Hardcastle (22 page)

Music got the buckets from the sideboard. “Wish I could at least teach him how to milk before I leave,” he told Ella on the way out of the kitchen.

The cow blew softly into her trough and chewed with a slow, sideways motion of her jaws. For a long time no one came out toward the barn. They had things to talk about, he suspected. Ella would want to fuss at Regus, and he would want to explain. Maybe they had things to say to each other he could not imagine. Still, he was glad Regus had asked the favor of him. He had left the badge, shoulder holster, and the Walker Colt on the barrel top in his room, hoping never to put them on again; but pulling that last shift with Regus eased his conscience. Even Kenton Hardcastle would have less cause to complain. He didn’t like it, and he feared it, but maybe, after all, it would be better all around. Perhaps Regus was right about the union. Perhaps it would cause everyone grief and do no good; yet he saw no reason why men like Kenton Hardcastle should have it all their own way. There was no doubt in his mind that the working stiff ought to have a say in the matter too, that he ought to have an organization, a union, by God, to represent him. If there had been an electricians’ union in Chicago, he might not have gotten burnt, might not have gotten fried like a piece of meat up there on that pole. The union would have seen to it that one man wasn’t at the mercy of another who didn’t know anything, some dumb son of a bitch the boss just felt like hiring who would pull the wrong fuse jacks and allow his working buddy to grab twenty-three hundred. Music snorted through his nose. Twenty-three hundred was what they sent through a man strapped in an electric chair, the dose they gave a murderer. “I done already paid,” Music said. “I got a wide margin comin before I run through the balance. I got room to fuck up,” he said and laughed miserably. He had no idea whom he was addressing or for what purpose, but it seemed to make him feel better. The cow moaned, shuddered her hide, rolled an ear in his direction. “Sawwh,” he said to her, “sawwh, ole bossy.”

Sitting with half his butt off the milking stool, he was comfortable. His leg felt much better since Ella had seen to it. He thought about Cawood Burnside lying on the cot in the powerhouse, that ridge swelling down the center of his head like the crest on a French soldier’s helmet. Hellfire, he thought, damnation. He had made a mess, there was little doubt of that. He could have gotten people shot up, killed. As for himself, he supposed he deserved it, but he had a sudden vision of Regus sitting off to the side with his pistol trained on Grady, and the implications of that came home to him: when he left, Regus would have no one to back him, not even the Burnsides. The cow switched her tail, shifted, stepped around; and automatically, without even being aware that he had done it, he took the bucket away. It was three-quarters full. “Sawwh,” he said to her. “Saawwwwh.” He set the second bucket beneath her udder. “Sawwh now,” he said and began again to milk. Regus and Ella could make it on the farm alone. They had a cow, some pigs, the chickens. They could make it better than any of the miners in Elkin. They wouldn’t require much cash money. If he left them twenty dollars, it could run them through till spring. They needn’t suffer a hungry day. After he quit, he’d hang around for a little while, cut down that bee tree, help get in a little more firewood, make another rabbit gum or two. Regus didn’t want to be a mine guard, a company goon; surely he didn’t. But whether he did or not, it wasn’t the thing to do anymore, not after coming in on his side against the Burnsides, not after he’d held a gun on Grady. He’d screwed Regus up, there wasn’t much doubt about that. Hell, he didn’t even quite remember what it was that Cawood had said, hadn’t heard more than the general drift of it. Anyway, it wasn’t what he said that mattered. It was that he’d had the presumption to say it. It was that he would be the sort to conceive it, and take pleasure in it, and then have the presumption to say it.

Down at the house, the door to the kitchen opened and Regus stepped out upon the dogtrot. He looked up toward the barn, rubbed the back of his neck, and, trailed by Fetlock, stepped off the end of the open dogtrot and came on toward the barn. Music milked, a tinny spewing in the pail. “Sawwh,” he said to the cow, who rolled her eyes and stepped around when the hound entered the barn. Regus leaned against the stanchion. “If you’d milk between your thumb and forefinger and not grab a teat like it was a hoe handle,” Music said, “you might learn to milk as good as me. You might even amount to something.”

But Regus wasn’t having it. He got out his tobacco and his knife and cut himself a chew. “If we don’t catch em tomorrow night,” he said, “you get yerself gone anyway. I reckon I was tryin to work a wrinkle on ye, but Momma caught me out.” He shifted his quid from cheek to cheek, spat, and tucked it along his jaw, where it made a knot the size of a walnut. “How many men did you see comin in last night?”

