Hardcastle (31 page)

“Sure,” Regus said, “I expect he has, for one of those miners he told on would likely settle it for him. Was it that damned Eyetalian that got hisself shot?”

“I don’t know,” Merlee said. “I heard they carried his body over to Valle Crucis, but I never heard what country he came from.”

“The Bible’s bein fulfilled,” Ella said. She had been standing just inside the door to the front room, where none of the three of them had taken any notice of her. “The Lord said there’d be a famine in the land of plenty. He will destroy a sinful nation and raise up another that will serve Him.”

It was as though none of the three of them knew what to make of that. At least none of them could knit it into the conversation, since, for a long moment, no one spoke. Still, Ella stood where she was, her head bent humbly to one side and her face composed and calm as though she had merely been thinking aloud. “Chile,” she said, as if, all at once, she’d entered the present moment, “I’ve got food in the cupboard if you be hungry. Won’t take me but a minute to heat it up.”

“No’m,” Merlee said, “they’s a curfew at the coal camp, and I thank ye, but I’m scared to stay another second.”

“Well, you are a pretty chile and sweet,” Ella said, as though she had dismissed all trials and tribulations with one pronouncement from the Bible and could go on to the more important matter of treating Music as if he were a son who had brought his young woman home for approval. “I hope you’ll come back when ye can tarry.”

“Yes’um,” Merlee said.

“I guess I better get you on back to camp,” Music said.

“No,” Merlee said. “Hit ain’t safe.”

“Me and you wouldn’t be popular down there fer certain,” Regus said.

“Then I’ll walk you partway,” Music said.

“You come back, chile,” Ella said. “I hope to see a lots more of ye from now on.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Merlee said, but the moment the two of them were outside, Merlee stopped and faced him. “Please,” she said, “I don’t want you to go with me.”

“How can you prevent it?” Music asked.

“Please,” she said, “don’t joke with me, not if ye want me to come again. And I will. Not tomorrow, but the next day. I’ll be a-walkin to Valle Crucis to the county relief office, and I’ll stop.”

“All right,” he said, “I’ll take you to the end of the pasture and no further.”

She did not argue and they walked together, but they didn’t touch or speak until they reached Regus’s sagging, half-down fence, where Merlee turned to him again. “If you went on to Virginia, you would write to me sometime, wouldn’t ye? There’ll be more killin here,” she said; “I know there will be.”

“I’m not ready to go just yet,” he said.

“But you ort to go home where there ain’t such craziness, and if you’d write me, I’d write ye back.”

He laughed softly. “How do you know I can write?” he said.

“Well, you could tell someone else the words and they could put them down. Or if you could just tell me where, I’d write to you; only it would be better if you could answer me back someway, so I would know ye were there.” Abruptly she jerked her head to one side. “Ohhh, but I’m crazy too,” she said in a small, broken voice; and, before he could so much as stretch out his hand, she lifted her skirt, and stepped across the sagging fence, and hurried away.

He watched until she had disappeared in the darkness, and then he followed. Once or twice he caught sight of her again and shortened his stride or stopped completely. Just before he got to the overgrown ditch bordering the rows of company shacks, he turned uphill, and moving as quickly and as quietly as he could, he found a hidden vantage point from which he could watch as, furtive and hurried, she crossed the wide, hardscrabble patch of earth between the ditch and her shack.

But even after she had entered her house uncontested, he did not leave. He remained crouching where he was, and for a long time he had no thoughts whatever, as though he had merely caught up to himself, somehow, and could do no more than simply wonder. It seemed unlikely that a man he had seen only a few days before had indeed been shot and killed; that the man’s life was all used up, gone. Nor was he convinced that there should be, in all the sorry world, such a sorry place as Switch County; or that he, by whatever accident or turn of fate, should have landed there. He stayed where he was for a long time, not so much thinking as pondering, until, at last, without having made the slightest peace with any of those things, without having found even one of them right and proper and, therefore, believable, he realized he knew only one thing for certain: the time when he could have picked up and gone home had passed him by.

