Hardcastle (13 page)

“The Spirit is upon them,” the small, sweat-soaked preacher said. “Hallelujah.”

The preacher took up his Bible and held his free hand out before him, the fingers spread as though he were delivering a benediction. He closed his eyes. Sweat dripped from his nose and the point of his chin. “Is there one among you with the gift of interpretation touching his heart and spirit? Do they speak to God or man? Rise and tell us.” The little blond girl got to her feet but her great, luminous, pale blue eyes did not blink, nor did she speak a word. The preacher acknowledged her and let his arm fall to his side. For a moment his chest rose and fell as if he were resting from a great labor; but at last, over the babbling of the others, his spent voice took up, hoarse and ragged and halting: “‘For I am persuaded, that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.’”

Somehow, much moved and much shaken, Music retreated across the hardscrabble earth. He did not know what he thought, but more like a thief than a watchman he crept between the coal company shacks, scaring himself unduly when, by accident, he kicked an empty food tin, which bounced and tinkled away in the darkness.

At last he climbed down the bank and got across the road to the depot, where he took comfort in the small yellow light glowing over the empty platform. From the church across the road, voices took up the final hymn.

“Holy Rollers,” he told himself. “Sure, that’s all they are.” He laughed a weak, panting laughter and got out the makings and rolled himself a cigarette. “Takes all kinds, I guess,” he said, aware, suddenly, that he was talking to himself, and almost in the same moment, aware of why. The old familiar world he thought he knew, understood, and had always dwelt in seemed to be slipping away. The old familiar Bill Music too. As unsatisfactory as they were, he wanted them back again. “Hellkatoot,” he said.

A little nervously he started back up the street toward the other end of town. For some reason he wanted to be closer to Merlee Taylor, who had not been in Bydee Flann’s congregation shouting “Amen,” speaking in tongues; not her, she was a hard case. Twice since he had taken her the coffee, he had returned with other things; once with a peck of potatoes, once with five pounds of side meat. When he’d arrived with the peck of potatoes, she’d given him a long, cold look, turned her back on him, and gone off into another room, leaving him to set the potatoes on the sideboard and take himself away. When he’d arrived with the side meat and put it into her hands almost in the same moment she appeared, she had given him a look just as long and penetrating. “Sure,” she’d said, “but if ye think I’m in your debt, you’re a fool surenuff,” and she’d shut the door in his face.

8

COON HUNT

“THAT BONEHEAD,” REGUS said. “Look at him. He’s about as smart as a cloud of cow-shit butterflies.”

In a big-footed, ear-flopping leap, Fetlock cleared the branch, let out a croupy bark, and began to cover exactly the same part of the cornfield he’d covered before, even sticking his head in the same corn shock to snuffle and snort before he began to clatter through the moony corn stubble, now and again raising his handsome voice to tell them that, by God, he smelled coon. He had already unraveled the maze of scent once and followed it across the branch to spend twenty minutes working the scrub oak and chinquapin thickets up the hill on the far side before the trail seemed to cool and he’d come back to the cornfield to start over.

“He run him backwards, I bet,” Regus said.

Music, who had twice in the past week gone to see the one-armed man, passed Regus a pint mason jar. “He’s got a pretty good nose. Hell, the track he’s on ain’t no fresher than last night, for certain,” Music said.

Regus tipped his head and drank and passed the jar back, shaking himself all over as though with a violent, sudden chill. “Yeah,” he said, “but he ort not to sound on a trail as cold as that. I don’t think he’s got any sense.”

Music drank. Through eyes bleared with water he saw Fetlock quartering back to the same corn shock he had visited twice before. Likely the coon had found himself a stunted ear of corn there and had spent a little time digging it out. Fetlock stuck his head in the corn shock once again before he began to cover the same ground over and over, turning and wheeling and working very low down and fast.

“Dizzy bonehead,” Regus muttered. “Lessen we want to bide the night right here, we gonna hafta hep that animal.”

“He does seem to be runnin in pretty tight circles,” Music said.

