Hardcastle (23 page)

“I’m grateful, missus,” Music said.

Although he meant to lie down only for a little while, he slept until almost two o’clock, when Regus called to him from the dogtrot. Certainly he’d had no sleep the night before, but it was something else entirely that allowed him to sleep so peacefully: he could see the end of his job as a mine guard. Even his fight with Cawood, even their plan to pick up whatever poor devil was trying to organize a union, even the guilt he felt for leaving Regus and Ella—nothing could mitigate against the relief he felt.

“Are ye dead in the hull in there?” Regus asked from the dogtrot. “Momma’s got some victuals set out, and I reckon she wants to inspect yer butt.”

“Comin,” Music said. He spied the flour sack Ella had spread over the barrel top and decided that a tablecloth was not what he needed.

In spite of the fact that his thigh was sore, he felt keen and rested. He ate a heaping plate of navy beans, corn bread, and side meat and washed it down with two scalding cups of coffee; and when Ella had cleared the table and commanded him to drop his trousers, he did so without any hesitation, revealing a flour-sack diaper with a large, rabbit-eared knot at each hip.

“Well, now,” Ella said, “hit’s swole up some but it don’t seem to be no fever ner pisen in it. Ye hold still. I made up a batch of medicine.” Music held on to the back of a chair and exchanged a look with Regus, both of them giving their heads one slight, identical, commiserating wag, as though they were mirror reflections of each other, while Ella got a saucer of black ointment from the warmer of the woodstove and picked up two yards of material, which, earlier in the day, had likely been a sheet.

She wiped Music’s wound clean with vinegar, which caused him to grit his teeth and close his eyes. When he opened them again, Regus wagged his head exactly as before and grinned sheepishly. He was a bit blurred. Music felt Ella’s broad finger spreading on the tarlike salve and tried to look down between his legs to get a glimpse of what she was doing. “Hold still,” she said; “this’ll take the pain of the vinegar off ye and help heal ye up.”

“What is it?” he asked.

“Hit’s chimney soot, lard, and sulfur,” she said. “Hold still now while I wrap it. I want to wrap it kindly thin so’s hit’ll get some air.” She started just above his knee and made a spiral wrap to the bottom edge of his diaper, pinning the bandage, top and bottom, with saftey pins. “There,” she said, “that ought to do ye.”

Quickly, Music pulled up his britches.

“We ort to get on the road,” Regus said. “Hit’s a ways around the back side of the mountain. Don’t look for us till after midnight, Momma,” he said to Ella, who was putting her saucer of medicine back on the warmer of the stove with another saucer inverted over the top of it.

“I ken more than I’d wish about what you boys are up to,” Ella said. “But I don’t want no shootin ner gettin shot, you hear me?”

“Yes’um,” Regus said.

“Yes’um,” Music said.

“Wait,” she said, “hit’s turnin off cold.” She went into the front room, rummaged around, and came back with a thick grey sweater spotted with moth holes. “Hit belonged to Ree’s daddy. Hit’s a right smart too small fer Ree.”

“Thank you,” Music said.

“You put it on,” Ella said.

Music pulled the sweater over his head and tucked it into his pants. It fit like a second skin.

“You git yore heavy jumper,” she said to Regus.

“All right,” Regus said. “Momma, now,” he said, “we got us a good plan, and you’ve no need to worry.”

Ella turned away toward her sideboard strewn with pans and dishes. “You ain’t talkin bout no life I know, Son,” she said. “I don’t remember the day I didn’t need to worry, cept maybe when I was a little bit of a girl.”

Music and Regus looked at each other, neither of them with anything to say. Regus nodded toward the door, and they went out, Regus shutting it behind them. “We’ll be on back,” he said.

Music slipped his arms through the hangers of the shoulder holster and buttoned the flowered cummerbund around his middle. He pinned the badge to the inside of his suit coat, put it on, and met Regus at the truck. Only when they had backed out into the highway did they realize that Ella had come out upon the breezeway to look after them, her hands rolled into the top of her apron and her head to one side after her fashion, as though, even at that great distance, there was something about them she could not face directly.

They filled the truck with gas in Valle Crucis, took a hardtop road west, and after ten miles or so, turned south on a dirt road. Though rutted out, it wasn’t so bad at first, but as they drove on, the small stream that ran beside it crossed the road more and more frequently, and there were long stretches where the stream and the road shared a common bed.

