The Tilted World (8 page)

“Bigger and meaner and more famous men than you have wanted to know.”

Jesse swished a last swash in his glass and drained it and set it down. Quietly: “Not meaner.”

The place had emptied of its dinner rush and now only one other table was occupied, a couple of drunk engineers scowling over their charts, the hopeless task of keeping the river at bay.

Jesse selected a toothpick from the holder and sat back against the booth, angled toward Ingersoll, who wondered was it dawning on the man that Ingersoll hadn’t said more than a dozen words.

“How ’bout it, Ing?” Jesse said. He was the kind of fella who’d use a nickname as soon as he could.

“How ’bout what?”

Pointing to Ham with the toothpick. “What’s his Christian?”

Ingersoll shrugged. In the kitchen, someone dropped a plate and cursed.

“I reckon it’s time,” said Ham, “to get back to bidness. Now, this whiskey is the finest I’ve had outside Kentuck, bonded or no. And I’m thinking a man like you, who makes dinner bills vanish and pretty waitresses bat their eyes like toads in a hailstorm, might know how to get some more.”

Jesse lifted the knife beside his plate and tilted it, smiled to inspect his white teeth. He flicked his thumb beneath the right wing of his mustache to curl it, then flicked the left. “Love to oblige you, boys,” he said, lowering the knife to the table. “But I don’t know nothing about nothing.”

“That so,” said Ham.

“That so. And even if I did, why would I trust a fella won’t tell me his real name?”

“All sorts of reasons to trust a fella.”

“Such as?”

“A taste of the take.”

“Thought you fellas were engineers.”

“Engineers is what we be. But with expensive tastes.”

“That right?”

“Got me a blue-book octoroon named Sappho in a house of ill repute in Storyville. Smokes moota with her coochie.”

Jesse leaned forward, eyes boyish and bright. “Liar.”

“No lie. She opens her whorehouse window and lowers a basket and the banana vendor packs up a big bunch of those Chiquitas, and a little moota in the bottom, rolled up to smoke. My gal Sappho can French inhale, blows smoke rings with her coochie lips. It kills me, every time. Can’t stay away. Even if her room always smells like rotting bananas.” Ham shrugged philosophically. “But such talent don’t come cheap. Costs me ten dollars. Wanna do her in the mirrored parlor? Costs extry. Wanna see her with her friend, Miss Carmen Brazilia of the Mule Skinner’s Whips? Costs extry. So you see even a distinguished engineer got to have some extry extry.”

Jesse nodded, removing the toothpick from between his lips and dropping it into the ashtray. “You have a point. Ten dollars is a lot.”

“Yeah, well”—here Ham jutted his jaw out and scratched his sideburns—“she charges by the inch.”

All three laughed, Ham the hardest.

“So if you find out the distiller of this here whiskey,” Ham continued, “wants a partner with ties to vast engineered metropoli scattered across this great nation, you tell him to come find us.”

“Oh, will do, will do.” Jesse gave them a keen look with those queer eyes of his. “Gentlemen,” he said, and pushed his chair back and stood, “this has been a most enlightening meal. We’ll see each other soon, I trust.” He reached and shook hands with Ham.

When Ingersoll extended his hand to shake, he bumped his whiskey glass, upsetting it. He snatched for it and the whiskey flung in the air and splattered down on his hand.

“Well, will you look at that,” said Jesse. “Man’s getting his date drunk.”

Silence while the joke touched ground. And then Ham’s huge guffaw, table shaking as he pounded it with his fist, and Jesse too throwing his head back and hooting. Ingersoll mopped his hand with a balled-up napkin and waited for the laughter to die. It took a good while. At last Jesse, still chuckling, made his way to the door, passing the table Connie was wiping down. He leaned close and whispered something that made her laugh too. She straightened, and all three of them watched Jesse proceed to the coatrack and slip into the camel hair and place his hat on his black hair and flick the brim. He withdrew his umbrella from the stand and opened the door, the bells ringing. Under the awning, he dipped his head to open the umbrella, then pushed off into the blustery night.

Ingersoll was exhausted. It hit him just that fast. “Let’s go,” he said, thinking of the rooming-house bed, and Ham nodded.

Then Ingersoll leaned over and picked up Jesse’s glass, a half inch of whiskey left, and he drained it. “Huh.”

“Water?”

Ingersoll nodded.