“He’s about five minutes away from runnin right up his own butt,” Regus said and stretched out his hand. Music put the mason jar in it, both of them watching the hound. “I swapped four dollars fer that featherbrain,” Regus said in a dreamy voice. “Feller said his daddy was a bluetick and his dam, a redbone.” Regus shook his head. “Don’t hardly see how they could have whelped such nonsense as that.” He took a drink, gave another nasty shiver, and passed the mason jar back again. Regus whistled and Fetlock skidded to stop, but he merely gave Regus a quick look before he swung back to work again, and Regus got up to fetch him.

Music took another drink, spun the lid down on the mason jar, and followed, carrying the little falling-block .22 rifle and a burlap sack. His own notion was that Fetlock was going to make a fine coon dog. “All that hound needs is more huntin,” he said when he caught up to Regus. “He just ain’t savvy yet.”

Regus took off his belt and looped it around Fetlock’s neck and crooned to him, “Whoa, whoa now,” for the hound was excited by the attention and the hunt, wanted to get back to the puzzle the coon had left him, and was nearly choking himself in his happiness and confusion over how he was supposed to do it on such a short leash.

“Maybe,” Regus said, “but I ain’t so sure there’s enough coon left in Switch County to train the genuine article on; never mind this critter here. Whoa, pup, settle down,” he told Fetlock. “I was thinkin we might strike out up the mountain back in behind Mink Slide. They’s a sight of fox grapes back yonder and a good-size branch a-coming off the mountain where I’ve seen more than one coon track.”

“Let’s do her then,” Music said.

Regus tried to lead Fetlock away, but the animal was unable to remember for more than a moment that there was a noose about his neck and seemed bent on choking himself. Regus stooped, picked the hound up, and carried him.

“If that branch is big enough to have crawdads in it, we ought to find coon,” Music said. “There ain’t nuthin a coon loves more than crawdads.”

“I bleve we done fell in with a honest-to-God coon hunter, ole pup,” Regus said to the hound bucking and struggling against his chest.

They crossed the split-rail fence and went south by the haystacks and then turned west up the mountain. “I did some coon hunting when I was a youngin,” Music said. “Had a good dog too, but I’ll bet yourn will be better.”

Fetlock heaved against Regus, whined and licked the bottom of Regus’s chin, and then struggled some more; but, being held fast, the hound groaned deep in his chest and, looking doleful, as if he had suddenly grown old, at last allowed himself to be carried without further commotion. About two hundred yards up the mountain, Regus set him down and released him from the belt. “Now,” he said, “if you strike something goin in a straight line, ye got a fifty-fifty chance a runnin it in the right direction.”

Each of them had a drink while Fetlock quartered this way and that.

Regus lit the carbide lamp on his cap. “I grew up in a coal camp and don’t know a terrible lot about coon huntin,” he said. He got out his plug of tobacco and offered it to Music. Music shook his head, and Regus cut himself a chew and bit it off the blade of his pocketknife. “I only got to go four or five times as a little chap over in Pike County, but I took a deal of pleasure from it. Anyhow,” Regus said, rubbing the back of his neck and laughing, “if ever somethin strikes you wrong, Bill Music, I’d as lief know it. Don’t think yer a-pokin another man’s fire. Speak on out.”

“Absolutely,” Music said, already feeling the warm effects of the moonshine. “I knew there was bound to be somethin in Switch County I understood even if it’s only coon huntin. Lead on. Lead on.”

The pale moon, the high icy stars were sowing seeds of a hard frost. Over the spiced mustiness of the woods, Music could smell the frost coming. It was a flat, cold odor like the odor of iron or wet rock. His breath billowed out before him, and his face was stingingly but pleasantly cold. Every so often Fetlock doubled back to check on them and then quartered ahead to range far out of sight. They traversed the mountain to the southwest, weaving through chinquapin and laurel thickets until below them they could see the blue-white lights of Elkin and Hardcastle and, further to the south, a narrow string of soft, yellow lights from the kerosene lanterns in the shacks of Mink Slide, lights glowing in the otherwise pitch-dark valley like souls in perdition.

Music was somehow unreasonably glad to be on the mountain, to be hunting, to be more than a little drunk, to be three times and three ways removed from being a mine guard. “Hey, Regus,” he said all at once, “I’m damned if I understand it.”

A step or two ahead of him in the moon-dappled woods, Regus drew up and turned his mild face. It was a face that nearly always seemed to have humor lurking just below the surface, as though humor, turned hard as bone, were its foundation. “What’s that?” Regus said.

