by Ron Rash
When I woke Doctor Griffen was gone. Daddy was back, sitting in a dinner chair he’d drawed up to my bed. Him and Momma stayed in that chair every night and day minute for the next week, watching my breath the way Doctor Griffen had warned them to. Every morning Momma sat at the foot of the bed and rubbed my legs and feet.
I’d got healed slow but by Christmas I was back tending my chores.
But my right leg lagged behind and never caught up.
‘You make more notice of that leg than anybody else does, Billy,’ Momma said.
But I was still skittish about it, especially around girls.
Then the time came when the shorter leg, the polio too, no longer seemed worth fretting over. Part of it was Amy. She never made notice of my leg, maybe because she had a brother that limped. But it was more than that. By the time I’d met Amy I’d paid enough of the bank loan to finally call the twenty acres I’d bought from Joshua Winchester my own. That had been a big doing for me. The only land Daddy and my Uncle Joel could claim was what dirt they carried under their fingernails.
‘I’m looking for to sell, not sharecrop,’ Joshua Winchester had said when I came to see him about that land.
‘I ain’t come about no sharecropping,’ I’d said and handed him the check the bank had made out for me.
He’d studied it close, as like he didn’t quite believe it was all on the up and up.
‘All right,’ he had finally said and stuffed the check in his overall pocket. ‘A Holcombe owning land,’ he’d said, then smiled. ‘You’re getting above your raising, boy.’
I’d cleared that twenty acres by myself but for Sam, me and that horse yanking up stumps stubborn to come out as back teeth. It had been a man’s work. You couldn’t call no one a cripple who’d done it and it was like it hadn’t been till then I’d truly got out of that bed I’d laid in so many years ago with my neck stiff as a hoe handle, my legs useless to walk on as two sticks of kindling.
I remembered that first Sunday after Amy had made it known all over the valley that it was me with the problem, not her. The women of the church all made a fuss over her but they had not a word for me. Their eyes was on me though, and those cold stares reminded me of some of the folks who’d showed up at the farm when the worst of the polio was upon me. They came into the room where I laid and counterfeited they was mournful but their eyes made notice. They’d looked at me like I was something in a county fair sideshow, something queer and hardly human.
Now as I laid in bed with Amy, I reckoned there was ways I’d never got up from that sick bed after all. Doctor Wilkins hadn’t said it but he hadn’t had to. That polio had gelded me.
At first light I eased my hand off Amy’s belly and got out of bed quiet as I could. I got me a chunk of cornbread and stepped out on the porch. My eyes lit on the dogwood Amy had planted in the spring, its leaves brown like cured tobacco and no more alive than a iron stab.
A sign of certain bad luck, my Daddy would have claimed, and I recollected how as a chap I’d been schooled by older kin to step lively if you wanted to stay out of bad luck’s way, because it was coming at you from all directions day and night, coming even in your dreams.
If you saw a new moon through the trees or a black cat crossed your path, it was always a sign of coming trouble, the same if you heard a screech owl or rooster at night or you killed a toad-frog or dreamed about near anything from crows to muddy water. And though there was things of good luck such as horseshoes and redbirds and planting your crops on Good Friday, they was reckoned pretty flimsy up against all the bad luck in the world.
‘No good will come from such a sight as that,’ Grandma said when she saw a letter in a writing spider’s web.
‘There’s a death coming soon,’ Uncle Joel said when he heard a whippoorwill before dark set in.
It had vexed me how the older folks always seemed to look for the worst. I’d sworn myself not to do such the same when I grew up but it was coming clear to me now that it all hadn’t been just silly notions. My kinfolks had crosshaired in on the truth of the world.
I thought of the luck I’d had the last few months, how in the first week of June my truck ran hot and when I checked my oil it came out white as milk. I knew right then my engine block had cracked and I’d not be able to fix it without I’d sold my crop. I recollected how the Dog Star showed early this year, just weeks after I put the truck in the barn. That had been more certain trouble.
And now Holland. If I’d had the want, I could have found plenty of signs telling me trouble was coming. Those signs would of proved real as a rock or tree or anything else in the world.
