Hardcastle

Hardcastle

A Novel

John Yount

This book is for my father

John Luther Yount

who lived part of it and inspired it all
.

SWITCH COUNTY, KENTUCKY,
SUMMER 1979

HIS VISITING GRANDSONS, lounging on the living room rug like young animals resting in the heat of the day, asked him to tell about a shooting he was mixed up in, but he would not accommodate them. It didn’t seem quite possible to say anything about a time so long before they were born, about a time when, indeed, he could not have imagined them. They asked about the shooting in a spirit of fun, but he could not answer in the same spirit. Yet just at that moment, and certainly not by accident, his wife came in from the kitchen drying her hands on her apron and sent the boys off to dig worms for fishing and sent him and his small granddaughter off to the store.

And so it is that he finds himself walking down the highway toward Elkin feeling strangely contentious, out of kilter with himself, and even a little mislaid in time. He is sixty-seven and on some level or other he is perfectly aware of that, but he is also bemused at the fact. Oh, he knows well enough he could account for his age as a man might account for an extraordinary amount of money he finds has slipped through his fingers. Sure, he could think back and satisfy himself that nothing was lost, but merely spent. Yet the odd notion persists that, if he knew just how to do it, he might shake himself awake and discover that he is young after all and had only dreamt otherwise.

“Pappaw,” the little girl says. “Pappaw?” And she tugs on his forefinger until he comes back to the present moment and realizes she is shying away from a bright yellow automobile pulling up to stop beside them.

“Mr. Music, can I give you a ride into town?” the driver asks and leans over the steering wheel to peer out at them from his sanctum of vinyl and chrome and Nashville songs. He looks freshly scrubbed and is wearing a clean, fancy shirt, but there is yet a little coal dust in the hollows of his ears. Still, to William Music he seems somehow as damnably innocent and ignorant as the two small boys he’d left digging worms behind the barn.

“I thank you, no,” Music says. “We’d as lief walk it.”

The driver nods, flips a hand up from the wheel in acknowledgement, and the dazzling yellow car rumbles off. It doesn’t go fast but its wide rear tires, throbbing engine, and raised hind end threaten terrific speed at any moment.

In his peculiar mood William Music looks after it a moment before he gives a little snort of laughter. Well sure now, he thinks, buying such as that is one way for a man to keep himself and his family poor until he goes on strike, gets himself hurt, or until the hard times come again. Yes, and how many are there in Switch County any wiser, he wonders. Yes, and who could say the hard times won’t come again? He does not wish to be hard on the man, or on himself, but he can find no other terms for his regard than to think that nothing lasts save man’s unteachable nature.

1

MORNING, WICHITA, KANSAS
OCTOBER, 1931

DAYLIGHT WAS LITTLE more than mist and blurred edges when William Music sprang up from the weeds and ran beside the Missouri Pacific freight train rumbling out of the switchyard. Other men appeared—ragged, dirty, ghostly in the grey half-light—running too. Music ran beside a boxcar, slid the door half open, threw in his paper parcel, and heaved himself in behind it. Before he even raised himself from his belly, he saw that the boxcar was already occupied by a huge man wearing bib overalls and no shirt or shoes. The big man was propped against the far wall, his hands draped over his knees and his head hung between his shoulders as though he were weary or asleep. Music righted himself, collected the paper parcel he’d thrown in before him, and said, “Howdy,” but the man’s hooded, groggy eyes drowsed only a moment upon him before they lost focus and his head lolled again toward his chest.

You ain’t used to being rousted, are you, Music thought. Despite the hard reputation of the Wichita railroad police, he could see why they’d left the man alone. He appeared to weigh two hundred and thirty-five or forty pounds and was nearly as hairy as a dog.

For a long time he kept the weary figure located, at least in the tail of his eye, and plotted a countermove or two in case he should be rushed. There was nothing in the paper sack he carried but his suit coat, an old newspaper, and a tin pot for cooking, no money in his pockets except eleven cents; but the giant of a man wouldn’t know that. Still, all through the morning and early afternoon, while Kansas at track side fell behind and Kansas in the distance seemed to keep pace, the man didn’t stir. The freight blew its whistle from time to time, slowed here and there to clatter past a shabby depot, but never stopped; and only those boes and stiffs who had run it down and swung aboard when it left the switchyard that morning were going to catch it, for it was hell-bent for St. Louis, and there hadn’t been a single grade steep enough to faze it.

To occupy himself, Music sat in the half-open doorway of the boxcar inventing the scene of his homecoming. It would be early evening. The sun wouldn’t have set behind Howard’s Knob, but the shadows would be long and cool when he turned off the county road just out of Shulls Mills and mounted the washed-out wagon road up toward the house and barn. His father would be out by the barn. His posture, the set of his shoulders, unmistakable. He’d be riving out shingles someone had ordered, say; and the wooden mallet would be striking the froe and bouncing once after each lick, which was his father’s style. The sound would go
whop-pop, whop-pop, whop-pop
until the bolt split evenly. His father would not notice him, dreaming as he was in the rhythm of his labor. There would be no one else about, his two brothers, Earl and Luther, being back on the Knob with the mules and the sledge, say, bringing out one last load of oak before supper. He would walk up within a dozen feet before his father sensed him and let the mallet bounce twice on the backside of the froe to make a little flourish by way of acknowledging and greeting whoever had come. The sound would go
whop-pop-pop
, and his father would look up from under the brim of his old straw hat, see him, recognize him, and tuck away every sign of surprise and joy almost in the same instant they flashed across his face. “Well,” he’d say in the calmest, easiest sort of voice and extend his hand. “We got that fine diploma from away off in Chicago,” he’d say, as though in answer to a question, as though the diploma from Coin Electric had just arrived, although no question had been asked and the diploma would have arrived a year before. “Come on in,” his father would say, and the two of them would start toward the house, but they wouldn’t get there before his mother appeared on the porch, the cessation of the blows of his father’s mallet together with some sure, sudden instinct having brought her to the door, eyes already brimming with the knowledge that it was he. “Will,” she would say, “Lordy mercy, Will!”

