by Tom Franklin
I’m sorry for your loss, Mrs. Tate said. Though if those women had known their places they’d be alive yet. You need the church, Portis, you always have. Now more than ever.
Yessum.
Our Scripture is very clear on a woman’s place. And the place of children.
Yessum.
A man’s too, Portis.
Yessum.
She reclaimed her seat in front of him. I believe your story. She plucked a wet cloth from a washbowl and wiped her fingertips of his filth and waved the other widows out of the room and resumed fanning herself.
But when the time comes to pay the fiddler, she continued, we’ve all got to chip in. Ante up, as a sinner like he might say. So I must ask you, Portis, to delay your mourning and commit us two jobs. First, find that judge before he tries to flee. He’s been unaccounted for since we put out the fire. And the more I’ve been considering it, the more I see he had to have been mixed up with Smonk. Else he’d be massacred too. Or at the very least knocked in the head like you or punctured like our new bailiff.
Yessum.
Second thing, she said, is that you must go with Bailiff McKissick. Make sure he kills Smonk. Help him. Come back and swear he’s dead.
Yessum.
And there’s only one way to prove that.
Yessum.
Do you know what that is, Portis?
Nome.
His eye. Bring me his eye.
Yessum. I will.
Good. Mrs. Tate gazed at her husband. She swatted a fly with her fan. She’d killed several already and formed a small pile at the justice’s shoulder and Gates watched as she used her fan to herd the fresh smudge over with the others. Then she resumed fanning. Is it true that Smonk took McKissick’s child? That boy William?
I heard it was.
Do I need to stress how your standing in our village will improve if you bring that little one back safely?
Nome.
You could be an important man in our town, Portis. Now that you’re a widower. With so little competition.
Yessum.
I think you should wash, she said. So we can see what you look like, those of us in need of a man, you now in need of a wife.
Yessum.
In search of the judge, Gates ran building to building, zigzagging through alleys, and had not been looking a quarter-hour when he spotted a pair of legs jutting from the rear window of town hall. Gates recognized the judge’s boots and seized him by the knees and wrestled him hard down into the dirt, papers from his bulging valise spilling into the sugarcane.
God damn, said the judge from the ground. He jabbed out his hand. Help me up and escort me to the gallows where I’ll see ye hanged.
They sent for ye, Gates said, pulling him into a headlock.
God damn, the judge’s muffled voice said. Let me go!
The blacksmith dragged the smaller man over the street as he flailed his arms and made a commotion of dust, still clinging to the valise. At the store across from the burnt-down hotel several women had congregated at the wagon in the alley as if the mounted gun had been scheduled to deliver a sermon or a serenade. When they saw the judge, they seized him from the smith and relieved him of his valise and raised him above their heads like a hero and he seemed to levitate down the street above them, his face the pallor of chalk.
Gates returned to his shack and sat alone at the table for the first time in ages—it was quiet without his wife’s fussing and the stepdaughters bickering at one another about whose turn it was to wash the clothes or who got to go and try to seduce McKissick. He left the table and rumbled in his dead wife’s trunk and found a shard of pierglass, a fingernail of soap, a razor, a nub of brush and a cracked washbasin which he filled with water. He studied the reflection of his face and began to scrub and shave. Twenty minutes later a ruddy white man slightly cross-eyed and with one long eyebrow looked at him from the glass, the water in the basin black as ink and full of gray whiskers.
Not half bad, he said, for a fellow of sixty-some year.
There were no weapons in his shop, but wearing his church shirt under his overalls, he crossed the dirt hefting his iron tongs and assessed them workable. He moved Clena’s legs and picked up a large pipe wrench and tested its screw. Lastly he put a fistful of nails in the bib pockets of his overalls.
I’ll be back, he said to the room. I hope.
He put on his hat and took it off when he entered the store.
We closed, said the owner’s widow. Unless it’s billed to the judge.
Then tally em up.