Music fetched the whiskey from his pocket, unscrewed the lid, and passed the mason jar to Regus. “There ain’t a miner in Elkin that don’t hate the sight of us,” Music said.

“That’s a fair statement, I reckon,” Regus said. He tucked the chew of tobacco into his cheek, spat, and drank.

“Well,” Music said, “you were a miner, and your father before you.”

“Yes,” Regus said and passed the jar back.

“Well, shitfire!” Music said. “I don’t understand what would make you cross over to the other side.” He took a drink, and then in the whispery voice the whiskey left him, said: “Looks to me like it would go against your grain.”

“Is that what’s fetched you up then?” Regus said and began to climb again toward the southwest.

“Hellkatoot! One of the things,” Music said, keeping about a half-step behind him. “It’s against my grain, and I never dug the first shovel of coal.”

“Then how come yer a-mine guardin?” Regus asked.

“You’re duckin me,” Music said.

“Yes,” Regus said. “But if you throw a stick in the creek, hit’ll float so long as hit don’t suck up the water. I aim to float,” Regus said. “Does that satisfy you, Bill Music?”

“It don’t,” Music said, “shitfire, no it don’t.”

Regus made a soft sound like laughing. “All right,” he said, “my poppa was a miner and a union man in the bargain fer all hit fetched him.”

The two of them made slow, steady progress up the mountain, more athwart the grade than with it, walking abreast when they could, Music dropping a step behind when they couldn’t; and Regus talked in his slow, humorous voice.

“I was a trap boy,” Regus said, “bout thirteen when I learned how it is with the miners. We had us a checkweighman at that mine by the name of Lightfoot. A mean sucker who had a hump on his back and whose habit it was to point over his shoulder at it and say, ‘See that, fellers? Now that’s just how them coal cars better look when they come outten this here drift.’ Them coal cars was supposed to carry two ton, and that’s what the miner got credit for, but I’d guess he had em loadin maybe five hundred pound extra the way they were rounded off on top. And hell,” Regus said and laughed, “if that son of a bitch seen a little slate in what a man had loaded, he would, like as not, dump out the whole shebang, and the miner who loaded it would lose credit for the car.” Regus stopped for a moment and caught his breath and then started up the mountain again. “Well,” he said, “coal was sellin high and times were good, and Poppa and some others snuck around and organized, there being a U.M.W. man down from Pennsylvania to egg em on.” Regus let out a short, soft bark of laughter and gave his head a little sideways jerk. “Well, when the miners stood up on their hind legs and made their demands,” he said, “they was prouder of getting rid of Lightfoot and electin their own checkweighman than anything else. Even than gettin a decent wage for yardage.”

“Well then,” Music said, “the union did some good.”

Regus nodded and spat. “Sure,” he said, “sure, when times were good, hit was a fine thing. But when the price of coal fell and the company wanted to cut the miners’ wages, why, my poppa and them others bowed their necks and struck. The operator brought in scabs. The miners carried their guns down to the picket lines. The operator hired on a dozen mine guards, ole Lightfoot among them; and boy, everybody had a fine time shootin up the place.” Regus snorted. “Somebody put the wind through Lightfoot right off, and they was other shootins too, and the national guard came on down, and Poppa and the others had to back off and think her over, which was when they got time enough to notice that the Pennsylvania organizer was nowhere in sight, nor the union funds either, which had been collected in dues.”

Regus stopped walking and propped his hand against a tree to rest. “They was about a dozen miners brought up on murder charges for Lightfoot and a couple other guards that got themselves killed. And they was maybe sixty or so got fired and evicted, Poppa with em. We damned near starved out that time,” Regus said and shook his head and laughed. “Not that hit taught Poppa a damn thing; he brought the same sort of trouble on himself till the day he died. Got himself blackballed so he couldn’t get a job without he made himself up a new name.” Regus shook his head. “He got hisself caught and fired more than once before him and the others ever even had a chance to make their first demand.”

Fetlock came loping back through the underbrush, and without so much as giving them a look, cut up the mountain above them and doubled back, his nose to the ground as though he were being pulled along by a wire through it and had to run in order to keep from being dragged. Regus took a step or two and set his foot on a blowdown.