Sunset and Sawdust (3 page)

4

Pete’s father and a colored man named Zack Washington brought Pete back. They went to Pete’s house, or what was left of it, found Pete the way Sunset said they would. At first, in the early moonlight, Zack thought the man on the floor was colored, but as they neared, the black on him rose up and flew away with a furious buzz.

Pete had his pants down, his head on the floor, his ass to the wind. There was a strip of shit in the crack of his butt that had jumped out when Sunset shot him. Blood had run down his face, into his mouth, onto the floor, and had dried.

Zack held the lantern close to Pete’s face and thought Pete’s expression was one of mild surprise, as if he had just spooned up a bug in his breakfast mush. One eye seemed more surprised than the other.

Zack tugged him up, and when he did, the blood that had dried on Pete’s face and the floor made a sound like someone tearing a piece of sandpaper in half.

They pulled Pete’s pants up, rode with him propped on the truck seat between them, Mr. Jones holding Pete up, Zack driving, trying to keep his mind on the road, trying not to let the smell of feces and decaying flesh overwhelm him. Due to the heat, even on the short ride to Camp Rapture, even though the day was now cooler, Pete had turned choke-your-nose ripe, and after they had gone a little ways, ants that had gathered in Pete’s clothing crawled out and got on Zack and bit him on the wrists and hands and ankles.

Zack had not volunteered to get Pete’s body, but Jones, who was called Captain by the colored workers because he was a main man at the mill, made him volunteer. Had he not gone, he knew he would have been out of work, looking to pick cotton for a fart and a song, hoeing between rows when he wasn’t dragging a sack, so there wasn’t a whole lot of saying no even considered.

Secretly, Zack was glad Pete was dead. Pete had pistol-whipped him once for not calling him Mister. Zack had referred to the constable as Pete, like the white men he knew.

“You done forgot your place, nigger,” Pete said, and the pistol came out and the whipping commenced. It was a pretty brisk whipping, just a few blows, and Zack thought it was a good thing it wasn’t the beating Pete had given Three-Fingered Jack. If it had been that bad, he would be pushing up grass and feeding the worms.

So Zack thought it was damn funny finding Mr. Pete the way he was, pants down, that silly look on his face, his crack full of mess, a bullet in his head, put there by his own gun, fired by a little redheaded woman.

Jones and Zack brought Pete home and made a cooling board by taking a door from the closet. They placed the door between two chairs and put Pete’s body on it. Zack said a few kind words, then stepped out, without Mr. Jones so much as saying thank you or go shoot yourself.

If things weren’t bad enough, Pete’s daughter, Karen, arrived from having gone fishing with friends. Showed up shortly after Mr. Jones brought back the body, opened the door with a smile on her face and a lie on her lips. At fourteen, it wasn’t the first lie she had told. She had picked up some fish after the storm to pretend she had caught them.

Instead of fishing with friends, she had been with a boy. Jerry Flynn. They had gone down by the creek to spoon, then the storm came up. They spent the time they had meant to spend kissing with their faces in the dirt, the storm howling all about them.

When the tornado passed, they started home immediately, in Karen’s case to the Jones’ house, where she had been visiting her grandparents.

When Karen came in the door the lie was lost. She saw her father stretched out on the cooling board. His hair was in his face, his tongue hanging out. His clothes were wet from the storm and his left eye was bulging from its socket like someone was inside his head pushing it out of his skull with his finger.

Karen dropped the fish, screamed, said, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.”

Sunset, who had gotten some of her energy back and borrowed an oversized dress from her mother-in-law, came out of the back room when Karen screamed. She was still carrying the revolver. She took hold of Karen and dragged her out of there.

Marilyn wondered where Sunset and Karen had gone, but was too weak and too sad to find out. She hoped they were okay out there in the dark.

She knew only that her husband was happy about Sunset leaving, said he was going to get his shotgun and when he saw her next he was going to cut those long legs out from under her. And Marilyn knew he would too, and probably get away with it.

