The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  But the agents wouldn’t be coming back. They hadn’t been seen in two weeks. Last seen in Hobnob. By her and then by Jesse.

  “Ouch!” Amity dropped the branch that had pricked her and stuck her plump pointer in her mouth. She studied Dixie Clay, then withdrew her finger and seemed to address it. “Jesse might not be too keen on you being here. He’s getting his sugar today. He phoned from the store yesterday. It’s coming from New Orleans by tug.”

  “New Orleans,” said Dixie Clay, and shook her head. Even now, he wasn’t slowing down.

  “Woman on the phone said, ‘What you need five hundred pounds of sugar for? Cotton candy?’ ”

  Both women gave a low chuckle. Amity continued, “Tugs have been coming along the river too fast, sending waves against the sandbags.” She selected a willow branch and began to weave it. “Randy Yates and them are all worked up about it. They telegrammed the Port of New Orleans saying tell the barge line that if they can’t control their speed, we will. Saying the next boat that comes through at thirty-five miles per hour better have two pilots, as they intend to shoot the first one.”

  “Lord God. They sent that?”

  “Anonymous they did.” Amity lifted a willow branch, found a kink in it, then discarded it by her feet. “So Randy Yates and Jim Dees and some others have spread a few miles down the levee.”

  “Amity, won’t the sugar go to you first, for the store?”

  She smiled wryly, carding the woven branches with her fingers. “Whiskey before cake.” She angled her backside on the chair to rejoin the larger conversation.

  When the mattress was finished, two women lifted one end, and Dixie Clay took the other. She was twenty-two and just over five feet tall but strong from lifting twenty-five-pound sacks at the still. The three women half hoisted, half dragged the mattress to the wall to stack it with the others, then stood brushing their hands against their skirts.

  Dixie Clay was the first to hear the rifle fire and she held her hand up and the women stopped chatting and then they all heard the shots. With a grunt, Amity heaved from her chair and bustled to the river-side door. The others followed, funneling onto the loading dock. By the time they’d gotten outside, the shooting had stopped, the tug just coming into sight as it sloshed around the horseshoe bend with an angry blast of its horn.

  “But it’s not even going that fast,” said Amity. “Thirty, at the most.”

  They watched the tug slow even more as it exited the horseshoe, muscling down the river, dragging two parabolas of smoke. It sounded its horn again as it drew abreast, the captain in profile red and jerky, very much alive. The tug passed them, blasting its horn a third time to warn small craft that it approached the Hobnob dock.

  “Don’t know why they fired,” Amity said, “but they fired above it. I guess Randy and Jim were just feeling ornery. Or maybe having a pissing contest, you know.” She shrugged.

  The dock trembled beneath them. It abutted the levee, the giant wall of earth thirty feet high, with another few feet of sandbags on top. In normal times, the river’s natural banks were almost a mile from this levee, so when you climbed to the levee top, you looked down to see the berm, then the barrow, which functioned as a dry moat fifteen feet deep, a pit from which the red earth had been excavated and carted in wheelbarrows to build the levee. Then you gazed over the wide flat batture, planted with willows, and a few separate channels that paralleled the main river, serpentining around small temporary islands. Then the Mississippi itself, almost a mile wide, and on the far side, Arkansas. That was normal times. But the river had started gobbling up the batture in January, closer every time you looked. And the whole town was looking as the river absorbed its channels, swelling and fattening, covering the batture, then filling the barrow pit, then climbing the levee foot by foot. Now it sloshed and surged at the top where the sandbaggers raced against it.

  The men on the levee had slowly straightened to watch the tug and now stood blinking, their fists pressed into their lower backs, the sky gauzy and low, like a rafter cobweb Dixie Clay yearned to knock down with a broom. The tug, now out of sight around the curve, gave a last blast of its horn, and then they heard only the rain again, which was what had passed for silence these last months. Dixie Clay thought how they’d all forgotten the sound of not-rain, the way they’d forgotten the smell of not-rot. No, they didn’t smell it, none of them, not the fetid mud, the festering crawfish mounds, the bloated cow washed down from Greenville and caught in their bight, nor, deeper, inalienable: their own flesh rotting. Beneath their sodden boots, the webbing of their toes scummy white and peeling in layers.

