by William Gay
Sutter stopped singing. Far enough so’s there ain’t no busybodies around. He resumed singing.
Tyler turned. To his surprise Sutter still wore the gray dress. He had removed the tortoiseshell specs but the bonnet was still there, rakishly askew and tied demurely under his horselike chin.
You ought to get that radio fixed.
We’ll see how smart your mouth is here directly.
At length the road seemed to just vanish, to fade into heavier and heavier timber, but Sutter seemed not to notice. He was driving over wristsize saplings that caused the car to lurch sickeningly and the engine to labor harder, and he drove it until he reached a veritable wall of timber with no give to it. When he cut the switch something gave under the hood with a soft whoosh and a rising curtain of steam enveloped the car. Sutter’s hands were at untying the bonnet.
Where’d you come by that getup?
Sutter studied him. Folks in this world are always just walkin off somewheres else and providin me with what I need. Do you honestly want to know?
Tyler thought about it. No, he said.
I thought not. Now I looked you over pretty good back there at the tieyard. While you was dozed off. You ain’t got no pictures. Now what I want to know is where they are and how we get to em.
Tyler was prodding his tooth with his tongue when it gave with a soft cracking he actually heard inside his skull and his mouth was filling with warm blood. He started to open the door then thought better of it and leant forward and spat a mouthful of blood into the floorboard between his feet. Damn, boy, ain’t you had no raisin? This car probably belongs to a doctor or a lawyer or somethin.
Tyler sat staring at the tooth. A dull anger seized him. He had been run halfway across three counties by some madman he had done nothing to, barely knew, had only heard rumored. Folks who had befriended him were in peril. Perhaps dead. And now the son of a bitch had knocked out a perfectly good tooth, one that would have served him all his days, one that lay worse than useless in a stringy gout of blood. And. And. And a thought that he had been trying to keep stuffed down into the darkness, that kept skittering out playfully and showing glimpses of itself. His sister was dead.
You remember that day in town when me and you had that talk? Sutter asked.
Yes, he said. It seemed a long time ago but it was not. He tried to remember everything about the day. The way the light fell, what his sister had been wearing when he came in that night, what de Vries had said about the roof.
You see how all I warned you’s come to pass? You see how I tried to tell you right. You see what meanness you’ve brought on everbody, and all that’s happened might never have been. It was your choice, and ever bit of it is on your head. There’s people been killed over your stubbornness, and probably more to come. I told you to imagine the worst thing that could happen and it would be.
Tyler didn’t say anything. He was staring past the glass. Where the brush ended a sedgefield tumbled steeply downhill in a stony tapestry toward a hollow so deep and distant it looked blue. Above the horizon a hawk dipped and rose on the updrafts of wind with soundless grace, and he wondered how it would feel to be there, to be watching all this throughthe arrogant yellow eyes of a hawk.
It’s just business to me. Just money. But more money than a man makes in ten years, just handed to me all at once in a paper sack. And the only holdup is you.
I’m not going to give them to you. The only man that’ll get them from me is Bellwether.
You’ll give em to me. Oh, yes. When I’m through with you, you’ll be beggin me to take em. You’ll say, Please, Mr. Sutter, take these nasty things and be done with em. You’ll pray to whatever god it is you hold dear for me to reach out and take em out of your hot little hand. Now get your ass out.
He got out into the cold. A wind with a taste of ice in it was looping up from the hollow, and snowbirds flew among the bare trees foraging.
Fixin to snow, Sutter said, studying the onecolor sky, curious weatherman in grandmother drag. Me and you got to get to them pictures and get the hell out of Dodge before the snow flies.
