Hardcastle (30 page)

Regus’s eyebrows arched. “Ha,” he said, “ye don’t say so!”

“Yes,” Music said. “She told me she would hide and whistle for me.”

Regus laughed, and in his face Music saw the old lines of humor and tolerance. “Ye’ve got me thinkin, Bill Music, that it ain’t entirely Momma’s cookin that’s kept ye so long in Switch County; no, ner us bein buddies either. Couldn’t be that I ken ye a little better than I did a while ago, could it, Bill?”

Music did not answer if only because in some small corner of his brain he thought he was beginning to understand Regus Patoff Bone a little better too: he was indeed cheered by the possibility of trouble. He was a coal man, just as he had claimed to be; and if he was afraid of anything, it was that Kenton Hardcastle might forget him, that the coal miners might forget him, that he might have to spend the rest of his days being merely a farmer. Coal was, Music feared, not only all Regus knew, but all he wanted to know.

“It makes a little sense,” Regus was saying as they came up on the dogtrot, “for a man to work fer no pay, to get himself bee-stung, and Lord knows what else, if only ye get the right angle on it.”

Having the lighter load, Music opened the door to the kitchen, but he went on in rather than stepping aside for Regus. And no matter that her glance was as oblique as ever, Ella Bone got a look at his face and abruptly set her hands on her hips. Regus dumped the stove wood in one end of the woodbox and Music dumped the kindling in the other. “Ree,” Ella said all at once, “have yawl been devilin each other again?”

Regus laughed. “Don’t hit me with nuthin, Momma,” he said. “I’ve only just been guyin Bill a little about his sweetie.”

“Well,” Ella said suspiciously, “I reckon if that’s all yer up to …” She cast Music a glance out of the corner of her eye. “I reckon that’s all right.”

“No, it isn’t,” Music said. “Go ahead and hit him.”

Regus tossed his head and laughed, but because of his recent and complicated understanding, Music could not. “All right,” he said, “all right, do you want to get at building a hogpen or not?”

“I’d just as lief,” Regus said.

“Then let’s do it,” Music said.

Without regard for Regus’s preferences in the matter, Music picked a spot thirty paces to the southwest of the barn, which would not be too close to the barn, the springhouse branch, or the house. Regus merely bobbed his head. “What do we do first?” he said.

“We can dig or we can cut posts,” Music said. “Some critters can’t change their natures,” he said and looked Regus in the eye, “and it is the nature of a pig to root. We’ll need to go down three feet, anyhow, if we hope to keep them up. If we’re going to do it, then we might as well do it right and put down locust posts set close enough together so they can’t get between them.”

“All right,” Regus said. “I can use a pick and shovel. You get the posts. I’ll dig.”

When they went back to the barn to get pick and shovel, bucksaw and ax, Regus said again that he would take it as a favor if Music would keep the old Walker Colt handy; and without arguing, Music went back to his room and strapped it on over the moth-eaten sweater that had belonged to Regus’s father. No one was going to show up in bright daylight to cause trouble; he was convinced of it. Therefore, it made little difference that, after the soaking the Colt had gotten when they caught the unionizers, the chambers might not fire. He would worry about that later. “Hellkatoot,” he muttered to himself, struggling to fasten the big yellow buttons and adjust the flowered belly strap. He had been a long time without much to eat when Ella had first made it for him, and over the sweater it was a very tight fit. “Hellkatoot,” he said again, but cumbersome as the rig was and ridiculously unthreatening as he supposed it looked out in the open rather than half hidden under a coat, he set his jaw and went out.

All through the rest of the morning and afternoon, he worked hard among the locust growing down from the edge of the woods toward Regus’s cornfield. Although the day was cold, it didn’t take him long to shed the sweater and the pistol as well, for he was soon wet with sweat, and the pistol was a clumsy thing to have strapped across his chest and under his arm when he was trying to use the bucksaw or the ax. His hands began to blister and a network of pain spread across his shoulder and even into his arms, for he was no longer accustomed to such work. But the labor comforted him and even gave him a grim, illogical pleasure, as though by working hard he could force Regus to work hard as well and, thereby, punish him somehow for being cheered by the possibility of trouble—perhaps teach him, by God, that doing the labor of a farmer was not a thing to sneer at.

