Hardcastle (17 page)

“Thank you, missus,” Music said. “I need a cloth too, big enough to put on her chest and reach up her neck a little.”

“Wool, did ye say?” the old woman asked and stood for a moment in thought, her head trembling slightly on her withered neck. “I don’t know as to that, now.”

“Any good cloth, I guess,” Music said, and with a sudden, shameful inspiration, he took up the wine material where Merlee had left it. “This’ll do all right,” he said.

“No,” Merlee said, and then blushing dark red, and in a softer, chastened voice, she said, “I’ll find ye somethin.”

Music didn’t allow himself the slightest smile. “Yes,” he said, “and then if you’d get the baby’s shirt off and lay her yonder on the table.”

When the cloth was brought to him, he dampened it first with turpentine, wrapped the chopped onion in it, and with the heel of his hand brought his weight to bear on the cloth until it was soaked as well with onion juice. He dumped the onion out on the sideboard again. “If you put this in a tight jar, it’ll get a little brown and slick and be better yet for your purpose,” he said. “Now I need some lard or butter to grease her with. The poultice will burn her skin if you don’t keep her greased.”

Her round eyes swimming in tears, the child lay upon the kitchen table and looked up at him while, as gently as he could, he covered the silky skin of her chest and neck with lard. Except for the soft cawing of her breathing and one fit of her croupy, baying cough, which was brought on, it seemed, by the light pressure of his fingers, she was quiet and still, as though fascinated at being handled in such a manner by a stranger. He made two slits in the poultice rag with his pocketknife so that a portion of it could fit against her neck and the edges could lie flat across her thin shoulders. “You keep her good and warm, and she ought to breathe a little better before too long. I’ll bring back the second part of the medicine this evenin,” he said. He nodded to the old woman and then, in a motion almost as deep and formal as a bow, to Merlee. “I thank you for the coffee,” he said, and before either of them could say anything at all, he let himself out of the back door into the cold, brilliant sunshine. On the way back to the power plant he scratched the stubble on his face, rubbed his tired eyes, and grinned; it had not gone so badly.

Even the filthy coal town seemed somehow acceptable. Out of the bright blue sky the sun shone on the broken pavement of main street, the commissary, the river, the black, hulking, noisy tipple wreathed in its cloud of coal dust. Hellkatoot, he thought, it’s all in what a man gets used to. He was so tired his eyes felt stitched with wire. He felt weak and frail. But he was, he decided, almost happy.

Still, it was a hard mood to keep when he and Regus took a look around Mink Slide, where company shacks were merely two-room shanties with neither electricity nor plumbing, not even so much as a sink, and so poorly constructed there were cracks in the walls big enough for a cat to jump through, at least where they hadn’t been patched with flattened-out tin cans and cardboard. As for the people, men, women, and children stood about before them like prisoners before their jailors, the silence so profound one would have thought there was to be an execution in the next moment. Perhaps it was the power of badges and guns that made the people seem to grow deaf, dumb, and blind in their presence. Whatever, no question put to a group drew an answer. Regus had to call a man by his name to lift the spell.
Nawh, Cap’n, ain no white folks been up in dis place. Nawh suh, we ain seen no white man up in Mink Slide, is we? Sho ain, nawh suh
.

The Bear Paw camp at Tip’s Creek was another sort of problem. It wasn’t Hardcastle property. Bankrupt, derelict, it was not quite a ghost town, but a community of squatters. The Model T truck pecked slowly through town, from one end to the other.

“What the hell we supposed to be looking for?” Music asked.

Regus raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Somethin that don’t look right,” he said. He spat out the window. “A car maybe,” he said, “some feller without no holes in his britches, two or three people who don’t look like they want to see us.”

“Hellkatoot,” Music said, “nobody wants to see us. How are we supposed to tell the difference?”

“Hit’s the difference between mad and scared,” Regus said and turned the truck around. “The one might stand his ground and give you the hard eye,” he said and winked. “The tuther might play like he didn’t notice us a’tall, or maybe he might try to ease outta sight.”

“Yeah, well I don’t want to catch no unionizer anyway,” Music said.

“Yes, you do,” Regus said.

“I reckon I don’t!” Music said.

“Yes, you do,” Regus said.

Music turned to look at him. Behind his grainy eyes, back in the sore, hung-over stations of his brain, anger flared. “Look,” he said, “if it would suit you just as well, we’d get along better if you didn’t try to tell me what I want.”

Regus raised his eyebrows, gave his head a little sideways tilt. “Now and again, Bill Music,” he said, “I get the feelin you ain’t altogether sweet-natured.” At the edge of Regus’s mouth there was the unmistakable twitch of humor.

