Hardcastle (10 page)

Outside, Regus was sitting on the back edge of the dogtrot, Fetlock curled in the soft dust of the backyard before him. He still seemed amused. “I don’t know, Bill,” he said, “maybe they’ll take ye as crazy mean.” He shook his head and laughed. “All them damned little flowers,” he said, “and them big yeller buttons, and that god-awful hog’s leg. Sheeit, I got no notion why, but I think ye’ll carry it off someway.” His shoulders shook and he made little snorting noises, but then all at once he cleared his throat and spat and seemed to get control of himself. “This ain’t no kind of world,” he said, “fer a feller of my good sense.” He cleared his throat again. “Here,” he said, “you better take this,” and he extended his hand, in which Music could make out a chrome-plated derringer and some shells.

“No thanks,” Music said.

“You better take it,” Regus said. “Leastwise you can load this’un in less than half an hour.”

“No thanks,” Music said. “If I ever get in so much trouble I got to draw that Walker Colt, if I ain’t out of trouble by the time it’s empty, I don’t think that thing will help me.”

“You don’t never know,” Regus said.

For a moment Music stood still and watched the moon where it hung above the barn. It seemed to touch the comb of the barn roof with light, the far edge of the corncrib, the rim of Ella Bone’s black iron washpot, so that all of them looked rimed with frost. “Would you care for a drink?” Music asked.

“That would be handsome,” Regus said.

Music went into his room to get his corn liquor and was surprised to find a chair, half an upside-down oak barrel with a clean rag over the top of it like a tablecloth, and a tick of nearly twice the thickness of the one he’d slept on the night before. There was a lantern on the barrel top, together with his paper sack, and the room had been swept and tidied. He took the pop bottle from the sack and went back out on the dogtrot. “Your momma really fixed me up,” he said, sitting down beside Regus.

“Yeah,” Regus said, “she’s got you sleepin on hay. Already after me to rig up some kind of bedstead.”

Music uncorked the moonshine and passed the bottle to Regus, who took a drink, pursed his lips, exhaled silently, and passed it back. They drank until it was gone.

“I’ve got to work out some room-and-board pay for your momma,” Music said after a while.

“Ha,” Regus said, “I’d like to see you try to get that past her.”

They sat and watched the pale moon where it rode above the barn.

“My people haven’t heard from me in a while,” Music said at last. “I thought I’d write them. Tell them where I’m at.”

“For sure,” Regus said and nodded. “I’ll bid you good night then.”

It took him a long time to start the letter. In a wash of yellow light from the lantern, he smoothed the piece of brown paper again and again with the side of his hand. He had written: “Dearest Poppa and Momma,” and nothing more; for when he put that much down, the impulse to write left him. There seemed, at last, nothing to be said in a letter. Strangely, only after he had lost heart and nearly crumpled the paper did he begin to write, drawing each word carefully with the bitten stub of the pencil. “I am in Kentucky and alright,” he wrote. “Have hired on as a mine guard and living with good folks who took me in. I will stay here a while then come on back home.” He read over what he had written. “Don’t look for me as I will write and tell you when I strike out,” he added. He thought for a while and then, smiling a wry smile, wrote: “Tell brother Luther and Earl to stay on home as it’s hard times, and to say hellow to any pretty girl they see for me.” After much thought, after smoothing the paper again and again, he began once more to draw slow, careful letters upon the square of brown paper bag. “I hope and trust you are all well and alright as I am. Your son, Bill.” He read the letter over carefully, decided it would do, folded it, and put it aside to mail the next morning.

6

GOON

WHEN HE AND Regus rode into Elkin, clattered across the plank bridge, and stepped down from the Model T truck in the smoky-grey light of morning, Ella Bone’s rig and the huge Walker Colt caused him no embarrassment whatever, at least none beyond what he felt already for wearing the stiff new shirt with the badge pinned to it and carrying any sort of gun.

Grady and Cawood Burnside came toward them from the direction of the powerhouse.

What was it about them, Music wondered, that made them seem to own the cinders and gumbo they walked on, the very firmament? Without quite thinking it into words, he knew at once it was the grim, taciturn, penetrating threat that seemed to look out of Grady’s eyes as though, if he thought of it, he might spit on you, or your mother, or your father, or your wife and the babe in her arms. And Cawood? That bastard. With him it was a matter of sheer cockiness.

