Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  “How’d you get away?”

  “Here’s the strange part,” he said. “They was all corned on whiskey they’d stole from me—good batch, too—and I reckon cut me down ’fore I was all the way dead. Lucky it didn’t break my neck. They put that youngest Burke boy to burying me. I come to my senses covered in mud and like to scared him to death. But it was him let me go.”

  “How come?”

  “Cause I don’t think he’s one of ’em. I think he just does what they tell him to.”

  “But the older Burke boy…?”

  “Him? Hell, he was giggling his fool head off when Lev was trying to get the mule to buck me.”

  “You said they’re fixing to try something. They’re gone come after the courthouse. You know any more details about that?”

  “After Arch Bedsole got killed, Tooch called a meeting at his store. Wanted ever man in the whole beat there. Said he had a revelation for us all. So I went. Gathering like that’s always good for selling a few jugs. But it came pretty clear to everbody that he was talking about some high-minded stuff. Said the whole county government was corrupt and that he wanted to organize against ’em.

  “Bunch of fellows left, and I left with ’em. I wasn’t interested in joining no alliance nor nothing. Done worked my whole life by myself, didn’t see no need to change then.” He looked at Waite. “Nor now. So I ain’t gone help you track ’em, and I ain’t going to court and pointing ’em out. I’m just telling you what I know so you’ll be able to go up in there and shoot the guilty ones and let the rest of them folks get back to normal.”

  Waite looked over the names on his list. None surprising. “What about Floyd Norris?”

  The door opened and the men watched the clerk carry in two steaming buckets, rags around the handles.

  “Obliged,” Bit said after the clerk had poured them in, steam fogging his spectacles. The clerk gave Waite a wearied look and left, the empty buckets clanking.

  “Go on,” Waite said.

  “Floyd Norris never was part of ’em, far as I know. I imagine he signed their paper, but so did everbody. Fellow didn’t sign, he’d hear about it.”

  Urgent footsteps up the stairs and both men looked at the door and then each other. Waite drew his sidearm and Bit ducked under the water, out of sight. The door opened. The clerk.

  “Sheriff,” breathlessly, “they’ve brought in Carlos McCorquodale. He’s been shot!”

  Waite burst out into the bright cold sunlight. A crowd had gathered around a blood-soaked horse with the boy lying across its saddle. Ardy Grant was sitting off to the side on the wooden walk, his hat off and his features vacant. His legs bloody and his pants in rags. Two or three men were standing by him asking him questions. Someone had handed him a canteen.

  “They sicced their goddamn hounds on me,” he said.

  Waite and the doctor arrived at the same moment and several men took Carlos down off the horse’s back and laid him flat on the dirt road. He’d been riddled with bullets. Waite counted the holes he could see, forehead, nose, belly, shoulder, kneecap. He stopped and looked up at the sky.

  Someone led the horse to the side so it wouldn’t get spooked and step on the boy. A woman turned away, sobbing. The doctor ordered everyone back and knelt over him, placing a pair of fingers to his throat. He then laid a hand flat on his chest. Oscar York stood across from him, his face as white as Waite had ever seen it, and it was to him the doctor said, “This boy’s gone.”

  “Tell me,” Waite said.

  Ardy Grant sat across from him. He’d taken off his coat, vest, and gloves, and with steady fingers dribbled tobacco into a paper. He rolled the cigarette tightly and licked it, then put the whole thing into his mouth before lighting it.

  Waite folded his arms. “Goddammit, Grant. Tell me your story before I put you behind bars.”

  “I done told the judge.”

  “Well, you’re fixing to tell the sheriff.”

  He inhaled his cigarette and blew a shaft of smoke into the light. “Well, me and the boy was out in Mitcham Beat—”

  “Doing what?”

  The door opened and Oscar came in. Waite rose and scooted his chair over to his ashen-faced cousin, who took it and sat. The sheriff leaned on the edge of his desk. “Grant here was just fixing to tell me what happened.”

  “He’s already told me,” Oscar said. “He told me him and Carlos got ambushed by that Hell-at-the-Breech gang.”

  “Do you mind if I get the details, Oscar? I’d like to know what that boy was doing out there.”

