William Gay - The Long Home

“I didn’t want no part of him. He just didn’t look right to me. He looked like a feller who’d do anything and already had a start on all of it but drivin a car, but I had three kids contrary enough to want to eat ever day or two. And he laid a twenty-dollar bill on the table, I never will forget it. It looked as big as a bedsheet, and I believe I could have warmed my hands off of it. I got to thinkin about grocers.”

“Hovington had about five or six hundred pounds of cotton down there in a crib and we loaded it on that truck. He had some old sideboards he’d cobbled up. We headed out to Hickman County and got that whiskey, and I was on pins and needles all the way. I never fooled none with whiskey, didn’t even drink. I think that’s why he wanted me. He had the whiskey hid under that cotton and a tarpaulin stretched over it and lit out like we was headed to Lawrenceburg to the gin. Made it all the way back and turned down the Mormon Springs road and a rod in that old truck started knockin. I was wringin wet with sweat, and it October, I knowed we wadnt goin to make it. I knowed I’d be settin there in the middle of the road with fifty gallon of whiskey and a blowed-up truck and I’d done made up my mind to take to the bushes.

“Then to top it off the law stopped us. Amacher was hid out in a sideroad and he stopped us. I don’t know if he’d been watchin Hardin or not, I do know he didn’t have em bought off like he does now. Amacher come up and checked my license. Wanted to know where we was goin. ‘Just takin off cotton,’ I told him. ‘Takin it where?’ he ast. We was headed the wrong way and I hadn’t even thought of it. Then Hardin spoke up calm as you please. He told Amacher we was headed to Lawrenceburg and the truck started tearing up and we come back.

“Amacher made me crank it up. It sounded like a cement mixer with a armful of brick throwed in it. Amacher just nodded and waved us on.

“Anyway, we got there and got the whiskey unloaded. Hardin took him a little drink and got to braggin. Spread hisself a little bit. That’s when he said what I started out to tell you that was the damnedest thing I ever heard of. He said he was a walkin miracle, that nothin couldn’t ever happen to him cause the worst already had. He said he was a walkin dead man.

“He told me he was born in a casket. Said his mama was killed when a horse run off with a buggy and throwed her out and broke her neck. They had her laid out and everthing and was preachin her funeral, and in a way I guess his too, when they heard a baby squallin. Folk didn’t know what on earth to do. Some just jumped up and took off runnin out of the church. Some of the women finally got up and looked. Godamighty. He was down in her clothes. He’d crawled out or got jarred out by them handlin the casket or somethin. Anyway there he was.”

“Not that I believe any of this horseshit for a minute,” Sam Long said. “But that’s the strongest argument for embalmin I ever heard. She’d a been embalmed he never would’ve been.”

“It just sounds like a damn lie to me,” a man named Pope said.

“I don’t know. I’ve thought about it a lot and I don’t know why a man would make up a tale like that to tell on hisself. But I don’t know why he’d tell it if it was the truth either.”

“Hardin never done nothin without a reason.”

“Yeah. It makes you think though. This ain’t nothin against religion but looky here. It looks like somebody slipped up and let him get started in the first place and then seen what they done. They tried to wipe out that mistake with anothern and let the cagey son of a bitch slip through anyway. I guess when they seen how set on gettin into this world he was they just throwed up their hands and said let him go.”

The car blew one peremptory blast of its horn but by the time it did Winer had already opened the door and stepped onto the porch. Dusk was deepening, the western sky beyond the darkling stubbed fields mottled with bloody red where the day’s light was draining off the rim of the world.

“What say, Winer?” The Packard sat gleaming dully in the yard.

“Hidy.”

“You got a minute? I got a little business I need to talk with you.”

“I reckon so.”

Winer approached the car. Hardin cut the switch and the lights and swung the door open a little way though he made no move to get out. He sat facing Winer with his arms on the door panel, chin resting on his forearm. “Come on up, boy. I reckon everbody’s peaceable.”

Winer thought the face curiously asymmetrical: the nose had been broken and healed crooked, tipped slightly toward the left side of his face. The right side of the face was lanternjawed, the cheek perpetually swollen. There was an imbalance to the jaws as if God Almighty had laid a hand on either side of the face, slipped one side a notch up and the other a notch down. The eyes were pale yellow, some peculiarity about the pupils. The eyes were goatlike. The left lid drooped sleepily as if his guard never dropped, as if one eye must watch while the other rested.

“I hear you run out of a job.”

“Yeah. I was working for Weiss.”

“Me and you might be able to help one another. You need work and I need it done.”

Winer hunkered in the yard, absentmindedly took up a stick, began to scratch meaningless hieroglyphics in the earth. A whippoorwill abruptly called from the woods, as if at some occult signal others took up the chorus. As dusk drew on the face phased out, there was only the voice and the pale gleam of the Packard, which seemed to emit some cool black light.

“What was it you wanted done?” Winer asked.

Something in his voice, caution perhaps, made Hardin grin. “I ain’t tryin to hire you to kill somebody,” he said. “I don’t sub that work out.” He took a cigarette from a pack, offered the pack to Winer, returned it to his pocket when it was refused. A match rasped on metal, flared. “You know that buildin I’m puttin up up there? I need some help on it. Reckon you can drive a nail? You ever done any carpenter work?”

“What I don’t know I can learn.”

“I hear your daddy was a carpenter.”

“That’s right.”

“I heard he was a damn good worker. I heard a lot of folks say you’re a pretty damn good worker yourself.”

“I don’t know about that.”

“I want that place finished before cold weather. I want it dried in before the rain starts and I ain’t getting it. I got Gobel Lipscomb down there piddlinass around and he’s cryin he ain’t got no help. Hell, he ain’t no carpenter nohow. I can pick up plenty of these old boys but as soon as they get enough worked out to buy a halfpint of whiskey you don’t see em no more till next Thursday. That ain’t what I want. What I want is somebody’ll be there to work ever day the weather’s fit and give me a day’s work for a day’s pay. From what I hear that’s you, Winer.”

“What are you paying?”

“Well, I’m payin fair wages. What are you worth?”

“I don’t know.”

“I might tell you a dollar an hour and be underpayin you. I might say two dollars a day and be payin you too much. What say you come down Monday mornin and we’ll try each other out.”

“Well, that sounds fair enough to me.”

“I guarantee you a fair wage. I ain’t astin you to work for nothin, and man nor boy don’t enter into it. I pay what a man’s worth. Me and you just might hit it off. I been lookin for a likely feller I could trust. A young man want to make his mark.”

Winer arose. “I’ll see you Monday then.”

“You got any tools?”

“I got my pa’s. I reckon he had about everthing I’ll need.”

“You get in there and rest up then. Me and you’s got a honkeytonk to build, Winer. A hell of a honkytonk. I’m gonna have a nigger cook fryin hamburgers for them that’s hungry. I’m gonna run poker games for them with money burnin their pockets and whores for them inclined in that direction. I’m gonna feed em, bleed em, and breed em, all under one roof. And you’re gonna build me that roof.”