The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (43 page)

“Enough to take a belt of the good stuff before raising my bidding hand.”

Cartwright shook his head knowingly. “It’s an animal you can’t do without.”

“Indeed. Like I tell my boys, you can’t do without a mule no more than you can do without legs. You’re a cripple without one. Don’t I, boys? Don’t I say you can’t do without a mule no more than legs?”

“Yes. He says it all the damn time.”

The boys had stalked up from behind. Cartwright couldn’t help but jump.

“I told you,” McBride said. “All the damn time I say it.”

Cartwright regained his composure. The pitch: “You speak with a lot of sense and experience. Fellows, a mule is important and so’s a man’s tools. I was a farmer for many years and indeed I know that a farmer is only good as his tools. Let the harness match the hide, as they say. You need something to equal that good mule.”

McBride flinched. A less experienced drummer might think
this the wrong tack, but Cartwright knew his trade, and his trade was talk. In his mind’s eye, he saw the contents of the Irishman’s barn: cracked, broken harnesses and homemade harrows, antiquated briar hoes and other tools of the Old World. They might even shell corn by hand. “Yessir,” he continued, “I got something here that will double, if not triple, a man’s yield at harvest with only half the effort. Half the effort, twice the yield. Powerful math. Now how about that?”

McBride said nothing. The good mule stood in the furrow, radiating a potent silence. The best draft animals have no discernible personality, and this one seemed such a beast.

“Now me,” Cartwright said, “I’d say you couldn’t beat that with a stick. This tool a man can’t afford to be without. Latest from Virginia Progressive Agriculture. Help me, boys.”

The twins pitched forward. Cartwright dismounted, whispered into the horses’ toggling ears, and walked around to the wagon bed. He peeled back a yellow oilskin, revealing a rectangular crate. He took out a small pry bar and removed a series of staples. The twins helped him lift the lid off a steel-pointed, double-footed plow packed in dry straw. It had been polished to a violent gleam, and the sun caught and danced like hooked minnows on every point and angle. McBride didn’t dare look back, but he was imagining his own single-footed plow: crude, hand-forged, nicked, and dull as any kitchen blade. Wouldn’t even break roots.

“Brand-new, our latest model. This here is the McCrory Reaper,” Cartwright said, “but I call it the Miracle Plow. Our engineers have designed it to render a maximum harvest as far as crops go, clearing twice as much land in the same amount of hours and cutting a deeper furrow, turning up fresher soil and more nutrients. We guarantee better crops or your money back. It’s been tested by a scientist at the state college for three years and the results have been proven.

“Look. I’m not the first drummer who’s come down the road and won’t be the last, but I sell no snake oil. I’m a farm boy myself,
grew up on a spread about the size of this one. I know what it’s like to rise with the last star and work under the light of the first. We lost that farm because we had two bad years running,” Cartwright said, licking his mouth with the moisture of the lie. “That’s all it took: two bad ones. I say with confidence, if we’d of had the McCrory Reaper, we’d still be farming my dad’s acres. But my dad wasn’t progressive. Wouldn’t change with the times. Now another’s working our land—successfully, with the Miracle Plow. Sold it to him myself. Broke my heart, too. Probably shouldn’t be telling it, but I did. You got to get that dollar. Boys, help me move this thing. If you don’t mind, Mr. McBride, let’s unbuckle your old plow and hitch up this one. You got a singletree? No? That’s okay. Let’s run a couple furrows with it, free of charge, and see how it measures up. Break a half acre. Would you be averse?”

The question hung there. The twins looked to McBride for instruction, eyes black and hard. Cartwright saw that one boy had only nine fingers—the one way to tell them apart. McBride gave them a slight nod, and they harnessed the new plow.

Tucking his tie between the buttons of his shirt, Cartwright approached the mule as the Irishmen sat on their haunches in the shade of an outbuilding. It was awkward for them to watch another man work without falling in line behind him. They rebelled against their jittering tendons, forced themselves still.

Cupping the mule’s nose, Cartwright said, “You got to get to know a mule, right? What’s his name? Ronald? Is that right? Ronald, do I have a treat for you. This thing’s going to feel light as a vest.”

He moved behind the double-footed plow, leaned forward, and slapped the mule on its ass with a tack fitted on the inside of his ring. The mule surged forward, the leather harness yanked with such force it began to groan.