It was in that moment, sneaking in between her other thoughts, that Marilyn realized she had been worried to death about her granddaughter during the storm, but the worry had been tucked away when Sunset arrived wearing only a shirt, toting a gun, saying she’d killed Pete. Now she was thinking about Karen again, and she was thinking about Sunset too.

She thought about all this as she lay in bed, not able to sleep. She kept seeing things over and over in her mind, and the thing she saw the most was her son and the little hole in his head.

When they laid him out on the cooling board in the parlor, his head had turned and the flattened-out load from the bullet rolled out of his mouth and fell bloody on the floor.

She could still see it in her mind’s eye, hear it as it snapped against the floor.

As she lay there, she realized another thing, and it pained her to think it, but she knew it was true, and she had known it for a long time.

Pete had it coming.

He was just like his father. For years now, Jones, which was what Marilyn called her husband, had considered his word gold, even if it was sometimes tin.

Pete was the same.

Jones had blacked her eye more than once—punched her all over, for that matter. Kicked her. Slapped her. And he had raped her. She had never thought of it as rape until now. She thought that was just his way, and the way of a husband.

But now she thought about what Sunset had said and what she had done and she knew it was not just the way of a husband, and if it was, it was a bad way.

She lay for a moment feeling the sweat on her lower back stick to the sheets, thought about how much better it was on the sleeping porch and wondered why they had not slept there tonight. She sat up in bed and looked at Jones. He had not bothered to take her tonight, but that was because of Pete. He didn’t have any lead in his pencil because of it.

Tomorrow, she knew he would hit her. A way to take out what happened to Pete on her. And he would find a way to make it her fault. He always said, “See what you made me do?”

Marilyn got up quietly, padded in her bare feet to the dresser drawer, pulled out a big Singer sewing machine needle, crept quietly into the parlor and looked at her boy lying there.

She had cleaned him up and put some of his father’s clothes on him, had even managed to push his eye back in place and close his lids and cover the hole where the bullet had gone in with candle wax.

For a moment she stood looking at him. She reached out and pushed at his hair to make it look the way it did when it was combed. Then she went outside and looked under the porch. She found what she wanted. Her husband’s fishing tackle box. She got some heavy fishing line out of the box and went back inside. She threaded the sewing machine needle in the dark by touch, went to the bedroom and very carefully removed the blanket from the bed, took to sewing the sheet to the mattress with Jones between them.

She was patient about it, silent and deliberate. When she finished, she had Jones sewed in tight with only his head exposed. She put the needle away, went outside and got the yard rake.

The rake had never been used except to scratch the ground to make it smooth, and now that she thought about that, it seemed silly. She raked the dirt sometimes to keep from going mad, listening to the whine of the saw, the sound of men and mules and clanking machinery, while anticipating her next beating.

Back in the bedroom she studied Jones for a while, then raising the rake, she brought it down hard on his head, trying to imagine she was standing in a watermelon patch busting a melon.

Jones came awake with the first whack, yelled, and she hit him again. His head turned toward her and she hit him once more, this time putting all her weight behind it. He tried to get up but the sewed sheet and mattress held him.

“You’ve hit me the last time,” she said.

“You’re crazy, woman.”

“Been crazy till now.”

She began beating him from head to toe. She beat him until she was too tired to beat him. She rested and he cussed, and she went at it again. Had she been stronger she would have killed him, but she wasn’t that strong and she didn’t spend enough time on the head. She beat at his big body, grunting with every blow, the sound of the strikes echoing through the house like a dusty rug being thrashed.

When she wore out the second time, she went out of there, and when she came back, she had her husband’s double-barrel shotgun.

Jones’ face was red. He was bleeding from his ears and nose and the sheet was spotted with blood.

“You ain’t right, woman,” he said. “You ain’t right on account of Pete.”

She pointed the shotgun at him. “I ought to just go on and shoot you.”

There was something about seeing him over the barrel of the gun, the smell of gun oil in her nostrils, that made her want to pull the trigger.

“What’s got into you?”

“I let you into me, and that gave us Pete. And I let you teach him how to treat women by letting you treat me way you did. Sunset killed him cause she had to.”

“You can’t mean that.”

