A Piece of My Heart

by Richard Ford

  “What about the law?” he said, not seeing any way he could be accused of soliciting if old John was already dead. “Didn’t anybody come and look for him?”

  Mr. Lamb looked at him curiously as if he’d never thought about that. He pushed his little hands together in front of him, shoving his plate back, and seemed to get lost in his thoughts again. “Well,” he said, bemused, “I don’t know. Didn’t nobody ever come looking. He told me what happened right off, and I thought, ‘Shit, I’da done the same damn thing,’ and he seemed satisfied to stay out here and help around. He built that cabin, and I just didn’t never ask about no law. I expect they was after him up in Pontotoc, but I never did get private with him on the subject.”

  “He did kill four people, though,” he said, trying to argue in whispers without drawing Mrs. Lamb back out of the kitchen. “Didn’t he admit it?”

  “Yes,” the old man said indignantly.

  “He could have got his baby some other way,” he said. “A Mississippi court wouldn’t give a half-white baby to a bunch of Choctaws.”

  “We didn’t worry about no courts,” the old man said, trying to rein in his temper, his cheeks coloring a little pink.

  He had a fast-failing mental picture of Hollis hitting the concrete. “Why the hell not?” he said. “Four people get blown up because some psychopath cousin wants his old man to take care of his baby, and you deprive the law the chance to settle with him.”

  “All right,” the old man said patiently. “But wouldn’t you of put up your own wife’s cousin if he’d done it and it didn’t put you out any?”

  “No!” he said.

  “Well, goddamn it, Newel,” the old man whispered furiously. “You ought to. It’s family!” Mr. Lamb glared at him, his nubby little fists pressed on the tabletop as if he’d decided to attempt a handstand.

  “But it’s against the law,” he said.

  “Fuck the law, goddamn it.” The old man almost strangled himself keeping his voice inside the foot of space that separated them. His spectacles slid down onto the soft skin of his nose, and he gave the table a good shaking that made the whole room vibrate. “I didn’t like the son-of-a-bitch no better than you did. He poisoned three of my pups with thermometer mercury and stole every bottle of whore water I ever kept out here and filtered it through a biscuit so he could get hooched. He was nuttier’n a pet coon, but I didn’t law him, by God. He was Mrs. Lamb’s cousin.”

  Mrs. Lamb’s face appeared unexpectedly in the gap of the pantry door, casting ominous looks over both of them, her upper lip drawn into a tight little pucker of disdain. She let the door shut abruptly and the old man got caught between his rage and his guilt.

  “Fidelia,” the old man bellowed, whacking his fists on the tabletop.

  No sound came from the kitchen. He pictured Mrs. Lamb and Landrieu sitting in the cooling darkness, silent, while the two of them floundered in their own conspiratorial baseness.

  The old man snapped toward him, ready for another affront. “What would you have done?” he demanded, abandoning whispering altogether.

  He sighed, realizing he just wasn’t up to the old man’s ferocity. Whatever the old man had stored in never-ceasing abundance was exactly what he lacked. And he wondered when his had been siphoned off, or if he ever even had it, and if he had, where it had gone. It occurred to him that if he did indeed have it, it was certainly all directed inward now, while all the old man’s fury was pointed out like ordnance at the armies of contravention and deceit that had him under constant siege. “I’d have gotten him a good lawyer, if there was one,” he said soberly, “had him plead dementia praecox, put him on the stand, and told him to act crazy.”

  “What the hell’s the difference in that and what I did?” the old man said. “I saved a lie by telling one.” The old man looked at him as if it were as clear as anything he’d ever said in his life and he should see the wisdom in it and give in. “You got to have a lawyer before you can fart, don’t you, Newel?”

  “Four people got killed,” he said wearily.

  “Choctaws,” the old man said contemptuously. “They absconded with his baby and run him off when he come to claim it.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “The hell,” Mr. Lamb said. “You’re a fish, Newel, by God. You belong back up in Lake Michigan where it’s cold and wet, not down here where people’s got blood.” He thrust himself backward into his chair as if someone had smacked him on the chin.

  “What happened to him?” he said.

  Mr. Lamb squinted as if he were surprised he was still able to speak. “Who?” he said.

  “John.”

