Hell at the Breech

by Tom Franklin

  Her fingers trembling, Bess unwrapped the cloth sack from around the ham, a good ten-pounder, the bone still in it. A pang of guilt turned in her chest when her mouth watered. Already its smoked smell filled the tiny room. She touched the cold, hard surface, saw four strange pockmarks in its red skin. Horrified, she used a fingernail to dig out a pellet of buckshot. It dropped and rolled over the uneven floor. She looked at her husband’s bloody shirt.

  “Oh, E.J.,” she whispered.

  The next morning, as Bolton predicted, Waite had arrived. She’d left Clay in the back, eating ham with his fingers.

  “I’m the Sheriff,” he said, walking past her into the cold front room. He didn’t take off his hat. His cheeks were clean-shaven and red from wind and he wore a red mustache with the ends twisted into tiny waxed tips. The silver star pinned to his shirt was askew, its topmost point aiming at his left shoulder.

  Moving through the room, looking in the corners and at the floor, everywhere except at the body of her husband, he seemed angry. When he saw E.J.’s old single-barrel shotgun he took it up from the corner where it stood and unbreeched it and removed the shell and dropped it in his pocket. He snapped the gun closed and replaced it. The door to the back room was shut, and glancing her way, he pushed aside his coat to reveal the white wood handle of a sidearm on his gunbelt. Pistol in hand, he eased open the door and peered in. The little boy he saw must not have seemed threatening because he closed the door and holstered his pistol. He brushed past Bess where she stood by the window and clopped in his boots to the hearth and squatted by E.J. and studied him. He patted the dead man’s pockets, withdrew a plug of tobacco and set it on the hearth stones. Watching, she felt a sting of anger at E.J., buying tobacco when the boy needed feeding. In E.J.’s right boot the sheriff found the knife her husband always carried. He glanced at her and laid it on the rocks beside the plug but found nothing else.

  Waite squatted a moment longer, as if considering the height and weight of the dead man, then rose and stepped past the body to be closer to her. He cleared his throat and asked where they’d come from. She told him. Tennessee. He asked how long they’d been here illegally on Mr. Bolton’s property and she told him that, too. Then he asked what she planned to do now.

  She said, “I don’t know.”

  Then she said, “I want my husband’s pistol back. And that shotgun shell, too.”

  “That’s a bold request,” he said. “For someone in your position.”

  “My ‘position.’”

  “Trespasser. Mr. Bolton shot a thief. There are those would argue that sidearm belongs to him now.”

  Unable to meet his eyes, she glared at his boots. Muddied at the tips, along the heels.

  “I’ll leave the shell when I go,” he said, “but I won’t have a loaded gun while I’m here.”

  “You think I’d shoot you?”

  “No, I don’t. But you won’t get the chance. The undertaker will be here directly. I passed him back yonder at the bridge.”

  “I can’t afford no undertaker.”

  “Mr. Bolton’s already paid him.”

  Bess felt her cheeks redden. “I don’t understand.”

  “Ma’am,” he said, folding his arms, “the fact is, some of us has too little conscience, and some has too much.” He raised his chin to indicate E.J. “I expect your husband yonder chose the right man to try and rob.”

  She refused to cry. She folded her arms over her chest and wished the shawl could swallow her whole.

  “I have but one piece of advice for you,” the sheriff said, lowering his voice, “and you should take it. Travis Bolton is a damned good man. I’ve known him for over ten years. If I was you I would get the hell out of this county. And wherever it is you end up, I wouldn’t tell that young one of yours who pulled the trigger on his daddy. Cause if this thing goes any farther, even if it’s ten years from now, fifteen, twenty years, I’ll be the one that ends it.” He had looked at E.J. as he might look at a slop jar, then turned to go.

  From the window, she’d watched him toss the shotgun shell onto the frozen dirt and swing into his saddle and spur his horse to a trot, as if he couldn’t get away from such business fast enough. From such people.