  “I sent him,” Oscar said.

  “You?”

  The judge nodded. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Wanted Ardy here to show him the ropes. Toughen him up.” He flipped a hand. His eyes were red-rimmed and raw. “But go on, Billy, and question Ardy. Sure. Why not. Why not waste more time so they can make another trip in and shoot me. Or you. Maybe they’re planning a raid for Christmas.”

  “Oscar—”

  “No, Billy.” Oscar stood up. He pounded a fist on the desk. “You’ve already had your chance. Hell, chances. And all you’ve done is wait and drink your bourbon. The rest of us, we’re organizing a meeting. I’m sending Ardy out to gather folks. We’re fixing to organize a damn posse and ride out there and put an end to this mess. You can come if you want. I don’t care one way or the other.”

  He and Grant left, the young man limping on his torn-up legs.

  From his table in the hotel dining room, his coffee untouched on the cloth, Waite watched them ride in. They’d been coming in groups of two and three all morning, rifles over their laps, sidearms tied along their legs, landowners from Thomasville, Coffeeville, Fulton, Dickinson, Whatley, even Jackson. Some had ridden all night to be here. Main Street—muddied by exhausted, sweating horses—reminded Waite of Mobile, men congregating in groups and comparing pistols, black boys hurrying to keep the public trough filled.

  Every so often he had been turning his sugar spoon in alignment with the minute hand of the large clock over the fireplace, which showed near one. The owner’s wife came and traded his cold coffee for a fresh cup and said it was a shock there weren’t more customers, dinner was their busiest time. “Don’t posses get hungry, too?” she asked.

  “I expect you’ll get besieged after the judge is done with his talk,” Waite said.

  A block down the street, the courthouse yard had filled with men with guns and the fence around the building displayed lines of boys balancing on its top rails to see what was going on. Another group of men came from the south leading a pack of horses and a wagon arrived with an armed escort of several men. Rifles, Waite thought.

  Finally it started calming down as Oscar pushed through the crowd and mounted the stile over the fence and raised his arms for quiet. Waite watched from his window, then went out to the porch where he could hear.

  “We’re going to put an end,” Oscar was saying, “to something that should’ve ended a year ago. Nobody’s blaming anybody—it started way out in the country, and nobody had any way of knowing it’d reach into town so fast, though some of us worried it would. But the thing I want you to know now is this: It ends, by God, tomorrow at dawn.”

  A righteous rumble of assent from the men. Waite knew some of them, good merchants all. Married men with wives and families. The livery owner there. Owners of the bank. A blacksmith.

  “My young friend,” Oscar was saying, motioning for Grant to come stand beside him, “was a lawman in Wyoming but he’s from here. Some of y’all knew his momma, Bess Carter. A good, Christian woman. Ardy come home to see to Bess’s estate a while back. Those of you who don’t know him, I ask you to trust me when I say he’s a good man. He’s been out in Mitcham Beat doing some investigating for me—”

  “Where’s Billy?” somebody called.

  “Drunk,” somebody else said, and a laugh went up.

  Oscar said, “He’ll join us later, I expect.”

  The hotel owner’s wife had come out and stood besi
de Waite; he could feel her watching him.

  “Now I’ll admit something to you all here,” Oscar went on, his voice lower, “and I hope you’ll forgive me for what I’ve done. I let my nephew, Carlos, go out to Mitcham Beat with Ardy here. The boy needed toughening up, I thought it would do him good. That’s something I’ll have to live with the rest of my life, for while they were out there, those sons-of-bitches ambushed Ardy and Carlos, set their damn dogs on ’em, and you know the result. The doctor’s already said that it was the bullets of at least three different guns that killed the boy.”

  How come Grant didn’t get hit? Waite wondered. He buttoned his coat and stepped off the porch between a pair of horses, the woman still watching him. As he went down the street, away from the gathering mob, two fellows hurried toward him.

  “Where’s the meeting?” one asked.

  “Follow the noise,” Waite said.

  His advantages over the mob: one, he knew the land better than Oscar did, though it was possible that Ardy Grant might know it better than Waite. Two, by himself, without dozens of men on horses, he could move swiftly, as he was now, low on King’s back, gigging him with his spurs. Finally, while the mob had many targets, Waite had only one.

