by Tom Franklin
The judge took his monocle off and polished it with his handkerchief. His eye looked small and weak without it, a puddle drying up. Well, he said, if you’ll permit me, this next part’s why I’m a goddamn circuit judge and you only a bailiff. See, what none of yall folks know out here in the wilderness between the rivers is that I’m a man of principle like none you’ve met. When I learned of this Smonk’s existence, at great personal expense I sought him out to discern and divine his motives. With only the good of my constituents in mind and of course the interest of science and theology as well.
The meeting had occurred a week before, the judge remembered, down south in Mobile, where he’d met Smonk for supper in a dive overlooking the bay. Smonk had brought a big ball-headed nigger and a chink whore in with him and several people got up and left the room.
I don’t usually eat with niggers, the judge had said, his black coat folded over his arm. Chinks neither.
Smonk bumped the table sliding in. We don’t usually eat with judges.
They’d had shrimp, which the judge despised. Bugs were what they looked like to him. He’d enjoyed the broiled potatoes, however, and speared them with his fork and added salt and chewed slowly as Smonk gobbled his shrimp—legs and shell and back veins in his beard—and rambled about the bridges he’d blown up in the War with the Spanish. How crucial the placement of the charge. How perfect the timing need be. How you always get your pay in advance. The ball-headed nigger never said a word, just ate quietly and with perfect manners which offended the judge. They were in a corner booth overlooking the water and shaded by a shutter propped open with a pool cue. Every door in the dive had a horseshoe nailed over it with the ends up.
His shoulders to the wall, Smonk smoked one cigar after another and ate a raw onion like an apple and had fits of coughing that shook the table. Once, he spilled a cup of salt then scooped a few grains and flicked them behind him. The judge had heard Smonk never left a building by any door except the one he’d entered. That he wouldn’t touch a toadfrog. Wouldn’t begin a trip on Sunday or bring anything black aboard a boat. Wouldn’t carry a hoe, ax or shovel into a house. That he never stepped over a fishing pole or under a ladder. Never swept beneath a bed or sang before breakfast or watched the full moon through green leaves. He made a point of getting his hair wet in the first May rain shower and believed that to take the rings off your finger would bring heart trouble and that a mouse-hole gnawed in your floor had to be patched by someone other than yourself. He believed it was bad luck to take cats into a new house. He believed that whatever you dreamed while sleeping beneath a new quilt would shortly come true, and that a dream of muddy water meant death.
His hands were abnormally large, though whether that was normal for his own peculiar brand of physiology or a symptom of one of his many ailments, the judge could only postulate. Smonk’s fingertops were hairy and his breath hot and acidic, hanging in the air like burnt skunk, occasioning the judge to chew with his handkerchief over his mouth. Smonk had positioned the whore under the table to rub his feet and once in a while he looked down and said something to her.
Oh, yah, she answered. Mista Smonk weal, weal hod. Weal, weal big. From under the table her hands appeared, a foot apart.
Trained her good, didn’t I? Smonk said grinning to the nigger but the nigger didn’t grin back or otherwise commit. Nor did he lower his eyes to the judge’s satisfaction when the judge stared at him, but this seemed a prudent time to set one’s sense of propriety aside for the greater good, so instead of having the impertinent fellow hanged, the judge had let it go for that day and turned to study Smonk’s features. In profile E.O.’s nose and mouth extended farther than your normal white Christian’s, an African feature which might locate some nigger in his past. And his eye, the one of use, was narrow, like a chink’s. Hell, wondered the judge, am I even dealing with a white man at all? Smonk had parched skin the color and texture of an ancient saddle and matted red hair tied at his neck, a cascade of beard graying down his chest but red around the lips like a consumptive’s. There’s your coughing. It was impossible to say how old he was. Might be fifty, might be eighty. Could of been handsome too in his young days, but now with nicks and sores and carbuncles and liver spots, et cetera, and that purple scar the size of a goddamn dirtdobber nest going up his neck behind his ear, well hell, it looked like any day could end his journey of years.
Smonk had sensed this inspection and for a moment locked his eye—as clairvoyant and intent as a wolf’s, gazing at snow with blood on it—with the judge’s.