  “Travis Bolton’s a good man,” Waite repeated now, putting his hat back on. “And it ain’t that he’s my wife’s brother. Which I reckon you know. And it ain’t that he’s become a preacher, neither. If he needed hanging, I’d do it. Hanged a preacher in Dickinson one time, least he said he was a preacher. Didn’t stop him from stealing horses. Hanged my second cousin’s oldest boy once, too. A murderer, that one. Duty’s a thing I ain’t never shied from, is what I’m saying. And what I said back then, in case you’ve forgot, is that you better not tell that boy who killed his daddy. Cause if you do, he’ll be bound to avengement.”

  “Wasn’t me told him,” she said. So quietly he had to lean in and ask her to repeat herself, which she did.

  “Who told him, then?”

  “The preacher’s son his self did.”

  Waite straightened, his arms dangling. Fingers flexing. He looked at her dead boy. He looked back at her. “Well, Glaine ain’t the man his daddy is. I’m first to admit that. Preachers’ sons…,” he said, but didn’t finish.

  “Told him at school, Sheriff. Walked up to my boy in the schoolyard and said, ‘My daddy kilt your daddy, what’ll you say about that, trash.’ It was five years ago, it happened. When my boy wasn’t but thirteen years old. Five years he had to live with that knowing, and do nothing. Five years I was able to keep him from doing something. And all the time that Glaine Bolton looking at him like he was a coward. Him and that whole bunch of boys from town.”

  Waite took off his hat again. Flies had drifted over and he swatted at them. He rubbed a finger under his nose, along his mustache that was going gray. “Thing is, Missus Freemont, that there ain’t against the law. Young fellows being mean. It ain’t fair, it ain’t right, but it ain’t illegal, either. What is illegal is your boy taking up that Colt that I never should’ve give you back and waving it around at the church like I heard he done last Sunday. Threatening everbody. Saying he was gone kill the man killed his daddy, even if he is a preacher.”

  Last Sunday, yes. Bess had hoped, when Clay’d returned with the pistol unfired, that it would be over. He’d gone out before dawn that day without telling her. Soon as she woke up to such an empty house, soon as she opened the drawer where they kept the pistol and saw nothing but her needle and thread there, the box of cartridges gone, too, she’d known. Known. But then he’d come home, come home and said no, he didn’t kill nobody, you have to be a man to kill somebody and he reckoned all he was was a coward, just like everybody said.

  Thank God, she’d whispered, hugging him.

  Waite dug a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his forehead. “Only thing I wish,” he said, “is that somebody’d come told me. If somebody had, I’d have rode out and got him myself. Put him in jail a spell, tried to talk some sense into him. Told him all killing Bolton’d do is get him hanged. Or shot one. But nobody warned me. You yourself didn’t come tell me. Travis, neither. And I’m just a fellow by his self with a lot of county to mind. One river to the other. Why I count on folks to help me. Tell me things.”

  He looked again at her son, shook his head. “If he’d had a daddy, might’ve been a different end. You don’t know. But when a fellow says—in hearing of a lot of witnesses, mind you—that he’s gone walk to a man’s house and shoot him, well, that’s enough cause for Glaine Bolton and Marcus Eady to take up a post in the bushes and wait. I’d have done the same thing myself, you want the truth. And if your boy come along, toting that pistol, heading up toward my house, well ma’am, I’d a shot him, too.”

  A fly landed on her arm, tickle of its air-light feet over her skin. Waite said other things but she never again looked up at him and didn’t answer him further or take notice when he sighed one last time and turned and gathered the reins of his mount and
climbed on the animal’s back and sat a spell longer and then finally prodded the horse with his spurs and walked it away.

  She sat watching her hands. There was dried blood on her knuckles, beneath her nails, that she wouldn’t ever wash off. Blood on her dress front. She’d have to bury her boy now, and this time there’d be no undertaker to summon the preacher so it could be a Christian funeral. She’d have to find the preacher herself. This time there was only her.