“Not when somebody tries to tell me what I think.”

“How else are ye supposed to know?” Regus said, looking straight ahead through the windshield and swapping his quid from one corner of his mouth to the other in order to keep from smiling.

“Christ,” Music said and fished out his cigarette papers and tobacco, “do you think we’re going to have to find out which one of us can whip the other?”

Regus shook his head sadly. “You
are
bad-tempered, but I’d as lief put that question aside till I tell you a story.” He pulled the Model T to the edge of the road, where it chortled and pecked and shook. “If there’s unionizers around here and we don’t run em off, there’s a good chance they’ll organize them fools at Hardcastle, and if they do that, then one of these fine days a bunch of men is gonna show up shakin their fists, blowed up full of hot air, askin for a livin wage or some other such nonsense.” Regus retarded the spark and throttle on the Model T and spat out the window. “I cain’t tell ye what Kenton Hardcastle will do, for I don’t know. He may bring in scabs and set you and me to tryin to keep the fool miners from shootin em. He may just put us to evictin any miner connected to the union. He may wash his hands of the whole damned thing and shut Hardcastle Coal Company down and run everbody off; but the one thing he won’t do is let a union come in, which means, sure as hell, that some half-starved miner will be tryin to shoot our asses off, or us his’n, somewhere around six times a day.” He took a deep breath, sighed a huge sigh, spat out the window again, and then after a moment turned and spat out his quid too, as though it had grown suddenly distasteful. “That there is why you want to catch a unionizer,” he said.

For some minutes Music had been holding his head in his hands. “I wonder,” he said at long last, “if you get tired of being right all the time.”

“Yep,” Regus said, “I do.” He advanced the spark and throttle, and the engine began to cluck and peck faster, and in the next moment they lurched into the road again. Regus made a sound like laughing. “But while we’re a-talkin on it,” he said, “any unionizer we’d catch, we’d give over to the high sheriff in Valle Crucis, but them Burnside sons a bitches would likely shoot him; and as to which one of us can whip the other, I can whip you, Bill Music, but it would be a chore.” He laughed again. “I’d as lief back down if I could.”

“Stop at that shack yonder on the end,” Music said. “I need to buy some whiskey.”

“I would have thought ye’d had sufficient of that last evenin,” Regus said.

“It ain’t for me,” Music said; “it’s for Merlee Taylor’s little youngin.”

“Ha,” Regus said, “do you aim to get her baby drunk? Don’t see what good that would do ye, Bill Music.”

“The child’s sick,” Music said, “and liquor’s good medicine.”

“Ha,” Regus said, “sure thing; I seem to recall gettin doctored nearly to death with it last night.” He pulled the Model T to the edge of the road. “I’ve heard it said hit was good for snakebite, and I expect that’s true, too, if only a feller could find the snake that was going to bite him and pour it on the poor sucker.”

Music did not reply. He got out of the truck, leaving Regus to amuse himself. Out of the tail of his eye he could see him laughing and shaking his head.

Before he had climbed halfway up the embankment to the first row of houses, he looked up to see the one-armed moonshiner standing on his porch, watching him, hat as absolutely horizontal on his head as if he’d checked the brim with a level, sleeve pinned to shoulder, hard, speckled eyes upon him without the least spark of friendship, or humor, or anything else in them.

“Howdy,” Music said.

The one-armed man did not speak.

Music topped the embankment and the steps to the man’s porch. “I’d like a pint of yer finest,” Music said and reached into his pocket for his money.

“Hit’s all the same run; doubled and twisted and good as hit gets,” the one-armed man said with so little of either pride or conviviality that he might have been reciting the alphabet.

“Well,” Music said, “it’s good red-eye for sure; it’s just that I ain’t going to drink this here. I mean to make a whiskey and honey potion for a little baby in Elkin that’s got the whooping cough,” he said.

Of all the people he had confronted since he’d put on the Hardcastle deputy sheriff badge and the enormous cap-and-ball pistol, the one-armed man was the only one who never seemed to give them a glance, as though he didn’t see them at all, or didn’t find them worth considering, or maybe saw them absolutely without having to move his somehow impersonal, cold, pebble-colored eyes one iota from Music’s face. But all at once Music found the one-armed man looking him up and down, as though mildly curious. “Dwight,” he called, without so much as turning his head toward the house behind him, “bring out a pint of my own stuff,” and Music was aware of movement behind one of the cloudy windows. “I don’t tell no lies, mister,” the one-armed man said. “Hit’s some I set aside in oak barrels for my use. But I ain’t so sure about you. Ye tole me oncet that ye was just a-passin through, and here ye show yerself a company goon. I give ye some advice, a-thinkin you a stranger. I’ll give ye better: don’t come around my house no more for whiskey, for I’ll sell ye none if you do. I misjudged ye oncet,” he said. He looked at Music hard, and his expressionless face came very close to gathering into a frown. “Now ye cause me puzzlement again. If you want to buy the hooch I make, I’ll sell hit to ye, but send me word by nigger. That way, if ’n I see you down here, I’ll know ye’ve come on that son-of-a-bitchin Hardcastle’s business.”