  “He died, that’s what happened to him.”

  “Did the house just burn down by itself?”

  The old man pinched the edge of the table between his thumb and his index finger as if he were trying to crack off a piece. “I burnt it down,” he said loudly. “I went in and I piled up all his old shit in the middle of the floor, including his umpire’s hat, and set the torch to it, by God. And that’s what’s the cause of that skint spot.” His eyes quit snapping and he seemed to lose his energy all at once, as if the recollection of the house going up had burnt off all his anger. “You know what?” the old man said, glassy-eyed.

  “No.”

  “Him and Mrs. Lamb wrote the state song.” The old man licked his lips and smacked them as if he could appreciate the feat. “Mrs. Lamb wrote the lyrics and John Carter made the tune. They sent it to the contest in Jackson in 1938, and won five hundred dollars and a picture of Senator Bilbo and J. K. Vardaman holding the sheet up in front of the U.S. Capitol. I told them they ought to send back the picture of Bilbo cause that little bastard was a dictator, but he pasted ’em both up on the wall in his house, and said he wondered what old J. K. Vardaman and Bilbo would have thought if they knew he had their picture up on his wall and had been hiding from the law thirteen years. And I said, Them two’s been hiding from the law longer’n that.’ I would ask Mrs. Lamb to come in and sing it for you if you wanted me to.”

  “You don’t have to bother,” he said.

  “No, no. Fidelia.” The old man spoke softly.

  The pantry door swung open and Mrs. Lamb appeared again on the sill, regarding them both with contempt. The kitchen was black. “What, Mark?” she said.

  “Newel here would like you to sing The Magnolia State,’ a cappella.” The old man had on his most beatific smile, his body erect in the anticipation that the idea would succeed.

  “Well, I will not,” she snapped. “You have a lovely voice—you sing it for him yourself.” She strode around the other side of the table from the bottles and disappeared into the bedroom.

  “It’s all right,” he said.

  Mr. Lamb’s face sank dismally. “I’d sing it, but I ain’t got the music,” he said.

  The floor squeaked in the bedroom. Outside it was dirt dark, and the light from the chandelier shimmered in the flimsy panes.

  “What happened to the five hundred dollars?”

  “She give it to him. She hoped he’d take it and go off to California and start a life. But the bastard stayed right there in his house, and when I went to pile all his stuff, I found four hundred-dollar bills. I don’t know what he done with the other one. Everything he ate he killed. I never seen him spend a nickel. I sent them four to the Blind Made Brooms in Jackson with his name wrote on it. What the hell. It was a paradise down here for him he wouldn’t of ever had if he hadn’ta killed them Indians. What’s the good of sending him to Parchman?”

  “I understand,” he said. He felt as if he wanted to go to sleep, though he didn’t want to strand the old man, sinking lower and lower.

  “You know,” Mr. Lamb said softly, his eyes shining, “I used to roam all over this island, all times of the day or night, and it didn’t make any difference where it was I went or when, I’d always see him. He’d be down at the dead lake, or squatting in the road, or I’d see him off in the trees, see his little miner’s l
ight he had on his cap, barging around back in the sumacs doing what, I don’t know. And it used to make me mad as hell that I couldn’t go without seeing his painful presence everyplace. But after a while I got used to seeing the old prune, and sometimes I’d see him standing down at the river looking and looking over at the Mississippi side like he was trying to make out something, and then turn around and go running back off without ever having seen me, just laughing like hell. And by God, when he died”—the old man shook his head as if it were a mystery of unfathomable complexity—“I took a fear of going out in the woods after dark. I know I ain’t going to see him. And I didn’t even like the son-of-a-bitch, and me and Mrs. Lamb sat up nights conniving against him, talking about how crazy he was, eatin them frogs. I must be a fool, ain’t I, Newel, afraid of the dark?” The old man peered at him as if he were hoping to find out he wasn’t a fool at all and could declare as much to Mrs. Lamb and win back her heart before she went to sleep.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  Mr. Lamb bolted back across the floor with a loud bracking and stood up. “We going fishing tomorrow?” the old man said, light revived in his eyes.

  “Yessir,” he said.