Chapter 6

T
he whole first day, she was skittish with the baby. She didn’t even realize she was expecting someone to whisk him away—the dead mother, risen from her grave, or even the cowboy who brought him—until she decided to trim the baby’s fingernails, bendy but so sharp they’d scratched his cheeks. She put her curved scissors to his inch-long finger and had to make herself squeeze. Holding her breath. One, two, three, four nails done, then his pinkie twitched and she pinched it and a tiny smile of blood appeared and immediately she glanced at the door. But no one came to take him, leave her orphaned. The child was squalling so she picked him up and sucked his little finger and shushed him, holding him against her shoulder and patting him as she executed her loose-legged bouncy walk, the one that had worked on Jacob.

The bouncy walk came right back. The baby calmed. Later, to trim the rest of his nails, she put his fingers one by one in her mouth and nibbled them smooth.

And so she grew to know him through her mouth. Through her nose and ears and fingers. He dirtied his diddie and the mess got all up his back and she bathed him, worked her wet cloth into his wrinkles and crevices, lifted up his chin to suds out the grimy beads. He didn’t like the bath, she could tell the sensation was new, and he fastened desperate eyes on her, so she sang to him about arms as she swirled the washrag over his arms, sang to him about toes as she flossed between his toes. He fell asleep afterward and she had the strange experience of missing him, though he was right there. She hovered over the nest of blankets she’d made on her bed, and at one point he was so still she held a finger beneath his nose to make sure he was breathing. She wanted to study him from every angle.
When have I had this feeling before? Oh yes—falling in love
. . . She didn’t mind the rain, which she wore like a cloak pulled tight around them both.

She named him Willy, for her father; Jacob had been named Julius Jacob Holliver, for Jesse’s father. She wished her father could meet Willy soon, though Jesse had never allowed her to go home to visit. She didn’t want to think about Jesse now, worried he wouldn’t like her having a baby. But she couldn’t give him back. Wouldn’t even know how to. It was too late.

Each hour brought her discoveries. The first was that he was happiest on the move. He’d woken squalling from his nap and kept squalling and she knew he was hungry. The strange-talking cowboy (where do you come from if you talk like that? Not Alabama or Mississippi, that’s for sure) had given her some strained peas and oatmeal, and she offered them, but he didn’t seem interested. She thought maybe he was thirsty. The cowboy had also said the baby liked Nehi soda, but that was crazy, and besides, she didn’t have any. She made him a bottle of Pet milk with a bit of sorghum molasses, but he wouldn’t take it. He cried when she held him and cried when she pinned on a fresh diddie and cried when she put him down on a pallet. She picked him up and he paused to burp then resumed crying. As the wind outside deepened from a whimper to a howl, he met it and raised it, opening his mouth impossibly wide (Dixie Clay thought of a snake she and Lucius had once surprised in the corncrib, disengaging its jaw to swallow a rat). The baby was good and angry by then, his eyes squinched, face a red fist, arms flailing, his tongue vibrating like the clapper of a bell. Dixie Clay decided to fetch him some cow’s milk from the nearest neighbor, Old Man Marvin, so loyal a customer that his teeth had about rotted. Marvin could be counted on not to gossip, and her instinct was to preserve the secret of Willy for a while. Certainly Jesse should learn about the baby from her.

But first she had to check the still, so she bundled Willy against the rain and ran with him pressed against her chest. She tried not to jostle him. He stopped crying, though the way was rough and rooty.

When she got to the still, the mash was bubbling and she needed both hands free, to lift the heavy lid and stir the wooden paddle. She rested the baby on the thumper keg while deciding what to do. She didn’t want to lay Willy on the floor because she’d seen a coachwhip there a few weeks ago. Her feeling was that if snakes got in her house, well, she had no choice but to kill them, but when she was in the woods, she was in their home, and she let them be. But now she was uneasy about the coachwhip, its black body tapering off into gray and then creamy white at the tail. She remembered stories from her girlhood about the coachwhip chasing children by putting its tail in its mouth and rolling like a hoop. It would loop their feet, trip them, and then whip them bloody with its tail. She knew all this was hogwash then and knew it more so now, but still she hesitated. And that’s when she realized Willy’d been lulled to sleep on the rumbling, hiccuping thumper keg.

Which was how William Clay Lucius Holliver became a moonshiner. A moonshiner, six months old on that day of April 19 (she had declared this to be the case when she realized he couldn’t have a birthday if she didn’t choose one).

