William Gay - Little Sister Death

Then one day in late July Charlie broke his arm and took the mules and went in early. A hackberry they were sawing split twelve or fifteen feet in the air. It kicked back, and it was a wonder they both weren’t killed. They had abandoned the saw and ran like hell, Charlie’s arm flopping like a broken chicken’s wing as he ran, stopping only when they heard the hackberry tumbling off down a hillside. Charlie left to get his arm set and left Swaw to trim up and mark the timber they already had down.

Of course, Swaw quit as soon as Cagle was out of sight and whittled himself a sharp stick and went to digging ginseng. Swaw would work as hard as you wanted him to as long as you watched him, but if you ever looked away he’d be long gone, almost as if the photoelectric weight of your eyes triggered some delicate sensory mechanism in his brain that kept the ax or saw moving.

Ginseng grew in abundance around these beech trees and this was found money. Clear money above his dollar a day he was going to get anyway and digging was a sight easier than swinging a chopping ax. He liked digging it anyway. He fairly flew at it, like a miser turned loose in a roomful of money and allowed to keep all he could pick up. Before long his overall pockets were bulging.

At the cry of a whippoorwill he leapt up, startled. All at once he looked up, as if he had been awakened from sleep or in a trance. Oh shit, he said. He swallowed hard. All there was of the sun was a thin rind of gold drowning in mottled red, and a thick blue darkness was seeping out of the hollows like rising waters. A fine thread of fear ran through him. He trudged out of the woods, into the field, his gait gradually increasing until his legs were fairly scissoring across the field.

He told himself he wasn’t going to look when he passed the graveyard. If you don’t look, it won’t be so, he told himself. He looked anyway and there was a girl sitting on Jacob Beale’s tombstone, plaiting her long blond hair. She was watching Swaw with bold eyes out of a pretty, sullen face, and when she arose the pale fall of her hair swung behind her. She beckoned him.

He ran, listening to the sob of his breathing, thinking desperately that that must have been old Clyde Simpson’s daughter and knowing full well all the time that Simpson’s daughter was dumpy and heavyset and had a flat, stupid-looking face.

Cagle could work the mules snaking timber one-armed, so he was back to work in a few days. Swaw didn’t see the girl for over a week. He kept his mouth shut, too. Then one Monday at dusk she came walking out from beneath the pear tree, humming to herself. Swaw could hear her, could hear the melody that had a haunting childhood familiarity about it, and he was about to say, There by God, now what do you say to this, when he saw Charlie’s bland, preoccupied face, jaws patiently worrying their quid of tobacco. His eyes widened and he turned to the stolid mules, walking stumblefooted down the slope, stopping momentarily to crop grass, coming on when the slack pulled out of the lines, and Swaw thought, They don’t see it. Nary one of them does. This is supposed to be just for me. A moment of blinding insight crept over him.

The girl was visible from the knees up, her calves and feet lost in the weeds, and even as he watched she changed from a pale sepia transparency to flesh and blood, a live woman of seventeen or eighteen standing there petulant and curiously erotic, so that he felt a rush of desire, a quickening of the blood in his groin that sickened him. She tossed her hair back. She seemed to be waiting for something. Her face was bright and conspiratorial, as if she and Swaw shared some secret the world didn’t even suspect. She raised a hand and pointed at him. Her mouth opened. He could see the clean line of her teeth. Her lips moved. You, the lips mouthed.

Cagle asked, Hey, what the hell’s the matter with you?

She vanished.

What?

What the hell’s the matter with you?

I thought for a minute I seen something.

You look like you know damn well you did.

Did you not see anything back there?

All I see is night comin and you wastin time.

They commenced walking. Swaw didn’t say anything. He began to roll a cigarette. His fingers started to shake, the little brown flakes of tobacco sifting about his moving feet, the plain rice paper shredding so that he wadded it in his fingers and dropped it covertly beside the pack.

Owen, I ain’t sayin you seen somethin and I ain’t sayin you didn’t, but I know what I’d do if I did. I’d put it out of my mind damn quick. I’d tell myself somethin likely it could have been and I’d hold on to that as hard as I could.

Swaw didn’t put it out of his mind. His mind was playing with her image like a cat worrying a mouse. She went just like that, like blowin out a coal-oil lamp. He wondered where she went to. He thought she went somewhere he remembered with a vague familiarity, someplace he had been years ago.

More luck. Good for some, not so good for others. Clyde Simpson had been sharecropping Beale’s land. He had the crop laid by and was waiting for fall, enjoying the pause before harvest time. In the white still heat of noonday he ran a snarling black dog out of his cornfield. It kept snapping at the cuffs of his overalls, and when he bent over to pick up a clod of dirt to throw at it his heart burst and he died there with the hot sun in his eyes and the Mastiff watching him from the edge of the cornfield.

Beale was in a quandary. Here he had a fine corn crop already making and no one to tend it and gather it come autumn, save Simpson’s widow and his simpleminded daughter.

A man named Hinson told it at the Snow White Café: he was wonderin who he could get. Hell, everybody that was worth a damn already had a crop goin. He’s too tight to hire it gathered. Swaw’s name came up somehow and somebody said, You don’t want Swaw. That tore it. You know how contrary the old son of a bitch is. He studied about it. I want Swaw, he said. Swaw’s the very feller I need. Swaw don’t know how lucky he is.

I wouldn’t mind workin that land, a man named Qualls said. But I wouldn’t want a man to have a stroke and die just so I’d get it. That ain’t the kind of luck I want.

Beale sent word for Swaw to come in and talk to him. He didn’t live on the Beale land. He lived in a tall redbrick house on Walnut Street in town and he didn’t lower himself to drive out to Cagle’s and see Swaw there. He figured he could work a better deal in his imposing study. He offered Swaw a tenant’s share of the ungathered crop: half the crop to Beale, twenty-five percent to the Widow Simpson, twenty-five percent to Swaw.

Swaw said he’d think about it.

Beale couldn’t believe his ears. He had offered Swaw a tenancy on the finest farm in the county and the occupancy of a house any other dirt farmer in the county would have mortgaged his soul for, and Swaw said he’d think about it. At that moment, though he didn’t know it, Swaw’s fate was sealed. Beale was determined to have him now.

What do you mean you’ll study on it? Lorene asked him. Us with no roof of our own over our head and Mama’s bed settin out there in a mule barn. It don’t seem to me you got anything to study on.

That place gives me the all-overs, Swaw said sullenly.

Look around you. Looks like seein your daughters livin piled up in the same old room like hogs would give you the all-overs, she said.

The analogy had never occurred to Swaw before, but he did note that, strewn out across the floor of the little moonlit room, their bulky bodies did remind him of sleeping hogs, and during the day they’d be just as useless, couched somewhere in the shade grunting to each other, probably, he thought about some boar: all they seemed to think about anymore was men and just showin up for feeding time, he thought. Fightin over what’s in the trough.