The Long Home (12 page)

“I hear you run out of a job.”

“Yeah. I was working for Weiss.”

“Me and you might be able to help one another. You need work and I need it done.”

Winer hunkered in the yard, absentmindedly took up a stick, began to scratch meaningless hieroglyphics in the earth. A whippoorwill abruptly called from the woods, as if at some occult signal others took up the chorus. As dusk drew on the face phased out, there was only the voice and the pale gleam of the Packard, which seemed to emit some cool black light.

“What was it you wanted done?” Winer asked.

Something in his voice, caution perhaps, made Hardin grin. “I ain’t tryin to hire you to kill somebody,” he said. “I don’t sub that work out.” He took a cigarette from a pack, offered the pack to Winer, returned it to his pocket when it was refused. A match rasped on metal, flared. “You know that buildin I’m puttin up up there? I need some help on it. Reckon you can drive a nail? You ever done any carpenter work?”

“What I don’t know I can learn.”

“I hear your daddy was a carpenter.”

“That’s right.”

“I heard he was a damn good worker. I heard a lot of folks say you’re a pretty damn good worker yourself.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I want that place finished before cold weather. I want it dried in before the rain starts and I ain’t getting it. I got Gobel Lipscomb down there piddlinass around and he’s cryin he ain’t got no help. Hell, he ain’t no carpenter nohow. I can pick up plenty of these old boys but as soon as they get enough worked out to buy a halfpint of whiskey you don’t see em no more till next Thursday. That ain’t what I want. What I want is somebody’ll be there to work ever day the weather’s fit and give me a day’s work for a day’s pay. From what I hear that’s you, Winer.”

“What are you paying?”

“Well, I’m payin fair wages. What are you worth?”

“I don’t know.”

“I might tell you a dollar an hour and be underpayin you. I might say two dollars a day and be payin you too much. What say you come down Monday mornin and we’ll try each other out.”

“Well, that sounds fair enough to me.”

“I guarantee you a fair wage. I ain’t astin you to work for nothin, and man nor boy don’t enter into it. I pay what a man’s worth. Me and you just might hit it off. I been lookin for a likely feller I could trust. A young man want to make his mark.”

Winer arose. “I’ll see you Monday then.”

“You got any tools?”

“I got my pa’s. I reckon he had about everthing I’ll need.”

“You get in there and rest up then. Me and you’s got a honkeytonk to build, Winer. A hell of a honkytonk. I’m gonna have a nigger cook fryin hamburgers for them that’s hungry. I’m gonna run poker games for them with money burnin their pockets and whores for them inclined in that direction. I’m gonna feed em, bleed em, and breed em, all under one roof. And you’re gonna build me that roof.”

Winer dragged the box of tools from the back room out to where the light was. Hands gentle and respectful to the tools. He wiped the framing square with an oiled rag, tilted it toward the white globe of light to read the spill of numbers. Something awesome, almost occult, ageless, in this sheer condensation of knowledge.

“What are you doin?”

“Getting ready to go to work.”

“For him?”

“Yes.”

“Buildin that Godless mess down there at Hovington’s.”

He laid the square aside. “Well. I haven’t noticed any preachers coming around to hire me build a church.”

“You think God Almight’ll ever allow a roof over such a snake’s den as that? No, he won’t. He’ll burn it down with a bolt of lightin before the first bottle’s sold or the first blasphemy’s said. Then where will you be? If it was me I’d want to be as far away from a sight like that as I could.”

“Well. God Almighty let him sell it off Hovington’s front porch and I never even heard any thunder.”

“Yeah. Yeah. And him gettin bolder every minute and darin folks to stop him. Shootin em and goin scot-free, burnin houses over folks’ heads. And you defending him to your own mama and gettin a mouth on you needs a bar of soap took to it.”

Winer didn’t reply. He tried a tape measure, dripped oil into the case, and tried again.

“And you gettin more like him ever day. Usin his tools. It’s a wonder he didn’t take em with him when he went, I reckon he figured there wadnt a dollar on them.” Old bitter anger long unhealed imbued her with vehemence. “Storm in here mad at nothin and gone with never a word of why to anybody.”

He still didn’t reply. He seldom did anymore.

Oliver had always expected his fences to outlast him but in the last year or so it seemed to him that he spent most of his time repairing them where the goats had pushed through.

“I aim to kill em,” he said. “Ever last emptyheaded one of em. I’m goin back to the house soon as I fix this fence and get my gun and lay out ever last goat I own.”