“I guess you don’t come back in here if there’s been a lot of rain,” Music said.

“Or snow,” Regus said, “or much of anything else. I don’t guess you come back in here noway, unless it’s home. I reckon this whole part of the country was just about like this till they started diggin coal and opened her up with roads and railroad spurs and all.” The Model T pecked and growled along in low gear, and even though the ruts yanked the steering wheel one way and another, Regus managed to hang on to it and cut himself a chew of tobacco. “I’ve heard it said that the entire assessed value of Harlan County was less than ten thousand dollars not much more than thirty year ago. I reckon hit’s millions now. Shit,” Regus said, “more than a man could count, I’d vow.”

Fifty yards above them on the right there was an old log house. It was two stories tall and made of square hewn logs with a chimney of mud and thin flat rocks. Smoke curled from it. An old man in overalls and a denim jumper, but, oddly, wearing a dark, formal-looking vest under the jumper, stood on the porch and watched them pass. He had a white beard and leaned on a walking stick. Off to the left of the house there was a pole barn with a small, split-rail corral, and in it, two large, handsome mules rolled their foot-long ears this way and that in order to cipher and classify the sound of the Model T. As soberly as the old man had done, the mules watched them too. Both the house and the barn had settled into the earth and were leaning north, but they looked sturdy yet.

“Yeah,” Music said, “too bad you couldn’t count the empty bellies thirty years ago and today.”

“Sure,” Regus said, “but these is hard times. There’s a depression on, if ye ain’t heard.”

“Shit,” Music said, “the depression don’t mean much if you never had any money anyhow. I bet if you asked that ole gentleman back yonder, he’d tell you he never had two half-dollars to rub together more than once or twice in his life.”

“Ha,” Regus said, “I bet he did. I bet he’s still got em too.”

“Maybe,” Music said, “but likely he grows or makes what he needs and trades for the rest, or does without. And I’ll bet he ain’t hungry, and even if this depression goes on five or six years, I bet he don’t get hungry either.”

“All right,” Regus said, “he might not. And them folks in Harlan thirty years ago might not have went hungry, but I wouldn’t be surprised if about all the workin and thinkin they done was on that very subject.”

“Not being hungry is enough for most folks to worry about, I guess.”

“Sure,” Regus said. He looked at Music, his eyebrows arched with humor. “But if that goddamned life is so fine, how come nearly ever sucker that had the chance throwed down his hoe and come a-runnin ever time some jerkwater minin operation got started?”

Music couldn’t account for that; in his notion of the scheme of things there were areas he hadn’t mapped out.

“Huh?” Regus said.

“Don’t ask me,” Music said. “Hellkatoot, I’m the feller that threw down my hoe and went off to Chicago to learn the electrician’s trade.”

“Ha,” Regus said, “so you are.” He adjusted the throttle and spark levers on the steering wheel, and the Model T growled and lurched ponderously at the rutted, steep pitch of the road. He turned his head and spat out the open crack of his window. “And while I’m askin,” he said, “how come we’re a-arguin about such as this?”

Music almost said he didn’t know that either, but all at once he realized he knew perfectly well. “We ain’t arguing anything,” he said. “There just ain’t no reason for you to be a mine guard. You got a cow, some chickens, a barn, a house, and forty acres. Ten or twelve of them acres lie pretty good.”

“Hold up,” Regus said; “I also got me a job that pays three dollars a day and I aim to keep it.”

“You wouldn’t starve without it.”

“Maybe not,” Regus said, “but I don’t aim to find out.”

“You could get you a shoat in the spring for two or three dollars. You could get a good mule for thirty.”

“The way mines are going broke around here, I could pick up a mine mule fer less than ten, I bet.”

“They ain’t much bigger than dogs!” Music said. “But, all right, with no more ground than you got to break, maybe you could get by.”

“Sure,” Regus said. “Then I’d likely be in about the same shape as Lon Harmon was when he owned it and throwed hit over to start diggin coal; only he knew somethin about farmin, and I don’t.”

“Ella does,” Music said, “and don’t tell me she wouldn’t like that better than you walkin around Hardcastle with pistols hanging off you. And don’t tell me you like being a goddamned company goon.”