I looked above Amy’s dogwood and saw the Dog Star raising up with the sun. I knew Amy was wrong to ever figure some words would keep Holland from doing as he pleased. I recollected how in eighth grade we all had been cutting up in class and our teacher Mr. Pipkin picked out Holland to punish though he’d been at it no worse than the rest of us. Maybe it was because Holland was the biggest. Mr. Pipkin held up a roll of black electrician’s tape and told Holland he was going to tape Holland’s mouth shut. Holland was stout, six feet tall by then and a sure two hundred pounds but Mr. Pipkin was as tall and outweighted Holland to boot. Holland had stood beside his desk, his hands by his side, fisted and ready.
‘You’ve no cause to punish me and not the others,’ Holland said.
‘You come up here now, boy,’ Mr. Pipkin said to Holland.
‘I’ll not,’ Holland said. ‘You come on and put that tape on me if you reckon you can.’
Mr. Pipkin had muttered some things but all he did in the end was put the tape back in his desk.
If Holland had lived in another county or even another valley, maybe we’d have been shut of him, but not with just some of barbed wire to keep us apart. Him and me and Amy was linked like the Dog Star and the morning sun.
I hitched up Sam and led him down to the cabbage patch. I fetched the .12 gauge to take with me, keeping close to the woods. The groundhog must have spotted me anyway. The only notice of him was two more chewed-up cabbage.
I did find a blacksnake though, quiled like a whip in the middle of a row. The old folks claimed you could kill a blacksnake and lay it on a fence and it would bring rain. I flattened the blacksnake’s head with the gun butt and did that very thing, letting its slick white belly catch the sun. But I felt bad soon as I did it. I knew I wasn’t trying to bring rain. I did it for no more than I was feeling mean. It was something I could hurt that couldn’t hurt me back.
I checked the tobacco and then me and Sam plowed the cabbage. I kept glancing up toward the house and come midmorning I saw what I’d been hoping not to see. Holland Winchester straddled the barbed wire fence beside the white oak and walked into the front yard, the same way he came in April when I’d sighted him from this very field. Even when Holland was having his way with another man’s wife he was too proud to skulk around back like a hound stealing eggs from a hen-house. No, that wasn’t ever his way of doing things.
Amy saw him coming too and stepped out on the porch. She tried to wave him back but he came up the steps anyway. He opened his arms to her but Amy stepped back, slapping at his hands.
Sam stamped his hoof and snorted, ready to work. I stood with the reins around my neck and hoped that Holland would go back over to his side of the fence and leave us alone, because unlike Holland I didn’t know if I was a brave man. I’d gone down to Greenville and they’d turned me down, 4-F. I hadn’t had my grit tested the way Holland had in Korea. I didn’t know what I’d do if Koreans came screaming and running toward me, certain to kill me if I missed or my gun jammed. I didn’t know if I could kill a man. What I did know was if Holland didn’t leave something would have to be settled, one way or another.
Every time Holland moved toward Amy she stepped back but she was almost to the railing. I didn’t reckon at all for Holland to hurt her. I was scared of something else. I walked over to the field’s edge and picked up the .12 gauge. I aimed at the sky and m
ashed the trigger.
Holland turned and looked down over the shriveled corn and beans to where I stood with the gun still aimed at the sky while I fumbled in my overalls for another shell. I reloaded and grabbed Sam by the reins, not bothering to unhitch the collar and trace chains.
I led Sam straight toward the house, straight toward Holland Winchester. We stumbled across rows of cabbage and then through the beans and corn, the corn stalks rasping and snapping when me and Sam cleared a trail right through them, the plow twisting and grabbing behind like a anchor. My legs felt heavy, like I’d been walking miles. That was the fear weighting down on me.
Holland stepped off the porch and met me in the shade of the white oak, the boundary between what was his and what was mine. My hands was trembly as I raised the .12 gauge, the barrel wavering in the direction of his heart like a compass trying to find true north.
‘I wronged you when I laid down with her but we’re way up the path from right and wrong now,’ Holland said. ‘What’s swelling her belly is mine, not yours.’