  Mr. Lamb began walking out before he answered, moving squat-legged into the gallery doors without turning. “I can fish and you can row,” he said. He clicked off the light in the sitting room, where Mrs. Lamb had left it on, and disappeared as she had back into the darkness.

  He sat at the table, the chandelier glossy in the cheap window, showing him back his own features wide and angled, his shoulders concave as if a wind had blown them and bent them around his chest. He could hear the old man scuffling in the bedroom, his voice low and appealing. The dishes were unmoved. He stooped and began to pick up the old man’s bottles and remount them on the table the way they had been. There had been a look in Mr. Lamb’s face as if he just felt the ballast of his life going off, and couldn’t stop it, and an abstraction had come on him for the first time ever and scared him and made him go after cures, which he knew in advance wouldn’t work, since he knew there wasn’t any way in the world to end it now. Since everything you were lonely for was gone, and everytning you were afraid of was all around you.

  The old man, he thought, had fifty years jump and was just now tearing apart, warring every inch, a war he felt he lacked the outrage to make, since it didn’t seem the least bit crucial to win it or lose it. He felt like a man wandering in a department store with no money and no attraction to anything under glass, but with a dilettante’s need to acquire. And it scared him. And back in some long night precinct of his mind there was a rising to get out and get on the train fast and get back before his own ballast went off and he was in the fix for good.

  2

  The year his father died he went in a car to Vicksburg with a boy named Roscoe Sampson, who liked to dance. In Vicksburg they took one quick drive down the red brick streets to the bottom of the hill the Confederates had defended for months, and drove along the riverfront past the bootleggers, and stared in the darkness out across the river into Louisiana, where tiny specks of houseboat lights were bobbing snugly against the other side. And when they had finished driving, Roscoe Sampson said he wanted to dance, and they bought a bottle of whiskey and a Seven-Up and went to dance in a Masonic hall where the lights were high up in the vaulted ceiling set in reflectors with wire mesh across their mouths. Roscoe found a girl and went and danced with her until the collar of his shirt was wringing wet and the red was high in his cheeks and he looked frantic. He came and told him that they would both take the girl for a drive in the car over to Louisiana into the cotton fields and that the girl would do it for both of them, because she was a typical Vicksburg girl and liked nothing better. But when Roscoe asked the girl if that would be fine with her, she said it wouldn’t and made a serious threat against him, and Roscoe came and told him he was ready to leave. In the car they drove back down toward the river, down the dark, murmuring brick streets to the bottom of the hill. And when they had driven around the same block twice, Roscoe rolled the car slowly past one house where there was a Christmas tree in the window that had nothing but tiny blue lights, and whistled out into the night and stopped. In a moment a Negro man came to the screen and whistled, and they parked the car and went in. In the house the air smelled like disinfectant and was hot, though it was cool in the street. Roscoe said that between the two of them they had one dollar and sixty-eight cents and would like to know what that would call to mind for the man. The man gave them a shabby smile and said they were lucky to be alive carrying that much money, and that as far as he was concerned it wouldn’t buy them safe passage out the front door, but that they should take it up with the woman in the room. When they got in the room, there were pictures of Jesus stuck to a vanity mirror and a narrow bed with a chenille counterpane, and it was hot. The woman, who was nice and reminded him of a lot of ladies he had seen waiting for buses on Northwest Street, said that while a dollar sixty-eight was not much, she was not busy, so that she simply pulled up her dress and laid the change on the night table, and first he did, and then he sat in the captain’s chair at the end of the bed while Roscoe Sampson did, Roscoe’s testicles bouncing against the woman like peas in a collander. And at the end the woman got up out of the bed and went to the corner behind the door and squatted over a dishpan and cleaned herself with a strong pine-scented disinfectant and a yellow sponge that smelled like the floors, and said it was the best there was when you got used to the sting and to the funny feeling it gave you way up in your stomach.

  3

  The morning got exploded by shotgun fire coming five feet from the Gin Den door. Robard had gotten up before light, dressed, and disappeared into the darkness. He had been waked by Robard’s jeep cranking and sputtering, and for an hour the house was still. Then somebody started firing a shotgun outside the door and whooping and making noises like the Fourth of July. He pulled himself up, holding his blanket, and looked out, leaning against the door facing. The sun hurt his eyes. It was working light down through the low limbs, making it painful to see more than a foot. Beyond the trees the airstrip was yellow and burning like wheat. A haze hung a foot over the bear flowers. The bicycle reflectors were twitching and snapping back to the far line of trees, and the whole business made seeing an ordeal.