“If I was going to kill them I’d just let the fences go,” Winer said. He was grinning, he’d heard death sentences passed on the goats before but the old man’s herd always seemed to increase rather than diminish. Even as Oliver spoke a baby goat was rubbing its head against the old man’s arm.

He was weaving a temporary deterrent of seagrass string among the rusted strands of wire. “I sort of like to hear the bells but by God I can string the bells on wire and let the wind ring em.” He knotted the string. Already the goats were pushing against the wire. “And say we’re out of the sang business?”

“I reckon. I told him I’d be there Monday.”

“Just as well, I reckon, I’ll be gone fore long. I look for a early frost and a long winter. Long and cold. Signs is there if you know where to look.”

“You reckon I ought to go work for him or not? I’m a little undecided.”

“Boy, you got to do what you want to do. You suit yourself. As long as you keep your head straight and stay out of his business you’ll be all right. Just drive nails and draw your pay on Friday and go on home. Besides, I know you. You’re goin to do what you want to anyway.”

Oliver straightened when he finished the fence, stood halfbent a moment then with hands on knees, his fingers kneading recalcitrant flesh and bone. “No,” he said. “But there ain’t no law says you got to like a man to do his work and draw his money. All you have to do is get along with him. I just worked for bosses I liked, I guess I’d a spent a good portion of my life settin on the front porch.”

“Would you work for Hardin?”

“Lord, no. I’d scratch shit with the chickens before I’d take a nickel that passed through his hands.”

“Why? Because he’s a bootlegger?”

“No. I got nothin against bootleggin. I lived around it all my life. Thomas Hovington was a bootlegger and I never had nothin against him cept he let folks run over him. Never would stand up for hisself. Let Hardin do him out of business, his place, even his woman. A man like Hardin now, he can spot that in a feller and use it, he knows who he can shove around and who he can’t. Just see he don’t get started off that way with you. The way I see it there’s a way of doin things, a way they ort to be done. Hardin strikes me as a feller that won’t cull much if it’ll get him what he wants.”

“Well. It’s your business anyhow,” Winer said. “I just wanted you to know why I won’t be over Monday.”

“You a good worker. Don’t sell yourself short and don’t let him run nothin over on you.”

Watching the boy go back up the roadbed Oliver knelt back in the sun and rested a moment. Well, go then, he thought. I can’t stop you. The sun was a warm weight on the paper lids of his eyes but it already had a quality of distance to it, a subtle eclipse of the seasons he had an affinity with, a clocking of the earth’s time he felt in sync with, he and the earth growing old together but never able to give up.

That spotted horse, he thought, remembering
the hoofbeats and almost concurrent with them the horse and rider appearing apparitionlike and immediate out of the brush and morning fog, the bunched muscles of horse’s hindquarters when Hardin sawed the reins and the horse rearing its eyes wild and muddy but no more wild that Hardin’s own, the look of surprise lasting no more than a second then going blank and serene, all surface you could not penetrate. There was a Winchester cradled in the crook of Hardin’s arm and as the horse calmed he laid it across the pommel of the saddle. Just resting it there.

“What the fuck are you doin out here?”

It was fall of the year and the woods were the color of bright copper and the wind was blowing, shifting the depth of the driven leaves like water. The forest became surreal, a place he’d never seen or dreamed or heard rumored, a dark corner of childhood night and he thought. This son of a bitch is crazy. This madman is goin to shoot me where I stand and leave me where I fall. He would rot in these woods, black millipedes sleep in his chambered skull, the teeth of predators score his bones. “Just mindin my own business,” he said. “A pastime I ain’t noticed much around here.” There was a sharp, metallic taste to his saliva, like cankered brass.

“Your business, hell. I reckon you think anything moves in these woods is your business. Don’t think I ain’t seen you prowlin. Stickin your long nose in my business.”

There was a hot seeping anger in Oliver’s chest. “You don’t own this property,” he said. “You better check your lines.”

“My lines is where I make em,” Hardin said. “And I make a new set everday.” He spurred the horse and almost as an afterthought quartered the horse toward Oliver, the horse’s shoulder catching him in the chest and spilling him backward into the brush, the spotted horse passing almost over him, he could hear the creak of leather and smell the horse, then the hot, acrid leaves he lay in, breathless. His lungs were emptied as if he’d fallen from some great height. His mind was a torrent of rage and disbelief. He lay stunned for a moment. He heard the blood singing in his veins, the fallen cries from a blackbird winging above him. Falling his mind had seen what his eyes had not remarked, the shovel across the saddle, not a proper shovel but a military entrenching tool, the blade wet with fresh clay. The shapes in a gunnysack tied to the saddlehorn.

