The Tilted World: A Novel

by Tom Franklin

  He ate chipped beef at the diner come noon, trying not to listen for once. At the table behind his stool, the woman was weeping, about to board the train with her two sons to evacuate to Birmingham, the husband staying behind to see to their farm.

  “This might be our last meal together,” the woman nearly wailed.

  “Shh, Alma, shh, now. We’re all gonna be fine,” he said. “I’ll fetch you soon as I’m able. Corn’ll be tasseling out before you know it.”

  Ingersoll pushed his plate away.

  The waitress—not the one from two nights ago, but her older sister, maybe—swooped away his plate and asked him if he was a levee guard. When he nodded, she slid from her apron pocket a flask and quirked an eyebrow. When he nodded again, she poured a splash into his coffee, and he gulped it as he stood and yanked on his coat.

  At the livery, freshly curried, Horace turned at the sound of Ingersoll’s voice. Ingersoll fastened the cavesson under Horace’s chin, thinking whatever, wherever his next assignment was, he’d probably have a car, but he wouldn’t mind a horse if it were this agreeable.

  He didn’t see Ham that afternoon, and that evening when they met up at the Vatterott, they each confessed to learning little. They slept for a few hours and then parted at the levee at midnight with shrugs that were anxious and grim.

  Finally, at dawn, Ingersoll did learn something interesting.

  The station whistle sang out and the workers began sliding and hopping down the levee, Ingersoll alongside them. They were moving as a herd to the street to cross over to town when a wheeled doughnut cart came careening around the corner and nearly crashed into the lot of them and halted. The man pushing the cart was blocked by doors painted with the slogan DON’T BE MISLED! DEMAND THE ORIGINAL BROWN BOBBY GREASELESS DOUGHNUT! 25 CENTS A DOZEN! The men had begun to sullenly skirt the cart when the doors sprang open and there on the counter sat a case of Black Lightning half-pints. A great cheer went up among the workers. “Sandbaggers’ special!” yelled the vendor, and instantly a line formed. One of the lucky first customers walked by, tilting his head to nibble the hot doughnut ringing the neck of his half-pint.

  “Capa! John Capa! Gimme a bite a yo doughnut,” called someone at the end of the line.

  “Shit. Give you a bite a my skinny nigger ass.”

  The men laughed and Ingersoll laughed with them and reached to his pocket to pull out a cigar when he felt a sudden presence at his elbow.

  “Ingersoll,” said Jesse with a nod. “I thought you’d still be at the Vatterott, sleeping off our debauch of a few nights ago.”

  So Jesse had learned where they were staying. “Naw,” said Ingersoll, resuming his reach and pulling out a Natchez cigar that betrayed the curve of his chest. At least all the rain kept it from drying out. He found another sad curved cigar and offered it to Jesse, who shook his head.

  “What are you about?” Jesse asked.

  “Levee engineers should be engineering the levee, don’t you think?” Ingersoll put the cigar between his lips and flicked a match and held it to the end. “But I’m surprised to see you out here.” He dropped the match into a puddle, small hiss.

  “Well,” Jesse shrugged, “I got me two bucktoothed sisters from Arkadelphia in the honeymoon suite”—here he thumbed at the McLain Hotel to his right. “Thought I’d give ’em a ten-minute break so they don’t get too sore.” He lifted a half-pint of Black Lightning from his pocket and took a drag and offered it to Ingersoll.

  Ingersoll exhaled and took it, nodding his thanks.

  “Want me to see if the sisters can find you a sister?”

  “Not while I’m working,” said Ingersoll.

  “Suit yourself.”

  They watched another satisfied customer prance by, this one with a bottle in each hand, turning his head to nibble one doughnut, then the other. A sandbagger tried to cut in line and there was a scuffle and he was pushed away, spinning to a stop in front of them.

  Ingersoll handed the whiskey back to Jesse. “You don’t seem very worried about Prohibition around here,” he said, doing some quick math on the profits from this line of a hundred workers.

  “Prohibition don’t seem very worried about us.”

  “No revenue agents around these parts?”

