Authors: William Gay
He underestimated the dryness of the chaff and last year’s hay: when he threw the match it very nearly exploded. An enormous wall of heat assailed him, knocking him backward. He scrambled down the ladder swearing and feeling to see was his hair afire. There was a fierce muttering above him and he could smell the clean scent of the hay burning. He wasted no time. He went past the tractor parked in the hall of the barn and through an eight-foot wall of pokeweed and through the fence and began to climb the hill, his breath coming harder, the white shirt plastered to his sides and stomach.
He paused halfway up the hill and watched through the gap in the cedars. The glade below danced with heat, a fierce quarter acre of hell consigned here shimmering and vibratory with menace, smoking bits of lathing falling into the dry sedge and small, bright flames darting playfully into the lot, a growing tide of fire that rode the crest of sedge toward the house like a wave on water. A landscape from a palette of fire. The tin curled and was blown off smoking into the wilting pokeweed and he could hear the enormous Whoof Whoof of the fire sucking, drawing off air from the hollow flue.
When she finally did come out he knew it not by seeing her but by the screech of her voice and even that seemed strange in the glassy air, something grating and mechanical, a shrieking of metal on metal. The voice through the fire came distorted and fragmented, foreshortened then elongated. When he heard the grinding of the truck motor even that sounded like nothing he’d heard before. Filtered so by the fire it intercut with her voice, became surreal, a garbled electronic shrieking there was no one about to hear.
A warrant was sworn out and Bellwether arrested him. Pearl followed the squad car back into Ackerman’s Field and he was on the street within the hour. In a week he appeared before Judge Humphries and the case was bound over to the grand jury. When the jurors met they threw it out. They decided there was insufficient evidence for prosecution and that they all owned barns.
Weiss’s wife was named Alma. She didn’t have much to say and when she did speak her voice was a wheeze like air leaking from a broken accordion in one endlessly sustained note. She had asthma attacks. Each breath she took was audible from several feet away. Winer caught himself waiting for her to breathe, holding his own breath. Then it would come, the tone of the wheeze breaking off in an agonizing pause when her lungs were filled, changing then, the pitch lowering as if some tension had been relieved, then the battle for oxygen would begin again.
She had a small dog she perpetually clutched in her arms and she swore it had saved her life during three separate asthma attacks. It was a breed Winer was unfamiliar with and it was the ugliest dog he had ever seen, possibly the ugliest anything he had ever seen. He judged it some model of lapdog. It had a mouthful of tiny needle-sharp teeth like some malign form of life dredged up by appalled fishermen from the keep of the sea. It did not like Winer any more than he liked it and it would bare its teeth and snap at him from the safety of the woman’s cradling arms in a gesture curiously catlike. It had black, shiny, bulbous eyes devoid of any emotion remotely doglike and with its bulging eyes and spiderlike limbs it looked like some grotesque insect the old women had taken to her bosom. Their fates were intertwined, for when she died in September that year the dog was put to sleep as well and placed in her coffin, a talisman whose own luck had run out.
“They say he went crazy and pulled a gun on Ratcliff,” Sam Long told Winer in town the Saturday after she died. Long was arranging the boy’s purchases in a cardboard box, totting them up in a ticketbook. “Ratcliff doin all he could to save her and Weiss throw down on him with a pistol thataway. Ratcliff said he was just a rippin and a rarin. Said he said, ‘You let her die and by God you die with her.’ Old Ratcliff told him, ‘Son, can’t nobody but God Almighty blow breath back into the dead woman and he ain’t no more impressed with pistols than I am.’”
“Are they burying her around here?”
“Lord, no, boy. You think the ground around here is sacred enough for old man Weiss? I reckon not. He hired a ambulance all the way to Nashville. Puttin her in one of these aboveground tombs, what I hear.”
Winer remembered the Sandburg book she had given him. In the dust, he thought. In the cool tombs.
He took up the cardboard carton and balanced it on his left shoulder, steadied it with a hand. He moved toward the door and opened it onto the hot sidewalk.
“I’ll see you.”
“You come back,” Long said automatically.
The door closed behind Winer with a soft ching from the bell and burdened with the box he went on down the street toward the cabstand.
Motormouth came out of the pasture past the looming bulk of the barn and halted where the moon threw cedared shadows, paused a moment to gain his bearings. A thin figure propelled by sheer anger dark to dark and shadow to shadow past the barn and on to the house. The world lay in a grail of silence, the only color a square of yellow light a window threw misshapen into the yard. One shadow among the others less mobile, he moved past the truck in a soundless lope through unprotected light, the gun clasped across his chest, gaining invisibility momentarily in the accumulation of shadows against the wall.