  Here was the question everyone was asking: When will it stop? And here was the answer everyone was giving: It can’t go on forever. But the answer had a lilt and sounded like a question.

  Now, as if the sky had read their thoughts, as if it’d stepped back and regarded their puckered upturned faces, it thundered a laugh and redoubled its efforts, pewter skewers hitting the men full in the face. Without protesting, they slid their fists from their backs and bowed down to the sodden sandbags once more.

  Amity turned and the others followed her inside and resumed their weaving. But not Dixie Clay. She walked through the mill and lifted her hat and slicker from the hook and exited, knowing Jesse’s men would be getting his sugar off the tug and that someone would have told him where she was. So she was waiting on the gallery but still jumped when she heard the bray of her name. Jesse had ridden up alongside the mill. His hat in the rain, his face obscured behind that dripping veil, just a pale oval and the dark smudge of mustache. Beneath him the bay mule, Chester, laden with tightly tarped sacks of sugar. She was glad the women were inside and couldn’t see this, her tightly tarped shame.

  Jesse rode to the porch steps and slid off Chester and held the reins to her.

  “Jesse,” she said, walking closer. The rain was loud and he didn’t even look up. She stood on the second-lowest step and glanced behind, but no one had followed her. “Jesse,” she said, almost shouting to be heard, and reached across the saddle to put a hand on his glove. “Two prohis have gone missing. The ones from our house—where did you take them?”

  “Get on,” he yelled.

  “When you left our house, where did you go?”

  “Dixie Clay, get on—”

  “Not till you tell me what happened—”

  “I bribed them, okay? I paid ’em so much they up and headed to Biloxi. That was two weeks ago. Probably blew it all at the casinos by now.”

  She watched his lips spread under his mustache, and his teeth, even through the rain, showed white, and she realized it was a smile and his attempt to charm her.

  He thrust the reins into her hands. “Now get on with it,” he yelled, and gave Chester a wet slap on his flank. Dixie Clay scrambling to swing her leg over, Jesse already turning away.

  She pulled her collar tight against her neck as Chester plodded down Broad Street, his hooves spackling her skirts with mud. She would have to think about her next step. Maybe the police, but she must be careful. The captain was in Jesse’s pocket. She could find someone else to report Jesse to—but she’d better be certain of her accusation first. There wouldn’t be a lot of careful investigation, Jesse just one more moonshiner they were happy to send to prison, Jesse’s wife the same but with the scandal and the jeers.

  When Chester reached a break between buildings, she craned her head to gauge the men’s progress on the levee. Will it hold, will it hold, will it hold? That was the other question asked a thousand times a day. She couldn’t discern the workers’ faces in the slanting rain, just limbs rising and falling, looking like nothing so much as the furious scrambling of ants building their hill. Most of the limbs were dark-skinned: the sharecroppers in cotton country all around them had been trucked here, slept at night on a barge tied to the levee. Some of the limbs wore white and black stripes: prisoners from Parchman.


  Dixie Clay stopped behind the Tidwell store and yelled for Amity’s husband, Jamie, to come out. She unloaded a sack of sugar and left it slumped against the wall, but because she cared little for issuing awkward explanations or receiving awkward thanks she was back around the corner by the time she heard the door.

  Chester knew the route home without even a nudge. Before Jesse had bought the Model T, this same bay mule had taken him to Hobnob from Sugar Hill several times a week. She withdrew her rain-chilled fingers into her sleeves and slumped into the saddle. She rode past the town square with its courthouse and jail, its Farmers’ Bank and Lund Pharmacy and Collins Furniture and Hobbs and Son Undertaker and Amos Harvey Furniture with its Victrolas cupping their ears to the glass to listen for a pause in the monotonous song of the rain. They plodded past the stolid stucco McLain Hotel, but Dixie Clay turned the mule before reaching the Vatterott Rooming House, a place she avoided. That’s where they had stayed the night Jacob died. After she’d found Jesse at Madame LeLoup’s, they’d ridden back to Hobnob in his Model T, and Jesse took a room at the Vatterotts’. He sat Dixie Clay, holding Jacob, on the bed and told her he was going to order the coffin. He removed Jacob from her hands then. Just lifted him right out. When he came back a few hours later, she was still sitting on the white chenille bedspread, staring at her empty hands. Their room was on the alley side, not far from the speakeasy. Later, lying in bed, Dixie Clay heard the horns slide their brassy song. She pretended to sleep so Jesse could sneak away.