“I don’t think there was more than three or four,” Music said.

Regus nodded almost imperceptibly. “They just gettin started then. Wouldn’t be surprised if they weren’t at it ever night for a while, tryin to work up a decent membership.”

“Well, why not try to locate the meeting tonight then?” Music asked. “Sawwh,” he said to the cow and went back to his milking, for she was beginning to fidget and wouldn’t stand much longer.

“All right,” Regus said.

“If we don’t catch up to them tonight, maybe we will tomorrow night.” Music milked and Regus leaned against the stanchion, chewed, and appeared to think. Music had his forehead against the cow’s side, but out of the tail of his eye he saw Regus shift, heard him spit.

“Dammit,” Regus said, “you ain’t bought in fer tonight or tomorrow night either if yer set agin it. I’ll carry ye all the way to the Tug River and clean outten Kentucky if yer anxious to get on. I reckon I am tryin to work a wrinkle on ye, Bill. You’ve no debt to pay with me, ner Momma either. Goddammit,” he said. “Goddammit, Bill Music, ye don’t feel that way, do ye?”

For some reason Regus’s embarrassment made Music laugh, and once he got started it was hard to stop. The cow shied, but Music saved the pail of milk before she kicked it over. He had nearly milked her out anyway. “Hell, yes, I feel that way,” he said, laughing still, and Regus began to laugh too.

“Good,” Regus said, rubbing the back of his neck, “good enough.”

“Why don’t you turn the cow out and get Ella some kindling, and I’ll strain the milk and get it in the springhouse,” Music said.

“How’s the leg?” Regus said, still giggling.

“Fine,” Music said. “Just fine.”

13

UNION MEETING

AFTER THE CHORES were done, Music took out the Walker Colt and fired off the last three charges, which obliged him to explain to Regus what had happened to the other two.

Regus listened. “Sounds like you was a little tight strung last night. It’s a shame somebody couldn’t have warned ole Cawood.”

Music was trying to disassemble the pistol to clean it before he recharged it, but he was having no luck. “I hate I got you into it with the Burnsides,” he said.

“Weren’t altogether your fault,” Regus said. “I got a little overexcited.” He scratched absently at the tawny hair growing out of the open neck of his shirt. “When I think back on it, I don’t reckon Grady was going to mess in it a’tall. I get the notion he don’t put his ass on the line fer nobody. And as for Cawood, you were handlin him all right by yerself. Fact is, I get the notion I nearly got you shot, messin betwixt and between you two like I was.”

“Yeah,” Music said, struggling with the plunger mechanism, “but the Burnsides ain’t your buddies now, and that’s no good.”

“Ha,” Regus said, “they never wuz friends.”

“You know damned well that ain’t what I mean.”

Regus did not speak. Music struggled with the plunger mechanism. He could not remove it and hence couldn’t remove the cylinder either. All at once he quit working at it and studied it instead. “Shit,” he said, “I’ve broken your grandaddy’s pistol in the bargain.”

“What’s wrong?” Regus said.

Music showed him. “I bent the goddamned plunger over Cawood’s head.”

Regus smiled and wiped his eyes. “I sorta wondered how that ridge down the middle of his head could be so long; I never thought about you wrapping that barrel clean around his skull.”

With absolute seriousness Music sighted down the barrel and then held the pistol sideways at arm’s length to squint at it. “No,” he said, “the barrel looks all right; I think it’s just the plunger.”

“They couldn’t make metal terrible hard eighty or ninety year ago, and I reckon the damned thang is that old. Hell, I know Grandpap had it way before the Civil War, cause he killed a man with it in 1846 down in Bristol, Tennessee.” Laughing, Regus squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “Course, he didn’t club hisn; he shot him, like the feller had a right to expect.”

“Yeah, well,” Music said, “I didn’t have time to shoot Cawood. I would have had to cock the hammer and point the damned thing at him and pull the trigger. Seemed a lot easier to hit him over the head with it.”

“I expect,” Regus said, “yawl bein so tangled up amongst each other and all.”

“I’m just as glad,” Music said.

“I expect,” Regus said. “But if ye bent it over Cawood’s head, I don’t see why we can’t bend it back.”