  “None that stay long.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Maybe they learn it’s all small potatoes around here, no stills worth busting. Or maybe they head on back where they belong because they don’t enjoy our company.” He took a drink. “But some folks find us good company. You, for example, seem to be fraternizing with the locals.”

  There was a strange bite to the word fraternizing. Ingersoll glanced at Jesse, who was still facing the whiskey line. Then with a pivot, Jesse stood in front of his face. “Like my wife.”

  Ingersoll lifted his chin to blow a funnel of smoke, considering what Jesse could mean, scanning his recent encounters—he’d been there when Ham had flirted with a gal at the lunch counter and the soda jerk hadn’t liked it—but there was nothing to occasion this. Finally he said, “I think you’ve been misinformed.”

  “Misinformed?” Jesse’s eyes seemed to spark.

  “I’ve been working. I haven’t been messing with any women, Jesse.”

  “Not unless you call riding out to a man’s house and giving his wife a baby messing.”

  There were no words. He felt his throat close as it had when he’d choked on the whiskey. Jesse’s eyes danced all over Ingersoll’s face, his face round and stupid as a doughnut.

  “I took her a baby.” He almost croaked it. “It needed a mother. You weren’t home to ask.”

  “And you didn’t see fit to tell me this while you were snorting good whiskey all over the menu?”

  “I hadn’t put it together yet,” said Ingersoll. “Who you were.”

  “And now you know. Who I am.”

  “Yeah. Now I know.”

  “Don’t forget it.” Jesse turned and walked straight at the whiskey line, which parted to make way for him then closed around him again, blocking him from Ingersoll’s view.

  Chapter 8

  You’re my best friend.”

  It was a strange thing to tell a baby, but that’s what Dixie Clay found herself saying. He’d been hers for five days. Willy was lying on his back on the afghan between the wide V of her legs. She would lift her hand high in the air and wiggle her fingers and he would watch, rapt, and then she’d make a clucking sound louder and louder as her fingers crabbed closer to his chins, which she’d tickle. “Gimme your sugar,” she’d say. “Such good good sugar.” He could barely stand it, pulling his legs into his chest and huffing happy air. After a dozen rounds or maybe more, he looked off to the side instead of at her waggling fingers, which meant he was tired, and she picked him up. Usually when she did this his little back was alert, such effort to lift that big noggin on his stalk of neck, but now he let it thunk onto her shoulder with a little puffball sigh. She was learning him so well. He was teaching her so well. Amazing, she thought, they’d never even exchanged a word.

  After a while it was time to feed Willy and she did that, too, on the afghan, though it now would need a washing. She’d like to order a high chair from the Sears catalog. There were plenty of layette items she’d like to order from the Sears catalog. She had the money. Well, Jesse had the money, but she had earned it. There were rooms in her head, and one of them was a dangerous room because she was decorating it for Willy. In this room, there was no Jesse.

  After Willy ate, she fixed him a bottle of milk and walked him out to the gallery. She began the bouncy walk and didn’t look down, didn’t need to, to know when she crossed the dime-sized bullet hole in the floorboards after she’d missed that revenuer’s pack of Lucky Strikes. Dear God, let the revenuers turn up somewhere far away and alive. This was the second thing she’d said this morni
ng that surprised her. She didn’t talk to God, hadn’t since Jacob died. Because after the funeral, when she’d gone to the kitchen to return the borrowed clothes, she’d overheard Mrs. Vatterott say, “Isn’t it a shame that little baby was never baptized, so he can’t go to heaven.” Dixie Clay was too much outside, or beside, or underneath herself to absorb this statement at the time, but she’d reflected on it plenty in the days to come. Fine, if my baby can’t go to heaven, then I won’t go either. If Jacob’s not there, it wouldn’t even be heaven. I’ll stay below with him.

  She’d vowed to stop praying. It had been hard at first because prayer was a habit, but every time she caught herself, she’d made a little tourniquet of her thoughts. But now with Willy here she couldn’t quite stanch the flow. And she no longer knew if she should. Thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou. God.

