A Piece of My Heart (15 page)

The road split, with one arm making a hemisphere to the left, and the other keeping straight then switching back so that both arms met beside the south steps of the house. Robard took the way that allowed him to go straight, then braked as the path turned toward the house, and let the motor idle as quietly as possible.

The sun had almost died. The pale light showed olive through the woods, with only a final narrow filament catching the house in its salient and turning the planks bright green. He felt an almost insufferable calm, as though the sun passing off had stranded the house and everything else in lush neutrality in which nothing could move until dark.

Robard shut off the jeep and filled his cheeks. “I'll let you announce us,” he said, expelling the air.

“I'm a fucking month late,” he said. “You think that's a good credit letter? You've got business. I'm just a goddamn parvenu.”

“Go on, for Jesus' sake. You act like a fool.”

He gave Robard a grieved look and climbed out. A voice, bent on expressing extreme displeasure, came all at once from somewhere back of the house. Several waxwings began taunting a blue jay up in the sycamores and went fluttering out behind the house.

“No, T.V.A.,” the voice cried imploringly. “Goddamn it, son, don't turn the thing
that
way. Turn it the way I say.”

He looked over at Robard reproachfully and waited to hear a reply from whoever was doing the turning.

“Go on around there and see,” Robard said crossly, lighting a cigarette and flipping the match on the floor.

He nosed past the foot of the stairs and stopped beneath the piling and looked back into the dooryard.

A small turkey-necked old man wearing duck trousers and a yellow pajama top was standing hands on his sides beside a Negro in overalls, who was bent on all fours over a thick iron pipe protruding several inches out of the ground. Beside them, an orange and white pointer puppy was watching. The colored man had an enormous black pipe wrench he was applying to the pipe at ground level, taking it off each time he turned it half a rotation, refitting it, and twisting it again, while the old man stood supervising the whole operation. He could see that each of them was dedicating a terrific quotient of concentration to the winding process, so that each time the colored man removed the wrench to reapply it, the white man insensibly muttered “Good,” and crowded a quarter inch closer.

The dog was the first to ratify anyone else's presence. He picked his head up and stared momentarily, flogged his tail once, then went back to observing the operations on the pipe.

He felt that he'd like to disappear altogether, but continued standing by soundlessly as the colored man grappled with the enormous wrench and the white man redeployed himself to the other side as though he wanted to beat the Negro to seeing down the hole as soon as it was opened. When the wrench was finally brought off with the entire four-foot length of pipe fastened to it like a magnet, the old man quickly dipped to his knees, pushed his face right into the hole, and held it there for several seconds
while the Negro backed away a few feet and gave the goings-on a grave look.

“Goddamn it,” the old man bellowed, lifting his head and wiping his nose with his sleeve and pushing his face back down to the hole for another test. He seemed to want to get part of his head inside the hole, but the hole was apparently too stingy. He sat back on his haunches abruptly, wiped his face again, and shook his head piteously.

“What do it smell like?” the colored man said. He was standing over the old man now with the entire pipe-and-wrench conjunction dangling in one hand like a watch fob and delving the other hand into his thick hair.

“Shit,” the old man said. “There's shit in my well water, by God. Mrs. Lamb knows what she's talking about.”

The colored man shook his head ruefully and stood over the hole, staring at it as if it were a grave.

“I bragged on it,” the old man said, still levered back on his haunches.

“Yes suh,” the colored man said.

“Don't
ever
brag on nothin you own, son.”

“Yes suh,” the colored man agreed.

“It queers everything. I told Gaspareau a month ago what a goddamn good well I had, been good since 1922, and the first thing I know the privy goes and infects it. That was a jinx, and I'm to cause.”

“I wouldn't know,” the colored man admitted.

“Well, I know, by God,” he said. “It's like feeling piss down your pants leg. You know you done acted hasty.”

The colored man turned and glanced at the house and saw him standing there and gave him an anguished look that suggested that if he looked again he didn't want to see anybody still there. He flicked his eyes at Mr. Lamb, then back at the house, then fixed him with a purely baleful look.

