The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (42 page)

He turned to Sean then to see how bad it was, what he had done, and in staring back at him Sean could feel by the contracted tensions of his face that it was a wrecked mask of disbelief and no reassurance whatsoever to the boy.

“It was a accident,” the boy said. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”

“Just you kneel down and put it on the ground,” she said. “In the leaves—yes, just like that. That was good.”

“It was a accident.”

“Sweetie, I know it was.” She sat up. With her face averted she said to Sean, “It could have been either of us. Did it nick you? Are you bleeding?”

He felt through his hair and held his hand out and they both looked: a perfect unbloodied hand stared back at them.

“A fraction of an inch,” he said in a voice soft as hers had been: conspirators. “I left the damn gun in the car. Fuck, I never even checked the safety, I was so sure it wasn’t loaded. It would’ve been my fault and he’d’ve had to live with it forever.”

“He doesn’t have to live with it now,” she said. “Or with you.”

She was on her feet, collecting the flashlight, and playing through the sapling audience the light paused and she said, “Jesus,” and he turned to look behind him at a young tan oak whose dove-gray bark was gashed in sharp white.

She turned from him. She told the boy, “It’s okay. Look at my eyes, Dylan. Nobody’s hurt. You see that, don’t you? Nobody got hurt.”

“You did,” he said.

“Baby, I’m not hurt. Pawpaw didn’t hurt me, and you know what? We’re getting out of here. You’re coming with me.”

Dylan looked down at the gun and she said, “No, leave it.” Then changed her mind. “I’m taking it,” she told Sean, “because that’s wisest, isn’t it.”

“You can’t think that,” Sean said.

“Tell me you’re okay to be left,” she said.

“A little stunned is all.”

“That’s three of us then.”

Dylan was staring at him and Sean collected his wits to say clearly, “You know what a near-miss is, don’t you, Dyl? Close but not quite? That bullet came pretty close but I’m what you call unscathed. Which means fine. Are you hearing me say it didn’t hurt me? Nod your head so I’m sure you understand.” The boy nodded. “We’re good then, right? You can see I’m good.” The boy nodded.

Esme said, “We need to go, Dylan. Look at you. You’re shivering.”

“Where are we going?”

“Far away from here, and don’t worry, it’s all right if we go. Tell him now that we can go.”

This was meant for Sean, and they watched as he took the full measure of what he had done and how little chance there was of her heeding what he said now: “Don’t disappear with him, Esme. Don’t take him away forever because of tonight. From now on my life will be one long trying to make this right to you. For him, too. Don’t keep him away. My life spent making up for this. I need you to believe me. I can make this right.”

“I want to believe you,” she said. “I almost want to believe you.”

Before he could think how to begin to answer that the mother and child were gone.

He knew enough not to go after them. He knew enough not to go after them yet.

T
hreadgill had been one of them, or something like it. This part of the world hadn’t been penetrated by the Company in four seasons, ever since they lost him, their ace drummer, on the Blackwater River, where he’d been shot off a farmer’s wife by the farmer himself. While the man fumbled a fresh shell into the breach of his shotgun, Threadgill ran flopping out the back door and tumbled down the sheer cliff behind the cabin. There he came to rest in the arms of a mighty spruce. The tree held him like a babe till they rigged up a block and tackle to lift him out. They said he had nothing but socks on, argyle. The image bored into Cartwright’s brain like a weevil. The week the Company hired Cartwright on as a drummer, he found the dead man’s sucker list wrapped in oilskin and tacked under the wagon tongue. It was the secret of Cartwright’s success. He grew flush off commission in no time.

Polishing a new gold tooth with his tongue, Cartwright clattered down the road in a buckboard wagon. He followed the split-rail fence worming along the trace. Ironweed and seven sisters
grew between the ruts, tickling the horses—a gelded pair of blood bays. The farther he traveled, the more the roadbed degraded. The spring rains had gnawed small ravines into it all the way down to the shining black chert; he kept his horses to a low canter, should they come upon a slip. The tunnel of rain-lush forest gave way, finally, to cleared farmland around the bend.