He lay in the grass. It had just been mown, he could smell it, could feel it, wet with dew, adhering to his bare arms. Slowly he began to rise, straightened to a crouch, scarcely daring to breathe. The screen was cool against his cheek.
The room was yellow. He could see three-quarters of the bed and a man’s freckled arm, a yellow wall bare save for a door and a calendar with a scene of a lovable waif wending his way down a country road, fishing pole on his shoulder. Unloved and perhaps unlovable, Motormouth straightened further when the door opened and a young woman came through it. She was young and pretty, Motormouth’s wife. She wore a peachcolored slip and now she drew it over her head in one smooth motion, tossed her hair, breasts bobbing, turning toward the lightswitch. He stared at the darker thatch of her pubic hair as the room went down to darkness. He fumbled open his clothing, spent himself in an act of bitter solitude, affected more by the sight of her naked now than in all the nights she’d willingly shared his bed. He moved limberkneed back to the truck, more confident now that the lights were out.
He brought out a packet from his hip pocket, unwrapped it. A soft avalanche of sugar down the throat of the gastank. “One lump or two?” he asked it. He moved on toward the barn, a figure curiously simian in the cold night. Somehow the sugar did not seem enough. He could smell the sour ammoniac odor of the horsestalls. He brought out his wirecutters and knelt in the grass. He could hear the soft shuffling of the horses. The woven wire clicked when he cut it, when he was through he went on to the barbed wire. The barbed wire was taut and it clanged when he cut it and sprang away into the darkness. The moon slipped behind a cloud and the horses were lost to his sight. He could hear them moving about the pen fretfully, almost furtively.
He pocketed the cutters and took up his rifle and turned hurriedly back toward the woods. The cloud passed the moon then and its huge shadow paced him, dreamlike, through the surreal field of silver weeds.
In Hovington’s last days they moved his bed out of the long front room and into a side room as if the sight of his dying might offend the sensibilities of such drunkards and whores as the nights seemed to draw ever more of. The long room held more cardtables now and the jukebox and sometimes late at night couples danced in the end where his bed had been. He’d lie in the darkness and listen to their laughter through the slatted walls, to the thump and slide of their feet on the rough floorboards. Perhaps in these last hours he was grateful for the jukebox. This world is not my home, the Crater family saying. Oh Lord, what will I do? Or perhaps he lay in the darkness and thought no thoughts at all, not even dwelling on the thousand deeds and nondeeds that had brought him to such a pass.
The room had one fourpaned window and he used to lie curled facing it and peer across the weeds to the branch and past that to where the hills gave way to autumn sky.
Visitors didn’t come much anymore and with the cessation of a need for appearances Pearl had stopped shaving him and his thin cheeks were covered with a soft black beard flecked with gray. He might have been a fanatic consumed from within by the fires of some fierce and obscure religion.
The girl used to come sit by his bed in the ladderback chair and watch him without speaking. In those days she could study his face at leisure. His eyes would be closed, the eyes unmoving beneath the yellow lids, and she guessed he didn’t dream much anymore.
She remembered his laughter from a childhood so long ago it might have been a tale she’d read in a dusty schoolbook. Then a little at a time silence had taken him over and there had been a time when she wanted to scream at him. “What’s the matter with you? Why do you let him run over us like you do?”
When his back began to bend like something folding what was left of his life inside it, and the perimeters of where he could go and not go were marked by the dimensions of the bed, he had grown more silent yet. Sometimes he’d come awake from dozing and she’d be a slim, dark presence by the window, watching him, her face as unreadable as his own. And he had no words to say, no deeds to do. Everything seemed said, nothing left but waiting.
He lay seeped in pain and oblivious of his surroundings like a dying rat preoccupied with the pellet of poison slowly dissolving in his belly. Death by misadventure, a garbage can explored better left alone.
“He’s coughing up blood again,” she told her mother. Pearl laid aside the dishtowel and went into the near-dark room.
Hardin shuffled a poker deck and dealt himself a full house, the cards rippling smooth as water. He reshuffled and dealt a jackhigh straight flush, conscious of the sounds from the sickroom, of the door opening. The shiftless shuffle of her houseshoes ceasing. He could feel her behind him, silent and somehow accusatory.
The she said, “He’s dyin.”
Bored with straight flushes, Hardin laid the cards aside. “Well,” he said, “there’s no news in that. He’s dyin ever since I knowed him.”
“He’s bad off.”
Hardin went to see. Hovington’s flesh was gray and clammy. Hardin’s hand came away moist with cold sweat when he touched the sick man. He wiped his hand on a trouser leg. It seemed to him he could already feel a rigidity seeping into Hovington’s flesh, stealthy, covert, he could already smell the sweet, carrion presence of death.
“You reckon he needs a doctor?”
