Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “Hell-at-the-Breech,” War Haskew repeated.

  “What the hell’s a breech?” Lev asked.

  “An opening,” Tooch told him.

  “Like a girl’s cooter?” Lev asked, grinning.

  “Yeah. Or like a grave,” Tooch said, “or the breech of a gun.”

  Lev had reached behind him for his shotgun. He snapped it open and the head of a shell rose from it. “This here part,” he said, tapping the hinge, “is the breech.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And the breech of hell is gone be us?”

  “It is,” Tooch said. “We are.”

  Mack heard nothing else for several days. Then he learned of an attack on the property of a man called Lem Howze. His house had been set on fire and he’d been robbed of more than seventy dollars. His barn, corncrib, sheds, and privy set ablaze, too.

  And thus the alliance commenced its work, groups of two or three in their white hoods going to the farms of white families, asking each man to sign their paper in blood. Most men were happy to write their name or make their mark, to participate in revenging Arch Bedsole, to secretly proclaim their anger. They were told they’d have to do nothing but possibly act as witnesses, and that they’d be paid for it. That no harm or violence would ever come to them. And if any men on their list were ever wronged by a town man, Hell-at-the-Breech would strike for them. It was their alliance, too.

  Mack heard rumors of who wouldn’t sign, Joe Anderson chief among them. Four or five other fellows, too. At first Tooch had others in the outer circle go and talk sense into them, which worked for everyone but Joe Anderson, a farmer named Jonesy Gray, and a bootlegger, Bit Owen.

  Then Gray, a large man, came to the store one day, Mack in the blacksmith’s shed hammering a horseshoe as Tooch, War Haskew, and Lev sat on the porch. Gray stalked up the steps, Lev not even getting up, and grabbed the smaller man and began shaking him, yelling that he knew it was Lev who’d burned his barn. Lev let himself be shaken and then thrown off the porch. He landed and rolled his head side to side. He stood, dusted himself off, and came up the steps. He had a pistol in his hand then and had to jump up to hit Gray, but hit him he did in the temple and hit him again and again and when Tooch and War got them separated Gray looked dead. They put on their hoods and tied him to a mule and dragged him off and Mack didn’t see where they went. Later he heard that Gray had lived, and the condition for it was his having signed their paper.

  By May, except for Joe Anderson and Bit Owen, the whole beat and most outlying homesteads had acquiesced, and the few black families had been frightened away—one story Mack heard found several of the Hell-at-the-Breech boys in their hoods going to the colored church and moving all the furniture outside—pews, pulpit, altar—setting it up exactly as it’d been inside. They’d captured the preacher’s pig and gutted it and slung it over the pulpit. Someone had opened a hymnal to “We Shall Not Be Moved,” and in pig blood crossed out the word “Not.” Other black men were robbed of what money they had, and one had been hanged for saying the wrong thing, though Mack didn’t know what that had been.

  But still, he’d been kept distant from it, Tooch wouldn’t speak of it in his presence. Since that first night, they’d had their meetings on the porch or on the croquet court, not letting him close enough to hear. There were several drunken parties, always on the occasion of a successful raid, money divided, cigars handed out, but on each of these nights Mack had been confined to his room.

  And though kept from the alliance’s activities, he still saw his share of violence. He’d been working for Tooch only a couple of months when a peddler came by with a jug; soon the peddler, Lev, and Tooch were drunk. They’d been swapping stories while Mack listened from inside, through the opened window. Tooch noticed him and said for him to come on out so he could hear better. The peddler gave them all five-cent cigars and fed them news of the outer world, and after a big sloppy snort of the shine, as Lev drunkenly lit his cigar, he somehow caught his beard on fire.

  He didn’t yell or whimper, just set his teeth and closed the eye on that half of his face and whacked himself on the cheek, Tooch and Mack watching somberly. By the time the fire was out his lip was bleeding and he was opening and shutting his mouth to see if his jaw still worked.

  “It clicks a little,” he said.

  The peddler’s mistake was laughing. “I ain’t never,” he said, wheezing.