This last was muffled by the dress being pulled over his head, and this more than anything else showed Tyler the contempt Sutter held him in. The rifle was gone, he was threatless, a small viper with his teeth pulled. He came around the car looking for some form of weapon and not finding one, but Sutter’s arms were pinned by the dress and he leapt upon him flailing with both fists and kicking even before Sutter hit the ground. Sutter was trying to roll away from the kicks and trying to get up and simultaneously trying to get the rest of the dress over his head when Tyler stumbled over a windfall whiteoak branch. Sutter was screaming and cursing in rage as if Tyler was not fighting fair and some obscure code of ethics had been broached. You blindsidin son of a bitch, he was saying when Tyler hit him alongside the head with the length of whiteoak. Chunks of rotten wood flew and Sutter fell sidewise. Tyler hit him again. Sutter’s head was sliding through the collar of the dress like some malevolent demon being born head foremost, and his nose was bleeding. When I get up you’re graveyard dead, he said.
But Tyler would not let him up. By now he was sobbing with rage and frustration and swinging the club as hard as he could. Sutter was on his hands and knees and seemed halfdazed and he kept trying to crawl away but Tyler would not let him. He headed Sutter at the edge of the woods and hit him on the back of the head, and Sutter fell facedown in the leaves and could only rise to his elbows. He had his hands clasped over the back of his head with his elbows still snared in the dress and Tyler was beating him about the fingers and blood was soaking through the hair and running down Sutter’s wrists. The branch broke and he looked about for another then took up the longest section of the one he’d had. Sutter was struggling sluggishly like some gross insect halfcrushed. A passerby would have been given pause by these demented-looking strugglers.
Tyler hit him a time or two and then he ceased and just watched Sutter with a dull loathing. He squatted on the earth with the club across his knees. His breath was ragged in his chest and his lungs hurt. He sat like a laborer at rest from some curious task. Goddamn you, why won’t you die? he asked.
But Sutter would not die. His face was just something you’d unwrap from bloody butcher’s paper and the skin was beaten off his fingers and the backs of his hands, and Tylerrealized sickeningly that he was just going to have to go on and on until Sutter’s head was crushed to bloody jelly and he didn’t have the heart for it. Sutter was just going to keep trying to get up. He had had no doubt that he would be able, given the chance, to cheerfully kill Sutter with whatever fell to hand, and selfanger brought tears of rage to his eyes.
Why won’t you just leave me the hell alone? he asked. Sutter just lay breathing heavily. The whiteoak branch had broken his mouth, and bloody froth bubbled as he breathed.
Maybe by God you’ll lay here and die directly, Tyler said.
He threw the stick away and went around the car and got in under the steering wheel. He sat for a time just staring out through the windshield at the woods. He turned the key and the motor turned over sluggishly but would not hit. He kept on until the starter turned slower and slower and ultimately there was only a dry clicking sound. He turned. The gun wasn’t in the back but there was a folded blanket and he took it up and got out of the car. The day was turning colder and he draped the blanket about his shoulders like a shawl. He struck out the way they’d come but he walked only a few paces before he stopped. The pictures lay the other way, and by now he felt he’d bought and paid for them. He didn’t want to think about how dear the price had been. He went toward deeper timber. It had begun to sleet. The windbrought pellets of ice stung his face and sang off in the leaves like birdshot.
It continued colder and by midafternoon pellets of sleet lay cupped in grails of winter leaves and the ground was beginning to whiten with ice and he moved through the sleet’s softsteady hissing in the trees. He hoped he was bearing southeast toward Bookbinder’s farm
but he wondered if he’d been in the Harrikin long enough to have acquired a sense of direction. He suspected that if he possessed a compass it would not point as advertised but at some anomolaic magnetic north of the Harrikin’s own.
He topped out on a hill and some alteration in the sound of the trees fetched him up short. He stopped to listen. He couldn’t hear the sleet anymore. He looked up and great snowflakes were listing out of the heavens, gray against the pale steely gray of the sky, enormous feathers of snow descending from heights he couldn’t reckon, and something of the child he’d been stood in bemused wonder listening to the almostsound in the trees and watching the snow drift down from far and far, falling sheer and plumb in the windless silence.
