Joe Lansdale - Sunset and Sawdust

The great round saw in the mill screeched as it chewed trees, and there was the sound of the planing saw as it shaped lumber. The air was full of the sweet sap smell of fresh sawed East Texas pine. Out of a long chute connected to the mill houses came puffs of gnawed wood that floated down on top of a mound of sawdust made dark by time and weather.

All about were broken limbs and trees twisted up by the storm. A log wagon was turned over and men were busy righting it. A dead ox lay nearby, half covered in fallen logs.

“Wonder if they even stopped working when the tornado come,” Sunset said.

“They did, wasn’t long,” Uncle Riley said. “Not here at Camp Rupture. Hell, someone will gut and skin that ox there and eat him by nightfall. A man fell down, they might skin and eat him.”

“That’s Camp Rapture, Uncle Riley. Not Rupture.”

“Not if you work here long it ain’t. And I worked long enough to know I didn’t want no more of it. I got a truss on to prove it.”

“Sure wish I’d just shot Pete in the leg.”

“Now that I ponder on it,” Uncle Riley said, “I’m starting to agree with you, Miss Sunset.”

As Sunset and Uncle Riley rode in, working men studied them, made note Sunset was wearing only a shirt. They put aside their work and began to move down the hill toward the wagon, like flies to molasses.

“What you doing with that beat-up white woman?” a man said to Uncle Riley.

“Just helping her,” Uncle Riley said. Then to Sunset: “See, they gonna cut me or hang me.”

“Take me to my mother-in-law’s.”

Uncle Riley looked at the men following the wagon.

“Oh, heavens,” Uncle Riley said. “They look mean. It’s that kind of mean only a dead nigger can make happy.”

“I still got the gun. Maybe I can get five of them.”

“There’s more than five.”

You could see screened-in sleeping porches on some of the houses, and on the porches were beds and the beds were there to take advantage of the night air and the screens were there to baffle the mosquitoes. The houses were painted industrial green and were jacked up on blocks or pilings. All around the houses chicken wire had been nailed and inside the wire, under the houses, chickens and geese pecked about. Most of the windows were black with soot from the power house and the grassless yards were sprinkled with sawdust from the mill.

Sunset’s mother-in-law’s house was classier than the rest. Had wooden shingles, electricity and fresh paint. Stood on treated pilings and there were no chickens under the house. They were confined to a large pen and chicken house out back, and they were fed in troughs and their water was in a big tub and it was changed daily. By the chicken house was a fenced-in lot and a shed containing a hog and piglets. The windows were fresh scrubbed and the yard had been raked clean of sawdust and there were marks in the dirt as if a giant hen had been scratching for worms.

The sleeping porch was large and not screened in, but framed by windows that could be cranked open. Sunset could see the potted plants her mother-in-law loved in big clay jars.

Parked in the yard was a black company truck with mud-caked tires and weathered wooden slats all around the bed. The sides of the truck were scraped from hard work and it was lightly coated in sawdust. On the side of it, with a finger, someone had written in dust: I’M DIRTY AS SIN.

As they neared the house, Uncle Riley turned the wagon so it came between the water pump and the house. He pulled alongside the front porch and the wide steps that led up to it. He yanked back on the wheel brake and loosely held the reins.

“You’re gonna have to come around and help me down, Uncle Riley,” Sunset said. “I help myself, I’ll fall face first in the dirt and show my butt under this shirt.”

“Oh, Miss Sunset, can’t you wait for one of them white men?”

“All right.”

Men, both white and black, gathered around the wagon. Sunset knew most of them, but she wasn’t sure with her face like this they’d know her. Then she remembered her hair. No one around had hair like hers. Not as long and flame-red and thick as hers. And unlike most women, she always wore it down.

“What the hell’s going on here?” one of the men said. It was Sunset’s father-in-law. He was big and looked like his son, Pete, only thinner of hair and bigger of belly.

His khaki shirt had wet swells beneath the arms and there were sweat frames around his collar and along his shirtfront. He cocked back his stained hat, said, “Goddamn, Sunset, is that you?”

“It’s me, Mr. Jones.”

“What in hell happened to you? And what are you doing with this nigger in his undershirt? He do this? Is that Pete’s pistol?”

The black men in the crowd faded back carefully, using practiced methods of sidestepping and eye misdirection. In a matter of moments they had managed themselves to the rear of the swarm, hands in pockets, watching cautiously, ready to “yas suh” or bolt.

“I ain’t got nothing on underneath this shirt and I’m weak, so help me down, but be careful.”

Jones helped her down. Sunset said, “Uncle Riley here found me after the storm and helped me. I didn’t have no clothes on, and he gave me his shirt.”

“Well, I thank you for that, Uncle Riley,” Jones said.

“You welcome, Mr. Jones. Just out gathering these here fishes, and along she come. I put my head down and gave her my shirt.”

“That’s exactly what he did,” Sunset said, and leaned back against the wagon. “I can’t hardly stand. I’m gonna need help up on the porch there.”

Two men eagerly stepped from the crowd to give her a hand. Sunset thought they were holding her just a little too warmly. Their eyes were playing to the front of her shirt where she had misbuttoned it and she knew they were peeking at her breasts. She was too weary to worry about it. Besides those peeks, more men were seeing her freckled legs this day than had seen them when she was a little girl in short pants.

They helped her onto the porch as she used her hands to tug down the back of the shirt and not give a free show.

Jones followed her up the steps, took a look down the front of her shirt himself, said, “What you doing like this? Get hurt in the storm?”

“Something like that.” Sunset turned and called to Uncle Riley. “Thank you for being such a gentleman, Uncle Riley.”

“You welcome, Miss Sunset.”

“I’ll give you your shirt later. For reasons you can see, I got to hang on to it just now.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s quite all right. You keep it you got a mind to. Reckon I better run along, get these fishes home before they go bad.”

Riley let loose the wheel brake, clucked to the mules, and the crowd parted.

One of the men in the crowd, Don Walker, said to the man next to him, “You can bet that nigger enjoyed him a peek.”

“Just hate it wasn’t me,” said the other, Bill Martin. “Even with her face all beat up like that, I’d take her.”

“Hell, Bill, you’d take a hole in the dirt.”

“Shit, I’d fuck a duck if it winked and bent over.”

“I don’t think you’d care if it winked or not.”

In the Jones house, Sunset sat down in a cane chair next to the radio and watched shadows run down the hill and over the house like spilled oil.

Sunset said, “I shot him.” She held up the gun. “With this gun. His gun. He had me on the floor hitting me. He tried to rape me. He’d raped me before. I couldn’t have it no more.”

When the truth of the matter sank in, Mrs. Jones, a tall, handsome woman with mounded hair skunk-striped with gray, let out a noise so shrill and pitiful, Sunset could feel it in her bones. It made her flex her right foot so hard her shoe came off.