Regus didn’t answer. He looked straight through the windshield, bringing the Model T truck up over a rise where the left side of the road was the creek bed, no more than three feet across, and the right side was a bank tufted with grass, a foot and a half higher. The Model T struggled along, threatening from time to time to turn over.

Once they were over the rise, Music expected Regus to say something, but he didn’t. He swapped his quid of tobacco from cheek to cheek and drove. They passed another log house, part of it one story and part two, and again there was someone on the porch to watch them. A woman, maybe thirty, maybe forty, maybe fifty, years old, stood rigidly still with a small child sitting astride her hip and another half hidden behind her, holding on to her apron with one hand and sucking the middle three fingers of the other. There were also two young men—in their twenties, maybe—standing on the hard-packed mud of the front yard. At once attentive and shy, neither of them looked at the growling Model T truck more than a moment at a time, although they must have heard it coming for many minutes and had come out to confront and greet it. Music and Regus nodded, threw up a hand, and the men did the same. But curious as they must have been, they made no nosy inquiries as the truck—perhaps the only one to come by that year, perhaps the only one ever—growled and jounced noisily past.

Above, the road got worse. Twice they had to stop and carry stones to fill washouts they could not pass over. Once they had to drag a windfall aside. The creek grew smaller, wandered, returned, and vanished at last into the earth. Still, the truck seemed always tilted dangerously to one side or the other, and the woods closed in, so that branches constantly raked the fenders and body. Small trees an inch or two thick grew up in the center of the road, but these they rode down. It was three or four miles before they passed another homestead and the road began to get a little better, likely, Music thought, because the people who lived there traveled south to do their trading, rather than north toward Valle Crucis. He had begun to doubt that the road went through.

“If Hardcastle folds,” Regus said solemnly, and as though half an hour of silence had not passed between them, “I reckon I can see if there’s any farmer in me.”

“Hellkatoot,” Music said. “It only calls for common sense, hard work, good weather, good luck; and if you get all that, the ability to make peace with being broke anyway.”

But Regus didn’t so much as smile; he looked straight through the windshield and nodded.

Not long after they hit the hardtop road and turned north again, Regus swung the truck off to the left on what appeared to be grown-over skidway. Within fifty feet, the truck was hidden from the road.

“Well,” Regus said, “we must have drove twenty-five mile to get four from home, but there won’t be nobody lookin for us to come callin.” He shut the Model T down, and after a moment of dying shudders and rattles, it ceased.

In the quiet that resulted, Music felt nervous. All at once he didn’t like what he was getting into. It felt all wrong. When he did something foolish, he told himself, he did it in the heat of the moment. He didn’t plan it out ahead of time. “Now that I think of it,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck and frowning, “I don’t understand just how we can arrest somebody when we ain’t on Hardcastle property just cause he’s talkin to some miners.”

“Easy. Draw that horse pistol, lay back the hammer and say, ‘Bud, you is under arrest.’” Regus pushed his door handle down, and the door squawked open. “We better git on. It bein cloudy, we ain’t got more than an hour or so of daylight.” He got out and the door squawked again and banged shut, seeming to startle the slash and brambles overgrowing the abandoned skidway.

Music got out too. He was not satisfied. “But that don’t sound too square nor legal to me,” he said.

“Hell, you’re a deputy sheriff,” Regus said. “If you say it, hit’s legal.”

Music came around the truck, and the two of them started up into the woods toward the northwest. Music lagged a step or two behind. “Well, it don’t sound square at all to me,” he said.

“Tell ye what ye do then,” Regus said; “don’t say nuthin, and leave me do the talkin.” Suddenly Regus stopped, raised his face to the sky, and held up his forefinger. “Hell, I got the words for ye.” Wrinkles of concentration sprang to his forehead. “Say, ‘Yer under arrest for sedition and criminal syndicalism,’” he said and tucked his chin into his chest and smiled with satisfaction.

“What does that mean?” Music said.

“Hell, I don’t know,” Regus said, “but it’s what they told my daddy the last time they took him to jail. I guess it means you can’t have no union.”

Regus started off again, and after a moment Music followed. All right, he thought, all right, I said I would do this thing, so I will.