Them was fruitjars, he thought. I just like to caught him buryin his money.

He thought of the jars packed with greasy coins and wadded bills, overflow from the money machine Hardin was hooked to, tucked into graves like the hasty and unforeseen dead.

The sight of the rifle had raked his forehead and a fine, bright line of blood crept down his face unnoticed. I will lay for him and shoot him, he thought, but he knew already he wouldn’t. I am old, he admitted for the first time, old, tired of it all. All I want is to be let alone, all I want is for things to run along smoothly. All I want is peace, and an old man ought to have that, if nothin else.

The girl had black hair as coarse and glossy as a well-kept horse’s mane and it was cropped straight across below her shoulders as it if had been sheared. The first few days after school started Winer would see he come out and await the schoolbus, her books clutched against her breasts, her face self-absorbed and touched with a kind of sullen insolence, staring down the road the way the bus would come. Then after a few days she didn’t come out of the house when the bus blew its horn. The bus turned and paused momentarily a few mornings and then it didn’t come anymore.

These warm days of Indian summer she used to bring out on old metal lunge chair and sit on the sunny side of the house and watch them work. Winer, looking up from the pile of corners and tees he was nailing together or the blocking he was cutting with a handsaw, would see her sitting with calm indifference, her fingers laced across her stomach, watching the progress of the work not as if it interested her very much but as it if were just something to watch, a motion, like a cat watching anything that moves.

She would sit with a kind of studied unawareness of her spread legs, the glimpses they stole of her white thighs. Her eyes were halfshut beneath the weight of her long lashes and she might have been asleep but she was not.

“She’s got a case on one of us,” Gobel Lipscomb told him. “And somehow I just don’t believe it’s you.” Lipscomb was the carpenter. He took to working shirtless so she could watch the play of muscles in his sunbrowned back, to ordering Winer around more. He used to drop his tape or hammer and stoop floorward for it and pause staring upward at the juncture of her thighs and he’d straighten with a look on his face near pain. “Black drawers,” he would say. “Godadmighty damn. Black drawers.”

Hardin’s business seemed to keep him pretty well occupied but sometimes on slow days he would come out and sit beside the girl and watch. Once he laid his hand on her knee and said something to her and glanced toward Lipscomb and laughed and she smiled a small smile and said nothing. When Hardin was about, Lipscomb found a higher gear in his nailing arm and seemed unaware of anything that transpired beyond the maze of partition walls he was erecting.

Carrying a beachtowel the girl came out of the trees above the abyss. Her bathing suit was wet and her black hair plastered seallike and glossy to her head. She passed the building where they worked without glancing toward them and walked on toward the house, her hips rolling like something meshing on ball bearings.

Lipscomb was suddenly frozen, the hammer frozen in midstroke as it if had come up against some invisible barrier. Even the jaws that were perpetually kneading tobacco were still. He stood for a moment and then with great deliberation he laid his hammer aside.

“If that ain’t a invite then I don’t know one,” he said. “Here goes nothin.”

He stood before the bedroom window with his hands shading the sundrenched glass.

“Hey,” Winer called.

Lipscomb might not have heard him. He didn’t turn. Stood leaning back to the sun staring into the room. Whatever he saw there seemed to have rendered him immobile as stone.

“Hey, Lipscomb,” Winer called again.

When Lipscomb turned he threw a hand to his eyes as if struck blind or perhaps paradoxically illuminated by divine revelation and he staggered across the yard. “Oh, Lord,” he said. “Oh Lord.” He wiped his brow and flung off imaginary beads of perspiration. He crossed the yard in great rolling seafarer’s strides and thrust his pelvis forward spasmodically, his hands and hips miming masturbation of an enormous phallus. His tongue lolled, his eyes rolled in his head.

“How high a fever you run with the fits?” Hardin asked him. Hardin leaning against the corner of the house smoking a cigarette. “You reckon I ought to send that boy after Ratcliff?”

Lipscomb ran a hand through his sandy hair. He seemed tonguetied. His face was so engorged with blood it looked swollen. “There ain’t nothin wrong with me,” he finally said.

