William Gay - The Long Home

“What then?”

“The he said about dark both of you got into a Diamond-T truck. Said his goats was out and he was huntin em up that branch-run and kindly keepin out of sight in the brush, listening for their bells. Said he was lookin right at the truck when all at once the inside of it just lit up yeller and he heard a boom and directly you got out draggin Winer toward where that big old pit of a thing is.”

Cooper could see Hardin’s vague dark outline. When Hardin grinned he could see his teeth. “That old son of a bitch,” he said. “That sweet old son of a bitch.” There was something akin to admiration in his voice as if upon coming across his traits encoded idiosyncratically in others he could not help but feel kindly toward their possessors. “Course you know it’s all a pack of lies.”

“Course,” Cooper said automatically.

“You think that old man’s been settin on a piece of information like that for ten years? The shit he has. He’d a done had me in the pen or a pauper, one or the other. Either that or the worms would’ve finished up with him a long time ago.”

“Well, I knowed all along he was lyin.”

“Did you? Somehow I doubt it, Cooper. What you know is what you heard last. When you hear Oliver you know that and then when I talk that’s what you know.”

Cooper didn’t say anything for a moment as if he were marshalling his forces. “I know one thing,” he said. “I know Bellwether’ll be after Humphries till he issues a warrant first thing Monday mornin and he’ll be on your doorstep before the ink’s good and dry on it.”

“Say it comes to trial, Cooper. Just supposin I wasn’t able to prove I was innocent and it all boiled down to my word agin his. What do you think would happen?”

“Well.” Cooper seemed flattered that his judgment was sought, paused to give it added weight. “I’ll tell you just what I think. That old man has lived here in this county all his life and you won’t find a man he lied to. He’s been rough in his day and had his ups and downs but he’d have to have a awful good reason to come up with a tale like that.”

“He’s got it too. That Goddamn Winer boy smartin off right and left. Whoever did kill old man Winer ort to’ve got to him before he went to seed.” He fell silent, studyin the contents of his wallet. “I thought Jiminiz could teach him a lesson but I see I misplaced my trust. Next time it’ll be just me and him and one on each end of a gunbarrel and he won’t get off so light.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Get me Dr. Sulhaney. Go down to Clifton tonight and tell him I got to see him tomorrow. Not no telephone, tell him I said come. I’ll put that old son of a bitch so far back in the crazyhouse he’ll wish he’d stuck to goats and ginseng.”

“Sulhaney won’t come cheap.”

“He never did. Doctors ain’t cheap, just deputy sheriffs. Get me that old whiteheaded lawyer Hull too. He looks like a damn senator or a preacher or somethin.”

Cooper was watching the pocketbook with the hypnotic eye of a serpent studying a bird. “Hull ain’t cheap neither,” he said. “It’ll cost you a arm and a leg.”

“I can always grow another one,” Hardin said expansively. “I’ve done it before.”

Bitter cold and timber frozen to the heart kept Simmons’ log crew from the woods and drove them to the warmth of Sam Long’s coalstove, clustered before the hearth amongst the ancient Coke-crate idlers. Beyond the redlettered LONG’s on the fogged windows the wind sang hard pellets of hominy snow along the sidewalks, harried children from their dimestore visions, Christmas enshrined out of reach beneath plateglass.

As it was wont to do, the conversation of these malingers had started with Dallas Hardin and it had remained there.

“All right, say he done it,” Sam Long said. “I don’t know if he did or he didn’t but say he did. You think he’ll get day one out of it? Why, hell no. They can’t prove he had a thing in the world to do with it.”

“Who told it?”

“Hell, everbody’s tellin it. You think you can keep a thing like that quiet? The only way’s to find it and squirrel it away the way they say the old man Oliver did. I don’t know who told it first. Teed Niten’s wife works in the registrar’s office and she said that whole courthouse bunch is talkin about it.”

“Well, you’re right about one thing,” Simmons said. “He won’t do no time. But reckon it’s Winer sure enough?”

“That’s what the government dentist record said. He was World War I. It was Winer all right. Winer with a hole in his skull the size of a number three washtub.”

“You remember when Hardin was supposed to’ve shot old man Wildman? Shot him in the road the way you would shoot a dog and claimed self-defense. Wildman’s mama, she seen it but Lord, she was old, must’ve been ninety if she was a day. Fore it was over Hardin got a doctor to swear she was crazy and had drawed it all up in her head. Hardin got her committed to Boliver and I believe she died there in 1935.”

“Yeah,” a man named Pope said. “Hardin went to Ratcliff and tried to get him to sign some papers but Ratcliff just laughed at him. Charged him five dollars for a consultation and told him to go to hell. Two or three mornins later Ratcliff went up the steps to open his office and here was a big brown poke with the top rolled down. He thought at first it was okry or stringbeans or somethin of that sort, it was summer and folks used to pay him with garden stuff or just whatever they had. Then that poke moved. Ratcliff hit it with his walkin stick and out come this big old velvettail rattlesnake. He said he like to had a stroke right there. That’s what he said but he was able to kill it with his stick and drive to Mormon Springs and throw it on Hardin’s porch. That’s what got me about it. Why didn’t Hardin kill him or burn him out? Less he just always knowed who he had his bluff in with and who he didn’t.”

“Bluff, hell,” Long said. “Ask Nathan Winer about his bluff. Senior or junior.”

“That boy’s peculiar,” Simmons said. “Acts like he’s about half-smart.”

“That boy’s all right,” Long said. “If I was Hardin I’d be dreadin him worse than anybody else. Hardin’ll have to kill him to stop him.”

Amidst the longforsaken oddments of scrapiron Oliver found a thin length of steel with two screwholes that when he hacksawed it aligned themselves with the jambs of the front door. He drove nails through the holes across the closed door and then went into the kitchen.

Figuring Hardin for a backdoor man, he set the leatherbottomed ladderback perpendicular to and about six feet inside the kitchen door. He backed off a time or two and eyed it from different angles, repositioned it slightly to his liking. He toenailed the chair to the kitchen floor with eightpenny nails and lashed the Browning shotgun to the back of the chair with pliers clipping the excess neatly and feeling to see was the gun tied securely. He looped a slipknot of staging around the trigger and down through the rungs of the chair and across the torn linoleum to the door and he stood for a time studying it. It presented a complication. The door opened inward. He thought about it then pushed the door, closed it, took up slack in his line, and reknotted the staging. This time there was a dry click when the door was halfopen. Oliver closed the door and recocked the gun and stood studying it. He packed his pipe and lit it with a kitchen match and went outside and came through the kitchen door.

He had thought so. When the hammer fell he was standing aside to come through the opening the way a man comes through a door and the blast might have torn an arm off but Oliver was not hunting arms this night. He went back and retightened the staging once more and this time the click came when the door was open only an inch or so and a man would be fully in front of it. He nodded thoughtfully to himself. It was a neat, workmanlike job.