  Long shadows of the pines fingered toward the gallery and she walked through them with Willy quiet on her shoulder, avoiding the earthworms that had squirted out of the waterlogged ground. She checked the box but there was no mail. Why would she expect any? She’d gotten her weekly letter from her father just yesterday. The cowboy ghosted through her thoughts, and she flung the mouth of the mailbox closed. She had Willy, she had everything she needed. And she sank onto the gallery rocker to wait for full dark to go to the still, where he was such good company, sleeping or awake.

  She’d had company at the still only once before, and it hadn’t worked too well.

  This was two years ago, after Jacob’s death. She’d grimly resumed shining. One dawn, Jesse yanked open the still door and stood scowling at the harsh smells and bubbling rumbles.

  “It’s brighter than a bitch outside,” he said. He walked to a case, batted open the flaps, withdrew a jar and squinted at the shine, slid it back into its coffin. He was sober, irritable; he made her nervous. He lifted the lid off the heating mash and was smacked with a faceful of steam, and he coughed and clanged the lid down.

  He grabbed an empty mason jar and went to the spigot where some hooch was making its final run through the worm coil. He tasted it and then leaned into the barrel of buckwheat bran and levered the scooper full. He was about to toss the bran into the whiskey when Dixie Clay cried, “Wait!”

  “What?” he stood with the scoop hovering over the mash.

  “I added it already.”

  “What about the cake of yeast?”

  “Yeah, it’s in.” Obviously, she wanted to say. They stared at each other balefully. She remembered Sundays after church when her father would come snooping about the kitchen. “Too many cooks spoil the broth,” her mother would say, and wave him away, and likely as not he’d grab a pinch of the tender meat on his way out, or give her a saucy pat on the bottom, or both, and her mother would say “Shoo now,” trying to sound annoyed but smiling as she whisked the gravy.

  Jesse poured the scoop back in the barrel, then turned and leaned against it. “I’m changing the recipe.”

  “What? Why?” Dixie Clay pushed the hair that had come loose from her braid out of her eyes. “Have there been complaints?”

  “No, nothing like that. Opposite, in fact. I’m busy as a stump-tailed cow in fly time.”

  “Then what’s the problem?”

  “Can’t keep up. So we’re gonna switch from corn to only sugar, double our yield. All over Washington County everyone’s already done that.”

  “But it’s as bitter as gar broth.”

  “Dixie Clay,” he said, and let out his breath. “Don’t sass me. Can’t you see I’m tired?”

  He did look tired, actually, despite his new pink suit. His green and blue suits did better to ice down the ruddy in his cheeks as well as bring out one eye or the other, but he liked pink and yellow suits because he’d read that Al Capone favored them. Once he told her admiringly that Capone had the right pocket of his suits reinforced for the weight of a revolver.

  Dixie Clay pressed her lips together and kept straining the whiskey.

  Jesse continued, “From now on, we use sugar only, we ferment for three days instead of a week, and we stop this overpurifying,” he said, gesturing to her sieve.

  Dixie Clay kept straining.

  “One other thing. I’ve got you a helper.”

  Now she looked up. “A helper?”

  “I’ve sent for Uncle Mookey. Should be here tomorrow. That way you’ll move faster.” Jesse pushed off the barrel he was leaning against and brushed his palms against each other, bran pollen dusting to the floor.

  “Uncle Mookey? From Louisiana? But—didn’t you say he was touched?”

  “Right-ee-o. But he’s easy to work with. Does everything I tell him to. Everything.” Jesse opened the still door.

  “Jesse—” But he was gone, the door slamming so hard that the oak and willow branches she had crisscrossed over the tin roof for aerial camouflage slithered down with the noise of a chain going over a gunwale.

  He wasn’t really Jesse’s uncle. Mookey and Burl were twins who’d lived next door to Jesse’s father, Julius, in Concordia Parish. They’d all gone to school together, then later they left together to serve as doughboys with the U.S. First, earliest of the American Expeditionary Forces at the western front, and they’d vowed to their mothers that they’d look after one another.