“She killed him for the reason I ought to done killed you. I ought to not let you treat me this way. Pete might not have been like he was, I hadn’t let you hit on me.”

She cocked back the hammers on the shotgun.

“Now don’t do nothing you’ll regret, Marilyn.”

“I already got plenty regrets.”

She went away, came back with a knife in one hand, the shotgun in the other.

“Now, honey, easy with that,” Jones said.

“Don’t call me honey. Don’t never call me that.”

She cut the sheet with one quick run of the knife, stepped back, flung the knife onto the floor and pointed the shotgun at him.

“Get up. Put your clothes on, take your shoes and socks with you. Don’t come back ’cept to get the rest of your clothes. And don’t make it tonight.”

Jones sat on the edge of the bed. His body was marked with red striping and he was bleeding from numerous wounds. There was a bruise over his right eye that looked like a grease smear.

“You can’t throw me out of my own house.”

“I can shoot you all over it. I can do that. Shoot you here. Shoot you over there. I can handle guns. You know that.”

“You wouldn’t do that, hon—”

“Don’t you dare say it. Put on your pants. Sight of you naked makes me sick.”

Jones took a deep breath and gathered up his pants, stepped into them, pulled on his shirt. He started to put on his socks.

“Do what I told you. Take them socks and shoes with you. Don’t stop for nothing else, or you’ll stop forever.”

“What about Pete?”

“He ain’t going nowhere.”

“The funeral.”

“You’ll hear about it. Come if you want. But don’t never plan on coming back here.”

“It’s my house.”

“It’s as much my house as yours. I earned it, putting up with you. Besides, my daddy owned the mill, and now I own the mill, not you. I’m the one with money.”

“You’re just upset.”

“I’m upset, all right. But I ain’t just upset. I’m real upset.”

“It’ll pass.”

“I don’t think it will, Mr. Jones. I didn’t know I had it wrong until today. Until Sunset killed Pete. I wanted to kill her right then, but it’s you I want to kill now.”

He looked at her as if he might see someone other than who he expected, but finally determined that it was indeed his wife.

He gathered up his socks and shoes.

“I tell you, you’re gonna live to regret this.”

“I ain’t taking another whipping from you.”

“A wife is obedient to her husband.”

“I ain’t your wife no more.”

“In the eyes of God you are.”

“Then he better turn his head.” She put the shotgun to her shoulder, sighted down the barrels.

“Be careful. That gun’s got a hair trigger.”

Jones got up and left the room and she followed him.

“Don’t stop at nothing,” she said.

“I’m gonna look at Pete. You can shoot me if you want. But I’m gonna look at my son.”

“Then look.”

He pulled the dangling string, which turned on the overhead light, stopped by the cooling board, reached out and touched Pete’s face. Before he went out the door he turned, said, “You and that little gal are gonna pay. James Wilson Jones does not forget.”

“Then get on out while you got brains in your head to remember with.”

“I’m gonna get ice over here. It’s too warm for the body. I’ll get ice sent over.”

“That’ll be okay. Now go. And don’t you bring it. You get one of the fellas to bring it.”

Jones gave her a look she had seen before. Right before a beating he was going to give her. But this time it wasn’t going to happen. She felt strange. Good. Powerful. She had not felt this strong since she was a girl.

“Don’t think to come back here,” she said. “I’ll be listening for you. And I won’t say a word next time. I’ll just shoot. And I want you to know I hate you. I hate everything about you, and have for some time. And today I hate you more than ever.”

Jones went out and slammed the door.

Marilyn followed him out, yelled at him as he went down the steps and into the moonlight. “You leave that truck,” she said. “I’m gonna need that truck.”

He didn’t look back at her, just kept walking.

Marilyn went out to the truck, got the keys out of the ignition, brought them inside the house with her.

They had seldom locked their doors here in the camp, but now Marilyn used the house key hanging on a nail beside the door.

As soon as she locked it, she remembered he had a key, so she put a chair under the knob. Tomorrow she’d have to find the camp locksmith, get the locks changed. She bolted all the windows down, locked up the back screen door, pulled the solid door to and put a chair under its knob as well.