Matthew Null: Allegheny Front

Cartwright shook his head knowingly. “It’s an animal you can’t do without.”

“Indeed. Like I tell my boys, you can’t do without a mule no more than you can do without legs. You’re a cripple without one. Don’t I, boys? Don’t I say you can’t do without a mule no more than legs?”

“Yes. He says it all the damn time.” The boys had stalked up from behind. Cartwright couldn’t help but jump.

“I told you,” McBride said. “All the damn time I say it.”

Cartwright regained his composure. The pitch: “You speak with a lot of sense and experience. Fellows, a mule is important and so’s a man’s tools. I was a farmer for many years and indeed I know that a farmer is only good as his tools. Let the harness match the hide, as they say. You need something to equal that good mule.”

McBride flinched. A less experienced drummer might think this the wrong tack, but Cartwright knew his trade, and his trade was talk. In his mind’s eye he saw the contents of the Irishman’s barn: cracked and broken harnesses, homemade harrows, antiquated briar hoes — all tools of the Old World. They might even shell corn by hand. “Yessir,” he continued, “I got something here that will double, if not triple, a man’s yield at harvest with only half the effort. Half the effort, twice the yield. Powerful math. Now how about that?”

McBride said nothing. The good mule stood in the furrow, radiating a potent silence. The best draft animals have no discernible personality, and this one seemed such a beast.

“Now me,” Cartwright said, “I’d say you couldn’t beat that with a stick. This tool a man can’t afford to be without. Latest from Virginia Progressive Agriculture. Help me, boys.”

The twins pitched forward. Cartwright dismounted, whispered into the horses’ toggling ears, and walked around to the wagon-bed. He peeled back a yellow oilskin, revealing a rectangular crate. He took out a small pry bar and removed a series of staples. The twins helped him lift the lid off a steel-pointed, double-footed plow packed in straw. It had been polished to a violent gleam, and the sun caught and danced like hooked minnows on every point and angle. McBride didn’t dare look back, imagining his own single-footed plow: crude, hand-forged, nicked and dull as any kitchen blade.

“Brand new, our latest model. This here is the McCrory Reaper,” Cartwright said, “but I call it the Miracle Plow. Our engineers have designed it to render a maximum harvest as far as crops go, clearing twice as much land in the same amount of hours and cutting a deeper furrow, turning up fresher soil and more nutrients. We guarantee better crops or your money back. It’s been tested by a scientist at the state college for three years and the results have been proved.

“Look. I’m not the first drummer to come down the road and won’t be the last, but I sell no snake oil. I’m a farm boy myself, grew up on a spread the size of this one. I know what it’s like to rise with the last star and work under the light of the first. We lost that farm because we had two bad years running.” Cartwright licked his mouth with the moisture of the lie. “That’s all it took: two bad ones. I say with confidence, if we’d’ve had the McCrory Reaper, we’d still be farming my dad’s acres. But my dad wasn’t progressive. Wouldn’t change with the times. Now another’s working our land — successfully, with the Miracle Plow. Sold it to him myself. Broke my heart, too. Probably shouldn’t be telling it, but I did. You got to get that dollar. Boys, help me move this thing. If you don’t mind, Mr. McBride, let’s unbuckle your old plow and hitch up this one. You got a singletree? No? That’s okay. Let’s run a couple furrows with it, free of charge, and see how it measures up. Break a half-acre. Would you be averse?”

The question hung there. The twins looked to McBride for instruction, eyes black and hard. Cartwright saw one boy had only nine fingers — a way to tell them apart. McBride gave them a slight nod. They harnessed the Miracle Plow.

Tucking his tie between the buttons of his shirt, Cartwright approached the mule as the Irishmen sat on their haunches in an outbuilding’s shade. It was awkward for them to watch another man work without falling in line behind him. They rebelled against their jittering tendons, forced themselves still.

Cupping the mule’s nose, Cartwright said, “You got to get to know a mule, right? What’s his name? Ronald? Is that right? Ronald, do I have a treat for you. This thing’s going to feel light as a vest.” He moved behind the double-footed plow, leaned forward, and slapped the mule on its ass with a sharp tack fitted on the inside of his ring. The mule surged forward, the leather harness yanked with such force it began to groan.

“Jesus,” McBride whispered. “Look at Ronald pull.”

“This way, you’re working the ground, and it ain’t working you,” Cartwright said, chewing on the poor food. “I hate to say it, but it’s true. These days a man can’t hope to compete without one.”

They took supper in the kitchen, the core of a three-room dogtrot, dredging up beans and their white, watery gruel with a great circle of cornbread that McBride had cooked in a deep skillet, scooping the golden meal from a sack that stood open beside the woodstove. The meal had quite a grit to it, so the cornbread offered no flavor and the consistency of damp sawdust. Cartwright choked it down, thinking, Promotion, promotion. The sullen boys ate little, seeming to draw their fire from tobacco and wee hits of whiskey from a jug, which they didn’t attempt to conceal, nor did they offer to share.

Cartwright and McBride discussed the merits and dimensions of the new plow at length. Look how effortlessly it turned the earth. Like a knife through hot bread, McBride kept saying, shaking his head. It barely wears on the mule, barely at all.

Cartwright looked about the room. Why’d Threadgill even note these people? Yet the sucker list read SHERMAN MCBRIDE in lovely, arching script. It made no sense. Even if McBride sold everything in this cabin and hid every cent from the government, he still couldn’t scrape together fifteen dollars, not even with a straight razor pressed to his turkeyneck. These people were prime candidates for Moses’s jubilee. Perhaps there was a relation who could lend them the money, with interest.

Come nightfall, McBride scratched up some fodder for Cartwright’s horses and showed him to the barn loft. McBride bid him good night and retreated to the cabin. A shining sliver of moon rested on the planks, and blue foxfire wafted on the hills. Shivering in the cool of the evening, Cartwright stood in the barn door and watched Orion wheel in his chase.

Then he saw the twins standing in the twilight. They draped ancient flintlocks over their shoulders, the heavy octagonal barrels tamped with cut-nails and brass buttons. Not far away, a boar hog threw itself against the stall and bawled out, raking tusks against the wood. If a man fell in, it would leave nothing but a skull plate. Cartwright looked at the guns.

“They got a fox pinned on the mountain,” the ten-fingered boy said. “Sometimes they cross the river here at the cut. Might get us a shot. Hear them hounds a-singing?”

Bound in a nimbus of light, the boys cocked their ears as if to a phonograph for music.

“There a bounty on it?” Cartwright asked.

Oh yeah, the boys said. They named a good figure. Maybe a piece of that plow, they hinted. They said it carefully, their green young minds grappling with the hard currency of commerce. “I see you looking at my hand,” the maimed boy said, holding it up to the lantern.

Cartwright’s stomach coiled.

“Lost it baiting a jaw-trap. Hand slipped.” He looked Cartwright in the eye and said it bluntly, without threat; he hadn’t lived in a civilized town yet. He hadn’t learned shame.