William Gay - The Long Home

Winer turned to study Hardin’s asymmetrical face. “Then why did you hire me?”

For a millisecond the eyes were perplexed. “Damned if I know. I reckon deep down I was just fuckin with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just let it be. It ain’t got nothin to do with this.”

Winer got out. Before he closed the car door he said, “I aim to see her. There’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Hell, you done been stopped. You was stopped the minute I kicked them comestained blankets out of the stumphole. You was stopped and never even knowed it.”

Deputy Cooper stood at the edge of the porch waiting while Hardin read the paper. Amber Rose was sitting against a porch stanchion with her dress high on her brown thighs. Cooper kept trying not to look. “Pull your dress down,” Hardin said without looking up from the paper. When he had finished it he handed it back to Cooper. “All right. I see what it says. All this whereas and wherefore bullshit. Now, what does it mean?”

“Well. All it is is a summons. It means you got to go to court. There’s goin to be a hearin. He got it up at Franklin. Blalock did. He tried to get Judge Humphries to issue one and course he wouldn’t, he told Blalocl he’d just have to work this deal about the horses out with you. Blalock he throwed a regular fit they said nearly foamin at the mouth and went to Franklin, and seen a circuit judge up there and he wrote one up. It come down this mornin and I brought it on out.”

“I reckon you didn’t have nubo selection. You doin all right, Cooper, and Bellwether ain’t goin to be sheriff always. We might fool around and run you next election they hold.”

“You know I always tried to work with you, Mr. Hardin.”

“Shore you did. But that Bellwether, now…he’s aimin to wake up one of these times out of a job. Or just not wake up at all.”

Hardin sat down in a canebottom rocker, leaned back, closed his eyes. “What’d happen if I just don’t show up at this hearin or whatever?”

“If one of you don’t go then the othern gets a judgement agin him. Like if you don’t show, the judge’ll automatically find for Blalock. He gets them horses back and you don’t get nothin.”

“Goddamn him.”

“I can’t help it. That’s the way it works.”

“I know you can’t. But he ain’t gettin them fuckin horses. If he does it’ll be when I’m dead and gone. All these sons of bitches startin to shove me around, Cooper, and I don’t aim to have it.”

“I don’t blame you about that, Mr. Hardin.” Cooper was turning his cap over and over in his hands, eyeing the door. The girl hadn’t pulled her dress down but cooper was looking everywhere but at her.

On a cold, bright day in late November Winer and Motormouth set out toward Clifton seeking gainful employment. The prospect of working regularly again and the idea of starting a day with a clear purpose and working toward it cheered Winer and he rode along listening bemusedly to the fantasies Motormouth spun for him.

“We’ll get us a little place down here when we get to makin good,” he said. “Buy us some slick clothes. Boy, they got some honkytonks down here so rough you kindly peep in first then sidle through the door real quick. And women? I’s in one down here one time and this old gal, just as I come to the door she come up and grabbed me by the pecker and just led me off.”

Winer said something noncommittal and stared off across the river. The highway was running parallel with the water now and beyond the border of cypress and willow the water was cold and metalliclooking, choppy in the windy sun. Far and away to his right what looked like an island and rising from it some enormous circular structure of gray stone like a silo or lighthouse and past this farther till three great pillars brooding in the mist like pylons for a bridge no longer there. He did not inquire the purpose of any of this lest Motormouth be inspired toward further fabrication, for no one had ever heard Motormouth admit the existence of anything he did not know and he always had an answer for everything even if he had to make it up. Winer watched them vanish like something unknown on a foreign coast and they drove on past used-car lots with their sad pennants fluttering on guywires and past old tilting groceries and barns with their tin roofs advertising Bruton Snuff and Popcola and Groves’ Chill Tonic like fading hieroglyphs scribed by some prior race.

“Some of these old riverrats,” Motormouth mused. “These old boys work the barges and stay out a week or two at a time. You think they ain’t ready when they hit port? They’d as soon cut ye throat with a rusty pocketknife as look at ye. They make Hardin look like a home-ec teacher. You have to be careful you walk soft,” he cautioned Winer. “A boy like you ain’t never been out of the county could get in a lot of trouble around here.”

Coming into Clifton they stopped for breakfast and directions at a place called Mother Leona’s. Winer judged himself safe in any place named Mother Leona’s but he didn’t see her about, after all his eggs and homefries were dished up by a surlylooking man in dirty whites and a chef’s hat cocked on the back of his head.

“We down here lookin for work,” Motormouth volunteered.

“I ain’t hirin today,” the man said.

“No, we lookin for where they load the ties. We heard they was hirin.”

“That’d be down by the docks.”

“I guess so. We ain’t never done it but we’ll shore give her a whirl. We hard workers.”

“You don’t have to sell me,” the man said, lowering a basket of sliced potatoes into poppin grease. “I don’t do the hirin for that neither.”

Winer broke a biscuit open and paused suddenly with his butterladen knife. A perfectly intact candlefly, wings spread for flight, was seized in the snowy dough like an artifact from broken stone. He sat for a time studying it like an archaeologist pondering its significance or how it came to be there so halt in flight and at length he laid his bread and knife side.

Motormouth pushed his empty plate back, chewed, and swallowed. He drank coffee. “Where’s these here docks at?” he asked.

The counterman turned from the spitting grill as if he might inspect these outlanders more closely. “They generally always down by the river,” he said at length.

A mountain of crossties guided them to where the work progressed. Men were unjamming the ties with tiepicks and dragging them to where other workers loaded them onto a system of chutes that slid them to yet another crew in the hull of the barge. They stood for a time watching the men work, admiring the smooth efficiency with which the workers hefted the ties from the dock, the riverward giving his end of the two a small, neat spin just so onto the chute and the near one pushing with the same force each time and the tie gliding smoothly down the oiled chute to slam against the bulkhead of the barge. “Hell, they ain’t nothin to it,” Moormouth said. “Look at the way them fellers goes about it. Reckon who you ask?”

Winer didn’t reply. He was studying the ties. They were nine-by-twelve green oak he judged to be ten or twelve feet long and they had a distinctly heavy look about them despite the deceptive ease with which they were slung onto the chutes.

They approached the river. The barge rocked in the cold gray water, a wind out of the north behind them blew scraps of paper past them and aloft over the river like dirty stringless kites. Nameless birds foraged the choppy waters and beyond them the river’s farther shore looked blurred and unreal and no less bleak and drear than this one.

The barge was secured by hawsers tied to bits on the dock and it rocked against its cushion of old cartires strung together. Two men in the aft of the boat took the ties as they came off the chute and aligned them in stacks. The chutes seemed always to have a tie coming off, a tie sliding, another one being loaded on. An almost hypnotic ritual of economic motion. The workers were big men, heavily muscled even in this cold wind off the river they worked in their shirtsleeves.