The only thing Cartwright knew about McBride, today’s prospect, was that the farmer was a sucker, though the few neighbors around there would have told Cartwright that no one knew the valley better than honest Sherman McBride—the creeks that bred trout, the caves that held flint—except for the two boys he raised off those mouthfuls of corn that rose from the fields and strained for the sun. Even so, honesty would be the man’s downfall. Cartwright gazed up at the Allegheny Mountains that trotted saw-toothed across the horizon. This was long before the forests were scoured off the mountain and the coal cut from its belly, before blight withered the stands of chestnut. A dozen passenger pigeons trickled through the sky, the first Cartwright had seen that year despite all his travels. The cherry of his cigarette tumbled, and he jumped and slapped it out of his lap.

Ah! The passenger pigeons he remembered best of all. Every fall, his family had waited for the black shrieking cloud. Word was passed down from towns to the north—Anthem, Mouth of Seneca—and there they were, a pitch river of millions undulating in the sky. When they touched down to rest, they toppled the crowns from oaks. They plucked any living plant and then the roiling swarm fell to the ground and tore at the grass. Under them, no one could tell field from road.

“Whoever cut this grade,” Cartwright said to the horses, “must have followed a snake up the hollow. Followed a damned snake!” He roomed near the courthouse in Anthem, but he hadn’t been there in seven weeks. He was deep into the summer swing through the highland counties, all the way up to Job and Corinth,
the old towns once called Salt Creek and Beartown until their rechristening in a religious fervor. Cartwright glanced at the crate jostling under the tarp. He said, “Damn, boys. I’d almost buy it myself to get shut of this situation.”

He swabbed his face with his tie. Soon, the sun burned off the fog and hoisted itself into the sky. “Horses, it’s hotter than two rats fucking in a wool sock. I tell you that much.”

He took another little drink. Bottle flies turned their emerald carapaces in the sun. Young monarchs gathered to tongue the green horseshit and clap their wings.

Before the Company hired him, Cartwright had sold funeral insurance, apprenticed himself to a farrier, and, in his youth, worked his father’s acres. To hear his father tell it, Anthem was a profane place, and they would do well to keep ground between their children and such ways. But a month after she buried her husband, Cartwright’s mother closed the deed on their land and moved them to Anthem without debate. Her sister lived by the railroad depot.

Though it had been years since he’d swung a scythe or sheathed his arms in the hot blood of stock, Cartwright’s boyhood helped him build a quick rapport, or so he said, with the farmers who bought his wares. Truthfully, he bullied them into buying the tools, or, if they would not be bullied, he casually insulted the farmers’ methods in front of their wives. “That’s one way of doing things,” he said to the hard sells. “Gets it done sure as any other. Yessir. Hard labor! Of course, you don’t see many men doing it that way anymore. Last season, I found bluegums down in Green-brier County working like that.”

“You don’t say.”

“No, excuse me. Season before last. And they might have been Melungeons. Ma’am, you spare some water for a wayfaring traveler?”

Cartwright would bid them good night and retreat to the
hayloft, and, as often as not, be greeted in the morning by the farmer with a fistful of wrinkled dollars and watery, red-rimmed eyes, having been flayed the night long for stubborn habits that clashed with the progressive spirit of the times.

Like his own father, the people Cartwright sold to worked rocky mountain acres, wresting little more than subsistence from the ground. None had owned slaves. Some abstained from the practice out of moral doctrine; all abstained for lack of money. They carded their own wool, cured their own tobacco, and died young or back-bent, withered and brown as ginseng roots twisted from the soil. A handful of affluent farmers in the river bottoms owned early Ford tractors, odd and exoskeletal, but most still worked mules and single-footed plows. Cartwright had seen acres of corn that grew on hillsides canting more than forty-five degrees. But even to the humblest farmers, Cartwright managed to sell a few harrow teeth or axheads.

It also ensnared him: the more success he found, the more desolate the places the Company sent him, and the higher the profits they came to expect. He was the rare man who could wring dollars from these scanty places, but he’d grown tired of the counties they cast him farther and farther into like a bass plug. A man couldn’t even buy a fresh newspaper where he roamed. Cartwright brought them the first word of the laws and statutes that a young state government was trying to filigree over the backcountry. Cartwright should have said no, but the Company representative had appealed to his vanity: “I’ll be straight with you. We’re in the middle of a recession and”—the man was a veteran of the Spanish War—“we need our best on the ramparts. We know you can make quota, buddy. You’ve proved yourself.” The praise flooded Cartwright’s belly with a singing warmth, sure as a shot of clean bourbon. Only now did he realize the Company had taken advantage of his loyalty. As soon as he hit Anthem, he’d demand a promotion.

