboles, almost jaunty in the outsized clothing he wore, fording drifts of kneedeep snow, going along the south face of a limestone bluff beneath which birds scratching in the bare earth paused to watch.

The road when he reached it was unmarked by any track at all. Ballard descended into it and went on. It was almost noon and the sun was very bright on the snow and the snow shone with a myriad crystal incandescence. The shrouded road wound off before him almost lost among the trees and a stream ran beside the road, dark under bowers of ice, small glass-fanged caverns beneath tree roots where the water sucked unseen. In the frozen roadside weeds were coiled white ribbons of frost, you’d never figure how they came to be. Ballard ate one as he went, the rifle on his shoulder, his feet enormous with snow where it clung to the sacks with which he’d wrapped them.

By and by he came upon a house, silent in the silent landscape, a rough scarf of smoke unwinding upward from the chimney. There were tire tracks in the road but they had been snowed over in the night. Ballard came on down the mountain past more houses and past the ruins of a tannery into a road freshly traveled, the corded tracks of tirechains curving away into the white woods and a jade river curving away toward the mountains to the south.

When he got to the store he sat on a box on the porch and with his pocketknife cut the twine that bound his legs and feet and took off the sacks and shook them out and laid them on the box with the pieces of twine and stood up. He was wearing black lowcut shoes that were longer than he should have needed. The rifle he’d left under the bridge as he crossed the river. He stamped his feet and opened the door and went in.

A group of men and boys were gathered about the stove and they stopped talking when Ballard entered. Ballard went to the back of the stove, nodding slightly to the store’s inhabitants. He held his hands to the heat and looked casually about. Cold enough for ye’ns? he said.

Nobody said if it was or wasn’t. Ballard coughed and rubbed his hands together and crossed to the drink box and got an orange drink and opened it and got a cake and paid at the counter. The storekeeper dropped the dime into the till and shut the drawer. He said: It’s a sight in the world of snow, ain’t it?

Ballard agreed that it was, leaning on the counter, eating the cake and taking small sips from the drink. After a while he leaned toward the storekeeper. You ain’t needin a watch are ye? he said.

What? said the storekeeper.

A watch. Did you need a watch.

The storekeeper looked at Ballard blankly. A watch? he said. What kind of a watch?

I got different kinds. Here. Ballard setting down his
drink and half-eaten cake on the counter and reaching into his pockets. He pulled forth three wristwatches and laid them out. The storekeeper poked at them once or twice with his finger. I don’t need no watch, he said. I got some in the counter yonder been there a year.

Ballard looked where he was pointing. A few dusty watches in cellophane packets among the socks and hairnets.