“We got somebody,” the colored man said.

“What?” the old man snapped.

“Somebody done come on. . . .”

“Mr. Lamb,” he shouted, propelling himself away from the house, regretting to have to speak at all.

“Who is it?” the old man grunted, twisting his face around so he could see.

“This
here
him,” the colored man said, pointing down at the old man, who was still on his knees in the grass, looking up with his entire forehead enraveled behind his glasses.

“I'm him,” the old man said loudly, batting his eyes and struggling to get on his feet. “That's me right here.”

“I'm Sam Newel.” His voice stopped inexplicably.

“Who is it?” the old man said, staring at the colored man with the same bewilderment he'd centered on the pump.

“Newel,” he said with greater difficulty. “Beebe Henley called you, I believe.”

“The sound's out of this ear,” the old man said, batting his right ear as though he were swatting a mosquito. “What did he say, T.V.A.?”

“He say he a friend of Miss Beebe's,” the colored man shouted directly into the old man's good ear.

“He is?” the old man said irascibly. “Newel?”

“Yes sir?”

“You sure are a
big
pile of shit,” he said, finally hoisting himself with the colored man's help, and taking a great handful of his trousers and staring at him with a hot intensity, as though he were only going along with a joke that was about to come quickly to an end, at which point he intended to claim the last laugh. “We thought you was coming a month ago.” His eyes flicked up and down. “You're the lawyer, aren't you?”

“Yes sir,” he said, trying to clear up the trouble with his voice.

“Well, everybody needs a goddamn lawyer sometime. My will's made, though.” The old man peeped up under the house, and saw Robard sitting smoking placidly in the jeep. “Who in the hell'd you bring with you?”

“That's a Mr. Hewes,” he said, trying to aim his answer directly into the old man's working ear.

“It is, aye? Well, who the hell is he? Not another goddamned
lawyer, I hope.” The old man took a faster grip on his duck trousers and jerked them up until the cuffs were several inches above the lasts of his bedroom slippers.

“No,” he said uneasily, trying to look under the house again and finding he couldn't see underneath as easily as the old man could. “He's here about some job, I think.”

“Let's see the bastard, then,” the old man said, lurching off hoisting his trousers with both hands.

He stood looking hopefully at the colored man for some sign of affiliation, but the colored man avoided his eyes and went trailing behind Mr. Lamb.

When they started to the jeep, Robard jostled out, mashed his cigarette in the grass, and started muttering something inaudible.

“Look here,” the old man said, batting his eyes in several directions for emphasis, as if he'd already given Robard fair warning. “If you expect to talk to me today, you're going to have to talk at that ear, or you might as well not talk.”

“Gaspareau sent me,” Robard shouted, staring at him behind the old man as if he suspected he'd been betrayed on the other side of the house.

“What the hell about?” Mr. Lamb said.

“About the guard job you had in the paper,” Robard yelled.

The old man looked at him accusingly. “You ain't no murderer, are you?”

Robard grimaced. “No, I ain't.”

“Gaspareau sent a
murderer
over here last week, and I run the son-of-a-bitch off. He killed some poor con-vict over there last year without the bastard even looking around.”

Mr. Lamb suddenly took all his teeth out of his mouth and worked them together, as if he were trying to iron out an irritating defect. “I don't want no goddamn murderers shooting up my island,” Mr. Lamb gummed, giving his teeth close inspection. “That boy won't live to be twenty-one, I'll guarantee that, the little shitass.”

Robard said nothing and stared back at him painfully over the old man's bony shoulder.

The colored man went sneaking off toward the house, set the pipe and the wrench against one of the pilings, then leaned against it himself, lit a cigarette, and took up watching the proceedings from a more comfortable distance. He scowled at the Negro and waited for the old man to finish examining his teeth.