At the hill’s summit he stopped to rest a moment. Beating folks with treelimbs is heavy work, he thought. Looking back the way he’d come below the hillside a flat valley lay spread out, merging into a row of cedars, then a slope began, already whitening, and he couldn’t believe what he saw. A man was coming down the slope, tiny and dark and furiously animate against the pale field, a dark malevolent stain bleeding down a Currier & Ives winterscape. A dark shifting cloud of birds came out of the woods. A cardinal arced from tree to tree like a bright drop of blood.
He went on. After a while the snow was deep enough so that he was leaving tracks but it didn’t seem to matter. He had come to feel that Sutter trailed him by some means that neither of them understood, some curious duality of their natures that enabled Sutter to intercept his thoughts and anticipatehis movements.
By dusk the thickly falling snow had drifted against the dark bottoms of treetrunks and filled shadowy stumpholes and stumps wore hats of pale phosphorescence and he was moving through a world of eerie beauty.
By midafternoon thirty or forty men were grouped loosely about the courthouse steps in Ackerman’s Field. They were armed to the last man. Squirrel rifles, shotguns, old pistols brought home from the wars, many with weaponry that would have been more at home on the walls of an antique shop and weaponry designed to slay beasts long extinct. They carried sacks or lunchbuckets and some of them had thermos bottles of coffee and a search would have yielded up more than a few halfpints of whiskey. They hunkered or milled about in loose groups talking among themselves and chewing and smoking, and there was about them an air of excitement restrained, the air of men setting off on an adventure whose outcome is very much a matter of conjecture.
After a while a man in neatly pressed khakis came out of the courthouse and stood on the top step facing them. The door closed behind him on its pneumatic closer and the man dropped his cigarette and stepped on it. The high sheriff of Ackerman’s Field had pale, nearcolorless eyes and wavy hair going prematurely gray.
Gentlemen, he said.
The door opened and a deputy came out. He as well in khakis. He stood slightly behind Bellwether, and there was something of deference in his manner. We’ve got two trucks with sideboards, Bellwether said. There’s no point in taking more vehicles than necessary. Deputy Garrison and I will go in the county car, and the Holt brothers will bring you all behind us in their trucks. We’ve got a bunch of flashlights in the trucks. Everybody make sure you get a light and make sure it works.
What about the state?
For right now they’re just manning roadblocks. Every road leading out of Ackerman’s Field and every road out of Centre will be secured.
Shit, somebody in the crowd said. Roads ain’t nothin to Granville. He can be in Alabama and never come out of the woods cept to steal somethin to eat.
Where we goin? another man called.
Last place we know for sure he was at was Claude Calvert’s place. That’s where the wagonload of bodies came from. I reckon you all know about that. We can get to there fairly easy with trucks. From there we’ll just have to play it by ear.
It’s a waste of time, the man said. It’s three or four hundred square miles in there. What are we lookin for, clues? Fingerprints? He’s long gone from there.
He may well be, Bellwether said. But all the same it’s got to be done. You understand this is purely a voluntary thing. Nobody has to come don’t want to.
I never said nothin about not goin, the man said, but what about Fenton Breece?
What about him?
What all Sandy told about the way he done them dead folks. About diggin up some graves.
Well, Bellwether said, right now it’s first things first. I meanno disrespect for the dead when I say it’s the live folks I got to worry about right now.
I hear some folks in Centre got that under control, another said and laughed.
Hey, Bellwether, Old Tippydo over in Centre knows the Harrikin better than anybody else. You sent for him?
Bellwether smiled a small smile. I tried, but it didn’t do any good, he said. Tippydo’s done been dead two years, and I couldn’t find a volunteer to go after him.
Sutter quit worrying about keeping to Tyler’s trail for he had divined that he meant to get back to Bookbinder’s. That’s all right, he told himself. Two fish in a barrel ain’t much harder than one fish in a barrel. He was crazed all over with dried blood and his body ached with soreness but he kept pushing himself on through the snow. It was falling harder now and the woods were filling up and it was heavy going, but he knew where he was bound.