  “What’s so goddamn funny?” Lev wanted to know.

  The peddler must’ve sensed the danger and tried to stop laughing. But when he saw how uneven Lev’s face looked with much of his beard singed off, he laughed again.

  “Shit,” he said, slapping his thigh. “I could of lent you a razor, friend, and spared us all the odor.”

  Calmly, Lev set aside his jug, stood, went down the steps to the peddler’s wagon. He untwisted the wire from around a pair of iron tongs where they hung alongside many other implements, yokes, traces, scales, and such, and still opening and closing his jaw, stomped up the steps with the tongs opened like a crab’s claw. The peddler lost his color and began to backpedal across the porch, ash from his cigar falling on his white shirt, but Lev snapped the tongs shut and caught the man around the neck.

  Mack rolled off the porch to get out of the way and Tooch watched, holding the jug.

  Lev slung the fellow in circles, the tongs fastened around his neck and the peddler clinging to the tongs, and when Lev let go the man sailed off the porch and landed in the dirt and bounced and rolled to a stop beneath his wagon. He lay there moaning. On his knees, Mack crept to the corner below the porch and had a peddler’s-eye view as Lev’s legs appeared on the other side of the wagon. The peddler looked right at Mack as he got dragged toward the other side. He was screaming, clawing the dirt. The wagon wheels obscured what happened next, but there was more screaming, then a gagging noise, then a moist kind of pop. Then nothing. Lev’s hand reached and got the peddler’s abandoned cigar from by the wheel and his legs went back around the wagon.

  “You can crawl on out, boy,” he said.

  When Mack stood, brushing off his knees, he saw Tooch coming out of the store with a wooden crate. He tossed it to Mack and said for him to start unloading the wagon.

  As he did, Mack stole glances at the dead man where he lay with his head in a puddle of blood, his eyes opened and a muddy lump lying beside him in the dirt: his tongue, which he’d bitten off.

  Opening and closing his jaw and picking singed hair from his face, Lev watched as Mack passed with the box full of goods. Now and again he’d stop the boy and select an item to keep—a cinch, an awl, a galvanized washtub, a teakettle, and a railroad lantern, among others—which he had Mack pile at his feet. When the unloading was done, Tooch and Lev drank more and haggled a bit on the value of the rest of the stock, Lev claiming since he’d disposed of the peddler it was all his but Tooch arguing it belonged to them both, since he, Tooch, had occasioned the peddler’s appearance and would testify if necessary that the man never stopped at the store. Finally, over still more whiskey, they agreed on a sixty-forty split, Tooch paying Lev half the cash equivalent of the stock’s wholesale value, a list of which they discovered in the dead man’s coat pocket. Also, Lev got the mule and Tooch the wagon.

  “What about you?” Lev asked Mack as he came back outside, rolling down his sleeves, the unloading done.

  “Sir?”

  “Ain’t you claiming a share, too? You don’t want to threaten me and say if I don’t pay you off you’ll head right straight to the law?”

  Mack shook his head. “I ain’t studying the law, Mr. James.”

  Tooch and Lev exchanged a glance. “Give him a dollar,” Tooch said. “Out of your share.”

  Lev reached into his pocket and flicked a coin, which Mack caught.

  “This gets out to anybody,” Lev said, “it’ll be cause of you. You get what that means?”

  Mack nodded.

  “Well, then,” Tooch said, “let’s deal with this ble
eding son-of-a-bitch before the buzzards start aswirling.”

  Mack dug the grave.

