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Home from the Hill

A Novel

William Humphrey

1

Early one morning last September the men squatting on the northeast corner of the town square looked up from their whittling to see, already halfway down the west side and passing under the shadow of the Confederate monument, a dusty long black hearse with a Dallas County license plate.

The cottonseed mill had just begun to waft downtown its hot sweet nutty smell. Dew was beginning to rise, steaming above the rooftops, hovering above the grass in the plaza, above the bale of cotton, the county's first for the year, that stood upon a wooden platform wrapped in red bunting there. On the air around the Confederate soldier, martens from the building eaves eddied and swirled like scraps of paper ash. Stores were just opening, the only sounds were the distant hum of the gins and occasional cries from the band of children playing up and down the empty walks, and at that moment not a car of the dozen or so in the square was in motion. Yet so noiselessly had it materialized that the hearse was halfway down the block before anyone saw it. At that moment the courthouse clock commenced tolling the sixteen chimes before the hour of eight.

Silent, but without stirring—for despite its slowness it could be just passing through—while the clock tolled the men on the corner watched the hearse move south down the west side. Only when at the corner it turned and headed into the band of shadow overhanging the south side did they close their pocketknives and get to their feet and begin brushing the shavings off their laps. It went as solemnly slow as a hearse leading a procession, but looking back at the corner by which it had entered, they saw no cars following it. It turned and came their way and through the bug-spattered windshield they saw two men riding in the cab. The clock began the second round of eight chimes. It had picked up on its journey a coat of bleached white autumn dust. It was long and lean and there was restrained power, throttled-down speed, sinister-seeming in a death conveyance, in the pulse of its engine. It turned at their corner back towards its starting point, as if it was leaving, as if it had just cruised in for a look, like a disappointed buzzard circling away. Then as the clock finished chiming, halfway down the block it swung in and nosed up to the curb in front of the confectionery.

The men saw the man on the passenger's side get stiffly out and stand at his door looking around and stretching himself and yawning. Then his partner the driver came around and joined him at the curb. Both were dressed most inappropriately, the passenger in white, his partner in a blue-and-white-striped suit, white shoes, and a sailor straw hat. Seeing this, the men on the corner lost hope.

“I suppose they mean to change into their work clothes when they get to wherever the job is,” said Otis Wheeler.

“Anyhow,” said Jake Etheridge, “maybe it's empty.”

They watched. They could see that the two strangers were having a discussion and were looking the square over as if searching for something. They saw the one who had ridden as passenger go into the confectionery while his partner set off down the block. He passed under the shadow of the monument, reached the corner, and jaywalked and strode up the south side until he reached the hardware store, where the clerk was just then rolling a garden tractor out on the walk. The clerk listened to him, nodded once, and the two of them disappeared into the store.

Then the men started across to the hearse. Meanwhile, cutting across the plaza, boys in the lead, girls hanging back, came their youngsters. Some were there already, in a ring at a respectful distance around the hearse, gawking, egging one another closer. The men—there were around a dozen of them—strung themselves out so as not to seem curious as a group, and when they reached the spot loitered casually. Then one by one they took turns looking in through the confectionery window glass. The stranger sat at the counter and before him were places set for two and two steaming cups of black coffee.

The men were struck by his youth.

“It beats me what could make a young fellow want to go into that trade,” said Marshall Bradley.

“It's steady,” said Peyton Stiles.

“Yes, and it's a business that's always good,” said Ed Dinwoodie. “The worse things are the better it is.”

“Pays good,” said Peyton.

“Money ain't everything,” said Marshall.

“Aw, you can get used to anything,” said Otis.

“Besides,” said Ed Dinwoodie, “it brings you in contact with all classes of people.”

“I God! Hit's a Rolls-Royce!” announced Ben Ramsay.

Meanwhile Clifford Odum was taking advantage of that established right of townsmen to examine a visiting car, and had raised the hood. At the sight of the engine he whistled softly.

“Is it somebody we know in there, Papa?” said one of Peyton's boys.

“Run and play,” said Peyton.

“Would you just look at them carburetors–” said Clifford.

