Hardcastle (27 page)

“I’m sorry,” Merlee said and patted one of the old woman’s warped, arthritic hands, but Aunt Sylvie only muttered, “Yes, ye would now; ye’d knock me to the ground,” and she went off into the front room with her chin trembling.

“She’s not feelin well,” Merlee said, “and I’ve been too scared to pay her any mind. I heard ye had a terrible fight with Cawood Burnside.”

“Yes,” Music said, both surprised and flattered. He could read the alarm in her eyes before she made some useless gesture with her hands and looked away from his face.

“And I heard ye quit yer job and ain’t a mine guard no more,” she said.

“Well,” Music said, “that was what I was anxious to tell you. News sure travels around here; I only just quit this afternoon.”

She looked at him again, and then just as quickly at the floor. “Ain’t much that won’t be all over Elkin in an hour,” she said, “anyway if anybody sees it, or that nasty store clerk hears about it.” She shrugged after the manner of a small girl. “I reckon ye’ll be off to Virginia then,” she said.

“Yes,” Music said. “Well, one of these days, but not for a while yet. I need to help Regus some before I go.”

“He quit too, I heard,” Merlee said.

“He was a miner himself for a long time,” Music said. “He didn’t like being a mine guard.”

For a moment Merlee stood before him, smoothing her dress along her thighs. “Would ye like to sit down then?” she asked him. “I can make some coffee if you want?”

“Ahhh,” Music said, “that would be handsome.”

Merlee shook down the ashes in the stove, poked up the fire, and put on a lump or two of coal. “We’ve still got a lots of coffee from what you brung,” she said as though merely to fill up the quiet. She dipped water out of a bucket on the sideboard and poured it into the coffee pot, but then she jumped suddenly and rushed to hang a dishtowel over the tiny kitchen window. “Mercy,” she said, “what if Cawood Burnside was to prowl by and see you? Hit ain’t safe fer no outsider in Elkin, but him with a grudge agin ye—he could shoot you down dead, and the law wouldn’t do a thing to him!”

“I wouldn’t worry,” he said. “I don’t think Cawood will be on the prowl tonight; I understand he’s not feeling well.” But there’s nothing wrong with Grady, he thought, and in spite of himself he felt a little buzz of fear.

Merlee went to the sideboard and measured coffee into the pot, and with her back to him and in a strange small voice, she said, “I heard today that Cawood had already shot you when you and him fought, and I nearly died.” She cleared her throat and wiped a strand of hair back from her forehead. “But then they’s another woman that said it wasn’t so, fer she’d seen you this mornin outten her window and ye looked in fine fettle and carryin a big sack of flour over yer shoulder.”

“Well, he shot me a little bit,” Music said. “While we was thrashing about and all, he sorta creased the back of my leg. But Ella Bone has doctored me fine.”

“I wish you’d killed him,” she said. “He ain’t nuthin but mean; just a big mean company goon is all he is.”

“Yes,” Music said.

Merlee brought two coffee cups to the table and sat down with him. She was deep red around the neck and ears.

Music smiled to himself—mother and widow aside, he thought, she’s still only a young girl and sometimes shy—but he tucked the smile quickly away. “How’s the little one?” he asked.

“Oh, she’s fine. She’s takin steps, she is. She’ll be runnin all over before long.” Merlee ran her finger around the lip of her empty coffee cup. “She’s asleep; I put her to bed about an hour ago. I think she’s been a-wonderin where you’re at. She likes you,” Merlee said, and the blush around her neck and ears seemed to creep into her jaw, to spread faintly toward her eyes the way a sunset diffuses into the sky; and she seemed on the verge of some sort of confession, but she rose abruptly and went to the stove, for what purpose, Music couldn’t tell, for she only moved the coffee pot an inch or two one way and then the other before she came back to the table and sat down again. “I’m right ashamed that I’ve treated you so poorly,” she said at last, “and you bein so nice to us. And now you gettin ready to leave and all. It might not none of us around here git to see you again.”

“Well, you did call me a company goon once,” Music said, enjoying her admission and embarrassment more than he knew he should.

“I’m shamed by it,” she said, “and I’d be obliged if you didn’t remember it of me.”

“I won’t,” he said.