He cut the locust posts in what he figured were eight-foot lengths, and when his back and arms were burned out beyond doing any more limbing or sawing, he would slip into his shoulder holster—although he left it loose and flapping—and carry the posts down to the site of the hogpen in order to rest himself. He could not carry many at a time, for the locust was green and heavy as iron, but it was a hard and durable wood and would not rot for many years, even buried in the ground. When Ella called them in to eat at noon, he carried two posts down and hunched them from his shoulder beside the ditch where Regus was swinging his pick. “I don’t know, I reckon coal miners don’t have to dig too hard to make a living,” he said, considering the trench Regus had dug where one side of the hogpen would be.

Regus took one more swing and turned his head and spat. Whatever had been in his face when he first looked up at Music changed. He ran his finger back and forth under his nose. “Well,” he said, “I reckon they don’t try to work the mine out in one day, for a fact.” He leaned on the butt of his pick, giving Music the once-over and grinning. “I reckon they figure they might have to work the next day too.”

Music tried to stand a little straighter. “I’ll be here tomorrow,” he said, “and the day after, and the day after that.”

Regus kicked the quid of tobacco out of his mouth with his tongue and spat two or three times after it. “All right,” he said. “I won’t argue with ye. Not, anyhow, until I can figure what it is we’re arguin about.” He stepped up out of the ditch and dusted his hands on his trousers. “Less us git some grub; I’m h-a-w-n-g-r-y,” he said, drawing out the word and mispronouncing it for the pleasure it gave him.

The homemade lye soap was painful where the blisters on his palms had broken, and when he ate, handling such small items as biscuits, fork, and cup seemed to make his hands creak in joint and flesh. Although it would be slower, he realized he was going to have to limb the posts with the bucksaw if his hands were to last out the day.

Still, all through that afternoon he set his teeth and labored, and by that evening he had a great, ungainly pile of locust posts laid out where the hogpen would be built. Regus paused in his digging from time to time to watch him and shake his head. Halfway through the afternoon, when Music struggled down from the edge of the woods to dump a load of posts from his shoulder, Regus said, “Look, Bill, hit ain’t no reason in the world to kill yerself.” But Music merely turned away as though, by that time, his stubborn determination had locked him in, even past the point of talking. When Ella came out on the dogtrot and called them in to supper and Music—having just dumped a load of posts from his shoulder—started back up toward the hillside for another, Regus climbed out of the ditch and blocked his way. “Ye’ve done the work of three men,” he said. “Now that’s enough.” Regus looked at him and slowly shook his head. “Ye’ve taken some sort of fit I can’t decipher,” he said, “but I reckon yer a-tryin to shame me.”

Somehow hearing it said, straight out, humbled him, and he unbraced just enough to provoke the great knot of pain which seemed to bind his shoulders to the rest of his back.

“I guess I don’t understand ye so well, Bill Music, but if it’s about Miss Merlee that you’re peeved, I meant no harm.” Regus’s forehead creased with thought, and he colored around the neck and ears. He stuck out his hand. “I’ll ride you no more about her; I’ll give you my hand on it. But if it’s something else ye got against me, then you’ll have to tell me, for I’m an ignorant man and slow to ken how I’ve wronged ye.”

The sweat began to dry and turn sticky at Music’s temples, and every muscle he owned seemed to stiffen and creak with pain. He had not been wronged at all, he realized. Wisdom, he decided, came to him, if it came, in very small portions. He had been peeved; Regus was right about that. He had been trying to shame him; he was right about that too. But in a moment of understanding that his labor seemed to have paid for, he realized how witless it was to be angry with Regus. It was in no way smarter than being angry with winter because it was cold, or summer because it was hot. All his labor had worn out more than his body; his anger, too, had worn thin. He tried to laugh and made a reasonable facsimile of it. He caught Regus’s hand and shook it. “You’re right,” he said, “I took a fit. It’s been about a year since I had any real work to do, and I guess I thought I could make up for all that in a day.”

Regus looked relieved and gave Music’s hand a single strong, hard pump.

It was as close to honesty as he could come, for if he had had no right to his anger, then he had no right to be honest about it. He tried to stand easy, to put a comfortable set to his shoulders, but no such thing was possible. He grinned and blushed a little himself. “And you can ride me as much as you like about Merlee,” he said.