  Mr. Lamb was twenty yards from the door, facing the other direction down in the scrub brush between the larger trees and the airstrip apron, stalking down into the Crosshatch of chokeberries, a shotgun at order arms, wearing his old canvas coat and woodsman’s cap with red flaps tied over the crown. Ahead of Mr. Lamb he could see Elinor’s skinny tail curved up and around, quavering above the clutch of weeds, the rest of her body out of sight. Behind the old man, who was accosting Elinor with an awesome caution as if he expected a Cape buffalo to come swaying out of the thicket, stood Landrieu, apparently reconciled, standing nonchalantly in a pair of overalls smoking a limp cigarette, and balancing a big steel-gray double-barrel so that the barrel end rested on the flat of his foot.

  He wondered how the old man and Landrieu had so promptly made up their differences, and decided it was because each one thought the other had picked up all the bottles, but didn’t dare say anything about it.

  Mr. Lamb began to croon, “Clooose, clooose, now, El’nr,” as if he were casting a spell over the ground in front of him. Elinor was getting more and more jittery with the old man closing on her with his shotgun, and was probably, he thought, watching whatever she was supposed to be watching and at the same time mapping out a quick place to hole up when the shooting started.

  Landrieu took a last drag on his cigarette, snapped the stub in the grass, spit, and all at once everything commenced. Two birds went up out of the chokeberries, wing to wing, directly into a spear of light, and got by the old man’s face with an unimpeded whir. The old man never had a chance and had to swing his gun up just to protect himself from the birds, who split at the very last second and fired by him in dif
ferent directions, while the old man yelled, “Wuuuup, wuuuup,” at the dog, who had started barking. Six more birds rose then and went fanning through the trees in a line ahead of the old man, and he managed to get the stock to his shoulder and bust off two shots, which didn’t draw a feather. Landrieu carefully got his big two-barrel to his shoulder in case any more of the covey started back toward him, and one promptly did, getting up behind Mr. Lamb’s feet, heading in the opposite direction, and Landrieu let go at the bird head-on and hit it in a way that reminded him of atomic attacks on sturdy brick houses. First the bird was there in flight, brown and black and white and crop-winged and intent on a lucky escape, then its physiognomy got changed and none of the original features were intact. It was as if Landrieu had thrown a mottled dishrag in the air and blown a knot in it.

  “Da-umn,” Landrieu said, lowering the barrels and frowning at the welter of feathers that hung in the air without seeming to move.

  Mr. Lamb gave him a pathetic look and went back to scrutinizing Elinor, who clearly believed there were more quail in the brush and hadn’t much moved from where she’d been, though she had barked several times while the first birds were starting up and displeased Mr. Lamb considerably. He began crooning again and frowning at Elinor as if he thought she was stubbing at the birds and encouraging them to take flight before he was ready for them. He got behind her again, and almost even with her head, then began thrashing the brush with his foot and holding his gun up with the barrel pointed out from his waist in the direction he intended the birds should go when they went. All at once a single came up out of the cover and beat out toward the airstrip, its neck stretched and its wings reaching as far into the empty air as they could. The bird had chosen the ideal direction, and with incalculable calm the old man raised the muzzle in one smooth, articulated motion, sighted down the single barrel, paused a second while some ideal distance was attained, then squeezed off a shot that overtook the bird without seeming to displace a feather, dropping him on the skin edge of the airfield. The old man never bothered to see if Landrieu had observed the shot. He moved forward in a fell, workmanlike stride toward where the bird had hit, calling “Dead” to Elinor, who bounded out ahead of him, head high in the weeds, until she reached the short grass and pounced on the quail with her forepaws and began rending it wing from neck, anchoring it with her feet and drawing the flesh away with her strong puppy’s teeth. The old man hastened a step, arriving at the bird two seconds after Elinor, and delivered her an immense kick in the ribs that sent her head over forepaws back into the grass, losing all grip on the bird, and trying to force out a yelp at the same time she was trying to win enough air back into her lungs to keep from suffocating.