William Gay - Little Sister Death

The girl was sitting on the butt of the poplar log. She seemed to have been awaiting him. She had one bare foot on the ground and the other cocked on the log, her knee drawn up against her breasts. Her arms encircled the leg and her chin rested atop it. She watched him moodily from beneath her tangled blond curls.

He halted, staring at her. She sat motionless, just watching him back.

Hidy, she said.

Or he thought she said it. He heard it in his mind clear as a bell but he didn’t know whether she had spoken or not. He hadn’t seen her lips move, but he knew it was what she would have said had she spoken.

Hidy, Swaw said awkwardly.

Her face was pale in the waning sun, her gray eyes level and inscrutable. You got any drink on ye, Mr. Swaw?

With her knee hiked up like that he could see all the way up her dress, the white expanse of thigh and the blond hair at the juncture, the slightly parted flesh of her sex. She seemed not to mind his scrutiny.

Shore I got a drink. He reached her the halfpint bottle.

She unscrewed the cap and took a delicate drink, coughed a little, and shook her head. She handed it back.

You like that?

It’s all right. I just like the way it makes me feel. Giddy and silly. The boys used to slip me a drink sometime. Drewry used to. It was a sight better whiskey than this, though. You know Drewry?

No.

I thought everybody knew Drewry. Drewry’s all right. What are you lookin at?

I ain’t lookin at nothin.

She laughed. The shit you ain’t. You’re lookin up my dress.

He looked away. A dark stain of twilight was seeping across the cornfield.

Stead of lookin at mine you ought to be studyin about some a little closer to home. You lettin them hogs of yourn run wilder’n a oneeyed jack, ain’t ye?

I don’t know.

Say you don’t? You didn’t catch one of em locked up there in the honeysuckles behind the woodshed? You ain’t seen em playin that stinkfinger down below the spring there ever night?

Swaw drank from the bottle and shuddered.

A man do what he ought to do. He’d just lay around him with a shotgun and be done with it all, clean the whole nest of em out. Just be out of the whole mess.

He tried to shut it out of his mind, then something hard, a stick, struck him a vicious blow across the shoulders. He recoiled in pain. The girl cried out and writhed beneath him, her face, or his perception of it, altering, widening, the gray eyes darkening to a deep brown even as he watched in astonishment, the pale wisps of light hair at her temples coarsening and turning black until it was Retha’s hair, Retha’s face twisted beneath his own.

Oh sweet Jesus, he cried. He was abruptly sobbing raggedly. He pulled away from her and saw momentarily her white body sprawled on the quilts. Then his eyes whirled to see the hoehandle coming again, a demented and outraged Lorene swinging it. You bastard, she was saying over and over, spitting it at him. You bastard, you. The hoe caught him a glancing blow alongside the head. He threw up his arms to protect his face. His mouth was hurting already and all he could think of was the pain. He stumbled toward her, fending at the hoe, feeling it stinging against his arms.

His eyes fell on the ax. Before he knew what he was about he had grasped it up by the handle and sprung forward, buried it to the eye in her face, rocked it free of the bone automatically like a man splitting a cut of wood, and stood with it poised to fall again, looking down at her still body on the floorboards at his feet. A dark moonlit stain of blood crept toward him.

Daddy? Retha said. You coming back to bed?

Shut up, Swaw told her. Goddamn your soul to hell.

He walked out with the ax in his hand. He felt the cold dew on his feet, sweat drying on his body. He looked down and he was naked. The silver moon was above and behind him, wrought his shadow twisted and black as pitch, a moving recess to infinity he might stumble into.

He heard the door of the toolshed fall to. He looked back. She was standing naked in the wet grass watching him. Her eyes burned with a fierce luminosity. He turned and went on. He heard her following him, her feet scuffing softly in the grass.

A black dog came out of the tall weeds and sniffed at Swaw’s tracks. A man stepped out of the shadows of the sycamore and stood leant against its bole watching him. A gangling black man came up from past the toolshed and followed him, his angular walk aping Swaw’s dragfooted progress. The white man against the sycamore had long silver hair, muttonchop whiskers. Swaw did not notice. He went up the stone steps and into the dark recesses of the house.

Here, pig pig pig, he called softly into the shadows. He went stealthily into the first bedroom he came to. The door creaked softly on its hinges. A pale yellow glow escaped as he pushed it open wide. Two here, rousing up at his step. He raised the ax. One scrambled up, fled past him, the other frozen dumb, mouth open. The last thing she saw was her naked father coming at her with the ax, its gleaming arc lit by the bare bulb of the nightlight.

He went out and sat on the stone steps and sobbed for a few moments. Then he couldn’t remember why he was crying and ceased. The girl squatted in the wet grass watching him. She was all black and silver, white body gleaming like a beached fish stranded in the moonlight. The two men and the Mastiff were gone.

He wanted a drink. He felt for the bottle but he was naked and he couldn’t for the life of him remember what he had done with his clothes.

He went into the bedroom to hunt them, found instead his shotgun leant in the corner and a cardboard box of shells sitting on the mantle. The box bore a picture of flying ducks. He took out two of the red waxed cylinders and loaded both barrels and went out again.

The shot that wounded one of his daughters brought the other out of the hall closet, arms outstretched and supplicant, shrieking. Swaw, cursing his luck and whirling after her, slipped in the slick blood and cracked his elbow on the floor. He struggled up, aiming on the fly at a frantic fleeing figure outlined in the moonlit yard. The explosion jarred his shoulder, blew off the top of her head and flung her limp as a rag doll through the screen and into the yard.

He went to reload. Images and memories flickered like frames of film in his mind: he couldn’t remember his name but he could remember the girl’s eyes, the serpent motionless below the screened lid, the way the crimped ends of the shotgun shells felt. The air smelled like cordite. A blue haze of smoke shifted dreamily beneath the hall ceiling.

She was heading for the steps, bloody from the wound, a hand held out to him. Daddy, she said. There was a petulant whine to her voice that he couldn’t stand anymore. He shot her off the top step and turned the gun on himself, leaning down and taking the smooth, cold steel of the barrel into his mouth. He could see her white body against the black grass, limbs flung out and twisted as if she had fallen from some enormous height.

In his last attempt at coherent reasoning, Swaw figured he could fire the gun with his toe, and for once he was right.

Beale Station, 1982

He called Pauline from a payphone outside the 7-Eleven.

How much have you got?

Fifteen or twenty thousand words.

First draft or edited?

I don’t know yet how much work I’ll have to do on it.

And you’re living down there, leased this place? Jesus, David. Can you afford that?

Well, I’m doing it. It’s a gamble, I guess.

And it seems to me a wholly unnecessary one. Why did you have to live there to write a book about the place? Christ, you could have flown down and looked the place over, spent the night there if you had to. This living there, leasing or buying, it just seems…overkill, so unnecessary. I hope you never write a book about the Taj Mahal. I don’t think that’s for sale.