I met his eyes, eyes dark as molasses. I didn’t know the exact of what I hoped to find in those eyes, maybe a speckle of fear for the shotgun in my hand, maybe a speckle of pity. But whatever it was I looked for I didn’t find in those dark eyes.
‘Just leave us alone, Holland,’ I said, letting my finger find the trigger.
‘I can’t do that,’ Holland said, his eyes not even blinking when I clicked the safety off.
Amy stepped into the yard but I nodded her not to come closer.
‘I’m not some stud bull you can use then take back to another farm,’ Holland said to Amy. ‘That baby’s as much mine as yours. You’re saying it ain’t so won’t change ever a thing.’
Holland stepped toward me then, reached out and grabbed the barrel. If he’d of wanted he could have jerked the shotgun out of my hands.
‘Here,’ he said, pushing the barrel against his chest. ‘I’d have killed a man who done to me what I done to you.’
My hands jittered but Holland steadied the barrel against his chest.
‘Settle it now one way or another, Holcombe,’ Holland Winchester said, ‘because this here is the only way to keep me from claiming what’s mine.’
The cicadas sang overhead. It seemed like they got louder each second that passed, so loud it was like they’d crawled inside my head. Sweat stung my eyes and I had no free hand to wipe it away. I squinched my eyes but it did no good.
‘Please,’ Amy said, and I didn’t know if she was talking to me or Holland.
The .12 gauge’s butt slammed against my shoulder and Holland stumbled backwards. His hand slid off the foot of barrel he’d held like a drowning man letting go of a life rope. I raised my left hand and dabbed the sweat from my eyes and reloaded. Holland’s brown eyes stared right at me but he was seeing something else. Maybe it was himself as a child, or in a foxhole in Korea, or tangled in one flesh with Amy. Maybe he saw all those things, one after another flashing in front of him like he was looking at calendars filled with pictures instead of months and years.
Holland steadied himself. For a moment he stood his ground, the way he did in Korea. I watched the life fade from Holland’s eyes like a pail getting gloamy as it sinks into a well. You’ve just killed a man, I told myself.
Holland’s knees buckled, a puff of dust raising around him he hit the ground. Amy ran to where he laid. She looked down at him and then at me, her face scared for maybe she reckoned I’d put that other shell in the .12 gauge for her. Maybe if she’d kneeled down beside him and started crying I would have shot her. At that moment I was crazy as any slobbering dog or shedding snake. But Amy didn’t kneel down. Her eyes was dry as the dust she stood on.
All of a sudden my arms and legs got to twitching, as like parts of me wanted to shake free from my body and take off in all different directions, away from the awful sight of Holland laying there with a big hole in his chest. Get a hold on yourself, I kept saying, saying it right out loud.
Finally the twitching stopped. Amy stood close by, not saying nothing for a while, like she was afraid her words would set me off to twitching again, like words was to me like water to a mad dog. I took my breaths slow and easeful, trying to clear my thinking of anything but getting air in and out of me. After a couple of minutes my breath near leveled out.
‘What are you going to do?’ Amy finally said, the same question she’d asked yesterday.
‘I’ve got to study on it,’ I said, my voice calmer than I’d figured it to be. It was like the fit had shucked all the panic out of me, at least for a while. ‘I ain’t going to the jailhouse if I can help it, and I ain’t going to Texas or California. If I was going to tuck tail and run I’d of went yesterday.’
Amy didn’t say nothing to that. She looked at me like I was somebody she couldn’t quite place. I was feeling a stranger to myself as well. It would take some while to get used to being a murderer.
‘Get on in the house,’ I said, and I said it kind of bristly for bad thoughts came sudden to me, swirling around in my head like in a cave. Bad thoughts like maybe Amy had planned on Holland killing me instead of me killing him. Or even if I could have sired a child she’d of rathered Holland do it. I had a thought-picture of her and Holland in the back room, the bed shaking and squeaking underneath them, her hands on his back pushing him deeper into her.
‘Go on,’ I said.