Music wasn’t nearly so much amused by it all as Regus, but there was nothing wrong with his suggestion. He went off to the barn, where he had been riving out shingles, and got the froe and mallet. He set the blade of the froe between the barrel and the plunger and rapped the plunger on its high end with the mallet until it was straight enough to be removed. Regus wiped the cylinder and frame of the pistol clean with a rag while Music worked on the plunger with the wooden mallet, rolling it against the floor of the dogtrot and beating it straight. When Music put the pistol back together, it worked, if not quite so smoothly as before. He fired two rounds of caps on all the nipples to clear them and loaded five chambers of the Colt once again with powder, cornmeal, .44-caliber balls, and lard. At last he rested the hammer on the empty chamber and slipped the pistol snugly back into the gaudy, homemade shoulder holster.

Regus, sitting on the edge of the dogtrot, his arms folded across his chest, had watched the whole operation. He sucked his teeth. “I reckon I can see the virtue in whompin a man over the head with that sucker after all,” he said. “Hell, if you shoot it, hit takes half the mornin to load her up agin.”

“That’s not going to bother me,” Music said. “I’m not planning on shooting it.”

“Well, if we’re smart about it, if we plan her out just so, there shouldn’t be any need.”

“Shit, we don’t even know where they’re meetin. Whether it’s up on the mountain someplace, or in Mink Slide, or where,” Music said.

“Sure we do,” Regus said. “They’re meetin at the Bear Paw. They ain’t goan meet on Hardcastle property if they can keep from it. That’s askin to get caught; it’s agin the contract the miners just signed; it’s trespassin for the unionizers; hit’s all kinds of things. If them unionizers set foot on Hardcastle property, they’re bought and paid for, and they know hit as well as you and me. And shit, they ain’t up on the mountain under no tree. Anyhow, Kenton Hardcastle owns that too.”

“Well, they came down off the mountain,” Music said.

“Sure, so would you. They ain’t goan walk back by the road.”

Ella came out the kitchen door then, and the two of them got quiet, as though their subject were, in some strange way, unfit for her ears. She carried buckets of water to the black iron washing pot behind the house. She built a fire beneath it and put clothes in it to soak, Music’s newly mended trousers among them. She took down the galvanized washtub they bathed in from its peg along the wall of the dogtrot and filled that with water too. She cut a sliver of homemade lye soap into the black pot, and with a long-handled wooden paddle she stirred the clothes and soap around as though she were cooking a stew.

In subdued, chastened voices, they made their plans. In the afternoon they would drive to Valle Crucis, circle around the mountain on the west side of the Switch River valley, and come up on the Bear Paw coal company from the south. They would drive no closer than a mile, and like the miners the night before, climb the mountain and approach the Bear Paw housing from the woods above, where they would stay until after good dark or until they saw what they wanted to see. They would allow the meeting to take place. They would allow the Hardcastle men to leave, and then they would collect the unionizer and deliver him to the sheriff in Valle Crucis. If no meeting took place, then they would try the next night; if there was no meeting the second time, then Music could take off his badge and gun and call it quits.

In grave, soft voices they agreed while Ella poked and stirred the clothes in the steaming pot, dipped them out on the end of her wooden paddle, and plunged them into the galvanized tub, where she rinsed them by hand. At last, paying no attention to the low, heavy clouds which had their vaporous beginnings at the tree line no more than three or four hundred feet above the barn, she wrung the clothes out and hung them on the line. She dumped the water from the black iron wash pot and from the galvanized tub, and when she brought the tub up on the dogtrot to hang it again from its peg, she said to Music, “You ort to rest yerself a little, son, and then I want to look at that leg again. I don’t want it collectin fever on me.”

“It feels fine,” Music said, “but I reckon I could lie down for a little bit.” He picked up the pistol and got to his feet, and indeed the leg didn’t pain him much.

“Well,” Ella said, “hit might grow proud if it ain’t watched, is all.”

“Yes’um,” Music said, although he did not know what she meant.

“Proud skin that can’t bear bein touched ain’t fun nowhere,” she said, as though she had read his mind, “but on a chap’s bottom side, hit ain’t no fun a’tall.”

Regus chuckled. “Don’t mind me,” he said.

Ella didn’t; she didn’t even glance in his direction. “As fer yer britches,” she said to Music, “I soaked em in the sink and I don’t think the blood set, but I’m feared the patchin has ruined them for looks, and them nearly brand-new too. I’m right ashamed I’m no finer hand at sewin; the Lord just didn’t mean these hands for makin things nice and purty.”