With her following, Gates bought a new Stetson hat, a scarf, a denim shirt with silver star snaps, three pairs of corduroy pants, long johns, two pairs of socks, a telescope and a bugle and several coiled ropes and a horsehair whip and the most costly snakebite kit on the shelf and two machetes and a compass and a Bowie knife. He bought a sleeping bag and saddle and bridle and blanket and knapsack and five pounds of salt, a bag of jerked beef, sugar, coffee, flour, cans of sardines and oysters, crackers, apples, hard candy, cigars and lard.
He bought a root beer soda and, sucking on his straw, requested a matching pair of Colt revolvers with hair-triggers if she had them and a twelve gauge shotgun with a pump action, and several boxes of shells, sixes or lower. No slugs, please.
We out of guns, she said. Bullets too. McKissick bought em all.
Ever one?
Well. I kept Abner’s birdshooter here. She drew the twenty gauge single from behind her counter.
How much?
What ’ll the judge offer?
One hundred dollars.
Sold to the judge.
In the livery stable Gates bought a silver gelding fourteen hands high without even bartering or checking its legs or eyes and a pack mule which he instructed the liveryman’s widow to lead to the store and load with his parcels, charged, including any special fees or taxes, to the judge.
You want these animals fed? the woman sobbed. She wore a sling around her arm and had a number of broken ribs. She also had two black eyes, a smashed nose and busted lips. Her dress was still torn and soiled with a hoofprint on her back. Either she was leaving it on as protest or it was her only one.
On the judge, Gates said. Was it you tried to stop Mister Smonk?
It was.
Look where it got ye.
Least I ain’t the fools going after him now.
Gates had ridden less than a mile when the horse, which was blind, stepped in a hole and projected him in his new outfit into the dust. When he rose he saw the animal had broken its leg. He raised the twenty gauge to his shoulder but it clicked. He checked was it loaded, it was, and tried again. Click.
He was using his pipe wrench to finish the horse, which was taking quite a while, when a gun fired.
Gates leapt over the animal as it convulsed one last time. He lay panting on the turf, his hands and shirt sleeves bloodied.
It was McKissick, his revolver smoking. He rode up behind Gates and reined in his mount and looked down. Who the hell are you out in these suspicious times?
The other half ye mob. Portis. Who’d ye think?
Who?
Portis Gates. The blacksmith?
Oh. McKissick put the pistol away and fanned his face with his hat. I ain’t never seen ye cleaned up’s all. Didn’t know you was so old. What the hell was you doing to that poor horse?
Putting it out of its misery. It got its leg broke and my shooter’s gone south.
Here. McKissick tossed him a thirty-thirty.
Where we going?
The bailiff nodded east. Smonk’s house first. Few more miles yonder-ways. He extended down a hand. We can ride double to save time.
And double they rode, east through fields of ruined cane, the blacksmith remarking how happy he was he hadn’t put his whole lot in sugar, considering the spate of weather they’d had. Wasn’t it something? How many weeks? Could McKissick remember the last drop of rain? Did McKissick think they could stop for some licker?
>
McKissick did not.
An odor had caught the wind and blew in their faces. What the hell is that? the blacksmith wanted to know and soon had his answer as they cupped their hands over their noses and McKissick tried to calm the horse, gazing down at a charred mess of burnt animal flesh beside the road, some dark satanic work of art, faces blended to other faces and eyes like strings of wax. Gates pointed out a few dog parts, a wildcat’s padded foot, a coon’s tailbone and a fox’s skull. His partner spurred the antsy horse along. The blacksmith said he reckoned the ray bees plague that had haunted Old Texas these last years was spreading all over.
McKissick said nothing.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Tate pronounced the judge guilty despite his citing precedents and quoting the law in English and Latin and calling upon various prophets and heroes of the Old Testament as well as Homer, Sophocles, George Washington, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Buffalo Bill Cody who was a close personal friend. He reminded Mrs. Tate that she was a female, not a judge, as she bade the widows bind his hands. They scissored off his outer clothes and took his shoes and shoved him in undergarments wrung with sweat off the porch and past the gunwagon down the narrow alley to where his knees gave way as he beheld the town’s rickety gallows.
Ye can’t hang me! he cried. Ye can’t!