The judge looked away.
You want ye shrimps, fellow? Smonk asked.
Naw. The judge swallowed. I don’t eat bugs.
Don’t eat bugs.
Weal, weal, weal hod.
Little more was said. After Smonk waited for the judge to pay, they’d walked down a narrow flight of stairs and through a back alley past mounds of rotting shellfish and along the tracks to the rail station where three men were loading a buckboard wagon. Smonk shooed them away and offered the judge the sum of five hundred dollars in a cigar box for a verdict against the town of Old Texas. The judge removed his monocle and took the box and placed it under his arm. Smonk put his cigar in his teeth and rolled back a green tarp in the wagon and what the judge beheld caused him to drop the box.
Is that a goddamn Gatling gun?
Hell naw, Smonk said. I got dirt on a general up in Washington. This here is Mister Hiram Maxim’s machine gun, the newest model. Makes a army Gat look like a goddamn flintlock.
Now, one week and one massacre later, the judge sat across from the bailiff and stuffed his handkerchief in the breast pocket of his coat and wished he had a rock of hard candy. From outside he heard a lady wailing.
Mic—Bailiff, he said, taking another swig, don’t trouble to thank me for my legal or scientific pursuits regarding Smonk. He rose and shut the window. On the sill outside was a parched white splat of birdshit. A monarch butterfly flittered down and landed there, then fluttered on. Thought the shit was a goddamn flower. The judge smiled. It’s been my pleasure and duty, he said, turning, to serve my fellow citizens, even unto the risk of my own life yea soul.
I ain’t a bailiff no more. Didn’t I say that?
The judge began to search his pockets ironically. Did ye file a letter of resignation in triplicate? If not yer still in the town’s employ and I can’t in good conscience accept a resignation now. In this current crisis. In other words, you the law.
What was they? asked the bailiff.
What was what.
Smonk’s motives. Which ye set out to discern and divine.
Ah. The judge looked up and to the left and composed his thoughts. Wretched, he said. There’s his motives, crystallized into one apt term. But what I’m trying to get at here is that with the justice of the peace et cetera et cetera murdered, the time’s done arrived to circumvent the natural course of law.
You ain’t got to go far to convince me, said the bailiff. Smonk kidnapped my youngun during his escape, if ye ain’t heard. Or killed him one. If you’d of asked me first off, I’d of told ye Smonk’s days is numbered fewer than the fingers on my hand and I’d of been gone.
Excellent. But ye gone need help. Man be a fool to take on E. O. Smonk without a goddamn army, jest about. I’m gone wire the governor post haste, but in the meantime is it anybody else left? Yall got to go after him now, this instant. Fore he disappears.
Holding the table for support, the bailiff stood to his feet. You dreaming if ye think he’s gone disappear this time. If ye think this is done. You ain’t the only one studied him, Yer Honor. I had my dark associations with ole Smonk too, matters not to speak of now. But in his mind, ye see, we attacked him. Now if we don’t finish the job he’s gone come back tomorrow or the next day with something bigger than that machine gun and burn Old Texas to the ground, or worse. This ain’t over, is what I’m saying. It’s jest begun.
God damn, said the judge. He sat looking perplexed. How in
the hell do ye account for him?
I don’t. They say when he come out his momma’s wound he caught his foot on something in her guts and snatched it loose. Say he weighed more than fourteen pounds. Say his eyes was open when the nigger midwife peeled back the caul and he sucked and gnawed on his momma’s tit even after she’d bled to death and started to cool and he never would of stopped eating if the midwife hadn’t prized her dern thumb in to break the seal. You know what else?
What?
They say he was born with teeth. Say the midwife died from the ray bees.
God damn, said the judge.
The bailiff put on his cap. It’s some things in the world ye jest got to take for what they is. On they own terms. He took up his rifle. It’s one other fellow wasn’t numbered among the dead, I heard. Blacksmith down the way. I reckon me and him’s the mob.
Well. If it’s anything yall need, charge the town for it.
I might need a few more guns.
Fine.
And a hoss.
Whatever. The important thing is to catch him and kill him and mail me his goddamn glass eye, which I claim for a souvenir.
