Child of God (3 page)

I
DON’T KNOW
. T
HEY SAY HE
never was right after his daddy killed hisself. They was just the one boy. The mother had run off, I don’t know where to nor who with. Me and Cecil Edwards was the ones cut him down. He come in the store and told it like you’d tell it was rainin out. We went up there and walked in the barn and I seen his feet hangin. We just cut him down, let him fall in the floor. Just like cuttin down meat. He stood there and watched, never said nothin. He was about nine or ten year old at the time. The old man’s eyes was run out on stems like a crawfish and his tongue blacker’n a chow dog’s. I wisht if a man wanted to hang hisself he’d do it with poison or somethin so folks wouldn’t have to see such a thing as that.

He didn’t look so pretty hisself when Greer got done with him.

No. But I don’t mind honest blood. I’d rather to see that than eyeballs hangin out and such.

I’ll tell ye what old Gresham done when his wife died and how crazy he was. They buried her up here at Sixmile and the preacher he said a few words and then he called on Gresham, ast him did he want to say a few words fore they thowed the dirt over her and old Gresham he stood up, had his hat in his hand and all. Stood up there and sung the chickenshit blues. The chickenshit blues. No, I don’t know the words to it but he did and he sung em ever one fore he set back down again. But he wasn’t a patch on Lester Ballard for crazy.

W
ERE THERE DARKER PROVINCES
of night he would have found them. Lying with his fingers plugged in the bores of his ears against the strident cheeping of the myriad black crickets with which he kept household in the barren cabin. One night on his pallet while half asleep he heard something scamper through the room and vault ghostly (he saw, struggling erect) through the open window. He sat there looking after it but it was gone. He could hear foxhounds in full cry, tortured wails and yelps nigh unto agony coming up the creek, up the valley. They flooded into the cabin yard in a pandemonium of soprano howls and crashing brush. Ballard standing naked saw by palest starlight the front door fill from
floorsill up with bawling dogs. They hung there for a moment in a pulsing frame of piebald fur and then bowed through and filled the room, circled once with rising volume dog on dog and then swept out the window howl on howl carrying first the muntins, then the sash, leaving a square and naked hole in the wall and a ringing in his ear. While he stood there cursing two more dogs came through the door. He kicked one as it passed and stove his bare toes on its bony rump. He was hopping about on one foot shrieking when a final hound entered the room. He fell upon it and seized its hind leg. It set up a piteous howling. Ballard flailed blindly at it with his fist, great drumlike thumps that echoed in the near empty room among the desperate oaths and wailings.

G
OING UP A TRACK OF A
road through the quarry woods where all about lay enormous blocks and tablets of stone weathered gray and grown with deep green moss, toppled monoliths among the trees and vines like traces of an older race of man. This rainy summer day. He passed a dark lake of silent jade where the moss walls rose sheer and plumb and a small blue bird sat slant upon a guywire in the void.

Ballard leveled the rifle at the bird but something of an old foreboding made him hold. Mayhaps the bird felt it too. It flew. Small. Tiny. Gone. The woods were filled with silence. Ballard let the hammer down with the ball of his thumb and wearing the rifle on his neck
like a yoke with his hands dangling over barrel and buttstock he went up the quarry road. The mud packed with tins trod flat, with broken glass. The bushes strewn with refuse. Yonder through the woods a roof and smoke from a chimney. He came into a clearing where two cars lay upturned at either side of the road like wrecked sentinels and he went past great levees of junk and garbage toward the shack at the edge of the dump. An assortment of cats taking the weak sun watched him go. Ballard pointed the rifle at a large mottled tom and said bang. The cat looked at him without interest. It seemed to think him not too bright. Ballard spat on it and it immediately wiped the spittle from its head with a heavy forepaw and set about washing the spot. Ballard went on up the path through the trash and carparts.

The dumpkeeper had spawned nine daughters and named them out of an old medical dictionary gleaned from the rubbish he picked. These gangling progeny with black hair hanging from their armpits now sat idle and wide-eyed day after day in chairs and crates about the little yard cleared out of the tips while their harried dam called them one by one to help with chores and one by one they shrugged or blinked their sluggard lids. Urethra, Cerebella, Hernia Sue. They moved like cats and like cats in heat attracted surrounding swains to their midden until the old man used to go out at night and fire a shotgun at random just to clear the air. He could’nt tell which was the oldest or what age and he didn’t know whether they
should go out with boys or not. Like cats they sensed his lack of resolution. They were coming and going all hours in all manner of degenerate cars, a dissolute carousel of rotting sedans and niggerized convertibles with bluedot taillamps and chrome horns and foxtails and giant dice or dashboard demons of spurious fur. All patched up out of parts and lowslung and bumping over the ruts. Filled with old lanky country boys with long cocks and big feet.