You’re right, said Mrs. Tate behind him.
At her command four widows seized his ankles and dragged him through the dust and upended his legs and two widows above from the gallows floor lowered a noose and hauled him into the air with a pulley through the trapdoor until he was hanging upside down. A dozen or so ladies began to pelt him with rocks and hit him with sticks of firewood like a piñata while two others over at the store backed a team of oxen toward the machine gun.
The judge swore and threatened and cajoled and shat hot mud down his back and stammered and tried to bribe them. His sour undershirt fell over his face as rocks bounced off him. At the creak of the gunwagon he cried, What’s that noise I hear? Is it the sound of my own demise? Two ladies unhitched the oxen and led them to safety while several others mounted the buckboard and puzzled over the operation of the giant gun, handing its steam hose one to another with no idea of its function. Mrs. Tate was the one who discerned that the lock fit in the side slot. She stood on a peach box and used both hands to latch back the bolt and two fingers to squeeze the trigger which was easier than she’d thought.
The instant thunder brought screams from the ladies but removed the judge’s right arm at the elbow and splintered one of the gallows-posts. The judge began to shriek and wriggle as the dirt stained beneath him and the widows nodded to one another and drew broom straws to establish a fair order and took turns at the trigger disintegrating the judge as a haze of steam rose from the water jacket and they fanned it with their hands and the gun hammered like a locomotive boring through the last tunnel to hell. The widows fired and fired and fired and fired until the final cartridge hull clattered to a stop on the wagon floor and what was left of the judge resembled a steaming mass of afterbirth, blue and dripping. The silence of the world shocked them all.
6 THE ORPHANAGE
IN THE MEANTIME, THE CROW HUNTER’S HORSE SHE’D TAKEN HAD bucked Evavangeline and fallen itself and then risen in a spray of gravel and legs and with dirt on its rump fled wobbling and whinnying like a sissy-horse, taking all those saddle-bagged guns with it.
She rose and dusted her pants and tied a bandanna around her head and walked several miles, pausing in a field to snap a section of sugarcane from a stalk. She shucked it but it was dry as kindling, like chewing sawdust. She walked on as the day’s colors drained, coming upon a modest homestead, a mud cabin with a chimney composed of flat white stones and off to the side a rickety stick shelter with no pretensions of being a shed. In the pen alongside stood the same sissy-horse that had thrown her. She looked at it for a long time. It had that certain aloofness horses have. But beside it was a pony she noticed, black with a white star on its forehead.
Hey, she said to it.
Behind her there was a pump and a watering trough. An arbor with clusters of grapes which she stuffed in her mouth. All around was flat land here, with the woods miles behind her and sugarcane everywhere. The horizon east to west had grown murky with heat and overhead was the whitest sky she had ever seen. It was like the sun had exploded. The light running out.
She crossed the yard and half a dozen children surrounded her. They touched her clothes gently, as if she were an angel. They purred like kittens. They smelled like soap and blueberries. She felt her womb clench as if somebody had pulled shut the drawstrings of an empty sack. The children cooed at her. They seemed to float. Maybe this was how you got knocked up. She shut her eyes. They were rubbing her arms and legs and bottom though not lecherously, except perhaps for the oldest boy, who had a knife handle sticking out of his boot.
She woke in a dark room and sat up in bed wearing a clean nightshirt. She felt fresher than she could remember. Her hair wet. Her underarms burned, so she reached and felt them. Shaved. She felt her calves. Shaved too. She put her hand between her legs.
Least ye left me my thatch, she said.
Why was you dressed like a man?
The voice had come from the rocking chair beside the window. Now she could discern the woman’s outline—weak chin, big overbite—as it rocked. She understood that she’d been hearing the creak of the chair for hours. The sound had been her sleep.
Go to bed, William, the woman hissed out the window. Yer disobeying the Bible.
Who you? Evavangeline asked.
An orphan keeper. Do you want to stay here? the woman asked. Our man’s lost. Gone. For days now. His horse come home so we think he’s dead.
I was escaping, Evavangeline said.
From who? Who from?