Cartwright took the last hit of whiskey and licked his lips. “My ass hurts,” he said to the horses, with a sly sidelong grin. “Do your feet hurt? Huh now?”

Now there was the trouble of the last plow. He’d never returned with inventory and wasn’t about to start. Had to make quota. Cartwright lobbed the jar into a roadside holly bush, where it left a quivering hole in the leaves. “Hup,” he said, slapping the horses’ haunches with the reins. The sweat went flying. A swarm of insects gathered to sup at the horses’ soft eyes, nostrils, and assholes. He began to doze but a furry gray deerfly tagged him on the neck. He slapped it away and cursed softly, so as not to spook the horses. Blood formed, round and perfect as a one-carat ruby. Again, he lifted his tie.

McBride seemed to be getting up a small orchard of thorny apples along the road. The split rails of the fence became fresher till they gave out, for around the bend Cartwright found two boys planing and setting lengths of locust by the roadside. Fresh from the adz, the cut lumber gleamed silver in the sun, if marred in places by heart shakes and spalting. The boys wore a coarse homespun, bearing the scurvy look of those who live without women. Their long hair was cut severely, as if it had been chopped with a mattock.

Over the
chip-chop-thunk
of the adze, the twins spoke to each other in a fluttering brogue, the voice of orioles. They saw the wagon and fell dumb, tools gone limp in their hands. Cartwright reined his horses and said, “Hello there, fellows. You the men of the place?”

While one answered, the other spat on the blade of the scrub plane and ran it grating over a stone. The boy said, “English barn a quarter mile up. Ought to find him there. You a preacher?”

“No.”

“Ah. That’s too bad. We haven’t heard good preaching in a while.” Cartwright wouldn’t have guessed it, but both of the boys
could cipher well. The eldest had read the family Bible seven times through. The one on the left asked, “You play music?”

“No.”

“Not the tax man, are you?”

“I’m a salesman.”

The boy had no comment for this. Waving Cartwright on, he opened a mouthful of teeth so black and broken they looked serrated. He stuffed a rasher of tobacco inside. Cartwright thanked both boys and slapped his horses forward. The wagon went rattling on.

When the drummer was out of earshot, one asked, “What do you think?”

“I expect he’ll expect us to feed him dinner.”

His brother sighted down the scrub plane, eyeing it for flaws. “Need that like a hot nail in the foot.”

“Least he’s not here for taxes.”

“At least.”

The twins turned away, shouldered a rail in tandem, and set it atop another.

Catholic Irish, Cartwright thought, like his mother’s father, who’d been converted to the Southern Methodist Church when the preacher said how the pope’s Catholics was little better than cannibals, eating up the body of Christ and carving the thumbs off of saints. The body is profane, the spirit real! When Cartwright was young, he heard a Catholic in the infirmary praying to beads. They’d come here to dig railroad tunnels, but, like exotic flowers, had never quite taken to the place and died about as quickly as the land would take them.

Soon, he came upon a sharp-shouldered man plowing up earth with acres to go. The farmer’s face was sallow and long-whiskered under a broad-brimmed felt hat, but his hands and arms were the color of leaf tobacco. His boots had been mended with baling twine. McBride, for sure. He whoa’d the mule to a stop. The animal
was stout and gleamed wetly in the sun, like a doused ingot of iron. Waves of salt had dried on its shoulders.

“Hi there,” the drummer said, lifting a hand from the reins. “Name’s John Cartwright.”

“Sherman McBride.”

“Good-looking animal you got there.”

“Ought to be,” McBride said. He took off his crushed felt hat and swept it across his forehead like a bandanna. “We paid big on him at the auction. My last mule lived to be thirty-two years old. Hell, my neighbor just give him to me on trade and we worked him swaybacked. After the war, it was. Know how much the price on a mule goes up in thirty-two years?”

Cartwright wanted to say, It’s called capital, old buddy. Instead, he politely inquired as to what the years could do to the price of a mule.