  A life of selling dry goods agreed with Mack. Such things of wonder and color he’d seen stacked on the high shelves behind the counter while visiting the store with the widow were things he now had access to, petroleum jelly, spirits of turpentine, borax, Dr. Walter’s Celebrated Eye Water, flake tar camphor, Epsom salts, a dozen flavors of hard candy. He enjoyed handling the products, reading their labels, pronouncing the strange words on the sides of boxes, bags, and cans. Tuberose snuff. Orange wine stomach bitters. Celery malt compound. He loved unscrewing lids from jars and bottles and sniffing the various powders and liquids inside, each with its own curious set of ingredients and distinct odor, this one bringing to mind green pinecones and that one cat piss or ripe persimmons, each a bona fide cure for some ailment or ailments. Each a link to the world he’d never have known otherwise. Where did these things come from? Far away, he imagined, men in aprons and leather work gloves and goggles in caves in foreign lands among barrels and copper worms with witches’ pots bubbling and spitting over precise flames. Stored in the hold of a ship bucked by waves large as hills. A world outside these cotton fields and woody hollows, far beyond the brown placid river and the trees blue with distance.

  Most every day during his first months, going along the high shelves, moving his stepladder a foot at a time, he discovered some oddity. He puzzled over a small box of variously sized hard rubber cups for half a day before realizing they were crutch bottoms. A curious, curled, flexible tube with a horn on one end and a small nozzle on the other was a mystery for nearly a week, until he saw an old man with the nozzle end sticking in his ear and the horn end to another man’s mouth—a device against deafness! Mack had looked up the aisle and down—Tooch must have been outside—and inserted the nozzle into his ear. When he spoke into the horn he nearly fell off the ladder and spent an hour stoppering a finger into his ear to blunt the ringing.

  “Get to work,” Tooch would say once a day or so when he appeared from nowhere and found the boy high on the ladder gazing one-eyed and longways down the shining, jagged barbs of a hacksaw, or at the intricate stitching of a calfskin glove, but when Mack turned to look into the man’s green eyes, Tooch seemed to recognize this wonder at design and execution, as if he’d been a boy here himself, atop this ladder, reaching a boy’s hand far back into these shelves as if it were the past itself you could touch.

  “What’s that you got now?” he would sometimes say, approaching Mack, wiping his hands on a rag.

  Mack would descend the ladder and offer the heavy thing he’d found.

  “You’ve happened upon a padlock here,” Tooch would say, showing how turning the attached key would release the curved metal hoop. When Mack asked what it was for, Tooch smiled and said, “What innocence, my lord. It’s for locking, boy. Locking people out, or in.”

  “Like in jail?”

  “Exactly like that.”

  Then he’d taken away the lock and walked back down the long aisle toward the window, calling behind him for Mack to quit daydreaming and start earning the money he wasn’t being paid.

  Another time Mack found a cigar box beneath the counter. Tooch was outside, talking to Floyd Norris, the two of them watching the sky for clues to the weather’s disposition. Mack unwrapped a piece of string from the box, and when he opened it and saw them in their plain brown paper packages he felt his pants tighten—without ever having seen such a thing or even imagining that they existed, he knew what they were. He snapped the box shut and rewrapped it, his cheeks blazing. When Tooch appeared and saw him look up, he grinned.

  “You unearthed the skins, I take it.”

  “The what?”

  “Never mind.”

  He learned, too, to sneak a piece of rock candy and suck it for a few minutes before drying it and slipping it back in the bottom of the jar.

  And, aside from the mysteries he’d found among the shelves and underneath the counter, Mack had discovered in himself an instinct for order—where the patient, careful counting and stacking and retrieval of boxes along an oft-dusted shelf would have driven William wild with boredom, it suited Mack to the core and out the other side. On reflection, he realized that all through his life this love of pattern had existed, though he’d not said as much to himself. How neatly he’d cut his fence posts, shaving off even the smallest stobs, always taking too long in William’s snarled opinion. And how straight he’d made the rows of vegetables the widow had had him plant, weed, and pick in their small side-yard garden. The way he threaded a worm onto a fishing hook, concealing the whole of the hook, while William had stabbed the worm three or four times and plunked it out into the water. How Mack had begun to find himself whistling as he scrubbed clothes on the washboard. How neat his graves were.

  The earth ticked along. Spring came, went. The dogwoods bloomed, then shed their petals and were green like any other tree. Tooch didn’t kill Mack and as the days numbered on the boy started to relax somewhat; sometimes he’d realize that half an hour had passed without his having thought of being a murderer.

