Little Sister Death (11 page)

More luck. Good for some, not so good for others. Clyde Simpson had been sharecropping Beale’s land. He had the crop laid by and was waiting for fall, enjoying the pause before harvest time. In the white still heat of noonday he ran a snarling black dog out of his cornfield. It kept snapping at the cuffs of his overalls, and when he bent over to pick up a clod of dirt to throw at it his heart burst and he died there with the hot sun in his eyes and the Mastiff watching him from the edge of the cornfield.

Beale was in a quandary. Here he had a fine corn crop already making and no one to tend it and gather it come autumn, save Simpson’s widow and his simpleminded daughter.

A man named Hinson told it at the Snow White Café: he was wonderin who he could get. Hell, everybody that was worth a damn already had a crop goin. He’s too tight to hire it gathered. Swaw’s name came up somehow and somebody said, You don’t want Swaw. That tore it. You know how contrary the old son of a bitch is. He studied about it. I want Swaw, he said. Swaw’s the very feller I need. Swaw don’t know how lucky he is.

I wouldn’t mind workin that land, a man named Qualls said. But I wouldn’t want a man to have a stroke and die just so I’d get it. That ain’t the kind of luck I want.

Beale sent word for Swaw to come in and talk to him. He didn’t live on the Beale land. He lived in a tall redbrick house on Walnut Street in town and he didn’t lower himself to drive out to Cagle’s and see Swaw there. He figured he could work a better deal in his imposing study. He offered Swaw a tenant’s share of the ungathered crop: half the crop to Beale, twenty-five percent to the Widow Simpson, twenty-five percent to Swaw.

Swaw said he’d think about it.

Beale couldn’t believe his ears. He had offered Swaw a tenancy on the finest farm in the county and the occupancy of a house any other dirt farmer in the county would have mortgaged his soul for, and Swaw said he’d think about it. At that moment, though he didn’t know it, Swaw’s fate was sealed. Beale was determined to have him now.

What do you mean you’ll study on it? Lorene asked him. Us with no roof of our own over our head and Mama’s bed settin out there in a mule barn. It don’t seem to me you got anything to study on.

That place gives me the all-overs, Swaw said sullenly.

Look around you. Looks like seein your daughters livin piled up in the same old room like hogs would give you the all-overs, she said.

The analogy had never occurred to Swaw before, but he did note that, strewn out across the floor of the little moonlit room, their bulky bodies did remind him of sleeping hogs, and during the day they’d be just as useless, couched somewhere in the shade grunting to each other, probably, he thought about some boar: all they seemed to think about anymore was men and just showin up for feeding time, he thought. Fightin over what’s in the trough.

And about as shameless as hogs, too. He couldn’t walk around the corner of the house without catching one squatting to pee. It had got to where they didn’t even leap up anywhere adjusting their skirts. They’d just sit there with their bare cheeks shining moonlike and gaze at him stolidly as grazing cows. Or hogs. They’d set across from him or he guessed any man who happened to be there with their skirts hiked up and their legs spraddled out, gleaming like barked-up whiteoak logs.

All except Retha.

Retha was the youngest, and she might have been a changeling the little people left, she was so different. She was so different in fact that Swaw had always felt some vague unspoken unease about her parentage. Perhaps she wasn’t his. He’d almost rather believe she was the only one who was.

Lorene was big and rawboned and she had hands and arms like a man’s. Her voice was masculine, too, a coarse sandpapery whiskey voice, though she didn’t even drink. And all the daughters except Retha seemed to be growing up divested of any mannerisms Swaw had been raised to consider feminine, save the essential and quixotic fact of their sex itself, the moonoriented flowing of their menses.

Lorene and the four daughters had already felt a subtle shifting of their social standing. They had been offered the Beale place. They wouldn’t own a scrap of land, but they would have a strong house and what was left of the Simpson crop. They were still oneeyed, but they were, after all, in the kingdom of the blind. They went to look at the Beale house, touring it with a proprietary air before the Widow Simpson had even begun to think of packing her bags. They came back for three consecutive days, and on the third they saw Widow Simpson’s brothers loading her furniture into two wagons. The Swaws sat on the wagon seat watching from a stand of cypress like distant spectators at a funeral. The horses stirred and the wagons began to roll soundlessly. The mirror of a tilting chifferobe winked at them in the sun like a heliograph.