She would surely say something like that. She would throw her hands up with joy. She would weep. For that reason, somehow, he could take the vision of his homecoming no further. His father, a quiet and private man himself, respected privacy. He would ask no questions, make no show. Seeing him come home after nearly two years—ragged, broke, hungry—would be enough to make him keep his peace. Not so his mother. It was not in her nature to leave a thing be.

Music got up to stretch his legs. He was light-headed, and his joints felt unstrung. At last, after so many days of nothing to eat, his innards had quit growling and rumbling, passing along the volume of emptiness inside him. The machinery of his digestion had grown quiet, sullen, painfully tight; and in his mouth there was the constant and unhealthy taste of brass. He remembered a greasy spoon on Maxwell Street in Chicago where a man could get a good-sized hamburger, potatoes, and coffee for a dime, the hamburger and potatoes served, not on a plate, but on a piece of newspaper. There were no seats and no flatware save spoons. So deep in his own thoughts, he was, he turned to describe to the big man propped against the far wall the dimensions of the hamburger, his hands already measuring it out in the air. But he caught himself before he spoke, and blew a little snort of laughter through his nose. The big man still slept, trembling all over with the motion of the boxcar. You’re run to ground, ain’t you, Music thought and pondered him for a moment, the bald spot on the crown of his head, the hair bristling even on his shoulders. There was a wound on one of the man’s bare feet about the size of a fifty-cent piece. It was beginning to scab over, but around the edges the flesh was a bright and unlikely shade of red. Maybe, you goddam bear, Music thought,
I
ought to jump
you
. Kill you. Eat you. There’d be enough to last me all the way back to Shulls Mills, Virginia. He couldn’t help the laughter that escaped him; and the massive head rose, but the eyes were hooded and only a rim of iris showed beneath the upper lid.

Music turned and leaned his shoulder into the doorjamb and looked out. The boxcar rocked, the wheels clicked, the air roared by; but in the distance Kansas kept pace. It seemed to go on forever. Closer, the infrequent houses and barns that slipped behind, the roads, the few trees, seemed interchangeable; and it required a leap of faith to believe there might be anything else. Rivers. Oceans. Mountains, say.

Somehow the man’s foot caused Music’s old wounds to itch, and he rubbed first one calf and then the other, remembering how he had regained consciousness in the line truck on the way to the hospital, the foreman driving, a working buddy calling again and again: “Hey, Music! Music! Goddammit!” He returned to the living with all his joints aching as though they had been pushed inches toward the center of his body; his lungs raw; and the calves of his legs, where the rivets had been, cooked as done as pot roast. He woke with the immediate knowledge that his working buddy had pulled the wrong fuse jacks and allowed him to get into twenty-three hundred volts. His life hadn’t exactly flashed before his eyes, but something nearly as peculiar had happened. He had seen his grandfather sitting in the kitchen, his warped hands lying one atop the other upon the head of his cane, saying to him as though it were a matter of great importance: “Hear that rooster a-crowin. He says, ‘
Kikere kikere kie!
’” That’s what his grandfather had told him, his rheumy eyes bright with the only German word he knew, besides
Musik
, the name that, two generations before his time, had been brought from the old country to the new. When the electricity hit him, he’d had a vision of that, and oddly of Roanoke when he had gone there to the tobacco auction with his father for the first time, their wagon coming around a turn in the road behind the sleepy mules and the house lights, street lights, and the colored lights of businesses spread suddenly below him in the valley.

He’d been done with his schooling and had been working as a lineman for almost three months when his working buddy made that mistake and allowed him to learn things that Coin Electric did not teach. He had learned that twenty-three hundred volts did not, under all circumstances, kill a man, if he happened to have his safety belt on and his spurs dug in and therefore didn’t fall and kill himself that way, if the juice didn’t hold him fast but slapped him back, and if the pole in question happened to be a very dry chestnut pole and therefore not the best ground. He had learned that, in one split second, electricity could enter where you touched it, leave through rivets in the leather shin straps of your spurs, and in no longer time than that, find and violate all of you, down to your deepest, most secret core. Still, if his job had been there when he mended, he would have gone back to it.

In four days, maybe five, he’d be home. He wondered how it would be and what he could tell them. He took a deep breath and rubbed the stubble on his face. Well, he could bring them news. The boom had never quite found the way to Shulls Mills; he doubted that the bust had either. He could tell them about the depression. He could tell them about the jobs he’d had: unloading boxcars at the freight yards in Chicago from three to five in the morning and working as a dishwasher to send himself through Coin Electric’s ninety-day course. He could tell them how once when he’d had his lineman’s job and had been flush, he’d been robbed by two men armed with socks. That’s right, he’d tell them. The socks were mates; pretty; each blue silk; each, it turned out, with a stone about the size of a hen’s egg in the toe. He’d tell them how, when the men with the socks had told him to empty out his pockets, he’d laughed and knocked the closest one flat on his ass; and how that one had later pleasured himself by kicking him in the ribs before taking his money, his pocket watch, his cigarettes, and, finally, even his shoes; and discovering the twenty-dollar bill he kept in one shoe against just such a possibility, had somehow taken great offense, called him a low son of a bitch, and folding the twenty carefully away into his shirt, had jumped with both feet on the center of his chest. He had been just on the fringe of consciousness, not quite able to roll away, and he had heard his breastbone crack and—he’d swear to it—felt some of his pride leak out and something like humility enter in to take its place.