The bailiff moved his jaw. I best git on.
Do that. The judge raised his flask in a farewell toast. He had no intention of wiring the governor or anybody else. This backward secluded town had designed its own doom and could burn forgotten to the ground as far as he cared. And as for the bailiff, closing the door behind him, well, the judge expected never to see the poor idiot alive again.
Cheers, he told the room.
Sucking Smonk’s eye, McKissick limped out into the heat. For a moment he leaned against a column until a spell of nausea passed, then he walked faster, hand clamped to his wound. He went to the doctor’s and the doctor’s widow gave him some bandages and lamp oil and he made a poultice. Then he limped along the road to the opposite end of town to the blacksmith shed where he found Gates, a filthy man in his sixties, hammering coffin handles on an anvil. Four covered bodies laid out on various stacks of wood. He’d been staring into his fire and had difficulty seeing who it was.
Who’s that? Will the bailiff?
I was once, said he. Who the hell are you? A blacksmith, or—he indicated the bodies—the damn undertaker?
Blacksmith. By God. My talent’s about the only thing he ain’t took from me. But since old Hobbs was shot, we all jest doing our own setting by. He nodded at the bailiff’s side. Catch one?
Naw. Jobbed me with his sword.
The smith drank from a tin cup and then resumed his hammering. Don’t touch them handles yonder. They still hot.
I’m going after him, McKissick said between hammerfalls. He took my boy. The judge is conscripted me.
Gates used a pair of tongs to turn the coffin handle which glowed orange and went back to whacking it on his anvil. Luck to ye.
McKissick limped to the corner of the shed and pulled back the sheet from a corpse and winced at the face stained in blood, much of the head mown away. Who’s these fellows?
The hammering stopped. That one was Lurleen.
Dern, the bailiff said. Sorry. He cocked his head for a different angle.
Them others is my stepdaughters. Itina there and Clena and that one cut in half yonder’s Revina. I still ain’t found her legs though them toes on the salt lick there’s probably hers. They long enough.
Dern. McKissick studied Gates’s dead wife. How come she’s wearing men’s duds?
All of em is. So they could go see inside the courtroom when Smonk got ambushed. They hadn’t ever saw such a show. We put they hair up under they hats and wrapped cloth around they knockers to flatten em. They was a family of big-bosomed girls, if ye remember.
McKissick did. The stepdaughters who’d lay with any man could muster a hard-on. Their mother who wasn’t a whole hell of a lot older than her oldest daughter but a lot prettier. It was common knowledge around town that she’d had congress with Smonk.
Look close, the smith said, sipping from his cup. You can still see where we drawed mustaches on her lip with ash. We was laughing so hard. Them younguns started cutting up. Scratching they make-believe balls and pretending to hold giant peckers and take a piss. Itina went over to Revina and humped on her. We was all drunk.
My condolences. On the whole brood.
Thank ye. Mine on ye boy.
Hold off on condoling him, if ye don’t mind.
Sorry. Didn’t go to jinx ye.
McKissick picked up a coffin handle from where it lay cooling on a block and threw it down.
Hot, ain’t it, Gates said. I told ye.
Naw. It jest don’t take me long to look at a coffin handle. He blew on his palm. How much longer ye reckon ye gone be here laying em out?
Why?
I come see might ye go with me.
After Smonk? The blacksmith studied his black hands. Their black nails. It wouldn’t be right, he said. I can’t jest up and leave the girls.
What’s worse, leaving em to set a spell here or letting go the scoundrel that killed em? Seems like you got a lot of reason to want Smonk dead. If it’s true what they say about him and—not to speak ill of the dead—ye wife here. Seems you was spared. Like me. I ain’t never thought much of God, but if this here ain’t God saying get yer selves out on a mob I don’t know what is.
The blacksmith didn’t answer. Using his tongs, he raised a glowing bar from the fire and began to beat it.
Well? said McKissick.
Naw, said the blacksmith. I can’t. I ain’t shot a gun in I don’t know when. Don’t even own one. I’m a humble worker. If ye had twenty, thirty fellows, sure, I might go. But jest two of us? No thank ye.
They got a word for not going. It’s called being a chickenshit.