The straw skimmer, more ornament than covering, sitting on the back of his head, Cawood bawled, “Ay Tune, gettin any wampus?” But then, all at once, Cawood noticed the two or three inches of pistol grip sticking out from underneath the lapel of Music’s coat, and his eyes seemed to bug taking in the lumpish bulk of a weapon nearly the size of a beagle pup strapped to the left side of Music’s chest, and he said no more. The proportions of the pistol seemed to unman him and take him aback. If he noticed Ella’s colorful and flowery bellyband or the large yellow buttons, the sight did not amuse him. It was, Music thought, as Regus had predicted, or perhaps, in a more general way, as Kenton Hardcastle had: there was power in being a stranger; power, for the moment at least, in the eccentric and unforeseen rig. He could see the effect of it written across Cawood’s unintelligent face and protuberant eyes, as if deep inside him something had just said, “Whoops!”

Not Grady, however. He had seen the pistol grip too, the vague outline of its size and shape; and upon his long, scarred, horse face there was no expression whatever. He merely swapped the stump of his cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other and chewed it solemnly, speculatively. What was he thinking? Music wondered. Whether the weapon was some sort of sawed-off shotgun or an outsized pistol? How quickly Music could get the thing unholstered? How willing he was to use it? You sons a bitches, Music thought.

Grady and Regus had begun to talk about something, but it was as if Music’s frustration, the machinery of his own thinking, were making so much noise he couldn’t hear them. What in God’s name, he asked himself, was he doing here? Cawood had begun to speak too. Music understood only that Cawood was talking about not having let anyone run off with the tipple during the night, and he caught the flavor of Cawood’s new tone—a kind of deference toward the five pounds of iron strapped to his chest—but he did not hear enough to be able to answer. It didn’t matter. Regus and Grady had finished whatever they were saying to each other, and Regus had started off toward the powerhouse. Music followed, merely nodding to Cawood in passing.

“Hey, Regus,” Music said, as the Burnsides were crossing the plank bridge and Regus was about to enter the powerhouse. Regus turned with his eyebrows inquisitively and somehow humorously raised. “I don’t like the goddamned job,” Music said.

Regus looked at him a moment longer before incredulousness gave way to laughter. “I wish I’d thought to time ye,” he said. “What ails ye, man?”

Music knew exactly what ailed him until he tried to phrase it and found that it had no name. There was merely a hollow feeling in his chest touched somehow with the cool breath of shame.

“I reckon so,” Regus said, as though he understood. “Come on, now.” The two of them entered the powerhouse, where the hum of the steam turbine and the windy whir of wheel and belt seemed to make Music’s uncomfortable feeling more complex. It wasn’t just the badge and pistol, or even the arrogance of the Burnsides. It had something to do with him, personally, as though, long ago, when he had decided to leave Shulls Mills, Virginia, he had dared just such a situation as this. It was as though the thug in Chicago who had found the twenty-dollar bill hidden in his shoe, called him a low son of a bitch, and jumped into the middle of his chest had somehow guessed him capable of it.

“This here’s Big Cigar Green,” Regus was saying, introducing Music to the nigger who kept coal shoveled into the boiler.

Beneath the black man’s rag of a shirt, sleeves missing at the seams of the shoulders, his chest swelled in perfect proportion like the breastplate of a Roman soldier. His arms were massively sculptured and black as pitch. He and Music nodded to each other. “Cap’n,” Big Cigar said.

The thug with the stone in the sock knew something, Music was thinking. Knew that when he had hidden the twenty in his shoe, he had anticipated the robbery and therefore somehow participated in it. There was a kind of collusion between him and the robbers in that act, a brotherhood; but what was more, he had tried to cheat them at their own game.

“This here’s Too Sweet,” Regus was saying, introducing the nigger who kept the wheels and belts greased.

Music nodded, and Too Sweet—all elbows, knee joints, and angles—nodded back. “Boss,” Too Sweet said, his eyes like knobs of porcelain in his black face as he tried not to look at the pistol grip and the lump under Music’s coat.

“And yonder’s Tom Harmon, chief head-knocker around the powerhouse,” Regus said.

“Hydee,” Harmon said.