“The hell there’s not,” Hardin told him.

Winer fell very busy. He knew intuitively that he had never seen a man so close to dying. His hand counting the nails in his nail apron. One, two, three, his busy fingers counted.

Hardin didn’t say anything to Lipscomb all day. He just got in the black Packard and left. At lunch they ate leaning against the wall they’d erected. “You see that bastard, how he looked at me?” Lipscomb asked. “If looks killed I’d be lookin at the underside of a casketlid right this minute. I’ve about decided he’s got the hots for that little gal hisself.”

Winer didn’t reply. He drank cold coffee from a pint fruitjar and ate his sandwich and thought about the way Hardin had looked at Lipscomb. Winer did not anticipate ever being looked at by anyone in just that way.

“Hell, he looks like one of these killdees,” Lipscomb said. “And they aint nothin to him but legs and pocketbook.” He studied his own thickly muscled forearms, his big hands. He seemed to draw comfort from them. “He fucks with me I’ll fold him up like a rule and stick him in my pocket,” he said. “Or else come upside his head with a clawhammer.”

Winer judged he’d about decided Hardin wasn’t going to say anything.

A few minutes before four they heard the Packard drive up and the door slam to, then Hardin came around the corner of the house. He stood there for a time watching them.

“Lipscomb, you want to step around here a minute? I need a word with you.”

“Here it comes,” Lipscomb said in a low voice. He slid his hammer into the strap on the leg of his overalls.

Winer went on nailing a wall together. He kept waiting for threats, blows, the sound of violence. All he could hear when he paused in his nailing was the murmur of the brook, doves mourning softly from the hollow.

Lipscomb was gone only a few minutes. When he came back his face was red all the way down into the collar of his blue chambray shirt and he was not pleased. He had an old plywood toolbox with a length of rope knotted through each end of for a handle. He began gathering his tools up and slinging them into the box.

“Get you shit gathered up,” he told Winer. “We’re draggin up.”

“What?”

“We’re quittin, by God. We’re goin to the house.”

“We, hell,” Winer said. “I didn’t know we came in a set like salt and pepper shakers.”

Lipscomb straightened with a square in his hand. He looked as if he’d just as soon take it out on Winer as not.

“What are you, some kind of Goddamned scab?”

“I’ll make up my own mind when to go the house. You never hired me.”

“Why, you snotty little bastard. I ought to just slap the hell out of you.”

“Why don’t you just fold me up like you did Hardin?”

“By God, I believe I will.” He took a step toward Winer but Winer held the hammer and he did not retreat under Lipscomb’s tentative advance, just stood with an almost sleepy look in his eyes. Lipscomb dropped his hands and stood staring at him, his eyes fierce and malignant. “You little backstabbin shitass. You set this whole mess up, didn’t you? Now you think you got the job and the girl too. All you had to do was holler, but hell no.”

“Why, hellfire,” Winer said. “I called you twice but you was so busy making a damn fool out of yourself you couldn’t be bothered.”

“Ahh, the hell with you and him both,” Lipscomb said, turning away. He laid the square in the box and took up the box by its rope handles. He started toward the door. “I’d like to stay and see the mess you’ll make out of things. You couldn’t build a fuckin chicken coop if you had a book to go by.”

After a while Hardin came out and climbed onto the subfloor. He sat on a box of nails watching Winer work. He had a slim cigar clamped in his jaw. He wore expensivelooking gabardine slacks and a yellow shirt. He began paring his nails with a bonehandled knife.

“Well, I had to let ye runnin mate go,” he said. “I couldn’t afford union scale for winderpeepin.”

Winer went on working.

“Hold up a minute. You ain’t gettin paid by the nail nohow.”

Winer ceased and stood waiting.

“Ain’t you worked past quittin time anyhow?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have a watch, we used his. Besides, I wasn’t sure what you wanted.”

“I told you what I wanted when I hired you. I want a honkytonk built. Can you do it?”

“Well, I can do most of it. There’s some things it’s hard for one man to do, like puttin up the joists and rafters. And I can’t raise the walls and plumb them by myself.”

“That’s all I wanted to hear you say. You measure em and nail em together and I’ll grab a handful of these highbinders I’m always waistdeep in and we’ll raise em for you. You run into anything requires more than two hands, just holler. All right?”

“I’ll give it a try.”

“Shore you will. You can do it. Ain’t you goin to ast me about the money?”

“What about it?”