18

EVICTIONS

THERE WAS JUST a dusting of snow, no more than half an inch, but it bleached the darkness so that he could see, even though the first sign of dawn was likely an hour away. He awoke sore as hell and restless beyond any hope of further sleep, but he hadn’t realized how early it was until he had dressed and made a trip to the outhouse. From Ella’s room, from Regus’s, the silence was as deep as held breath; and outside, too, the night was dense as stone and deep as a well.

Since he did not wish to wake anyone and couldn’t abide the thought of stretching himself out on his tick to wait for morning, he decided to make the rounds of the rabbit gums. By the time he’d done that, Ella might have risen, and he could get himself a cup of coffee before he did the milking. Behind the barn he broke ice in the springhouse branch with his heel and washed his hands and face. The night was bitterly cold, and the water stung his face and paralyzed his fingers. He dried his face on his coat sleeves and his hands on his britches legs, but before he was halfway to the first rabbit gum, his fingers began to ache so fiercely he had to keep his hands in his pockets, where they drew heat from his thighs and chilled them too.

Snow or no snow, he couldn’t see into the elderberry thicket across the branch where the first gum was set, and he had to jump the tiny stream, which caused all his sore muscles to sing with pain. But even on the other side he could not tell that the trap was open wide and unsprung until he was close enough to touch it. The next trap, about thirty yards up the hill, was also just as he had left it; but the third, set toward the head of the spring branch, had been tripped.

He set the gum on end, hearing the light scuffling of an animal inside. Not much liking the idea of reaching blind into the trap, he struck a match on his thumbnail so that he could take a look when he slid the door open. Whether or not the lighted match caused it, he couldn’t say, but he had the door no more than halfway open when the rabbit made a leap for freedom, and he had to let the gum fall and grab the scruff of its neck. He snapped the match away, caught the rabbit’s hind legs, and gave it a blow to the base of its skull with the side of his hand to break its neck. He pitched the rabbit aside and struck two more matches in order to find the various parts of the gum and set it up again. When at last that was accomplished, he picked up the small, limp, incredibly warm body and carried it some distance away before, carefully, he slit the belly and flung the entrails upon the ground. In the light of another match he saw that the liver was bright and unblemished.

He rolled himself a cigarette then, and smoked it, and tucked his hands under his arms to warm them. While he squatted in the darkness, thoughts of the dead unionizer came to him unbidden, and soberly he pondered the nature of death as though trying somehow to understand its specific gravity. He shook his head. He had come very close to dying and had not found it especially hideous, but then again he had drawn back at the last moment, too, and therefore had not pulled aside the final curtain. He shook his head again. He supposed, for all his narrow escape, he knew no more than any other man. What could he know, after all, about the one who had died except that at this moment he was deprived of the sharp, raw bite of the cold that he, himself, could feel; that he could not smoke a cigarette or look forward to a steaming hot cup of coffee. Perhaps that’s all there was to death: merely the giving up of things both good and bad. And maybe, indeed, it wasn’t the worst thing that could happen, but only the last. And even if that was not all that could be said about dying, he saw no reason why a man should take the matter further. He smoked his cigarette until the coal began to burn him; then he plucked it from his lips and snapped it away into the darkness.

The next trap he found was sprung, but mysteriously empty. By the time he reset it and made his long way back to the grown-up field where the new traps were set, the rim of the mountain was visible against the eastern sky. Both new traps were sprung, and both had rabbits in them. The second rabbit, however, unnerved him by crying in a thin, bleating voice when he reached in to grab it. Almost always rabbits suffered their fates as silently as if they were mute, but this one bucked and struggled and set up such a keening that he struck it too hard with the side of his hand and sent its head flying through the broomstraw; and for a moment, though headless, it continued to buck and jerk as it dangled from his grasp about its hind feet and, consequently, covered his britches leg with blood. Even when he shucked out its entrails to steam and crawl upon the earth, he was still unnerved and trembling, although he made no conscious admission that death might have dimensions besides those he had conceded.

There was no doubt, however, that when he started back toward the house, he was comforted to see a soft yellow glow of lamplight coming from Ella’s room. Still, he went on to the barn and dressed out his rabbits before he delivered them into the warm sanctity of her kitchen.

