William Gay - The Long Home

“No.” Hardin didn’t smile. “You know where a feller name of Blackstock lives? Runs a drygood store.”

“Charles Blackstock? Sure. West Fourth Street, right behind the school. Why?”

“I got him out in the car. Him and some whitecaps or Kluxers or some damn thing come down to the house to teach me a lesson.”

“Is he dead?”

“No, but he may have wished he was a time or two.”

The men at the table arose and followed Hardin back through the cabstand. The woman had awakened and her face wore a stunned, vapid look as if she did not know where she was, or care.

Blackstock was conscious as well. He stirred on the back floorboard, said something unintelligible. His eyes stared at the faces ringing the windows of the Packard but did not remark them. He flung an arm across his face as if the light bothered him. His trouserleg from the knee down was saturated with coagulating blood.

“Shitfire,” de Vries said. “You better get him to a hospital fore you’re lookin a murder charge in the face.”

Hardin got behind the wheel, cranked the engine. “By the way,” he said, “you didn’t by any chance know anything about this, did you? Or know anybody else who might be in on it?”

“Hell no, Hardin. They may hit me next.”

“No. It was me they wanted.”

The man remained conscious all the way to his house, mumbling something incoherent, prayer, blasphemy, benediction. When Hardin opened the door and laid a hand on either side of his shirtfront the eyes opened and when Hardin jerked as hard as he could the face blanched lifeless and the eyes rolled back and he went to sleep again. Hardin laid him in the dewy grass and sat down breathing hard. As he arose a black dog loped around the corner of the house, paused, its hackles rising. It growled deep in its throat.

Hardin had the pocketknife out. “Try it if you feel lucky,” he told the dog. The dog hushed and then dropped to its belly and began to inch along the ground toward the wounded man.

Hardin got back in the car and blew the horn. The dog turned and lay watching him across the fallen man. Hardin lit a cigarette with the gold lighter, turned to study the house. It was silent and dark. He blew the horn again, longer, puffed the cigarette, his image reflected back by the windshield fiercely orange, a curious fiery face with black recesses for eyes.

The porchlight came on. The door opened and a woman stood under the lightbulb tying the belt of a yellow robe. She raised a hand to her face and stood staring at the crumpled man on the lawn. She opened her mouth to speak but the Packard abruptly cut off whatever she said. Hardin glanced back once and she was running down the walk.

Sometime after four o’clock in the morning William Tell Oliver was awakened again, this time by a heavy determined pounding at the door. He lay for a sleepy minute listening to it, perhaps thinking that if he ignored it it would go away. It did not. It intensified and after a time a voice began to call, “Hey, hey.”

What on earth, the old man wondered. He got up slowly, began to pull on his pants. The voice kept calling. “All right, all right,” Oliver said. “I’m comin.” He took down the Browning over-and-under from the rack above the bed. He lit a lamp and with it in one hand the gun in the other crossed to the door. He leaned the gun against the wall and opened the door slightly.

The moon had set by now and the porch was in darkness, fainter darkness framing the bulk of the man standing before the door. The door opened wider, allowing the seepage of yellow light to spread, illuminating a tiredlooking man leaning against the doorjamb. He swayed slightly as if drunk or exhausted.

“What is it?” Oliver asked.

“Well, I’m in kind of a bind and I need some help. I need to get you to run me into town.”

“Have you got a stick?”

The man looked startled. “A stick? What kind of a stick?”

“Well, you wanted run to town. I shore ain’t got no automobile.”

“Shitfire.” When Oliver didn’t comment the man said, “I’m Cecil Blalock.”

“I know who you are. But I still ain’t got no way to town. What’s the trouble, ye car play out?”

“Yeah, and it’s a hell of a piece to town. Seems like I been wanderin around in the woods half the night.”

“Where’d ye have trouble?”

“Down by Hardin’s.”

“Why, Lord, that ain’t over a mile. It ortnt took but a few minutes to walk that.”

“Yeah. Well I might’ve got turned around or somethin. How about lettin me use your phone to call a cab?”

Oliver was silent a time. “I’m sorry,” he said at length. “I just ain’t bein no help at all. I ain’t got no telephone either.”

“Hellfire.” Blalock stood as if undecided what his next move should be. A cool wind blew across the porch, rustled through the leaves. The light wavered in the quaking globe, guttered, flared up. “Thanks anyway,” Blalock said. He descended the steps and crossed the yard toward the road. He was out of sight but Oliver could hear the walking. “Hey,” Oliver called. The steps ceased. “Ain’t no use wakin up them Winer folks. They ain’t got no car either.” There was no reply save the steps commencing again and after a moment he went back inside and closed the door.

Like aging birds aligned on a winter wire the row of old men sat before Sam Long’s cold stove and endlessly refought Hardin’s set-to with the whitecaps. On creaking Coke crates and upended cuts of wood they refurbished or delineated the story to its marrow according to their whims.

“I hear they takin his leg off,” Horace Hensley said. “What of it Hardin didn’t take off with that highpowered rifle.”

“Some say Hardin didn’t do it,” a man named Pulley said. “Blackstock hisself says he had a fight with a feller he caught ransacking his house.”

“A man tells a baldfaced lie like that I wouldn’t believe him if he was standin in Buffalo River and he told me his feet was wet.”

Sam Long dumped William Tell Oliver’s poke of ginseng onto the scale, watched intently the fluctuation of the needle. “I make it just under thirty-nine ounces, Mr. Oliver. You want it in cash or credit?”

“Well, I took me on a partner. You might ort to just let me have it in cash.”

“That must’ve been a purty good to-do, though,” Long said. He punched No Sale on the cash register and began to count bills onto Oliver’s palm. “Shoot Blackstock’s leg off and kill a Diamond-T truck. All in the same night. Well, I guess Blackstock was astin for it since he didn’t have no business down there. But that truck was just a innocent bystander.”

Horace Hensley had been listening in silence. “I’ll tell you what Hardin told me one time,” he finally said. “And it was the damnedest thing I ever heard tell of, I still don’t know if it was so or not. You never could tell when Hardin was tellin the truth and when he was talking just to hear hisself.

“It was right after he come to this part of the country. Back before Hovington died and right after Hardin moved in with Pearl. Times was tight then and by God I mean tight. They wadnt no soldiers blowin money nor judges birdhuntin with him nor none of these sharptittied Memphis whores down there. He wadnt drivin no Packard back then neither, all he had was an old Diamond-T truck and he won that off old man Pennington in a poker game.”

Pope raised the lid of the dead stove and spat into the ashes. “Which he probably rigged,” he said.

“Which he probably did,” Hensley agreed. “Anyway, somebody had busted his still up, just teetotally demolished it and busted all his whiskey, and he worked up some kind of deal with Homer McCandless over in Hickman County and bought a bunch of whiskey off of him. I don’t know how, he probably beat him, you know how slick he could talk. The hell of it was Hardin couldn’t drive a car. Here he was a grown man and he couldn’t even drive. Oh, he could I guess hold one in the road but nobody had never showed him the gears nor how to start and stop one. Course he can now he drives that Packard, but he couldn’t then. So he come to me.