Wiley Cash - A Land More Kind Than Home

I heard my daddy’s bare feet walking down the hall to the front room, and I was afraid he was going to come in there and yank me up out of the bed, but I heard him open the screen door instead. It slammed shut behind him, and the sound woke me up and I opened my eyes and looked around at all that darkness under the covers. I listened for my daddy to come back inside and wake me up, and when he opened the screen door I heard his voice inside the house, but it sounded like he was far away from where I was laying in bed with those covers pulled up over my head. “Goddamn,” he said as he ran past my bedroom on his way back to his and Mama’s room. “Stay in the bed, Jess!” he hollered. “Goddamn,” he said again.

I laid there under the covers and listened for him to say something else, but he didn’t say nothing. I could hear him in the back bedroom. He was in there opening and slamming the drawers on his dresser like he was tearing them apart looking for something.

“Who’s here?” I hollered from under my sheets.

“Stay right there,” he said.

I heard him pass by in the hallway again, and it sounded like he was dropping things and they were rolling down the hallway toward the kitchen. I lifted the covers off my head and laid there and looked up at the ceiling and listened, and then I heard him push open the screen door and run down the steps into the yard. The door slammed shut behind him. I could hear him yelling something out there, and I could hear somebody yelling back. Then I heard a gunshot.

I tore the covers off me and sat up in the bed, but I didn’t hear nothing else, and I wondered if I’d heard all those things in a dream.

“Daddy!” I screamed. I waited for him to say something.

It was quiet outside, and I sat there wide awake and listened. My heart thumped against my chest, and I could hear it beating in my ears too. Then I heard another shot.

I jumped up out of the bed in my jockeys and ran out to the hall, but I stepped on something and it rolled under my foot and I fell and landed on my back and hit my head on the floor. I looked over and saw the shells for my daddy’s shotgun rolling all over the hallway.

I got up and ran to the screen door and pushed it open, and when I did I heard another gunshot, and I saw my daddy fall on the ground in front of somebody’s old car. The sheriff stood by his police car with his gun out in front of him, and my daddy just laid there in the gravel. Blood squirted up out of his neck and sprayed all over the hood of the car and turned it red. The sheriff saw me and hollered something, but I was screaming too loud to hear what he said. He put his gun in his holster and came out from behind his door and ran up the driveway through the gravel. He stopped on the other side of that old car where somebody was sitting on the ground inside the open door. He bent down and said something to them, and then he ran up the porch steps to where I stood. He wrapped his arms around me like he was hugging me, but I didn’t want him to because I knew he’d shot my daddy. I fought with him, but he held me even tighter and I couldn’t get him to let me go. My jockeys were wet, and I knew I’d peed myself.

“Hold on, son,” the sheriff said. “Just hold on, now. Let’s go back inside.”

“Daddy!” I hollered.

“Hold on,” he said again.

“Why’d you shoot my dad!”

“Let’s just go back inside.” I heard sirens coming toward the house from up the road, and I fought with him again, but he still wouldn’t let me go. Somebody out there in the driveway was screaming, and I thought it sounded just like Mama.

BY THE TIME I ROUNDED THE CORNER ON MY WAY UP TO Ben’s house, I saw that he’d already come down the porch steps and taken a stand at the top of the driveway in front of Chambliss’s old car, the same one I’d seen him working on out in his barn the day before. Ben had on an old white T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, and he’d raised his double-barrel shotgun eye level and had it pointed at Chambliss’s driver’s-side windshield. He stood there frozen stiff, like he could stay that way forever, and I blasted my siren once to get his attention. He raised his head just enough to look over the roof of Chambliss’s car, and he watched me roll slowly up the driveway toward him.

My siren must have gotten Chambliss’s attention too, because his red taillights went white when he put his old car in reverse, and I heard his tires crunch on the gravel when he began to back away from Ben and down the driveway toward me. He put his arm across Julie’s seat and turned around and looked at me through his back window. It struck me as strange then, and it’s even more troubling to think about now, but he smiled at me. It was almost like he was proud to be playing the good guy all of a sudden-somebody who I’d come out to protect now that Ben Hall had finally made him the victim.

And then all that blood on the windows. It seems like I saw it happen before I even heard it. Chambliss’s face was there on the other side of the window, his eyes narrowed like he was concentrating on staying in the gravel and not veering into the wet grass. And then I couldn’t see his face at all, and I realized I couldn’t see through that glass window either. By the time my ears had registered the shot I knew I was looking at bits of Chambliss’s brain and skull where they’d been blown up on the back window from the force of the blast. His car kept on rolling back toward me though, faster and faster, until I put mine in park and braced myself for the impact. His car slammed into mine and rolled up over my bumper and into my grille, and when it did Chambliss’s trunk flew open and I saw where he’d packed a half-dozen of those little wooden crates I’d seen inside his barn. A couple of them tumbled out onto my hood, and I looked at them through the smoke that poured out of my radiator. Then I heard another shot blow out what was left of Chambliss’s front windshield, but with his trunk open and the steam gushing from under my hood I couldn’t see a thing.

I opened my door and used it for cover, and I stepped out onto the gravel and drew my sidearm and pointed it at Ben. He’d walked down the driveway following Chambliss’s car as it rolled backward, and now he was standing right in front of its bumper. When he saw me draw and take a position behind my door, he pointed his gun at me. I wondered if he’d had time to reload, but I knew better than to assume that he hadn’t.

“You need to drop that gun, Ben,” I said. He looked at me like he didn’t know who I was for a minute, and then his eyes registered some kind of recognition and he held them on me. “This thing’s over,” I told him. “Put it down and let’s go inside and talk about this. Ain’t nothing else for us to do. You know that.”

It was quiet, and the two of us just stood there staring at each other. Suddenly the passenger-side door of Chambliss’s car creaked open and I heard Julie tumble out into the driveway. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her breathing heavy in short, quick breaths, and I listened as she crawled slowly through the gravel like she was trying to get away. Ben waited until she’d gotten out from behind the open door, and then he took that shotgun off me and pointed it at her.

“Don’t do that, Ben!” I hollered. “Look at me! Turn that back on me!” I could hear Julie sobbing over there on the far side of the car, and I could hear her struggling to get away from him. “It ain’t going to be worth it,” I said. “I know it won’t. You know it too.”

“No, I don’t,” Ben said, and when he said that he turned his head and looked at me with a face I’d never seen on him before, and I can say that it was the only time in that boy’s life that I’d ever seen his daddy in him. He kept his eyes on me, but he called out to Julie.