Ella had fixed rabbit again for supper, but it wasn’t the rabbit that made Music pick over his food. He had, he realized, worked not only past his motive for working, but past his appetite. He tried to make a show of eating, but he didn’t fool anyone. Ella asked if he felt like he was coming down sick. Regus speculated that there might be too much rabbit showing up on the table, to which Ella replied that she wasn’t about to see good food go to waste. Music, honest at least in this, said he was merely a little more tired and sore than he was hungry. Regus said he could understand that, all right, and would do the milking, since he hadn’t tried to kill himself like Music and didn’t have a lady friend to entertain like Music. Even his soreness of body, even his new humility, couldn’t keep Music from getting up to take the milking buckets off the sideboard, but they did keep him from arguing when Regus beat him to them.

Instead of doing the milking, Music got down the galvanized tub and set it out by the north corner of the house and filled it with piping hot water from the stove; and in the last tarnished light of day, he bathed. He was pale against the darkness, and he and the tub of hot water smoked like a fire of green wood. He knew how visible he must be. If he should hear Merlee’s soft, dovelike whistle, he was too weary to consider what he would do. If he should see one of Kenton Hardcastle’s goons sneaking toward the house with a stick of dynamite, well, he supposed he’d yank the old Colt out of the holster hanging from the rough corner of Regus’s windowsill and simply—without worrying about it one way or the other—shoot the son of a bitch. But neither of those things happened. While the hot water seemed to reach into him and take some of the soreness from his muscles, the cold air seemed to penetrate no deeper than the surface of his skin and so refreshed him.

By the time he was back in his room, he was feeling oddly content and happy, although he was certain such feelings could not bear close scrutiny, since they were at least as suspicious as Regus’s own change of mood. Humility, he decided, suited a man of his principles a good deal better than self-righteousness.

He put on the clean shirt Ella had recently made for him and a new pair of undershorts, taking stock of the all-but-healed wound where Cawood had shot him and Ella had doctored him. There was a thin scab down the middle, which itched like hell, and a very dark scar on either side, where the chimney soot in Ella’s medicine had been absorbed by his flesh and would, he suspected, remain with him until the end of his days.

He had dumped out his bathwater and was hanging the galvanized tub on the wall of the dogtrot when he heard her whistle. Never mind that he had heard it before, it took him a moment to recognize it, the sound seemed so natural and proper, at least until he asked himself what it could be. Even though it lingered in the darkness, he had no notion of its direction or how near or far it was until he heard it a second time and realized it was coming from the pasture somewhere around the haystack where Regus had first discovered him. Even Fetlock, curled nose to butt just to one side of the kitchen door, paid it no attention.

He stepped off the dogtrot and paused a moment in the light coming from the kitchen window so that she might see and recognize him before he started in the direction of the haystack. Still, he hadn’t gone far before she whispered to him from the ungainly jumble of locust posts, closer and far more to the west than he thought she could possibly be. When she came out to meet him, he cupped her face in his hands. “Come on,” he said, “I want you to meet Mrs. Ella Bone, and I want you to meet Regus when he ain’t got some damned contract in his hand for you to sign.”

“No,” she said, “I cain’t. There’s a curfew on everybody in the camp, and I got to be back by seven.”

“Well, it can’t be much past six, and how come—”

“Hit’s a bad thing that’s happened,” she said, putting her fingers on his mouth to stop him. “The mine guards killed a young white man in Mink Slide last night, and they know what you and Regus done.”

“Killed a man?” Music said.

“Yes, and they’s another, a nigger man that might die too, for he was bad shot.”

“Come on,” he told her; “we’ll get you back to Elkin quick, but you’ve got to tell Regus everything you know,” and he took her off to the house.

But there wasn’t much she could add. A miner, a fellow named Floyd Lewis, who had been at the union meetings down at the Bear Paw, had given the whole thing away. He had known that one of the unionizers was going to hold a meeting at Mink Slide and he made a special trip to tell Kenton Hardcastle. He had told about the men who had gone away to Chicago, about Music and Regus catching the two unionizers and then turning them loose, and all the rest of it. He had also, since the shooting, disappeared.