  She walked two miles along unfenced cotton fields wearing Clay’s hat, which had been E.J.’s before Clay took it up. She didn’t see a person the whole time. She saw a treeful of crows, spiteful loud things that didn’t fly as she passed, and a possum that waddled across the road behind her, making her turn at its scratching noises over the dirt. She carried her family Bible. For no reason she could name she remembered a school spelling bee she’d almost won, except the word “Bible” had caused her to lose. She’d not said, “Capital ‘B,’” to begin the word, had just recited its letters so her teacher had disqualified her. Someone else got the ribbon.

  Her Bible was wet with sweat from her hand so she switched it to the other hand then carried it up under her arm for awhile. Later she read in it as she walked, to pass the time, from her favorite book, Judges, longing for such a judge to preside over this land.

  Her pastor, Brother Hill, lived with his wife and eight daughters in a four-room house at a bend in the road. Like everyone else, they grew cotton. With eight sets of extra hands, they did well at it, and the blond stepping-stone girls, less than a year apart and all blue-eyed like their father, were marvels of efficiency in the field, tough and uncomplaining children. For Bess it was a constant struggle not to covet the preacher and his family. She liked his wife, too, a tiny woman named Elda, and more than once had had to ask God’s forgiveness for picturing herself in Elda’s frilly blue town-dress and bonnet with a pair of blond girls, the youngest two, holding each of her hands as the group of them crossed the street in Coffeeville on a Saturday. And once—more than once—she’d imagined herself to be Elda in the sanctity of the marriage bed. Then rolling into her own stale pillow which took her tears and her repentance. How understanding God was said to be, and yet how little understanding she had witnessed. Even He, even God, had only sacrificed once.

  Girls. Everyone thought them the lesser result. The lesser sex. But to Bess a girl was something that didn’t have to pick up his daddy’s pistol out of the sideboard and ignore his mother’s crying and push her away and leave her on the floor as he opened the door checking the pistol’s loads. Looking back looking just like his daddy in his daddy’s hat. A girl was something that didn’t run down the road to leave you, something that didn’t leap sideways into the tall cotton and disappear like a deer in order to get away and leave you alone in the yard, trying to pull your fingers out of their sockets.

  She stopped in the heat atop a high place in the road. She looked behind her and saw no one. Just the cotton. In front of her, the same. Grasshoppers springing through the air and for noise only bird whistles and the distant razz of cicadas. She looked at her Bible and raised it to throw it into the cotton. For a long time she stood in this pose, but it was only a pose, which God saw or didn’t, and after a time she lowered her arm and walked on.

  At Brother Hill’s some of his girls were shelling peas on the porch. Others were shucking corn, saving the husks in a basket. Things a family did while the cotton was laid by. When they saw her coming along the fence, one hopped up and went inside and returned with her mother. Bess stopped, tried in a half-panic to remember each girl’s name but could only recall four or five. Elda stood on the steps with her hand leveled over her eyes like the brim of a hat, squinting to see. When Bess didn’t move, Elda came down the steps toward her, stopping at the well for a tin cup of water, leaving the shadow of her house to meet Bess so the girls wouldn’t hear what they were going to say.

  “Dear, I’m so sorry,” Elda whispered when Bess had finished. She reached to trace a finger down Bess’s face. She offered the tin which Bess drank quickly and gave back.

  “I thank you,” she said, moving the Bible from one hand to the other.

  Elda reached and held her empty hand, squeezed the fingers. “Will you stay supper with us? Let us go over and help you prepare him? I can set up with you. Me and my oldest.”

  Bess shook her head. “I can get him ready myself. I only came to see if Brother Hill would read the service.”

  The watchful girls resumed work, like a picture come suddenly alive, when their mother looked back toward them.

  “Oh, dear,” Elda said. “He’s away. His first cousin died in Grove Hill and he’s there doing that service. He won’t be back until day after tomorrow, in time for picking. Can you wait, dear?”

  She said she couldn’t, the heat was too much. She’d find someone else, another preacher. Even if he wasn’t a Baptist.