Somebody raised his head and nodded towards the south side. The gesture was passed along. There came the stranger back down the block, and over his shoulder he carried two shovels and a pickaxe. Clifford Odum lowered the car hood with a show of care and appreciation.

He was burly and tough-looking, surly-looking. He looked like a bouncer or a bodyguard. He was red-eyed and his clothes were crumpled and creased and his jowls bristled with overnight beard.

“Men,” he said, and grinned widely.

They nodded. He stepped off the curb and swung down his digging implements. Apparently he meant to stow them in the hearse. Apparently he changed his mind. He stepped back onto the curb and shouldered his shiny new tools again and entered the confectionery.

The men waited a minute, then began to stroll in in groups of three and four, some going to the counter and ordering coffee, leaving a space of empty stools on either side of the strangers, others collecting around the marble machine. The shovels and the pickaxe leaned against the counter beside the big man, and for a moment all eyes centered on them. Then all shifted to the two men. They ate their ham and eggs silently, sitting with strained, stiffened backs and necks and straightforward eyes, with that rigidity of strangers under scrutiny. The sound of the marble machine was like static.

They finished and ordered their coffee cups refilled, and when the waitress set them down the big fellow broke the silence:

“Which way to the cemetery, ma'am?”

You heard a marble drop into a slot in the machine and the counter clucking as it ran up the score, then no further sound from there.

“You heard of anybody dying that buries here?” said Ed Dinwoodie to his neighbor Ben Ramsay.

Ben thrust out his underlip and studied a minute, then shook his head. “Maybe they want the Cath'lic cemetery,” he said. There was a little Catholic cemetery outside of town, about the size of a kitchen garden plot and with maybe half a dozen graves in it.

In the glass on the wall behind the counter, the big fellow's face appeared puzzled. “What about that, Doc?” he asked his companion.

“You mean to say you don't know!” the waitress could not help exclaiming.

“It's the regular,” said the young one. “I mean the Protestant,” he added hastily, scowling.

“You go out from the square due north, friend,” said Ed, turning on his stool. “It's just up the street. You can't miss it.”

But the stranger preferred dealing with the waitress. “Well, now tell us, ma'am, where we might find a couple of niggers that'd like to make a dollar.”

She looked at the tool handles sticking up over the edge of the counter. Then she glanced quickly around at her fellow townsmen. In returning her gaze to the stranger she was again caught for a moment by the handles. “Well,” she said at last, “they's generally some boys hangs out in the alley back of the place here in the good weather, waiting round for odd jobs. No-count town niggers, too lazy to pick cotton,” she added hastily, as though to offer such was not to be too disloyal to her townsmen in this matter in which they were being snubbed. “I haven't seen any out there yet this morning, though,” she said. “Still sleeping off their Saddy night Sweet Lucy, I imagine.” She tried a little laugh, which did not come to much, as again her gaze fell upon the tool handles. “If yawl wait around a little they'll prob'ly be some turn up.”

“We can't wait,” said the young one.

“Oh,” she said, and seemed to jump a little. “Oh. Well, I don't know. It may be some out there now. Only I don't guarantee they'll want your job. But I'll go see,” she said and, glad to be gone, fled down the counter aisle and disappeared behind the swinging kitchen door.

“No family waiting, no mourners with them,” whispered Otis Wheeler to the men around the marble machine, suspicious now, though ten minutes earlier he had been disappointed at the same possibility, “how do we know it's one of our'n? Who knows who they got in there? Or what they died of? I tell you what I think. I think they're just going from one town to another like somebody driving down a backroad looking for a spot to ditch a dead dog in, just trying to find some place to palm it off on. I tell you, men, they's something fishy with that corpse they got in there.”

But others there knew what was up now. “It's somebody to go down in the back of the graveyard, down in the Reprobates' Field,” one whispered, while the rest nodded. “If they is any family they want to keep it quiet.”

“Yeah,” said another. “I wouldn't be surprised if it was old Will Thurlow. Maybe he has served out his sentence at last. He's been in the Huntsville pen since—”

At that moment the waitress returned, followed by two shuffle-gaited young Negro men in coveralls carrying their shapeless caps in their hands. They shuffled out from behind the counter and stood waiting to be spoken to, their faces adjusted to a fine point between attention and curiosity.