“Undertaker is more like it.” Hardin passed through the door and paused and lit a cigarette. He went on through the house and onto the porch, then sat on the edge of the porch in the sun. Pearl followed him out, the door closing nigh soundless behind her. “Stay with him,” he said. “It’s him in there dyin, not me out here.”
Pearl was silent awhile. “He’s wantin somethin,” she finally said.
“I don’t doubt it for a minute,” Hardin said. “In his place I might could think of a thing or two I’d want myself.”
“He wants that Winer woman brought up here. He wants to talk to her.”
“Say he does?”
“That’s what he asked for.”
“He’s out of his head.”
“Maybe, but he ain’t never asked for nothin else.”
“That’s crazy and a waste of time besides.”
“All these years and he’s never asked for nothin,” she persisted. “Nothin only what a preacher could give him and he never even got that. Just laid there all this time and took what come.”
“That’s all any of us can do, take what comes.”
She looked stricken, the flesh of her cheeks folded on itself, her lips trembling. A damp and fearful blue eye. He thought she might cry.
“Just shut up,” he told her. “Don’t think it’s a bit late in the day for this? He made his bed and by God you made yourn and all you can do now is lay there with the cover pulled up around your chin and rest as best you can.”
Yet there was a stolid immutability to her he hadn’t known was there, an immovable weight of stubbornness that held her rooted before him as if he were wedded to her, condemned alike to her tardy sense of guilt. He thought suddenly that to move her aside he’d have shove her, cut a path through her with a hawkbill knife. He dropped his cigarette and ground it out with the toe of his boot.
“Then by God get her. But get her on your own book. I’ve got more to do than run up and down the road.” He stepped off the porch and strode toward the barn. She went back in.
The girl came out and hurried across the yard, a momentary hand raised to shield the sun. It was early yet, the morning sun resting above the green treeline. A day brimming with incandescent light and filing up with birdsong and she thought she’d never seen a brighter day. So bright a day to lie dying on. She was touched with horror, with a desperate need to hurry.
Her shoes made flat little plops in the roadbed and little clouds of dust arose like phantoms pursuing her. She increased her pace and the hash green world became a world in motion, a bobbing wall of greenery like murky water, and even the cries of birds were muted and distorted like sound filtered through fire.
Amber Rose did not believe in miracles. He is dying, she thought. She thought of a casket lid being closed. No one will open it, ever, she thought in wonder. The concept of forever struck her with the force of a blow. It yawned before her, all engrossing, awesome. She stopped in the curve of the road and looked back.
The house sat full in the sun, its roof growing dull green, its walls myriad shades of weathered gray. Brooding so in the morning light it seemed pulled magnetically by the anomalous shadows from the hollow. She whirled and hurried on.
Through the moving windshield of the Packard he watched with wry amusement their progress up the dusty roadbed, two figures imbued with haste, hurrying jerkily towards him like puppets dragged along by strings.
He slowed the Packard as he neared them, braked to a stop when they were almost parallel with the car. He cut the switch and sat watching them, an arm on the sill of the window.
“Looks like you had a long, hot trip for nothin, Miz Winer,” Hardin said. “Brother Hovington passed away a minute ago. I thought I’d save you the rest of the trip.”
“It wadn’t no trouble,” the woman said. Her voice sounded stilted and formal beneath the rim of her bonnet. “I have to hear about Mr Hovington.”
“Well, I guess he can rest easy now. Get in and I’ll run you back home.”
“I’ll just go on I reckon and see if I be of any help to Mrs. Hovington.”
“We can manage. I’m sorry we drug you into our troubles.”
“Folks got to help one another.”
“I reckon. We’ll manage though.”
The girl came around the side of the car, opened the door, and got in without speaking. The woman stood awkwardly in the roadbed as if awaiting enlightenment. “What was it he wanted me for anyway?”
“He never said,” Hardin told her.
The girl sat staring across the fence where Oliver’s goats grazed the bright tangle of bitterweed, though she did not see them. She thought, they will have to break his back to ever get him in a casket. A sense of horror suffused her, she fell to thinking on how this could come to be. Surely there were tools for this, no ordinary hammer would suffice. Beyond the grazing goats her mind dreamed implements of brass and gleaming bronze, folds of purple velvet to mute the blows.
Hardin had said something.
“No, I’ll just walk,” Mrs. Winer said.
“Suit yourself then,” Hardin said. He started the car and began to turn it in the road.
She sat watching her hands fold pleats in her blue skirt. She thought she ought to cry but she didn’t.
William Tell Oliver straightened from the milling goats amidst the halfmusic glangor of the bells to watch the stately passage of the hearse, the corn spilling forgotten from his hands, the polished black of the hearse winking back the midday sun, its sides already dulling with a film of dust.