Once after dark he stopped to rest and smoke a cigarette, and far off on the hillside he saw a long line of lights moving in a slow curve around the face of the hill. The lights were disembodied and seemingly sourceless. Distant and silent and stately as a wending line of torchbearers making pilgrimage to some obscure god. All in silence as if all this was preordained and speech could neither help nor hinder its outcome. They scattered and regrouped and spread again like a curious ballet of fireflies or St. Elmo’s fire roiled and swirling in the depths of the sea. He watched them for a time in bewilderment then he put out his cigarette in the snow and took uphis rifle and went on.
It was some time before it occurred to Sutter that they were looking for him.
That boy was all right. He was kind of curious turned, but to tell you the truth I sort of liked him. He’d speak to you. Not like some of these young fellers thinks the world didn’t start till the doctor slapped em on the ass.
There is about these old men who have arranged themselves about the coal stove in Patton’s store a curious air of waiting, of time in suspension, as if they had already achieved some remove from the world, the eldest among them awaiting death as calmly as someone waiting on a bus. Beyond them through the plateglass window it is snowing hard and when cars pass to and fro the sound is muted and cloistral and the lights look blurred and unreal, a dream of carlights.
I notice you keep sayin was, another man said. I reckon you done wrote him off, then.
When he run crossways of Sutter I reckon he wrote hisself off. I always thought of that myself as one of the more unpleasant ways you commit suicide.
The old man shook his head. You can say what you want to about him, but if I was able I’d be out there with Bellwether and them scouring the woods.
Leastways some good will come of this. Sutter’s done it this time. The son of a bitch is finally gone way over the line.
A man named Junior Raymer was whittling something unrecognizable but vaguely obscene from soft red cedar. He sat on his upended Coke crate a time studying his creationthen he rose and opened the stove door and tossed it inside. He stirred the fire with the poker and showers of sparks cascaded outward. He spat into them then slammed the door.
Don’t you bet on it, he said. He’s rolled through the cracks before, and he’s fixin to do it again. You mark my words. He’ll be gone like a lost ball in the high weeds.
Talkin about that Tyler boy, the old man said, they must be more to him than meets the eye. Some said that schoolteacher of his worked around and got him a scholarship in a college. Up to Knoxville, they said.
He’ll work, Junior agreed. That’s more than anybody could ever have said about old Moo
se. Less you count totin sacks of sugar up them hollers back in there. He’d do that. That boy come up hard, him and his sister, too. I used to drink some back when they was little, and I used to lay drunk out there.
Raymer took out a pipe and began to tamp it with roughcut applesmelling tobacco. Someone got up to peer out the window at the snow blanketing the road. The day had waned and the glass had gone a surreal and unearthly gray against whose cold slick surface flakes list and slide with the faintest of ghostsounds and beyond them there is a faint and sourceless fluorescence.
Raymer struck a match on the side of the potbellied heater and lit his pipe. You know, they used to have cockfights in the Harrikin back then. Moose, he fooled with it some. Raised some of them game roosters. Anything there was money in and the work took out of you’d find Moose in it somehow, and don’t nothing draw loafers and lowlifes like a cockfight will. Moose had him one he was real proud of. It was silvercolored and had these little coldlookin eyes like a damn cottonmouthmoccasin. It didn’t look like no chicken I ever seen. It looked like some kind of a weapon.
Anyhow, this boy y’all speakin of was about seven years old. He had this lit old dominecker rooster he raised from a chick. It used to foller him around the way a dog would. That Sunday Moose was about drunk and the boy’s rooster done somethin to piss him off. Messed the porch, I reckon. Young Tyler seen the way things was headin and grabbed that rooster up and hugged it to him. He made to run off, and Moose grabbed him and jerked that rooster away from him. He looked around and spied that silver chicken and set the dominecker down in front of it. He grabbed em and rubbed their heads together, and that game jumped straight up and hung the dominecker through the head and that quick it was deadern hell. It was the beat of anything I ever seen. His own boy’s pet. That boy was takin on and talkin to that dead chicken, and I learnt somethin right then and there. I was learnin it late, but I reckon that’s better than never. There’s folks you just don’t need. You’re better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain’t in it. Moose was the first I cut loose, but I cut him clean and I never went out there no more.