Swaw was not far behind in the awareness of his altered level at the bottom of society’s sediment. A man long accustomed to walking anywhere he had to go, he suddenly had a fine team of horses at his disposal. There was a rubbertired wagon, not yet two seasons old and with the red paint not even weathered off that was a source of great wonder to Swaw. It was the closest thing to an automobile he’d ever ridden in.

Swaw is a fool about that rubbertired wagon, they said about him in the Snow White Café. He don’t never walk no more. Thinks he’s too good. I bet Swaw won’t go down to the shithouse lessen he hooks up that rubbertired wagon.

Swaw piddled about the place waiting for the corn to mature and for frost and he spent much of the time before the dead fireplace with his feet propped up, slowly turning the pages of the new fall and winter Sears Roebuck catalog. He was making lists in his head of all the things his twenty-five percent of Simpson’s crop would buy. And he wasn’t the only one making lists. A veritable epidemic of list-making ensued.

Swaw was already thinking of next year’s crop. There was a turtleback Hudson Hornet setting in the second row of Toot Grimes’ carlot that made him want an automobile so bad there was something achingly erotic about it. He hungered for the feel of the steering wheel in his hands so deeply that he dreamed about it at night. He imagined driving it down the main street of Beales Gap, his head reared back a little, his eyes looking neither to the right nor to the left. He might even start going to church. Church would be a good place to show off his automobile. He saw himself on the way out, his dark suit crisp with newness, his boiled white shirt blinding in the sun, his black hair slicked down and gleaming pomade. Women turning to look at him speculatively.

All this was before the rats began in the walls. They began first in the girls’ room. He didn’t hear about it for a few days.

What rats? he asked. Rats doin what?

Eatin, they said. Chewin in the walls. Grindin their old teeth together.

Long as they ain’t chewin you, just pay em no mind, he said.

A shriek in the night brought him barefoot down the moonlit hall. The oldest girl was cowering in the corner of the room, half naked, white as a bedsheet. There was a rat in the bed with me, the girl said, shuddering. I could feel it rubbing against my leg.

You get some goddamn clothes on or I’ll be rubbing something against that hind end, Swaw said.

He went through the bedclothes a piece at a time until there was a white mound in the center of the floor. Nothing. With the coal-oil lamp in his hand and his shadow humped and broken against the wall he searched for holes in the baseboard, in the paneling, for anywhere a rat could have gone.

It ain’t nowhere a rat could have went, he said. If it ain’t nowhere it could have gone and it ain’t no rat in here, then you ain’t seen no rat.

I know a rat when I see one, the girl said, and I seen that one jump off the bed. I heard it hit the floor.

Get in that bed and get to sleep, Swaw said. I got work to do in the morning, and I’m damn tired of hearin about rats.

When he was back in bed they began in earnest: a rising ocean of rat sounds, as if a veritable legion of them were steadfastly gnawing the structure into sawdust that would ultimately come sifting over their heads as they lay abed. The sounds spread incrementally, infinitesimally as air, over the floorboards to the footboards of the bed itself and ascending on the wooden bed, steady and unrelenting gnawing over all the bed at once. He lay clutching the covers.

Lorene awoke, drowsily listening until the sounds brought her wide awake and apprehensive.

What on earth?

It sounds like rats, he said, unnecessarily.

She didn’t answer. The noise rose in volume as if controlled by some vituperative force. A faint and far-off squeaking of the young so that Swaw saw in his mind great hordes of soft pink rats clutching their mothers, the elder rats gray and malign, tails like rattail files. Lord God, she said.

It ain’t no rats, Swaw said. You can smell a goddamn gopher rat and there ain’t no smell at all in this house.

The words were no sooner said than a stench of rats saturated the room, unspeakably fetid and overpowering, instantaneous, foul and malefic, just abruptly
there
, the house stifling with it. Swaw lent gagging over the side of the bed, struggled up.

They ran out choking and retching into the night. The six of them silently aligned before the dark house. It set still and impassive as if it were watching them back.

Swaw cleared his throat and spat. He had the taste of rats in the back of his mouth.