  In early June Arch’s father, Ed, died, and Mack and Tooch rode on the dead peddler’s wagon, pulled by Arch’s horse, to the funeral. Arch’s four plump dark-headed sisters had come from wherever they lived, outside the beat, brought their earnest farmer-husbands and what seemed like two dozen children, each identical to the next. The daughters gazed with unmasked hatred at their cousin Tooch, but none of the women approached him. The members of Hell-at-the-Breech came, too, armed—though no one knew who they were—as did all the farmers who’d signed in blood. Their families were present, too, women in dresses worn only for church, men wearing what they wore for fieldwork except that the clothes had been laundered midweek and their white shirts were buttoned to the neck. Mack saw the widow—someone had given her a chair—and waved, but she seemed not to see him. He had heard she’d been living at Ed Bedsole’s, tending him in his dying, and who knew what thoughts she had.

  On the slow ride back to the store, Tooch elbowed Mack out of his daydream and handed him the reins.

  And just under two weeks later they returned to the graveyard to bury Arch’s mother, this funeral an exact replica of Ed’s, same people, clothes, even the weather the same, and whatever the preacher said might’ve been the same, too, had Mack listened.

  Since buying it, Tooch hadn’t changed much about the store’s layout—for instance, he left the hand-lettered sign hanging above the counter, over the cash register. Arch had been a lover of bookish words, and this sign warned NO EXPECTORATING UPON THE FLOOR. Mack remembered the story. For several hours after Arch’d hung the sign, men coming in had asked what it meant.

  “What what means?” Arch had said.

  “That word.”

  “‘Floor’? Why, you’re standing on it. It’s composed of pine boards held together by a curious invention called ‘nails,’ which are long sharp fasteners—”

  “The other word.”

  “‘No’?”

  “No, not ‘no,’ dammit, that long one there.”

  Arch went on all afternoon, not telling the meaning of the word, and men kept guessing, and laughing. Someone said he’d make a good politician.

  “To piss?” somebody suggested.

  “No, but I’d ruther you not do that on the floor, either.”

  “Expect—To guess?”

  “Well, if that’s what it means,” Arch said, winking, “then you’re breaking the rules right now, ain’t you?”

  “To clog?”

  “To lay down?”

  Finally somebody got it right, “To spit,” and the community had itself a new ten-dollar word, and for a spell you could hear it used whenever possible:

  “You reckon it might expectorate on us today?”

  “I expectorate so.”

  Tooch’s visible changes to the store, when they came, came slowly. In fact, he’d owned the place for two months before the qu
iet spring afternoon when he climbed the stepladder and went to work on the sign nailed up over the porch. It said BEDSOLE’S DRY GOODS in large, ornate letters. Beneath those, in smaller, plainer letters, it read ARCHIE BEDSOLE, PROPRIETOR. Tooch simply painted over Arch’s name and replaced it with QUINCY. Mack had been raking the yard and watching. He asked, “How come you ain’t changed that sign before?”

  Tooch climbed down the ladder and stepped back to inspect the sign. “Cause whenever you come into a place, it’s best to come slow so you’re dug in before anybody gets wise to you. Remember that. Nothing alerts people more than things that move fast. Now get back to work.”

  One Sunday a month or so later he was raking the dirt in the croquet court when an acorn fell out of the air and hit him on top of the head. Mack dropped his rake and looked up, a perfect gray-blue sky with a smudge of late-afternoon sun in one corner and a parchment moon in another. He looked between his feet and saw the acorn, and saw others, too, all around where he’d been working. He took off his hat and one rolled out of its brim and he caught it in midair. He frowned at the woods twenty yards to his right, no wind able to carry acorns this far.

  Then, from the patchwork of trees, he saw his brother’s face peering out between the wishbone of a mimosa trunk.

  Retrieving his rake, Mack idled over, aware of Tooch behind him in the store, and shouldered into the cross-stitch of briar and vine.

  “Hell,” William said. “I been throwing acorns at you for ten minutes. What the hell you studying so hard?”