“I didn’t lie to you, mister,” Music said. “I was only passing through.” He made a futile gesture with the hand that held the money. “I got caught sleeping in a haystack, and instead of landing in jail, I landed in this job.”

The one-armed man made no reply, merely continued looking him in the face until the front door opened and the boy with the strange cowlick sticking up from the crown of his head stepped out with a pint mason jar. He handed the jar to Music and took the twenty cents in return.

“If you have no further business,” the one-armed man said, “I’d be pleased if ye’d take yerself off ’n my front porch.”

Music wished somehow to explain, wished to say,
Look here now, I’m Bill Music from Shulls Mills, Virginia, electrician by trade and not one of your goddamned company goons
. He wanted to take out the revolver and say,
Look, it’s older than me and you put together. What kind of a gun thug would carry a pistol like that?
But no such argument seemed very persuasive, and finally, flushed to the ears, he only nodded and took himself off the man’s porch as he had been asked.

On the way back to Elkin, he sat in silence for the first two miles; then he unscrewed the lid of the mason jar and offered it to Regus. Regus shook his head, and Music took a drink and spun the lid back down.

“Thought that was for the little Taylor gal,” Regus said.

“Ya know,” Music said, “I thought I’d save up a little money and buy a car and have a dollar or two in my pocket when I went back home. Didn’t want to come draggin in like a bum after all my big notions, after two years being gone.”

“Yeah,” Regus said, “a car don’t cost so much, leastwise if ye don’t mean a new’un.”

“I don’t know if it’s worth it,” Music said.

“I couldn’t answer as to that,” Regus said. “Anyhow, I don’t know much about how a feller wants to look when he comes back home, since I either never had one or never left it. Sure,” he said, “even when I got married, I reckon I only asked Momma and Daddy to move over a little so’s I could bring my young gal in.”

“I didn’t know you were ever married,” Music said.

“Still am, I reckon,” Regus said, “leastwise I ain’t heard to the contrary.”

“Hellkatoot,” Music said, looking at Regus’s calm, serious face, in which there was, even in that moment, the merest hint of humor. “You’re full of surprises. Whatever happened to her?”

Regus sniffed through one nostril and arched his eyebrows. “I don’t recall that the subject of my wife ever come up,” he said. “But as to yer question, she never did much take to a coal camp. Hit was always as if she was moonin after another sort of place, thinkin on somewhere else; even when ye thought she was happy, you could feel that about her. And one evenin, when I come home outten the drift, she was gone. Youngins an all. Found out later she’d caught a ride with the mail truck into Harlan. You could give the mail carrier a dime and he’d carry ye with him into Harlan from Burdine.” He took a deep breath and let it pass wearily through his nose. “When I got to Harlan, I found out at the train depot that her, or some young gal that looked just like her, a-totin two little youngins, had bought a ticket to Cincinnati.”

“You go after her to Cincinnati?” Music said.

“No,” Regus said, “I thought on it, but the train depot in Harlan was as far as I trailed her.” He got out his plug of tobacco and, not bothering with his pocketknife, bit into it, twisting his quid loose as a dog might twist a piece of tendon from a bone. “Cincinnati is a right big town, and I didn’t know where in it she might land up, but I reckon I could have found her one day, or another, or the next. I thought on it, but, finally, hit didn’t seem the right thing. She never did like livin in a coal camp. I think she liked me well enough, though a man might not ken that sort of thing as well as he thinks. But she never liked the life.” Regus turned his head and spat out the window. “I was born in a coal camp myself, so I don’t know no better, but she wadn’t. She was nine year old when her father, like so many other fools, decided he’d be a coal miner and make big money. She just had poor luck, I guess. She lost her daddy to the mines and her momma to consumption. Although I don’t think she ort to have laid her momma’s dyin to the coal camp, she seemed to.” Regus made a sound like laughing and spat out the window again. “Course Ella Bone wasn’t altogether happy about havin grandchildren she couldn’t pet and feed and fuss at, but you could hand Momma just about anything and give her time to turn it around and around, and she’d find its good side,” he said and laughed. “She’s long ago decided that it’s a blessing her grandbabies ain’t livin in the shadow of some coal tipple, just a-waitin to get old enough to clip a carbide lamp to their caps and go dig coal.”