  But according to the story Jesse told, back when he told her stories, Julius, Mookey, and Burl made it out of France, but it took just one weekend back in Louisiana to ruin all three. It was spring of 1918, the German troops already faltering. Telegrams found them where they were stationed at Belleau Wood: their fathers had the Spanish influenza. The sons hurried home on leave. By the time they’d arrived in New Orleans, their fathers were dead, and Julius, weak-lunged because he’d been gassed at the front, took the influenza, too. He was sent direct to Camp Beauregard, Louisiana, where they’d been trained, to be looked over by a doctor at the general hospital. As soon as he arrived the whole camp was quarantined. Julius was dead within twenty-four hours of touching American soil. Jesse, a teenager, hadn’t seen his father in two years, and now saw him in a coffin spiky with gladiolus.

  Neither Mookey nor Burl fell ill. They attended the funerals of their father, and Julius’s father, and then Julius’s, helping to dig the graves because the gravediggers couldn’t keep up with all the corpses. In five days’ time they were ready to return to the front. At the train station in New Orleans, Mookey wearing Julius’s Sam Browne belt, they hoisted their duffels and kissed their mother, who stood weeping into her handkerchief. The train pulled clanging alongside them and blew its whistle, and Mookey fainted. Out cold, for no seeming reason. When he came to, helped up by Burl, he couldn’t talk at all. Damnedest thing, said Jesse. Couldn’t even form words with his mouth, the mouth just used now for breathing and eating as if it had lost that other function entire. Also, his brain seemed different. He was, folks whispered, simple. Mookey was evaluated by an army doctor who diagnosed him with the Shell Shock and prescribed six months’ rest and physical activity in the woods around the camp.

  Burl returned to the Aisne Offensive, but his first night at the mess some of the squaddies were talking, saying Mookey was faking so he wouldn’t be sent back to the front.

  “The way I heard it?” Jesse said. They were in sitting in bed, Dixie Clay leaning back on Jesse’s chest, the first year of their marriage, must have been one of the first months of the first year. Jesse was rivering his hands through Dixie Clay’s sex-snarled curls, and when he found a tangle he’d spread his fingers and work it loose. “Burl leans over their table and says, ‘Call my brother a coward again, I’ll cut your tongue out for you.’ And the guys all look at each other and it gets real quiet and then a big tough from upstate New York, guy named Otis with a good-looking mug, crosses his arms over his chest, looks up and says, ‘Coward.’ So Burl kept his promise.”

  Jesse was laughing though Dixie Clay was not. It’d grown cold in the room
and she pulled up the sheet. “What happened to Burl?”

  Jesse was still smiling. “Bunking in Angola.”

  “Angola? Landsakes, Jesse.”

  “Well, there was that tongue incident, which got him discharged, and later he had what you’d call a tough time readjusting to civilian life.”

  “And Mookey? What happened to Mookey?”

  “Uncle Mookey stayed on at Camp Beauregard. Never said another word. The day his R&R ran out, he picked up a broom and began work as a night janitor. Been there ever since.”

  Until, that is, he’d been summoned by Jesse for another nighttime cleanup.

  The next evening when she arrived at the still, Mookey slid out from behind a tree twenty paces off. She recognized him from Jesse’s description, “bald, fat, and white, like something you’d see squirming if you lifted up a log in the forest.” He wore dungaree overalls that were straining at the sides, revealing a crescent of white flesh between buttons, the chest bib pulled low to tent the giant belly.

  “Hello?” she said.

  He made no gesture. His head was bowed, and the moon glinted off his shiny pate.

  “Um . . . Uncle . . . Mookey?” She waited, then moved to the door, gripping the key in her fist, and she didn’t turn her back to him as she unlocked the latch and hurried to light the lantern.

  He followed her inside. Jesse must have instructed him, because he set about flipping fifty-pound sacks of sugar over his back, unlike Dixie Clay, who had to wrestle first one corner of a sack onto the hand truck and then the other. The boxes of mason jars he stacked and carried four at a time. When it was time to fill them, he fished one from its cardboard compartment and handed it to her just as the jar she was filling brimmed, which he removed with his other hand, not a drop spilled. Together they worked deftly, but Dixie Clay was anxious. Mookey never met her eyes. When she looked down, she’d feel him studying her, but if she lifted her face, his vacant gaze was on the wall. Near dawn, when a squirrel landed loudly on the tin roof, she jumped and upset an open jar of shine. Before she could grab a rag, Mookey was mopping it with a bandanna pulled from his overalls.