Hovington, he thought, fascinated by the windows curtained by red velvet, the hearse’s low, sinister configuration somehow profound and appalling against the border of sumac and blackberry briars, diminishing then, content this time with another.
Winer went three times to the Red Diamond Poultry Farm. The first two times there was no one about at all and no sign of Weiss’s car. The chickens were halfstarved. He fed and watered them. The third time was on a Wednesday and Weiss’s car was parked in the drive and the front door was ajar though no one answered his call. He stood uncertainly in the clutter of the porch and after a while he sat in a lawn chair and waited. He felt restless, bemused, time was a commodity in short supply and he must ration his.
Everything seemed to be in disorder. The porch held stacked boxes of white cylinders that turned out to be photographs rolled tightly as window shades. A box was upended and the pictures scattered about the floor. He unrolled one. Another. They all seemed to be photographs of military units, hundreds of soldiers posed before barracks that looked makeshift and temporary, perhaps as temporary and fragile as the men they housed. Only the faces were different, a multitude of them, stern faces with overseas caps cocked jauntily, and then after a while even the faces seemed to merge and lose identity, become multiple exposures of some soldiers posed in limbo, awaiting a ship that would bear them to a war fought long ago.
A noise drew him up through the halfopen door. This room as well was in disorder, suitcases open, clothing strewn about the floor as if kicked there. Weiss lay on the couch. His mouth was open and the room was full of his noisy breathing. A stain fanned out from an overturned wine decanter, a red seeping as if the room had been the scene of gruesome carnage. Weiss slept in his clothes and his boots. The pith helmet lay tilted on the carpet.
When Winer shook him. Weiss’s eyes opened and he started, rose on his right elbow, peering wildly about the room.
“What? What is it? What’s the matter?”
Winer suddenly found himself bereft of anything to say. Weiss’s startled face struggled up from sleep wore an expression somehow akin to madness as if whatever had happened in the last week had marked him, left him deranged.
Weiss had always worn the helmet and looking down at him Winer saw that he was almost bald, the scalp pink and vulnerable through the kinked black hair.
“It’s morning,” Winer said. “The sun’s way up.”
“Fuck the sun,” Weiss said.
He struggled toward a semblance of erectness, abandoned the effort, settled back against the couch cushions. His eyes were open but unfocused, his fingers going awkwardly through all his pockets. At last he came up with the remnants of a pack of Camels, took one out and stuck it in his mouth, and sat without lighting it. His big head was propped on the heel of his hand, his elbow kept sliding off his knee.
“Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”
Winer stood in silence peering out the window. The sun fell through the window, a rectangle of merciless light. Where the yard fell away he could see the fence bordering it and through broken greenery the red road itself. He wished he were already on it. When he turned back toward the man on the couch Weiss’s eyes were closed to slits and were watching him speculatively as if surprised to find him still there.
“What do you want anyway?”
“Well, I came to work. To feed and all.”
“There’s not any work,” Weiss said. He had taken up a table lighter and was turning it in his hands this way and that, dropping his eyes to stare at it bemusedly as if uninitiated in its complexities.
“Not any work?”
“That’s what I said. I’m gathering up some stuff and getting out of here. I’m getting the fuck out and I don’t know if I’m ever coming back or not.”
“What about the chickens?”
“What about them? You can have them. Give them to those rednecks around here and let them have a barbecue to remember me by. Give them to our friend Hodges, he wanted them badly enough to try to steal them.”
Winer stood awkwardly without speaking, unable to articulate his thoughts. Finally, he said, “Then you don’t need me?”
“Hell, no. I don’t need you. What would I need you for? I told you, there’s nothing. I’m getting the fuck gone and you may as well do the same.”
“I guess that’s plain enough. I’ll see you.”
“I doubt it.” When Winer was halfway to the door Weiss said, “Look. Goddamn it. For what it’s worth I’m sorry, Winer.” He raised his hands, dropped them. “There’s just nothing. How much do I owe you?”
“Eight dollars.”
“All right.” He withdrew his wallet, sat for a time staring into it so that Winer thought he had forgotten is purpose in extracting it. Then he tossed it to the boy. “Here. You get it. My vision seems somewhat impaired this morning.”
Winer counted out a five and three ones and folded them down into his shirt pocket. He handed Weiss the wallet.
“No hard feelings, Winer. You did me a fine job.”
“No hard feelings. I was sorry to hear about your wife.” Winer turned to the door. When Weiss didn’t reply he went into the hot sunshine.
Dreading what she might have to say he didn’t tell her until the next morning.
“Ain’t I told you?” she wanted to know. “That’s just like him, I always knowed he was no account. Come in here throwin his money around and buildin his big chickenhouses and now where is he? I reckon now you’ll take him up and argue your own mama down. Read a book one time and think you know it all.”