“These things,” he said ruefully, referring to the pink and porcelain teeth. “I wouldn't give a nickel for a hundred of 'em. Used to, when I had my teeth, I could get WRBC on my second molar after 10 P.M. at night.” Mr. Lamb's eyes flashed by Robard and quickly found the colored man, who turned his face and cackled.

Robard smiled weakly.

“What's your name?” the old man said.

Robard pronounced his name as if he hated to hear it.

“Well, I'll tell you, Hewes,” the old man said, finally reinstating his teeth in his mouth and smacking them up and down fiercely. “The job I got pays twelve dollars a day just for one week of turkey season starting tomorrow and going till Thursday, plus your food and your place to stay. It ain't but a week's work, and I want you on the job six to six unless you and me arrange different.” The old man gave Robard an odd look as if he were trying to talk him out of it. “I'll give you a cap gun I got in there, but I don't want you even to take it out. I want you to have it cause some of those farmers over there like to get funny with you sometimes if they think they can get away with it. Gaspareau lets 'em come in here. There ain't nothing I can do about it.” He stopped suddenly and stared at Robard. “You ain't no kin to Gaspareau, are you?”

“I hadn't ever seen him before a hour ago,” Robard said, and looked away.

“You sure about that?” Mr. Lamb said, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth across Robard's face, examining every feature thoroughly.

“That's what I said,” Robard snapped.

“All right, then,” Mr. Lamb said.

“One thing, though. I got to get to Helena some nights.”

“What the hell for?” the old man shouted, cocking his usable ear so as to hear the excuse free from interference.

Robard looked out at the woods, which were almost dark. “Some business,” he said quietly.

“Is that so?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, Hewes. I'm going to call you Hewes. That's what I call my employees. You tend to your business. But when the sun ups, you tend to mine.”

“All right.”

“Use the boat, but don't let it get empty of gasoline. People are going to come in here to hunt turkeys, and I don't want you poopin out the gas with your
business trips.”

“All right,” Robard said, and started to walk away.

The puppy came twisting up behind the old man from where he'd been lounging in the grass, and sat down at his foot and stared at Robard.

“This here's my huntin dog,” the old man said, admiring the dog and giving its ear a friendly jerk. “She's my long-casted pointer. I need me a long-casted dog since I can't walk anymore from the bed to the pisspot.”

The colored man began chuckling again and disappeared around the house with the pipe and wrench in his hand.

“You see my huntin dog, Newel?”

“Yes sir,” he said, moving forward a little, thinking about the hound flattened out in Gaspareau's road.

“Say, ‘My name's Elinor,'” the old man instructed the dog, bending down and picking up a fat patch of flesh behind its head and grinning. The veins in his face fattened up dangerously as he bent, monkeying with the dog's skull. “You got any gear?” the old man said to Robard, glancing at the back of the jeep.

“What's in my sack,” Robard said.

“What about you, Newel?”

“No sir,” he said, thinking dismally about his suitcase strewn open like debris in a train wreck. It made him feel like he needed a bath.

“You're just a couple of goddamned derelicts,” the old man shouted, standing straight up and hoisting his pants a little higher. “Beebe Henley didn't say you were a goddamned derelict.”

“Somebody stole my bag in Chicago,” he muttered.

“The hell they did?” the old man said. “You oughtn't never live in a place like that. The bastards'll steal everything you got.”

“A policeman took it,” he said.

The old man looked at him, temporarily astounded.

“Well, put yourselfs in the Gin Den there. That's where the men sleep, except me. Me and the ladies all sleep in the house, so there won't be any unauthorized screwin go on.” The old man's eyes brightened considerably. “Hewes, you'll start tomorrow.”

“Yes sir,” Robard said, turning toward the jeep again.

“We'll eat supper in a little while and I'll tell you what I want you to do. Newel, what the hell are you going to do?” The old man frowned at him through the tops of his spectacles. “You haven't come to hunt turkeys, have you? You don't look like much of a hunter to me.”

“No,” he said, trying to think up something believable.