  In the morning, they drank coffee in the dining room and when they went back to their chambers, they found that Mrs. Vatterott had lain out a black dress, and Mr. Vatterott a dark tie and jacket. So, like children playing dress-up, they walked to church, where a tiny maple coffin lay on the altar. The preacher and the soloist and Hobbs the undertaker were the only people there. Words were said and “Nearer My God to Thee” sung and then Jesse lifted the coffin (the size of a toolbox) and carried it to the churchyard, Dixie Clay following and tripping on the dress. She didn’t listen to the words spoken there, either. She was thinking of how Jacob liked to suck his three middle fingers. That little slurping sound. How he liked to grab a handful of her dark curls while he nursed. The preacher, a stranger, had never laid eyes on Jacob. She couldn’t imagine why they permitted an unbaptized baby to be buried there. Likely the preacher was thirsty.

  After the funeral, she and Jesse had walked back to the rooming house, where she saw Chester tied to the post beside the Model T. They stood in front of the hotel, Jesse turning his hat in his hands as if a eulogy might be embroidered on the label. They watched the mule lower his muzzle to the weeds poking out of the slats in the gallery. Dixie Clay was aware of being stared at by both the people on the street and the ones in the parlor.

  She spoke at last, saying, “Reckon those traps need emptying, before the coyotes get there.”

  Jesse hadn’t answered and after a moment she continued. “Reckon I better ride home and see to ’em, and to the still.”

  She turned and began the business of unhitching the mule, then reached down for her satchel before she remembered she’d come to town with nothing in her hands but her stiffening son.

  At her back, Jesse said, “I’ll follow on directly in a day or two, once business here is tied up.”

  She nodded and fit her shoe into the stirrup and swung up.

  Jesse spoke again. “Dixie Clay, hey, you go on, take the Model T. I know you know how. I know you’ve always wanted to. I’ll—I’ll take the mule this time.”

  She merely yanked Chester’s head toward the road and gigged his flanks.

  Jesse called out to her back. “Dixie Clay. Dix. There will be more babies.”

  She gigged the mule harder and was gone.

  It was April when Jacob died and it was April now, but a stranger looking through her eyes wouldn’t guess she traveled the same road, mud choked, deeply rutted, washed out altogether in spots. A sort of phantom road sprang up alongside the first, cutting through the forest where a giant elm, struck by lightning, had toppled, or where a buggy had mired in the mud and the furious owner up and left it after a vicious kick or two. Today, if she didn’t get stuck and have to haul the mule out herself, the seven miles down Seven Hills would take over two hours, and it’d be dark when she arrived. This ride two years ago would have taken an hour. Not that she’d been in a hurry to find her house empty of everything but signs of how much life it’d once contained.

  As she rode with her shoulders hunched against the rain she thought that if she’d lived in a different kind of place, she might have been spared the worst of that homecoming. If she’d had a sister, or a friend like Patsy McMorrow back in Pine Grove, or a neighbor like Bernadette Capes. Neighbors, not these squinty, rifled men (here she passed Skipper Hays’s house, a bootlegger who drank too much of his product to have enough to sell), men as skittish and inarticulate as the game they trapped. A sister, friend, or neighbor would have come to strip the baby bunting and remove the cotton dresses she’d made, each with a J in blue embroidery floss. Instead, after that mule ride home, she’d stood in the doorway and stared. On the floor had been the soft cloth that she’d used to wipe Jacob’s sick—when he’d still take enough of her milk to get sick on, before he turned away from her leaking breast. Before he began panting, and she saw first the White Strawberry Tongue she’d heard of, pale with raised red bumps, which progressed exactly as she’d heard it would to the beefy Red Strawberry Tongue.