A evil man.
The woman stopped rocking. Can you tell me the particulars of him?
Evavangeline’s instinct urged her to lie, so she described not the veteran but, instead, the strange man she’d heard about from the dice-playing niggers on the river. They say he killed his momma when he was born. Say he bombed bridges in the War. They say he never sleeps and knows the devil by first name. Say he likes to drank the pee of young girls. They say he has white blood, nigger blood, Indian blood, all three. That he can see in the dark.
The woman left her rocking chair and came to sit beside the girl on the bed. You mean ole Smonk, she said. Minute there I thought you was gone describe me my own husbandman. He wasn’t a good man, not no more. Not since the weather got so contentious. Like the saying goes, if you seek him, check Hell first. But you can stay, we got room. She set her hands on the girl’s thighs, her thumbs nearing Evavangeline’s privates. She leaned in and feathered her lips against the hot skin of her throat.
You exhausted and wounded, the lady whispered. I done tended ye hurt places. I been feeding ye broth and tea. Come dawn you’ll feel like a brand new girl. Things always look better in the light of day. You can stay with us if ye want to. But sleep now, the woman said, thumbing Evavangeline’s magic pea better than any man, her voice like a fiddle bow pulled real slow over the gut. Sleep.
But she couldn’t sleep, even after the dyke had left her in spasms and shut the door. She lay awake tingling, wondering if she was an orphan or not. The earliest thing she could remember in the days before Ned was the gypsy witch named Alice Hanover. Days she rarely let herself think of now. How she would watch the old witchwoman perform her black magic, pantomiming her spells into existence, into beings you could only see in the blackest pitch of night. Rising up out of the ground they would stamp whatever they had for feet and look about with their horrible innocence, their skin blacker than the night around them. When they moved it looked as if darkness were swallowing itself. The old woman would summon these things indiscriminately and for the highest bidder and let them loose on whom her employer told with money her only thought. Sometimes these summoned would execute their sentence upon the intended and then, inst
ead of dishappening back underground, be taken by a wind and remain lost in the world. It happened more the older Alice Hanover got. They were glints now, the girl knew, half here, half someplace else, the shadow of a tree moving when the tree was not, the thing that bumps you in the dark.
Once, she’d gone with Alice Hanover to hex a whole family. Perhaps the witchwoman, who bragged she was a hundred-sixty years old, had sensed her own end drawing near and, despite her hatred of every other person, thought it necessary to bestow her knowledge on a student. Otherwise her spells would be gone forever, a language when its last speaker dies.
In the gal’s memory she and Alice Hanover were shreds of shadow sliding under that night’s halfmoon, figments creeping through the bright-blooming cotton to the edge of the homestead, the pair peering through a log fence so recently cut it still smelled green. The witch clucked her tongue and the dog fell dead on the porch. Evavangeline watched the old woman close her eyes and point her gnarled left trigger finger and begin to spin her right hand, palm cupped and suddenly full of water. In a clear quiet voice Alice Hanover spoke words Evavangeline had never heard uttered before nor since. They were——, ———, —and ——.
For a moment the night hushed, as if it had noticed them.
Then blades of grass began to whisper, cotton bolls nodding on their stems.
Her skirt-tails ajostle, Evavangeline heard leaves rattle in the branches. She heard a horse nicker. A shutter bang open. The chickens started to cluck. Wind picked up and her hair stood on end and the breeze cooled her scalp. A light flickered on inside the shack and somebody screamed and the baby began to squall. Lightning cracked the starless dome of space and showed the powderhorn of black air weaving over the cotton destroying all in its wake, barbed wire whipping and rocking chairs and corn cribs and cows and large snakes raining down, the funnel’s great endhole snorting the face of the land, the grass on the cabin’s roof standing and then the roof still in its shape rose and folded like a letter. And one by one among floating chairs and washpots the flailing enemies of Alice Hanover’s customers rose screaming, even the naked baby and its doll made of corn shucks. Shorn from the baby’s hands, the doll turned a child’s eternity in the air then landed at Evavangeline’s feet like a gift.