“About how much I was payin him. I’m payin it to you now, you’re the architect and the carpenter and the hired help too. You fuck up we’ll know who to blame it on.”

Winer grinned.

“Come on and I’ll run you home. Can’t have my builder walkin to work totin his tools. Folks’ll be talkin about me.”

Winer was still wonderstruck. I am rich, he thought. I am a wealthy man.

Lately Winer’s mother had taken to cleaning herself up more and doing her hair. She seemed always to have on a clean dress and there was something foreign about her. Winer realized for the first time how much she had let herself go down through the years. She was not pretty but had she been less dour and practical she would have qualified as plain.

He noticed tiretracks even before she got the pans.

“Had company today?”

“No. A salesman stopped by.”

“A salesman? Selling what?”

“Sellin pots and pans,” she said irritably as if there were no other kind of salesman, as if he was interrogating her.

A week later she had the pans. He saw them when he came in from Hardin’s, a great motley collection of them, coppercolored, gleaming, skillets and cookers and spatulas and doubleboilers and seemingly a pan for every purpose the mind of man could devise.

“Great God,” he said.

“What?”

“Where’d you get all that stuff?”

“I bought em.”

“Bought em? Why?”

“Because I wanted em is why. I always wanted me a set of cookers like that.”

He was a little awed by them. “Well.” He paused. “What’d they cost?”

“Never you mind what they cost. It won’t be a nickel of your pocket.”

He took his razor and mirror and a bar of soap down to the branch. Beyond the barn it curved and there was a hole of water deep enough to swim in. He washed and shaved and came back out of the woods and onto the stoop and she was awaiting him. Apparently their conversation was not yet over.

She laid a hand on his arm. “I got a friend,” she said. “Sells them pots and pans.”

He thought, a friend, not understanding at first. Then he saw in her sallow face some commingling of shame and pride, the eyes imbued simultaneously with humility and stubbornness, and he thought, she means a man. He didn’t know what to say though her face expected something, she looked as if she were ashamed of whatever it was she was doing but had no plans to stop.

“I think you’d like him, Nathan. He wants to see you.”

“Well. Sure.” He was looking all about. “Where is he?”

“He’s supposed to be here next Friday,” she said. Not “He’ll be here Friday,” Winer noticed, not yet with sureness or even confidence, she was uncertain of her hold on him, or did not believe it yet.

Monday he was there long before worktime planning his day. There was more to know than he had realized and now there was no one to ask. Old questions on the pitch of roofs, the cuts on rafters, troubled him. Yet as the week wore on he discovered an affinity for planes and angles, for the simple rightness of things. His corners formed perfect squares and they stood as plumb as a level could plumb them. There were things he did not know how to do but he found there were several ways to do everything and that even if he took the long way it did not matter if the end result was the same.

He seemed always to work with an audience. With the weather holding fair Hardin’s coterie of convivial drunks used to follow the sun and in the afternoon they’d align themselves on Coke crates or folding chairs or old ladderbacks as spindly and loosejointed as themselves and against the whitewashed concrete blocks of Hardin’s addition they took on the character of a sepia daguerreotype, old felthatted and overalled rogues watching time pass with attentive eyes out of dead faces. Watching anything that life chose to parade before them. There was a great calm about these old men, they seemed to have arrived at some compromise with life long ago and nothing much surprised them anymore.

The young men were mostly furloughed or shellshocked soldiers or over-the-hill sailors far from any seas and they would be inside drinking and trying to get the girl to ride down the road with them. Finally drunk they settled for whatever whore chanced to be in attendance or even Pearl herself should the need be acute.

Winer was comfortable with the old men but he could never become comfortable with the soldiers, there was an air of desperation about them. They acted as if time were the commodity they were shortest on, as if they did not have the leisure to take life as it came but were eternally seeking shortcuts, must twist each moment until it suited their purpose, bend every event to their own amusement. Something had to be happening for them every minute. They were wound too tight, Winer thought. He knew why and he didn’t guess he blamed them but he thought they were wound too tight anyway. They reminded him of a war being fought that had heretofore been just a disembodied voice in a radio and he knew that unless things changed it would not be long before he was fighting it too.

All the soldiers looked alike to Winer and he thought if he ever saw one sober he might think about them differently but around Hardin’s he wasn’t likely to. All the ones he saw were a little drunk and a lot belligerent. They always wanted to fight the sailors but if there were no sailors they’d fight each other.