“Hydee,” Music said, and all at once he knew exactly how he felt: he felt like a man who had been falling and was anxious to hit bottom and have it over. When he’d caught himself going through those garbage cans behind the hotel in Salt Lake City, he had known the fabric of his ambitions simply could no longer hold him up, and he was going to land back in Shulls Mills, where his father and brothers scratched out a living on their ragtag farm as though they couldn’t conceive of anything better, as though they had never even thought of another way to live. He had made, at last, a kind of peace with that. He would hit bottom and start all over again, new and humble. He didn’t like being fetched up in Switch County with the sensation of falling still in his bones. But how could he explain that to Regus or anyone? He wasn’t sure it made any proper sense. Perhaps it was only that, being a man who didn’t like to leave a thing half done, he wanted to fail completely if failure was what fate had marked him for.

Regus showed him the bunk where they would take turns sleeping on the night shift and handed him a copy of the new contract which Grady had told him they were to take around for the miners to sign. The Burnsides had gotten the niggers in Mink Slide all signed up the evening before, Regus explained. They would have to sign up the rest.

“You ort to read her over if ye can, so’s you can tell them that asks what they’re signin. Ain’t many of em that won’t know, but they’s some will forever have to hear it.”

Music sat down on the bunk to read the document. It was full of legal-sounding words he could only guess at from the context; still, the message was clear enough. The miners agreed to join no union. They agreed that no one but members of their immediate families had the right to “ingress” or “egress” to and from the company houses they occupied. The contract made it clear that all streets, alleys, or lanes about the premises were private property subject to any police regulation Hardcastle Coal Company might make. It warned that a miner’s employment could be terminated for breaking any regulation and that on termination of his employment, the employee forfeited all rights to occupy company housing immediately. The company had the right to enter at any time the premises of any “domicile,” and the lessee expressly waived any benefit or protection to which he might otherwise be entitled by law.

“Sons of a bitch,” Music said, “this thing even claims, if a man owes the company any money when he gets evicted …”

“The company can keep all his truck,” Regus finished. “Sure,” he went on, “I can’t handle the fancy words in it myself, but I know what she boils down to. I’ve signed my share of them things. Hit ain’t nuthin but a simple ole yeller-dog contract; and what with cold weather comin on, and the National Miners Union organizing whomsoever they can, I reckon ole Hardcastle wants to remind everybody that he means business.” Regus ran his finger back and forth under his nose and laughed. “Hit ain’t like they ain’t signed nearly the same thing before. Come on,” he said, “let’s us get started.”

They left the insistent heat and noise of the powerhouse, Music with the contracts and Regus with a checklist of names. Outside, Elkin looked like a picture drawn in black, sepia, and shades of grey. The cold, silver sunlight polished the surface of the river, windows scummed over with coal dust, and fingers of frost retreating into the shade. No one gave them much trouble.

Even with most of the children in school, the small, four-room dwellings they entered were often crowded, and Music wondered where so many could lie down to sleep. Even the cleanest of the houses smelled like a fart in a paper sack from the coal being burned for cooking and upon grates for heat. Often the sulfurous odor of coal was complicated by the stink of dirty bodies, clothing, and linen; and almost always, another kind of odor, persistent, somehow ancient, but not quite identifiable, as though, at last, it was the profound odor of poverty, existing as solidly as a mildewed and dusty trunk locked away in an attic to be passed down generation to generation. No one gave them much trouble. Hardcastle had been working shifts for a long time, and only about a third of the men, or fewer, were back in the mountain, so there weren’t many houses where they had to leave a contract to be signed later. Matter-of-factly Regus explained to the women of such houses that there would be no scrip paid, no advances on scrip given, and no trading at the commissary until the contracts were signed and turned in to Cecil. More often the man of the house was there; and grimly, his jaw as rigid as a horseshoe, he signed and shoved the paper back to Music, sometimes without one word being spoken on either side. Usually the womenfolk hung back, inside the doorways to other rooms, where often the walls were papered with pages from catalogues or magazines. There were old people in many of the houses. Often there were two or three children too young for school: here a child clinging to its mother’s skirts; there another, nose jeweled with snot, sitting upon a sprung and cluttered divan; yet another squatting on its heels, the ragged cloth ends of a sugar tit sticking, like a flower, from between its pursed lips. In almost every house someone was holding an infant; sometimes a babe was being held by a child of no more than three or four, but with such unself-conscious grace and skill, such comfort and naturalness, there seemed in neither small head any clear distinction between what it was to be a parent and what it was to be merely a brother or sister.