That’s five words.
Don’t be counting my words, Gates. Judge says we can supply up, charged to the town. New firearms and such. Mounts.
Preciate it, naw. These handles won’t forge they selves.
Suit ye self then, chickenshit. I’m taking off terectly, if ye grow some balls.
He raised his hand farewell, shape of a coffin handle burned into the skin, and limped out past the covered bodies. In the town proper he sidestepped a dead horse and turned the corner and limped past the wagon with the machine gun, two young women guarding it.
They were making eyes at him.
In the store the owner’s widow had laid her husband’s body on the shelf where the tins of potted meat were usually displayed. She’d dressed him in his church suit and boots.
I can’t do business today, she told McKissick from behind her black veil. We closed for mourning.
Well, this re-supplying is on the judge, he said. He’s sending me out after Smonk. I’m sure he’d be happy to pay double. The judge, I mean. Or triple.
What is it ye need?
He bought her entire supply of firearms: four pistols, three rifles and two shotguns. She tried to sell him a used twenty gauge single but he glanced at it and said, Junk.
Then he bought all her ammunition. After that he carried his packages to the livery where he bought a tall paint (on the judge) and had the liveryman’s widow remove its shoes for a quieter ride. He noticed that the livery also sold fireworks, and he charged a box of Roman candles and several bundles of bottle rockets and firecrackers, too. His boy Willie if he were still alive would love such noise and fire. And if not, the bailiff would shoot them off in his son’s memory.
Then he was running back through the street, to the store, tromping up the steps, pounding on the glass.
Balloons, he told the lady, ye got any more sheep-guts?
Meanwhile, Gates the blacksmith had slipped off his apron and leather gloves and donned his hat and was walking toward the store when four women in black dresses and veils surrounded him with rifles. He raised his hands in surrender and they shoved him along at gunpoint to Mrs. Tate, widow of the justice of the peace and owner of most of the land around Old Texas and owner of the bank and the apotheca
ry’s. And the hotel, recently destroyed.
They found her in her dark house at the edge of town, in her parlor with the drapes drawn. She sat beside her dead husband, very upright in an upholstered chair, fanning herself primly with one hand and with the other holding his fingers. He lay on a sideboard, dressed in a brown suit. Using pins, she’d arranged his hair despite his deflated head and placed a towel under his neck for the drainage and spread a plaid cloth over where his face had been. A tiny woman with tiny hands, Mrs. Tate flipped down her veil when they entered.
The widows shoved Gates forward and he snatched off his cap and tried to smooth his wiry hair.
Are you drunk? she asked. Such your habit.
Nome. This all is sobered me up.
Mrs. Tate snapped closed her fan and rose to inspect Gates, circling him, her head level with his biceps, poking at his kidneys with the fan.
Why weren’t you at the trial? she asked from behind him. Account for being alive. When so many better men have passed.
He stammered how he’d voted to lynch Smonk, how he’d planned to attend the trial and celebration after, but the gun-killers had robbed him and knocked him in the head. Did she want to feel the whop? He knelt as she pressed the needles of her fingers on the soft lump at the base of his skull, her touch lingering to a caress as he stammered the tragedy of his own family, dead and tarped, one and all, back yonder in his shop.
What he didn’t mention was that two of the three killers had visited his shed earlier that day, before the trial. Before the massacre. How the smith had not realized that these two strangers with a packhorse full of guns on the day Smonk was going on trial meant something was up was beyond him. He ought to of reported it. It wasn’t like there was a pair of strangers through here every day. In fact, he couldn’t remember the last new face he’d seen—other than Smonk’s. The killers had asked about a whore and he’d pointed them to his house, but instead of paying him the three dollars, they’d knocked him in the head with a rifle butt and took the coins from his pocket and left him for dead and he’d lain half-conscious on the floor in his own head blood for over an hour. It was just like Lurleen and her girls not to come get him after laying with the killers, traipsing off to the trial in their men’s duds. Lurleen would of done anything to see Smonk again, Gates knew—she still was in love with the one-eye. The blacksmith had just awakened on the floor and touched the throbbing lump at the top of his neck when he’d heard the machine gun going off.