  She must have dropped the cloth as she’d fled with him. Balled on the floor, it was studded with flies. She kicked and the flies lifted, swirled, resettled. The air was rank—milk she’d left on the counter. She’d known that as soon as she got the still running, she’d have to put things to rights, get down upon her bones and scrub. She was twenty then and knew that all that lay before her was work and more work until she died. So far, she hadn’t been wrong.

  Now Dixie Clay swerved the mule off Seven Hills to skirt a tree that had fallen even since her ride into town. It was an elm, with a squirrel’s nest that had been ripped like a paper sack as the branches bounced against the ground. But maybe, she told herself, the squirrels had felt themselves falling and leaped to safety. The key was to know when you were falling.

  Around the tree she was in sight of the last hill, beyond which was the turnoff to their house, a drive you came upon quickly, as Jesse had intended. Of course Chester knew to turn. Pines crowded the drive, low limbs forcing Dixie Clay to duck, and once she didn’t dip her head enough and a shaggy forearm knocked what felt like a gallon of cold water down her back. But there was the house, a black bulk against the navy sky.

  She’d hated Jesse that day two years ago for saying there would be more babies—as if Jacob could be replaced—although some part of her knew, too, that that was what she’d been waiting for. But Jesse was wrong: there’d been no more babies. He stayed in town more and more, coming home only to load whiskey to fill the orders that he wrote in his pretty script in a little ledger he kept in his breast pocket. She knew now she’d never recover from Jacob’s death. That’s what Jesse had never understood: she didn’t even want to. She’d known, too, for the first time, that her mother had been lucky to die in childbirth, still one with the baby dying within her.

  She led Chester past the house to the barn and unloaded the sugar and peeled the wool blanket from his back and began to curry his coat. He gave a little whinny and she scratched his long black ears. She wondered—when was the last time she and Jesse had lain down together? Would she even want that? As she dumped a scoop of grain into the mule’s bin and watched him sink his nose in, she tried to imagine Jesse kissing her, the tickle of his mustache on her lips. But when she thought of kissing, she thought only of Jacob. Suckling, his hungry mouth working, his eyes squeezed in pleasure, his long eyelashes two dark zippers.

  My husband is a murderer, she thought. It tasted true.

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nbsp; She wondered when she’d see him next. Jesse kept a room, she knew, at Madame LeLoup’s, paid for with cases of whiskey. Her whiskey. She remembered again the painted door, the whore in the short blue dress who’d opened it and brought Jesse downstairs, how she’d opened the door again after Jesse had gone back up to get his things. The woman was staring at the street when she said, “I done lost three.”

  For a second, Dixie Clay didn’t know what she was talking about.

  “Three babies,” the woman said. “I done lost three. All three.”

  Dixie Clay knew now that the world was full of secret sorrowing women, each with her own doors closed to rooms she wouldn’t be coming back to, walking and talking and cutting lard into flour and slicing fish from their spines and acting as if it were an acceptable thing, this living. But there wasn’t the least thing acceptable about it, Dixie Clay thought as she bent to grab the corners of a sack of sugar and, with a flip, hoist it over her shoulder. Not the least, and she made her way by memory up the path to the darkened house.

  Chapter 3

  If folks thought it strange to see a mud-coated man with a mud-coated baby sleeping on his shoulder riding past the crowded storefronts of Greenville, they gave no sign. Probably they’d seen lots stranger these past months, and they’d see stranger yet if the levee blew. At the lumberyard, men were listening to the radio tell of record levels on the Tennessee River, Chattanooga flooded, sixteen dead. Ingersoll asked a man pricing a boat kit where he could find the police station. The man removed the nail he was holding in his mouth to point.

  Ingersoll hitched his horse at the station and lifted Junior to his shoulder and mounted the steps with dread. On the hour-long ride into Greenville from the crossroads store, he’d realized how strange and suspicious his story sounded. But it turned out that the story—and the bodies—had beaten him to town. A pretty dark-haired receptionist directed him to the officer who took his report: Ingersoll was just a fella who wanted chewing tobacco and had the good luck to arrive at the store after the shooting was over. The officer was only half listening, kept one ear cocked to the loud fellow behind him offering a dramatic story of the shoot-out. There were no tough questions for Ingersoll, just name and place he could be reached. Levee in Hobnob, he answered. I’m an engineer.