  He figured the Bear Thicket was his only choice—going through Coffeeville was too wide a detour. Still, it seemed to take longer than ever to get there, the woodlands on either side dragging past, King’s hooves drumming and mud issuing from underneath them as if man and mount were the point of a tornado dragging across the ground. Just past the covered bridge his hat blew off but he didn’t go back for it, didn’t even turn in the saddle to see it roll to a stop beside the road or sail past the bridge and whirl into the slow water below. He bent lower.

  He’d been out of the thicket for a while when, from a hundred yards, he spotted the dead mule where it lay in the center of the road. He skidded King to a halt and sat watching for anything to move. The wind in his face brought the strong odor of blood and King stamped, nervous. Waite dismounted and led the horse off the road, through the ditch and into the cover of trees where he whispered in his flexed ears and tied him to a cross limb. Drawing his rifle from its scabbard, he crept to the east, closer to the mule’s carcass. He’d always believed his instincts and now they confided to him that no living man was about. Still, he went silently, lowering each foot to the bed of leaves as if Bedsole’s entire gang was waiting, itchy to kill. He stopped.

  There was a man lying in the leaves.

  Waite dropped to his haunches and raised his rifle. He could see legs and a back. He watched the man’s shoulders for movement but saw none. Dead? He edged forward.

  Dead all right. Though his head was an unrecognizable, exploded mess, Waite knew him by his new shoes. Lev James. The sheriff approached him and looked carefully about. With his foot he rolled James over. He raised an eyebrow when he saw he’d been shot a number of other times, chest, shoulder, calf, half a finger missing from his right hand. His left fist was closed; Waite knelt and prized it open to discover a pebble. Curious.

  He looked at the sky—soon buzzards would blacken it and descend on slow wings to squat in the trees with their curved necks and featherless heads. Then they’d flap to the ground and stand watching, waddling toward James and the mule, and in no time they’d have their heads inside the dead, pulling out long red ribbons of entrails and raising their beaks to swallow.

  Waite stood. Had Lev James been with the gang when they ambushed Grant and Carlos? You’d have to assume not, else they’d have taken him back and buried him. Which meant somebody else had killed James. Grant was the logical candidate, but why hadn’t he mentioned it? Waite held his rifle under his arm and dragged the dead man out of the woods and into the road, beside the mule, and left him there. Hopefully, if Oscar’s mob came this route, the body would cause them to hesitate a bit and give him more time. Maybe make them question Grant’s story.

  He checked his watch—five o’clock. Night coming. He retrieved King and pulled himself into the stirrups and off they went, Waite glad to leave the dead behind, wondering how many more would die before the moon and sun changed places again.

  Darkness was upon him. He rode quietly now, suddenly nervous at the thought of Bedsole’s gang. Hell, count it a miracle you haven’t tripped over half a dozen fellows in the bushes, lying in wait to shoot anybody not their brother.

  He’d half expected to find Bedsole’s overrun with horses, the gang there waiting. Yet the store, closed, seemed quiet, and save smoke and embers rising from the chimney, nothing moved about it. He approached over the field, on his hands and knees, through the picked cotton. This move would be tricky, he thought. Though there were no dogs to warn of his approach, he was going in on at least two of them, and Bedsole would have no trouble firing on sight.

  Once he’d cleared the cotton he rested, his body covered in sweat, dirt, bramble, beggar’s lice. He waited, rechecking his rifle and the pistol. The attic light he’d seen before was out.

  Here we go, he thought, rising, striding over the road, up the steps. He looked through the glass door and saw only the boy, sitting on a stool by the stove, reading a book.

  The door was unlocked, so he walked in, rifle held at his hip.

  Macky looked up when the bell rang and closed the book.

  “Tooch ain’t here,” he said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Over to War Haskew’s.”

  “Then you and me just might live a little longer.” He jerked the rifle toward the door. “Come on.”

  The boy obeyed, still holding the book, giving Waite a wide berth, and soon he was following Macky through the cotton, the rifle in the boy’s back.

  “Where we going?” he asked.

  “Never mind. Just walk.”

  “You gone kill me?”

