William Gay - The Long Home

“Why, hellfire. A string of Goddamn lies.”

“I seen you drivin out to Hardin’s place last spring. I seen him hand you money and you slip it down your britches pocket and you and him had a regular get-together. The brotherly love was just drippin off yins both. After a while you left and they flew to totin out whiskey like the house was on fire. Time the rest of the laws got there that place was as bare of whiskey as a Baptist footwashin.”

“You Goddamned lyin troublemaker,” Cooper said, rising, his face fiery with rage. “Sheriff, he—”

“Go get that coffee, Cooper.”

Cooper crossed to the door. He opened it and stood for a moment as if undecided what to do. He turned back toward the room. “Damn it, Sheriff,” he said. Then he walked through the doorway and slammed the door behind him.

“If that story’s true you ought to told me long before this, Mr. Oliver.”

“It wadnt nothin to me. That yins lookout. I just come about Hardin and if I’d wanted him to know my business I’d just cut out the middleman and deal with him direct.”

Bellwether didn’t say anything. He took out a pack of Luckies, tipped one out and smelled it reflectively, sat turning it in his fingers studying it as if he’d never come across another quite like it before.

“This other thing though, I ort to have come about it.” Oliver was silent a moment and when he spoke his voice was charged with vehemence. “I knowed yins would work it around and blame it on me or I would’ve done brought it in. God knows I never wanted it on me. But I didn’t want no more time and I didn’t want that boy thinkin it was me killed his pa. I reckon I’d’ve brought it anyway if I hadn’t knowed he’d kill Hardin and throw his own life away.”

Bellwether had arisen. “Here, slow down a little,” he said. He touched the old man’s shoulder. “I can’t follow just whatever it is we’re talkin about here.”

“Course I didn’t care for him killin Hardin cept for messin his ownself up. I think a right smart of that boy.”

“Who are we talkin about here, Mr. Oliver.?”

“Hardin, Hardin,” the old man said impatiently, he seemed to think Bellwether bereft of his senses. “What do you think? Somethin’s got to be done about him. Somebody’s goin to have to waste a cartridge on him and I wish I’d done it myself a long time ago. He’s just using up air other folk could put to good use.”

“Mr. Oliver, have you somethin I can use against Dallas Hardin or is this just some kind of general complaint?”

Oliver set the shoebox on Bellwether’s desk. Bellwether crossed behind the desk and reseated himself in the chair and drew the box toward him, a hand on either end of it. He sat for a moment without opening it.

“There he is,” the old man said. “He’s yourn. I’ve done with it, I wash my hands of it. I’ll let yins worry about it for a while.”

Bellwether opened the shoebox and folded the crinkly tissue aside. He sat staring down at all there was of Nathan Winer. His face didn’t change. He folded the paper gently back over the skull and took up the cigarette he’d laid aside and lit it. He leaned back in the chair and laced his fingers across his stomach.

“Tell me a story, Mr. Oliver,” he said.

“I don’t mind buyin a pig in a poke,” Hardin told Cooper. “If I figure I might ever have a use for the poke. But hell, you don’t even know what sort of a poke it is you got.”

“Well. It’s more a feelin than anythin else. I know he told Bellwether somethin about you and I know it was somethin purty serious. He give Bellwether somethin he brought in a shoebox too but I don’t know what it was.”

“Say he did?”

“Yeah. And he wanted me out from there, got right feisty about it and got Bellwether down on my neck. He seen me and you together back in the spring and he seen me take money.”

“Seen it or heard about it?”

“He says he seen it.”

“Yeah. I guess he did at that. I wish I’d a killed that old son of a bitch long ago when I had the chance.”

“Well, what are we goin to do?”

“Do? Hellfire. How do I know what to do if I don’t even know what it is you’re tellin me? All I know is my path and his has wound up a little close to suit me and I believe they’re goin to cross a little later down the line.” * * *

Motormouth took a taxicab from Ackerman’s Field to Winer’s. Through the cab window he studied the cold silver fields and wondered what he’d tell Winer about Chicago. But he didn’t guess it mattered. Chicago had been different than he’d expected, fastmoving folks who were caught up in their own lives and had no time for you. All the time he was there instead of becoming a memory the thought of the wife who had quit him grew stronger. The last week in Chicago while he waited for his last paycheck he stayed in his room and drank and he forgot to eat and finally he began to hear voices. Footsteps approached his door and a fist knocked, but when he opened the door there was no one there. He was sitting on the sofa when his mother said quite clearly, “Clifford.” He did not even open his eyes. His mother was long dead and he knew it could not be her.

On the bus back he had dreamed of his wife but when he awoke he could not call the dream back any easier than he had been able to call the wife. Snowy little towns in Indiana and Missouri had rolled past and he thought he might get off at any one of them and the rest of his life would be different but he had not.

It was the middle of the night when he got there but he woke Winer anyway. He wanted to borrow the Chrysler. He said he only wanted it for a couple of hours. He told Winer that he had a good job in Chicago and that they had given him a paid vacation. Winer didn’t believe paid vacations came that easily even in Chicago but he was halfasleep and for some reason he lent Hodges the car anyway. Perhaps it was because he had never come to think of it as his own, it had always been Motormouth’s. More likely it was because of the curious aura Motormouth projected that Winer did not know what to make of it. Watching Motormouth drive away Winer at the attic window was already having second thoughts but the taillights grew faint down the Mormon Springs road and were gone.

Motormouth drove to the house where his wife and Blalock lived but there was no one home. He thought he might drive off down to Hardin’s and drink a beer while he waited but he was there three days before Hardin decided what to do with him.

These were the days when Hardin felt set upon from every side and Motormouth’s arrival did nothing to cheer him, it was just one more trial to bear, and he felt before this winter was through he would be either gone or as hard and wiry as the ironwoods that clung precariously on the cliffs above the pit.

A state prosecutor had been appointed a man to evaluate such properties of Hardin’s as had been destroyed by the Morgans and he had arrived and gone, a necktied man from Nashville wearing a blue suit and totting up figures in a notebook that he consigned to a briefcase. It didn’t look promising to Hardin. The accountant had stood with his head cocked sideways studying the garden, or lack of one, then looked all about, uncertain of the spot, and just shook his head. The man hadn’t seemed impressed with Hardin’s claim or with Hardin either for that matter. Hardin guessed the man figured Nashville was far enough out of reach or that he planned to die home in bed.

Hardin went out to the pen and watched the stallion lope toward him to nuzzle the sugar cubes he palmed from his coat pocket and something old and unnamable stirred in him, almost an intimation of destiny: he felt an intense nostalgia for himself as he had surely been, he felt that if he could magically be back on Flint Creek where he had grown up, just him and the stallion, then he could attain a measure of peace. Suddenly he felt like an old man reeling down the years of his life and all he saw worth holding on to was the horse: in his vision he saw himself and the Morgan moving like phantoms through the unalterable geography of his youth and he could smell the brittle air of childhood winters, feel the hot weight of the sun, smell the sharecropped cotton holding back the sack he dragged across the sandy red earth. His father’s voice bespoke him out of a dead time and to dispel it he drank from up uptilted halfpint then pocketed it and went back into the house to the fire.