What we need is us a good housecat, the woman said.

Swaw just looked at her. He didn’t say a word.

He was abroad early the next morning. The rubbertired wagon stood before Judge Beale’s house. Swaw sat across from Beale in the oak-paneled study. Beale trimmed his nails with a nail clipper. Swaw talked of rats and watched Beale’s disbelieving face and listened to the nail clippers make little snick-snicks of punctuation.

Swaw spoke of rats at some length. When he had finished Beale just shook his head. There were no rats, Beale said. The house had been fumigated in the spring for bugs and poison and traps set for rats. Besides, there had never been a problem with rats. The place had always been scrupulously kept. Swaw said there was for goddamn sure a problem with rats now, and if Beale thought he was a liar he could drive out there tonight and see for himself. The judge declined. He gave Swaw an enigmatic smile and a chit for the grocery store good for twenty pounds of rat poison.

Swaw came out angry and sweating. He balled the chit up and threw it in a hedgerow bordering Beale’s lawn. He knew in his heart there was no need in hauling in a sack of rat poison.

He was right, too. They never heard them again. The house was bored with rats.

The summer drew on, warm and mellow. In the soft, moist nights the bottomland alongside Sinking Creek was beset with fireflies, great phosphorescent droves of them drifting like St. Elmo’s fire through the cool blue dusk.

In the fields the ears of corn lengthened and hardened, the leaves yellowed and withered, then grew brittle. The fields that bordered them turned bright yellow with goldenrod; wild apricots ripened on their dying vines strung on fences, withered globes of dusty gold, and the air was heavy with their musky perfume.

They were briefly happy.

Random as the fireflies, his three eldest daughters were coming and going at all hours of the day and night, as if they had all come into heat simultaneously and word of it sent abroad into the land so that in early September Swaw found himself beleaguered every night by swain from all up and down Sinking Creek, old rustyankled country boys with red necks and hardons and old highbacked rolling junkers held together by spit and baling wire and blind luck, weighting the harvest dusks with the smell of oil burning engines, the stench of rubber from smoking tires. Drunken laughter echoed in the still dark, his daughters with it, raucous and meaningless as calling crows or harpies.

I never seen the goddamn like in my life, he raged to Lorene. Lately he was mostly in a rage. He was sleeping badly.

Lorene just seemed pleased they had entered into an active social life. Let em have their fun, she told him, adding darkly, I never had any. You seen to that.

I aim to put a stop to it, he said.

They just poplar, Lorene said.

Popular was not quite the concept Swaw was struggling with. He would hear them leaving in the old highbacked sedans, gone awhile, back once more. Then after a while horns blowing, wild mindless laughter, gone again. He wished for sons. At least sons would be at somebody else’s house worrying the hell out of them.

At first they sat on the stone doorsteps and plied him with splo whiskey, spoke with transparent craft of the weather, crops, the likelihood of an early winter. Biding their time until they could be gone in a cloud of oily blue smoke and a roar of rusted mufflers, gone to the beer joints at Flatwoods, the show, the woods. They grew emboldened. At last they just drove up and honked their horns. They quit bringing him whiskey, too.

He found a used condom down by the creek. It lay drying in the morning sun, like some arcane form of life beached here by distant seas. He took it up on the end of a stick and threw it in the creek, cursing all the while. They poplar, all right, he said to himself. Pussy was always purty well thought of in these parts.

He commenced running them off. He’d run out into the yard shouting, waving his double-barreled shotgun, maybe fire off a round or two just to hear the shot rattle in the trees. You’d hear Model Ts cranking all the way to Shipps Bend. But they were getting bolder, like wild dogs held at bay by a circle of light. While he was nailing up the front door they were kicking down the back, and there were nights he ran off the same bunch three or four times.

One night a soft mewing noise drew him behind the toolshed. Bowered by honeysuckle, he came upon a naked couple stricken by moonlight, laboring away. The sons of bitches were even bringing their own blankets now. They didn’t hear him until he was upon them. He could smell the raw aroused smell of them, could feel his own member thicken. He raised a booted foot and slammed into the boy’s naked nates. The boy went squalling like a ribkicked dog, hauling at his breeches as he went, whirling where the dark opened up and leering back at Swaw.