They fell pregnant one by one. He beat them. The wife cried and cried. There were three births that summer. The house was filling up, both rooms, the trailer. People were sleeping everywhere. One brought home what she said was a husband but he only stayed a day or two and they never saw him again. The twelve year old began to swell. The air grew close. Grew rank and fetid. He found a pile of rags in a corner. Small lumps of yellow shit wrapped up and laid by. One day in the woods and kudzu jungles on the far side of the dump he came across two figures humping away. He watched from behind a tree until he recognized one of his girls. He tried to creep up on them but the boy was wary and leaped up and was away through the woods hauling up his breeches as he went. The old man began to beat the girl with the stick he carried. She grabbed it. He overbalanced. They sprawled together in the leaves. Hot fishy reek of her freshened loins. Her peach drawers hung from a bush. The air about him grew electric. Next thing he knew his overalls were about his knees
and he was mounting her. Daddy quit, she said. Daddy. Oooh.

Did he dump a load in you?

No.

He pulled it out and gripped it and squirted his jissom on her thigh. Goddamn you, he said. He rose and heisted up his overalls and lumbered off toward the dump like a bear.

Then there was Ballard. He’d come up the path with his narroweyed and studied indifference and the rifle in his hand or on his shoulders or he’d sit with the old man in the bloated sofa in the yard drinking with him from a halfgallon jar of popskull whiskey and passing a raw potato back and forth for a chaser while the younger girls peeped and giggled from the shack. He had eyes for a long blonde flatshanked daughter that used to sit with her legs propped so that you could see her drawers. She laughed all the time. He’d never seen her in a pair of shoes but she had a different colored pair of drawers for every day of the week and black ones on Saturday.

When Ballard came past the trailer this very one was hanging up wash. There was a man with her sitting on a fifty gallon drum and he turned and squinted at Ballard and spoke to him. The girl pursed her lips at him and winked and then threw back her head and laughed wildly. Ballard grinned, tapping the riflebarrel against the side of his leg.

What say, jellybean, she said.

What you laughin at?

What you lookin at?

Why, he’s lookin at them there nice titties for one thing, said the man on the drum. You want to see em.

Sure, said Ballard.

Gimme a quarter.

I ain’t got one.

She laughed.

He stood there grinning.

How much you got?

I got a dime.

Well go borry two and a half cents and you can see one of em.

Just let me owe ye, said Ballard.

Say you want to blow me? the girl said.

I said owe, said Ballard, flushing.

The man on the drum slapped his knee. Watch out, he said. What you got that Lester can see for a dime?

He’s done looked a halfdollar’s worth now.

Shoot. I ain’t seen nothin.

You don’t need to see nothin, she said, bending and picking up a wet piece of cloth from the dishpan and shaking it out, Ballard trying to see down the neck of her dress. She raised up. Just make your peter hard, she said, turning her back and laughing again that sudden half crazy laugh.

Why a cat couldn’t bite it now, could it, Lester?

I ain’t got time to mess with you all, the girl said, turning back with a grin and picking up the pan. She cocked her hip and set the pan on it and looked at
them. Beyond the little trailer the old man walked against the sky rolling a tire and a ropy column of foul black smoke rose from a burning slagheap of old rubber. Shit, she said. If you’ns ever got any of this you never would be satisfied again.

They watched her saunter up the hill toward the house. I’d like to chance it, the man said. Wouldn’t you, Lester?

Ballard said that he would.

T
HE CONGREGATION AT
SIX
mile Church would turn all together like a cast of puppets at the opening of the door behind them any time after services had started. When Ballard came in with his hat in his hand and shut the door and sat alone on the rear bench they turned back more slowly. A windy riffle of whispers went among them. The preacher stopped. To justify the silence he poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on the pulpit and drank and set the glass back and wiped his mouth.

Brethren, he went on, a biblical babbling to Ballard who read the notices on the board at the back of the church. This week’s offering. Last week’s offering. Six dollars and seventy-four cents. The numbers in attendance.
A woodpecker hammered at a drainpipe outside and those strung heads listed and turned to the bird for silence. Ballard had a cold and snuffled loudly through the service but nobody expected he would stop if God himself looked back askance so no one looked.