“Jesus,” McBride whispered. “Look at Ronald pull.”

…

“This way, you’re working the ground, and
it
ain’t working
you,
” Cartwright said, chewing on the poor food. “I hate to say it, but it’s true. These days a man can’t hope to compete without one.”

They took supper in the kitchen, the core of a three-room shotgun, dredging up beans and their white, watery gruel with a great circle of corn bread that McBride had cooked in a deep skillet, scooping the golden meal from a sack that stood open beside the woodstove. The meal had quite a grit to it, so the corn bread offered no flavor and the consistency of damp sawdust. Cartwright choked it down, thinking, Promotion, promotion. The sullen boys ate little, seeming to draw their fire from tobacco and wee hits of whiskey from a jug, which they didn’t attempt to conceal but didn’t offer to share, either, as they surely would to a neighbor.

McBride and Cartwright discussed the merits and dimensions of the new plow at length. Look how effortlessly it turned the earth. Like a knife through hot bread, McBride kept saying, shaking his head. It barely wears on the mule, barely at all.

Cartwright looked about the room. Why’d Threadgill even note these people? But the sucker list said
SHERMAN MCBRIDE
in its lovely, arching script. Jumping Jesus, McBride couldn’t scrape together fifteen dollars if you held a straight razor to his turkey neck, even if he sold everything in the cabin and not a cent to the government. These people were prime candidates for Moses’s jubilee. Perhaps there was a relation who could lend them the money, with interest.

Come nightfall, McBride scratched up some fodder for Cartwright’s horses and showed him to the barn loft. McBride bid him good night and retreated to the cabin. A shining sliver of moon rested on the planks, and blue foxfire wafted on the hills. Shivering in the cool of the evening, Cartwright stood in the barn door and watched Orion wheel in his chase.

Cartwright saw the twins standing in the twilight. They draped
ancient flintlocks over their shoulders, the heavy octagonal barrels tamped with cut nails and brass buttons. Not far away, a boar hog threw itself against the stall and bawled out, raking tusks against the wood. If a man fell in, it would leave nothing but a skull plate. He looked at the guns.

“They got a fox pinned on the mountain,” the ten-fingered boy said. “Sometimes they cross the river here at the cut. Might get us a shot. Hear them hounds singing?”

Bound in a nimbus of light, the boys cocked their ears as if to a phonograph for music.

“There a bounty on it?” Cartwright asked.

Oh yeah, the boys said. They named a good figure. Maybe a piece of that plow, they hinted. They said it carefully, their green young minds grappling with the hard currency of commerce. “I see you looking at my hand,” the maimed boy said, holding it up to the lantern.

Cartwright felt his stomach coil.

“Lost it baiting a jaw trap. Hand slipped.” He looked Cartwright in the eye and said it bluntly, without threat; he hadn’t lived in a civilized town yet. He hadn’t learned shame.

“We put too much oil to it,” the other said. “Got it slickery.”

“Easy mistake to make,” Cartwright said, relieved. “Do you cure them or bounty them?”

“Depends if the fur traders or the government men are coming around,” the ten-fingered boy said. “Neighbors send word up the road.”

“You know,” Cartwright said, with a knowing shake of his head, “an animal has just enough brains to cure its own hide, be it deer, fox, or bear. Something to study on, I’d say.”

The boys thought on it for a minute. “That is something,” the nine-fingered boy said. “I’d never thought of it, but it’s true. Wouldn’t call it a puzzle, but it’s something to note.”

A grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, the ten-fingered boy said, “You
were
a farmer, weren’t you?”

“Oh yeah,” Cartwright said, smiling. “Those were good times.”

“Hunh. We’ll have to talk some more about that plow.”

Before they left, they slipped him a twist of tobacco, as they would a neighbor. Cartwright snapped his fingers, twice. He was in with them now.

Cartwright climbed the rungs of the ladder. Out the window, he glanced up at Andromeda, chained to the rock. The drummer was careful with his cigarette, cleaning the boards with his shoe and killing the cinder on the wood. Then he heard a woman screaming on the mountain, but remembered that it was merely the cry of a gray fox, a dog that walks trees like a cat. He leaned back, breathing the ancient smell of cured apples and tobacco hanging from the rafters. Also, a whiff of swallow droppings.