  “No, boy, course I ain’t. But there’s others that might try to.”

  At the edge of the field, before they entered the woods, they heard a wagon. They knelt while Tooch Bedsole rode up and parked the wagon underneath the shed on the right side of the store and climbed down. He called for Mack. When he got no response he drew a pistol from his coat and went inside the store.

  “Let’s go,” Waite whispered, and pulled the boy into the safe, dark trees.

  Instead of killing King with more travel, he and the boy holed up in the loft of an old barn. Waite was wary of lighting a fire and so the skin on their faces grew tight in the chill air, and as the night deepened their fingertips and toes began to numb. Some small animal scratched around the barn and kept them on edge and Waite got up twice on his sore knees to frighten it off. Coon or possum, though he never saw it. At least he’d brought a couple of blankets.

  The barn had much of its roof missing; overhead the sky darkened and disappeared, no moon to speak of, and they looked about in wonder as a languorous fog climbed between the boards and unfurled down through the holes in the ceiling, enclosing them in a cold vapor. Waite commented on it, quietly, but the boy said nothing, just gathered the blanket around his head, covering all but his eyes, and peered out from the cave he’d made. Across the loft Waite leaned his rifle against a crossbeam and periodically looked out the door to see if someone had followed them. He unholstered his sidearm and set it on the mat of hay beside his thigh. Below, the horse shifted in the stall, nickered, and was quiet.

  Looking out, the sheriff would mutter things now and again. He unscrewed the lid of his canteen and drank a modest amount of water, then offered it to Mack.

  Mack was thirsty but felt he should decline and did, no good reason he could think of. He looked across the barn at the walls, wide planks roughly fitted to each other. He knew where they were. Behind him through the boards were the remains of a burned cabin, its chimney rocks home to hurtling chimney sweeps sharp-winging in and out of the top and mingling with the smudges of bats dipping low.

  It was Tooch Bedsole’s place. The one he’d set fire to.

  “You sure you don’t want none o
f this?” the sheriff asked. “Gone be a long wait.”

  He shook his head, the dry blanket scratching on the board behind him. All the night seemed enhanced, he could feel its corners widening and its bottom and top closing. They sat listening to a barn owl and Mack wondered if they’d ousted it from its home in the rafters or eaves. You called baby owls owlets. He remembered that from one of Tooch’s books.

  “Boy,” the sheriff said, “I ain’t gone lie to you. There’s a mob of ’em coming in the morning, and your buddies, all of ’em, will likely be shot or hanged. There’s been a fellow up in here spying around, and he’s give ’em names. I don’t know which names or how he got ’em, or if they’re even mixed up in it. But I got a feeling the innocent will suffer alongside the guilty come dawn.”

  They sat.

  “I got a few names myself, boy. I don’t figure you’ll confirm ’em for me, but you don’t have to. I trust the fellow that told me. You wanna know why I trust him?”

  Mack shrugged and closed himself tighter in the blanket. He wished they’d go below and Waite would start a fire. His toes were frozen. If there were a fire he’d just put his feet right in it and let his shoes start to sizzle.

  “I trust him because he’s a fellow come back from the dead, and I don’t figure a man who’s tasted hell will bother with lying on earth.”

  This registered on Mack slowly. He looked up.

  “That’s right,” Waite said, as if he’d read his mind. “Bet you didn’t know Bit Owen was a old friend of mine, did you? That me and him was in the War together.” He waved a hand. “Not that we knew each other back then. Just happened to wind up at the same place near the end, when everthing was going to hell. End of a war,” he said. “You don’t want to be on the losing side, that’s for sure.”

  He fell quiet, gazing up at the sky through the broken roof. “Well,” he said, “Bit, he give me names. Said Tooch Bedsole was your leader. Which I figured. Said War Haskew was in with him. Lev James. Kirk James. And those crazy Smiths. Massey Underwood. And yep, even your own big brother, which I hated to hear. But Bit told me he didn’t think you were in it. Said he thought you were just working in the store. So I come out here to get you. Take you back in.” He paused. “You mind if I ask you a question? Not that I figure you’ll answer me. Hell. You ain’t give me a answer this whole year. But I’ll ask, just the same: Why?”