Dixie Clay did buy milk from Old Man Marvin and then on second thought rode back and bought the cow outright. Her name was Millie, and Dixie Clay put her in the stall next to Chester and he sniffed at the partition and pawed his hoof. Four years back, when she’d begun to shine, she’d let all the farm animals go, first the cow, then the sheep and chickens, no time to tend them, no need for what they could give. But Chester—this she’d never tell Jesse, he’d laugh at her, but was true nevertheless—had grown melancholy. She scratched his withers and then leaned her forehead on his shoulder. “We both have some company now, Chet,” she whispered.

Buying Millie was maybe the first time she’d spent any of the moonshine money (what need had she for frippery when she kept a raccoon’s hours?). It felt good, so unexpectedly good, that the next day she tucked her son (her son!) inside her apron and buttoned her raincoat over him and rode him into town, where she bought baby supplies at Amity’s store. Amity was helping another customer and Dixie Clay kept Willy hidden, but her packages made Amity curious enough to follow her outside. Finally, after Jamie had loaded her mule and gone back inside, Dixie Clay opened her coat to Amity and lowered the top of her apron, revealing Willy’s face, chubby lips open in slumber, drool darkening Dixie Clay’s green blouse.

“An angel,” Amity whispered. Amity herself had never had a child. “What did Jesse say?”

“He hasn’t seen him yet.”

“Oh, Lord.”

But then Jamie was calling Amity inside and Dixie Clay was glad to ride away from Amity’s ridged brow. They headed home and Willy seemed happy on Chester with her arms around him, and happy tucked into her apron front while she unloaded her purchases, and happiest of all that evening on the thumper keg. Her William. Willy. Willy-boy.

Who wasn’t happy was Jesse, arriving home the next day with red eyes and a dent in the Model T and, she saw as he strode past, a tear in his calfskin coat. He didn’t even notice the baby at first, propped in a peach basket balanced on the Energex vacuum sweeper she was pushing over the rug. But after a nap and a bath, Jesse came out for dinner wearing a new navy pin-striped shirt and smelling like spicy oranges and was taken aback to find a peach-colored baby in the peach basket. Questions, and more questions. No, Dixie Clay didn’t know the man, the baby bringer, or where he came from. And no, Dixie Clay didn’t know his business in Hobnob, or how he found the house, or where he went when he departed. And no, she didn’t even know his name. And, no, she wasn’t very smart.

At this point they were finishing their pork chops.

“What did he look like?” Jesse asked.

“I don’t know. Tall. Shaggy.” Dixie Clay cast her eyes up, remembering. “Maybe thirty, maybe not quite. Red shirt, muddy dungarees.”

She stopped when she saw Jesse snap his head back, and she figured he knew the man, but didn’t know what that meant.

“What did he do when he brought the baby? Did he look around?”

“No.”

“Ask questions? Seem curious? Try to buy whiskey?”

“No. He just wanted to find the baby someplace to live.”

Jesse lowered his knife and pushed his plate back and said, “Bring it here.”

Dixie Clay lifted the basket of sleeping baby and tipped it toward Jesse. The evening light filtered soft through the rain-running window and lit up Willy’s skin, his peach fuzz hair. He was beautiful. She wanted Jesse to say so. She was hungry to hear it.
Say “beautiful,” Jesse.

Jesse studied the baby, then said, “Well, well, well.” He slowly refolded his napkin and tugged it into its ring and placed it beside his plate. “I suppose he’ll be company for you,” he said, looking up at her. Dixie Clay realized she was holding her breath, and she let it out. Jesse surprised her and compounded it by giving a wink of his blue eye, and a grin: “Just don’t let it slow you down none.”

Dixie Clay nodded and turned toward the kitchen with the basket and had the impulse to give a little leap through the doorway, like a vaudeville dancer. She smiled at the thought, then sliced the jelly roll for Jesse.

And Willy didn’t. Slow her down, that is. He had his days and nights mixed up, but so did she. He got fussy in the early evening before it was time to go to the still. But so did she. She calmed them both with the bouncy walk back and forth across the gallery.

The night that Jesse said Dixie Clay could keep Willy, she gave him the bouncy walk and sang what little she knew of the cowboy’s song, “Trouble, trouble, trouble, I’ve had it all my days,” then fell to humming. Maybe she’d take some moonshine money and buy herself a Victrola and some records, some Bessie Smith. Back and forth on the gallery, humming and bouncing and humming as the sky grew dark and her boot soles made a scuffing percussion on the floor.