The smell brought to mind his father, mother, brothers, and sisters. Cartwright’s family took up pine stobs, brooms, and pokers, beating pigeons to death by the dozens, so numerous and stupid they were. His father lined them up on the ground, and his sister Audrey broke kindling to fire the kettle and scald feathers from the bodies. They gorged themselves, like every other hard-up family from Canada to Texas. It was nothing less than manna, and the bird-soil fell like flakes of lime, his mother and sisters holding umbrellas straining over their heads to keep it off their dresses. The birds they couldn’t eat, they ground into fertilizer. Back and forth, his sisters carried the pailfuls of feathers and pulp. The flocks blotted the sun and spooked the horses, which tried to crop grass to the verge of foundering because they weren’t ready, at midday, to return slack bellied to the barn and stand hungry in the darkness. The screaming clouds peeled back the green table of grass, and the horses chewed faster, faster.

Cartwright’s brother Nige handed him a dead passenger pigeon to play with. He turned it over in his hands: the red eye set there like a hardened drop of blood, the slaty guard feathers the color of water churning over the bottom of rivers that hold trout. The
body was limp in his hand, neck lolling about, and he stroked the saffron underbelly. In his trunk in Anthem, he now kept that mummified pair of wings, feathers still crisp as fletching against his thumb. Wrapped in black gauze and smelling sweetly of dry mold, they could have been torn from its back yesterday. He would wrap them back up and put them away under his winter clothes. There were damn few pigeons left now and someday the sky would be evacuated of everything but rain, airships, and stars.

Cartwright turned and felt a sharp corner dig into his kidneys. He plunged his arm into the straw and came up with a jar of corn. “Hallelujah,” he said, grinning. He held the clear liquor up to the moon, which looked as hollow and weird as Thomas Jefferson’s death mask. He turned the jar, and the geography of the moon warped and spilled to the corners. With luck like this, he’d be back in Anthem in no time. He unscrewed the two-piece lid with a grainy, skirling sound.

After taking a third of the jar, Cartwright made a nest in the straw and settled into a dream-sleep rife with women. He was a man of low station, a virgin at twenty-five. He wouldn’t be Threadgill, though. Cartwright wanted a steady woman. Regional manager pay would get him one. Maybe she’d have earth to till, a few acres. Yes, she would. He cocked his ear. The gray fox screamed.

The nine-fingered boy said, “Here it comes, dollar bills on the foot,” and his brother laughed a laugh dry as corn husks. The boys waited for the fox under a wash of stars. There were hunts, too, ciphered in the sky above: the hare, the dogs greater and lesser, and the Great Hunter whipping them on.

A square of sun teased Cartwright’s face and chest in the morning. Blinking, he glanced about the loft, trying to remember where he was. Swallows peeked out of their mud nests and streaked blue and gold out the window. He woke to their piping, and McBride called him out of the barn. In the kitchen, a tray of sloppy eggs
was laid out and a kettle whistled. The tea had the musty tang of roots, or the kettle had been used to make chicory coffee, one. Cartwright asked if the boys had shot themselves a fox. McBride said he supposed they had not.

“That’s a shame,” Cartwright said. “Bounty’s a good way to turn a few dollars.”

McBride flinched. Cartwright meant to spur a conversation of whether McBride wanted to buy or not—his back ached from sleeping strangely and a bouncing wagon might cure it—but like these mountain people do, McBride shunned talk of money and led the drummer in an elliptical conversation that touched upon foxes, what foxes eat, foxes and chickens, bounties, plows, planting by the signs, the Stations of the Cross, the months of the moon, the death of his wife in the winter, TB, washing handkerchiefs of red roses, foxes again, plows again, and, finally, the matter of money. McBride counted out quarters, wheat pennies, and paper bills, building them into a small pile.

Cartwright frowned, plucking off the Confederate note the man placed on top—a two-dollar Judah Benjamin—and setting it aside. He said, “This is only half, I’m afraid. Barely half.” It was time to go. Experience told him that McBride was about to offer him goats and old boots to make up the difference.

“I know this,” McBride said. “But you said it yourself, this is a tool a man can’t do without. I got something to cover the rest. It’s out where we get flints, just sitting in the ground. It can be sold back where you come from for great profit.”

“If you’re talking about ginseng or hides, I don’t truck in that,” Cartwright said, the tooth flickering as he spoke.