“I don’t know what would have become of Anna Mae if ye hadn’t doctored her. And all the things you brung to us, and that purty cloth. I’m a-makin a dress, but I’m scared ye’ll be gone outten Switch County before I git done with hit.”

“I’ll make it a point to stay until you finish, so I can see you in it,” Music said.

She rose from the table again and moved the coffee pot around on the stove and brushed the hair off her forehead with her palms. “I don’t think hit’s ever gonna boil,” she said. She started back to the table, but then stopped and gave him a look he couldn’t fathom before she went into the front room and disappeared. When she came back, she was flushed to the eyes again. “Aunt Sylvie’s gone to bed too,” she said. “I reckon she ain’t asleep, but she’s nearly too deaf to hear hit thunder.”

“Well, that’s a shame,” he said, “but she’s right old and …” Merlee was standing just inside the doorway with her head hung, fairly glowing with embarrassment. The back of his throat went dry, and in some remote chamber of his brain he told himself in a quiet voice: You are a fool, Bill Music; you have always been a fool and you will always be a fool. He accepted the pronouncement without quarrel, and in the next moment put the thought away as not even important enough to be regrettable.

“If ye want,” Merlee said without looking up at him, “I’ll be yer woman until ye leave.”

He held out his hand to her. “Hush now,” he said, but whether to her or to the voice inside his head, he couldn’t tell.

Man of experience though he was, he was humbled that he had never actually held a woman, not with his cheek resting on the crown of her head and her breath against his neck; nor had he ever thought of doing so. And since he had reached his majority, no woman had ever held him. He had been hugged. He had been squeezed. He had resided for a time in the warm cradle, the sweet scissors of their legs, spurred by their heels, clutched by their hands, urged by the breathless and urgent sounds they made. But he had not been held. There was nothing wrong with what he had experienced, he decided. It was fine. It was a hell of a lot better than fine. But somehow it was also irrelevant to Merlee, who had said she would be his woman and then came to him to be held and to hold him so that he could feel the beating of her heart like some small animal he had caught in a trap or a snare and would likely kill. The other women were exciting. The memory of them made him burn. But even as she withdrew from his arms and gave him another brief and mystifying glance and went off into the other rooms of the shack and came back with a worn and tattered quilt and spread it at his feet and drew her dress over her head in one smooth and graceful motion, even then, he was sure he wouldn’t remember this moment with so much heat as the others, but with another sort of feeling he didn’t yet understand. It was all very curious and sobering.

At a little past midnight Merlee turned out the light in the kitchen so that he could pass from dark to dark, and he slipped out of Elkin. But he hadn’t much more than scuttled across the ditch and gained the grown-up pasture on the other side before he began to puzzle over what had happened. It seemed to him strange that he had been so calm and detached, as though a part of him had been standing back and looking on, a part capable of setting the coffee pot aside and—when he took off his clothes—capable of leaving his coat in such a manner that he could reach Regus’s little chrome-plated derringer, which he had carried with him instead of the huge Walker Colt. It wasn’t like him to be so calm and distant, and he wondered what was wrong with him until he thought better of it.

Women had always been able to play him like a fiddle, and Merlee herself had set the style of their lovemaking. It was curious. The holding and the gentleness was new to him, but there was something missing too, something held back. He paused among the broom straw and locust of the overgrown pasture to ponder it, and he had such a sobering thought he had to sit himself down to let it sink in. She hadn’t, he realized, given him her pleasure. She had been so resigned about it all and, in spite of her shyness, so determined.

The first notion that came to mind made him angry. Hellfire, he thought, was she just paying him some way or other for the things he’d brought by, for doctoring the little girl? He thought of turning around and going back and getting that straight with her. She’d said she was shamed for treating him so poorly. She’d said that. He did not wish to think she was only trying to make it up to him. No, he thought, somehow there seemed more to it than that. If nothing else, there was the way she’d been so still in the circle of his arms, the way she did not want him to leave.

He sat and pondered it until the frosty earth had wicked his heat away and he was so cold and stiff it was hard to rise. Well, all right, he told himself in frustration, you have already admitted you’re a fool, and women are too big a puzzle for a fool. But it didn’t help, for he was in no mood to kid himself with easy conclusions. After all, he could still smell the warm musk of her upon his body. He looked around the grown-up pasture under the high, sailing moon as though to seek its counsel. He scratched his neck, tried to rub some circulation back into his buttocks, and, finally, he started out again toward home, hoping he had invented the whole problem. But he knew he hadn’t.