  It was after dark when she arrived at the next place, a dog-trot house with a mule standing in the trot. There was a barn off in the shadows down the sloping land and the chatter of chickens everywhere. This man was a Methodist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but he was prone to fits and was in the midst of one then, his wife said, offering Bess a cup of water and a biscuit which she took but didn’t eat. Though Bess couldn’t recall her name, she knew that here was a good woman who’d married the minister after her sister, his first wife, had died of malaria. Been a mother to the children.

  In a whisper, casting a glance at the house, the woman told Bess that her husband hadn’t been himself for nearly a week and showed no sign of returning to his natural, caring state. She’d sent the young ones to a neighbor’s.

  As Bess walked away, she heard him moaning from inside and calling out profane words. A hand seemed to clamp her neck and she felt suddenly cold though her dress was soaked with sweat. God above was nothing if not a giver of tests. When she thought to look for it, the biscuit was gone, she’d dropped it somewhere.

  The last place to go was to the nigger preacher, but she didn’t do that. She walked toward home instead and thought she smelled him on the wind on her face before she came in sight of their house. For a long time she sat on the porch holding his cold hand in hers, held it for so long it grew warm from her warmth and for a time she imagined he was alive, sleeping. The flies had gone wherever flies go after dark and she fell asleep, praying.

  She woke against the wall with a pain in her neck like an iron in it. The flies were back. She gasped at their number and fell off the porch batting them away. In the yard was a pair of wild dogs which she chased down the road with a hoe. There were buzzards smudged against the white sky, mocking things that may have been from God or the devil, she had no idea which. One seemed the same as the other to her now as she got to her knees.

  Got to her knees and pushed him and pulled him inside and lay over him crying. With more strength than she knew she possessed, she lifted him onto the sideboard and stood bent and panting. He was tall so his ankles and feet stuck out in the air. She waved both hands at the flies but most were outside, only a few had got in. She closed the door, the shutters, and moved back the sheet to look at his face. For a moment it was E.J. she saw. Then it wasn’t. She touched Clay’s chin, rasp of whisker. It was only a year he’d been shaving. She built a little fire in the stove, heated some water, found the straight razor and soaped his cold face. A fly flew out of his mouth. She scraped the razor over his cheeks, rubbing the stiff hairs onto the sheet that still covered his body, her hand on his neck, thumb caressing his Adam’s apple. She talked to him as she shaved him and talked to him as she peeled back the stiff sheet and unlaced his brogans and set them side by side on the floor. She had never prepared anyone for burial and wished Elda were here and told him this in a quiet voice, but then added that she’d not want anybody to see him in such a state, especially since she’d imagined that he and Elda’s oldest daughter would someday be wed. Or the second oldest. You could’ve had your pick of them, she said. W
e would’ve all spent Christmases together in their house and the sound of a baby laughing would be the sound of music to my ears. His clothes stank, so she unfastened his work pants and told him she’d launder them as she inched them over his hips, his knees, ankles. She removed his underpants which were soiled and covered his privates with the sheet from her bed. She unbuttoned his shirt and spread it and closed her eyes then opened them to look at the wounds. Each near his heart. Three eye-socket holes—she could cover them all with one hand and knew enough about shooting to note the skill of the marksman—the skin black around them. She flecked the hardened blood away with her fingernails and washed him with soap and water that turned pink on his skin. Doing his back was messier as the bullets had come out and taken much of him with them, and in the end she had to stuff a rag in to close him up. Then, with his middle covered, she washed him and combed his hair. She had been talking the entire time. Now she stopped.

  She snatched off the sheet and beheld her boy, naked as the day he’d wriggled into the world of air and men. It was time for him to go home and she began to cry again. “Look what they did,” she said.

  The Reverend Isaiah Hovington Walker’s place seemed deserted. The house was painted white, which had upset many of the white people in the area, that a nigger man would have the gall to doctor up his house so that it no longer had that hornet’s nest–gray wood the rest of the places in these parts had. He’d even painted his outhouse, which had nearly got him lynched. So many of the white folks, Bess and Clay included, not having privies themselves. If Sheriff Waite hadn’t come out and made him scrape off the outhouse paint (at gunpoint, she’d heard), there’d have been one less preacher for her to consult today.