Amy had enough smarts to do what I told her.
I sat down on a root that raised out from the white oak like a halfburied leg. I laid my head on my knees and closed my eyes, shedding my mind of all the bad thoughts that kept trying to roost in my head.
When I opened my eyes, it was like waking up from a bad dream because nothing that had happened since I’d aimed the shotgun at the sky seemed real. But Holland Winchester’s body was real and it was laying no more than a coffin-length from where I sat. The bluebottle flies and yellow jackets had already found him. The law would too by and by if I didn’t soon do something.
Holland’s truck would still be at his house. His momma would know he hadn’t gone far. I wondered if she knew he was coming over here and the what-for of his visit. I reckoned Mrs. Winchester had her suspicions, especially since he was dressed more for sparking than farm work. I pondered if she’d heard the shot and already knew, the way a momma will sometimes know, that trouble had found her boy. For all I knew, she could have already telephoned the law.
I sure knew I couldn’t bury him. A fresh-dug grave would be so easy a thing to find. Besides, hard as the ground was I’d still be digging when the law showed. I couldn’t hide him neither for anything dead in the dog days gets rank in the worst sort of way.
The river was the natural place. I could take a big flat river rock and tie it to Holland’s chest and sink him in a blue hole. But be a trick to that since I could swim no better than a rock my self. Even if I was slick enough to get it done, that would be the place anybody would look. Low as the river was, they’d surely find him too.
I took out my tin and papers and rolled a cigarette for to calm me more. A checkerbacker flew up from the river and lit in the white oak, its beak tapping like a hammer as it grubbed a branch. The cicadas soon started again. I looked up but the white oak leaves was so thick I couldn’t see a one of them. It was like the tree itself was singing. Think hard, I told myself, remember everything you ever knew. Don’t get stirred up. Stay calm and you’ll figure a way. And that’s what I did, flushing thoughts out in my mind like you’d flush doves from a September corn field. All the while that checkerbacker and the cicadas made their racket above me I figured what I would do, or at least try to do. I thought out the how’s for a while and walked into the house.
Amy sat in the ladder-back chair, her hand laid on her stomach. Maybe she was trying to soothe the baby, maybe just herself.
‘If anybody comes and asks about Holland, you say you ain’t seen him,’ I said. ‘I’m going to go do what’s got to be done.’
&nbs
p; ‘You going to bury him?’
‘It’s better you not know,’ I said. ‘All you need to say is what I just told you, that you ain’t seen Holland Winchester today. Understand ?’
Amy looked up at me and nodded, her blue eyes sorrowful.
‘I didn’t never think a thing this bad could happen,’ Amy said.
‘You’re near twenty years old,’ I said. ‘You’ve lived long enough to know once trouble comes it don’t wander off on its own.’
Amy teared up, not much but enough to have to dab her eyes.
‘You can’t cry,’ I said. ‘We’re going to act like this never happened. Never a word to no one about it, not even to each other, so if you got anything to say, say it now.’
‘Could we just tell the truth?’ Amy asked. ‘Tell that he wasn’t going to leave us be?’
‘The truth is I shot a unarmed man, a war hero,’ I said‘That’s the only truth a jury would care about.’
‘I could say I did it,’ Amy said. ‘I could say he raped me.’
‘And then he let you press a shotgun against his chest and pull the trigger,’ I said, my voice tough as barbed wire. ‘The biggest chucklehead in this county wouldn’t believe that. All that would do is get us both sent to the jailhouse, maybe get me a sit-down in the electric chair.’
My back was to the window. I turned and searched till I caught sight of Sam out by the barn chewing what little grass the dog days hadn’t killed.
‘There’s but one way,’ I said. ‘And that’s to put him where nobody can ever find him. The law needs a body to claim a murder.’
I turned from the window.
‘I got to get to it.’
The late morning light beveled through the panes and brightened Amy’s face, made her yellow hair and blue eyes shine. She looked down to shirk the glare.
‘We never speak again about any of this without it’s to get our story straight to tell the law,’ I said. ‘Not about you and him, not any of what happened today.’