16

FREE MEN

MUSIC SQUATTED IN a litter of shavings and sighted down the trigger stick he was making toward Regus, who was supposed to be working on the door; but though Regus had the board which would make the sliding door of the rabbit gum clamped between his knees and the drawing knife in his hands, he wasn’t doing anything. “I’d hate to be paying you by the hour, cousin,” Music said. He shook his head and made a noise in his cheek as if he were clucking to a mule.

“Yeah, well, you ain’t,” Regus said, but after he’d given Music a long, hard stare, he turned his head and spat and began to use the drawing knife.

He was, Music figured, still bothered by quitting his job, and more than that, he guessed, by the way Kenton Hardcastle had dressed the two of them down. He himself hadn’t been much shaken by Hardcastle, since he’d taken what the old son of a bitch had to say as the ravings of a man who was used to having his own way, all of the time, under all circumstances—a rich man who had glimpsed the shitty possibility that he might lose what he’d spent his life getting and wind up no better off than, say, William Music or Regus Patoff Bone.

As before, they’d gone around to the back of the enormous house and been confronted there by the splayfooted, tired-looking black woman. But this time, after she’d consulted with the master of the house, she came back and guided them through the musty rooms to Kenton Hardcastle’s office, where he greeted them heartily and had them sit down. Well, he had style, did Hardcastle. Likely he’d have gotten around to asking them why they’d come sooner or later; asking them what he could do for them, perhaps. But first, as though they were equals and partners, he told them about the little coal contract he’d won. Then, as if Music and Regus were responsible, he plucked a newspaper off the corner of his desk and showed them where it said that two organizers for the National Miners Union had been jailed in Whitesburg, and a third in Pikeville. “We got them on the run,” he’d said, and he’d been generally full of gruff, false cheer, Music thought, at least until Regus told him that he and Music had come by to quit. But then, with no warning whatever, an awful stillness fell upon the old man; he turned pale and his lips trembled. “You say what?” he asked, his voice deceptively weak and mild as though, indeed, he might not have heard correctly.

Regus looked a little stunned himself. “I thought I might try my hand at farmin,” he said and stared blindly at the floor between his feet.

“You sit there and tell me you’re quitting when my back’s against the wall?” the old man asked. “When the goddamned Reds are crawling all over the state of Kentucky! What the hell you think you’re doin?”

Regus shook his head as though he wondered.

“I’ve paid you good money! Hell, I’m losing my ass all the time, but I paid you, didn’t I? I treated you right, and you let me down like this! Goddam!” The old man’s fists were clenched and his jowls were trembling.

“You can call the sheriff,” Regus said, his voice humble, reasonable, subdued. “He’ll have you two men down to Hardcastle by tomorrow, I’ll vow.”

“You goddamned right he will,” Kenton Hardcastle said, “and let me tell you somethin: you ain’t quittin; you’ve been fired, Mr. Bone! You let me down. You let me down when my back was against the wall. Now, I’ll tell you what that means, mister,” he said and pointed a trembling finger at Regus; “you’ll never hold another job of any kind with my coal company; no, nor any other in this county, not as long as I draw breath. Now, you and that damned scoundrel there,” he said and included Music in the shaking arc of his finger, “you get the hell outta my house.”

Flushed to the eyes, Regus got to his feet, and for a moment Music thought he was going to make some reply; but, at last, Regus only nodded, and he and Music left as they had come, trailed by the splayfooted black woman, who scuffed along behind them in an old, cracked pair of men’s shoes—likely, Music thought, Hardcastle’s. She let them out the back door and shot the bolt behind them.

“I guess you don’t get no cigars when you quit,” Music said, but the joke seemed weak even to him. Regus, who was beyond the reach of humor, didn’t reply; he merely went on toward the Model T truck sitting static as a derelict on the pea gravel of Kenton Hardcastle’s driveway.

As before, too, the sheriff had been called and was waiting with his hand out when they walked into his office. “Let’s have em, boys,” he said.