William Gay - The Long Home

Bellwether had light wavy hair going prematurely gray. His mild eyes were gray as well and his smooth face calm and reassuring. He had the note unfolded on his desk. The three words were blockprinted on a leaf of foolscap from a nickel tablet. They looked like the work of a child. Bellwether shaking his head.

“What do you want me to do?”

“I want him put away.”

“There’s no way I can even arrest him on the strength of this. His name’s not on it. It’s not even a direct threat. Even if I sent it to Nashville no expert could tell me anything about that printing. It may just be a prank. What did you get into it with him about?”

“My daughter went out there with them DePreists and took to hangin around down there at Mormon Springs. Runnin wild, layin drunk down there. I went after her a time or two and the last time Hardin cussed me and run me off. I told him what I thought of him. I told him I was going outside the county if yins wouldn’t do nothin.”

“And then you got this.”

“In the mailbox but it wasn’t postmarked or nothin. He just slipped it in the box. It’s scary, somebody sneakin around like that, peepin in your windows, spyin on you.”

“What happened to your daughter?”

“Last I heard she was still down there livin with Hardin. Her and that Hovington trash too. God knows what kind of devil’s nest of meanness they’ve got down there. But I’ve give up on her. All I want is not to be burned out.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“What good’ll that do?”

“Maybe none. But it’ll let him know you know who wrote the note and that if anything does happen we’ll know where to come lookin. It might scare him.”

She arose, an angry, heavyset middle-aged woman clutching a shiny black pocketbook. “If you plan on scarin Hardin you just might as well set here in the courthouse,” she told him. “I knowed all the time it wouldn’t do no good but I come anyway. All right. You go talk to him. And I’ll tell you what I aim to do. I’ll lay for him with a shotgun. And the next time I need you it’ll be to gather him up out of my back yard.”

“I’ll talk to him anyway,” Bellwether said.

Bellwether talked but as he did he got the distinct impression that Hardin was not even listening. His eyes looked abstracted and far away as if he were already experiencing what he knew he was going to do and perhaps could not have been deterred from doing even if he had been willing. They sat in the shade on Hardin’s porch and as Bellwether talked a slight, pretty girl with violet eyes that in the shade looked black as sloe came out and stood leaning against the screen door. No sound came from the house save the constant whirr of an electric fan. A drunk man naked to the waist and wearing army O.D. pants and dogtags reeled around the corner of the house. His mouth was already open to speak but when he saw Bellwether in his neat pressed khakis and badge he veered suddenly back out of sight. The girl smiled a small, secret smile and said nothing.

When Bellwether appeared finished, Hardin said, “You care for a little drink?”

“I reckon not. I ain’t ever been much of a drinkin man.”

“I didn’t mean nothin illegal, Bellwether. I got two-three cases of Co-Colas icin down in there.”

“I reckon not.”

The fell silent. Hardin’s hands were composed. He kept studying his shiny wingtip shoes. “Damned if I know what to tell ye,” he finally said. “That old woman’s crazy. And that girl ain’t even here no more. She took off with some soldier from Fort Campbell. But that old mother hen…you know how some women gets in the change of life. Some goes one way, some another, and I reckon she went crazy.” He paused, seemed to be in a deep study. “I hate to say this about southern womanhood,” he said. “But she got to horsin. You know how some of these women gets to where they got to have it. Well, she got to horsin and kept comin around here tryin to put it on me. Hintin around. Finally she spelled it out to me and I turned her down flat. Hell, I can pick and choose.”

Bellwether did not believe one word of this story but at the same time he divined that Hardin didn’t care if he believed it or not. He was spinning out the tale for his own amusement, just something to pass the time. Just keeping his hand in.

“Everybody knows she’s about half a bubble off plumb,” Hardin said. “Didn’t hang a Co-Cola bottle up in her that time and had to go to Ratcliff and have the bottom busted out of it fore they could even get it out? They tell it on the streetcorners. Ain’t you heard that?”

Bellwether stood up. He felt an intense need to be elsewhere, he’d stayed not only past his welcome but past the limits of his endurance. “It don’t matter if I’ve heard it or not,” he said. “As far as I know there’s no law against it. There is a law against threatenin people, and torchin off their property, and my job is to enforce it.”

“Shore,” Hardin said thoughtfully. “Folks always got to do their jobs. You got yours to do, I got mine.”

“It might be easier on both of us if they never overlapped,” Bellwether said.

“I was thinkin that very thing,” Hardin told him.

From the edge of the wood Hardin watched her get out of the truck, heard the door slam. The widow Bledsoe crossed in front of the old pickup, a square, unlovely woman with a masculine walk. She opened the door on the passenger side and a few moments later reappeared burdened with two grocery sacks, going up the walk to the front door. He unpocketed and glanced at his watch. “Go on in,” he told her softly. “It’s time for ye stories. Time to see what’s happenin on the radio.”

He sat in silence for a time seeing in his mind her movements about the house, a vivid image of her before a cabinet, arm raised with a can of something. Folding the empty bags, laying them by for another time.

When he judged her finished and listening to the radio he arose, followed the hillside fence as it skirted the base of a bluff. It was very quiet. Once a thrush called, in the vague distance he could hear the sorrowing of doves. The timber here was cedar and the air was full of it, a smell that was almost nostalgic yet unspecific, recalling to him sometime past, incidents he could not or would not call to mind.

He waited until she had her hay cut and stored and the loft was stacked with it nigh to the ceiling. A good crop, it looked to him, for a year so dry. The barn was made of logs and situated in the declivity between two hills and it sat brooding and breathless under the weight of the sun. The hills were tall and thickly timbered and the glade was motionless Not a weed stirred, a leaf, heat held even the calling of birds in abeyance.

Lattice shade, the hot smell of baking tin and curing wood and dry hay. Eyes to a crack in the log, he watched the hose. It lay silent as the barn. Some old house abandoned by its tenants, reliving old memories. Drowsing in the sun. “I guess you thought it was all blowed over,” he told the house. Eyes still to the unchinked crack he urinated on the earth floor, spattering his boots with foam-flecked bits of straw and humus. He straightened and adjusted his trousers. A core of excitement lay in him like a hot stone. He ascended through dust-moted light a ladder to the loft. Under hot tin dirtdaubers droned in measured incessance, constructed their mud homes along the lathing. Hardin was already wet with sweat. He turned toward the house, he could see the sun wink off the metal roof, instill in the wall of greenery a jerky miragelike motion as if nothing were quite real. Near the end of the roof the wind had taken a section of tin and the bare lathing showed, he could smell the hot incendiary odor of the pine. Harsh light trapped in a near-translucent knothole glowed orange and malefic as if already an embryonic fire smoldered there.