When Willy fell asleep on her shoulder, she stood and moved to go inside, and when she opened the screen door, a bright flash beside her made her duck. A hummingbird, its needle nose caught in one of the screen’s tiny squares. So small. So furious. Dixie Clay waited for it to work itself free, its wings in their blurry panic sounding like Jesse’s boat’s outboard motor. After a moment of watching, with one hand on Willy’s back to steady him, she propped the door open with her foot and with the other hand reached underneath the hummingbird to quiet its whirring, and then she unscrewed it.

Dixie Clay opened her palm, but the hummer didn’t fly away, just sat, stunned, its heartbeat rapid. She lifted her hand close to her face. The hummer’s grommet had three or four scarlet flecks, and so she knew it was a young male, just easing into its ruby muffler, one feather at a time. Like Willy’s eyes, which she’d studied earlier that day, in the process of turning from blue-gray to brown, not by darkening overall but dot by chocolate dot.

I’ll show you hummingbirds, Willy. I’ll show you every wondrous thing.

And then the bird lifted and flew like an arrow, westward and gone.

Dixie Clay took Willy inside to the kitchen and laid him on a pallet so she could wash the jelly roll pan. As she began to scrub she remembered how, when she was a girl, she was like a baby hummer, genderless to look at, a quick darting thing, preferring the woods behind her home to the home itself.

Every winter since she was six, her papa had taken her on his weeklong hunting trips, leaving her younger brother, Lucius, home with their mother. Those weeks were better than Christmas, opening the tent flap to the dawning world woozy with hoarfrost, Papa already setting a match to the crackling rosin pine tinder they’d gathered the night before. She’d tote the aluminum kettle to Petty Creek and fill it and set it on the fire for coffee. Papa, checking the guns, whistling, mockingbird answering. Soon, the smell of bacon fluttering its fatty edges in the pan. Blue digging his front paws into the grass and pulling his weight back to stretch in what could only be pleasure. Ahead of her, the synchronicity of her shot hitting, as if all she had to do was aim her eye at her target. A few years prior, government men had put telephone lines between Pine Grove and Birmingham, and though her father explained the science—the voice translated into a wave of sound that was sent down the line—she knew that the real explanation, like how she knew her bullet would hit, owed something to magic.

It was the last trip of her twelfth winter, right before spring planting, the grandpa’s greybeard blooming so thickly the tree trunks looked covered in tatting lace, when she’d shot the panther. Papa had taken the long way home, pretending to need horseshoe nails at the mercantile, really wanting to brag on her. But his pride cost them. It was then that some of the women began asking how old she was, and did she not go to school? Soon there was a rare visit to the old home place from the plump red preacher. Dixie Clay, making dinner, had been sent to the kitchen but heard enough. It didn’t look right, not with Dixie Clay turning thirteen and becoming a woman. Besides, the younger son was coming up, right? Nearly eight, wasn’t that right?

“Nearly nine,” answered her father.

“Well, there you have it,” and the preacher smacked his palms together, or that’s what Dixie Clay imagined from the sound. She pushed through the swinging door into the parlor and found the preacher standing before the mantel, hands clasped behind his back, examining the photograph of her mother, dead from childbirthing, the baby swelling her dress also dead. Would have been her younger sister. Then girls would have outnumbered the boys. The preacher turned and his lips were drawn back as if snagged by fishhooks: a smile. “What’s that delicious smell?”

She’d shot two rabbits and fixed stew with sweet potatoes and onions but now wished she hadn’t. She glanced at her father, who offered no help. “Please join us, Preacher Nettles, for stew and biscuits.” They followed her into the kitchen and, with her back to the table, she covered a nostril with her finger and huffed snot into the preacher’s bowl. Yes, she was a good shot all right.

And that was why she was alone when the fur trader drove up. Papa had given Lucius a rifle for Christmas, the Winchester Model 1895 Takedown chambered for the 30-40 Krag cartridge that Dixie Clay had admired in the catalog so often the book fell open to its profile. So far, Lucius had done nothing with it but sit on the gallery and shoot holes through her underwear clothespinned to the laundry line. But now they’d gone into the woods with their rifles, leaving Dixie Clay stuck at home to tend to the turpentine trees, with Bernadette Capes checking on her. They had near five hundred pines, and it was February first, so yesterday she’d swept the pine straw away from the trunks to protect them from fire, and today she slashed the V low on the trunk and attached the drip iron and patent cup to catch the gum. She hoped to get through half the trees before sunset, but heard a wagon, coming fast, its trace chains singing like fiddle strings. She walked back to the house and saw the fur trader’s wagon, the same one drawn by the same mules as last year, but a new driver atop the buckboard, not the old man she expected. With the sun behind him, she couldn’t see his face, even shielding her eyes.