“Oh,” she said when he came in with them, “ain’t they just the cleanest, purtiest things? I’ll rinse em and carry em right on down to the springhouse; but I wish you’d tell me, son, just what yer a-doin up and about so early in the day. I thought you boys had set them traps all over tarnation.”

“Just couldn’t sleep,” he said. He fidgeted, scratched the back of his neck. “You don’t suppose a fellow could get an early cup of coffee before he went out to milk, do you? I got a little chilled, someway.”

“Why, course ye can,” she said. “Set ye down and I’ll fetch you one in just a minute.”

He did as he was told, and before long he held a steaming cup of coffee between his cold hands. To whatever degree he had been chastened by the morning, he felt also blessed by Ella’s kitchen, and as he listened to Regus beginning to stir across the dogtrot, he tried to forget everything in favor of the simple and comforting anticipation of the work they would do.

The day warmed and the snow disappeared, and with it, the dusty, cold odor of winter. He could smell the earth they dug in, dead grass, leaves, the odor of wormy, worthless apples from a nearby ancient tree, apples many times frostbitten but warming in the sun. Lucky for him Regus did not push hard and seemed amused by his slowness and the groans that escaped him from time to time. And by the middle of the afternoon, Music’s back and arms were beginning to loosen up from the previous day’s abuse. The two of them, switching off with pick and shovel, finished the ditching and even had a few locust posts seated along one end of the hogpen when the tan Dodge coupe turned off the highway, and jounced up toward the house, and the last person either of them expected to see opened the door and got out.

“Damned if hit ain’t that Eyetalian,” Regus said. “I reckon I just took fer granted it was him that bought it.”

Music bobbed his head. “Me too,” he said.

“He sho seemed to expect it,” Regus said, “seemed damned near to count on it. Hmmm,” he said, “so it was that little sucker from Memphis, then, that said he’d started out to be a preacher. I’ll be damned.” Regus turned his head and spat. “I reckon we ort to see what he’s got on his mind,” he said and plucked his jumper off the pile of locust posts beside him. He did not put it on but merely hooked the forefinger of his left hand in the collar and carried the jumper across his shoulder, which left the .38 in the shoulder holster unencumbered and visible.

Fetlock came out from under the breezeway to bark at the stranger in his nonthreatening, croupy hound’s voice, and Ella, too, came out of her kitchen to see what all the fuss was about.

Music collected the Colt, slipped his arms through the hangers, grabbed his coat, and caught up with Regus, who was only a step ahead of him.

Standing by the left front fender of his car, Arturo Zigerelli hadn’t moved since he’d gotten out except to take the cloth cap from his head and give Ella Bone a stiff and formal little bow when she’d appeared on the dogtrot. As Music and Regus came around the southern end of the house, he still held his cap in his hands as though, once having removed it, it would be bad manners to put it back on his head. “Mr. Bone and Mr. Music,” he said, “I have come to ask a favor of you.”

Regus spat and looked the Italian up and down. “I think we done you a favor some nights back,” he said. “If we’da carried ye on to jail, I reckon there’d still be two of you.”

“Yes, perhaps that is so,” Zigerelli said. “But where is the blame when you cannot see into the future?”

“I don’t know,” Regus said, “but I ain’t sure, either, how many of my favors the likes of you and me can afford.” Regus ran his finger back and forth under his nose. “To tell ye the truth, I was certain you was already shot.”

“My comrade was a foolish boy,” Arturo Zigerelli said. “I tell him not to go on the ground of Hardcastle, but he would not listen. However, he had conviction. Perhaps he thought that all mine guards would turn him free as you did. Still,” he said, “even in death he will accomplish very much. His body will be taken to New York City. It is already on the train. And when he gets there, a big meeting will happen and there will be many speeches, and the people will walk in long, long lines past his coffin and leave the money they can spare to help the coal miner. They will give a great deal of money because he has given his life.” The Italian passed the rim of his cap around and around through his hands. “It is a strange lesson, is it not, that one who carried so great a burden of foolishness could help the struggle against the oppressors so much?”