Hardcastle (29 page)

But even as the realization came, anger surfaced in him again. Regus was even dumber in some respects than he advertised himself to be. Just naturally and as a matter of course, if a farmer were going to make it, he not only had to be able to sow his fields and get his crops to grow, but he had to be a carpenter, a mechanic, a veterinarian, a blacksmith, a butcher, a damned smart man in a trade, a man who could cure meat, mow hay, set a fence, patch a harness, make a proper potato or cabbage mound so such things didn’t rot or freeze and would last the winter out, and do a hundred other things. Regus had a hard time milking a cow or making a nest a hen would lay in. It wasn’t very long ago that he’d thought Regus was the rare sort of man who could take anything in stride, anything that came along, and make peace with it. He was afraid he had misread him. There was in Regus, like any other, the possibility of turning sour, the possibility of making an alliance with failure before it was forced. Well, buddyroe, Music thought, you’ll have to pull against me.

They had eaten half the meal in silence before Ella seemed able to weigh their bad humors and decide to speak up. “You boys,” she said at last, as though she had decided that their anger was not as serious as her own, “I want you to treat each other right!” and she gave each of them a whack on the head with a wooden stirring spoon, which splattered them with gravy and so startled them, it might, under different circumstances, have caused Regus and Music to go for each other’s throats like two dogs, hackles up, joints stiff with tension, springing at each other just because some onlooker had scuffed the ground with his shoe or clapped his hands. “Hit ain’t right fer you boys to be ill with each other,” Ella Bone said, coming back to the table with the coffee pot, “and I won’t have it!” She filled each of their cups. “I been seein it in my dreams: they’s hard times comin, and we got to stick close,” she said. “Hit ain’t time fer nonsense.” She put the pot back on the stove and tossed each of them a rag from the sideboard. “Clean that gravy outten yer hair,” she said. “Yawl look like hogs at a trough.”

And through the afternoon and evening—although they were a bit awkward and self-conscious—Music and Regus confronted each other with something like their old good humor and tolerance. The cutting of the large, black-gum bee tree did not go well, and Music didn’t know whether that had anything to do with the slow return of Regus’s good spirits or not, but if it did, Music told himself, then maybe, by God, it was worth it.

There was trouble from the beginning, probably because the day was fairly warm and the bees were more active than he’d hoped; so much so that, when they had decided which way they wanted the tree to fall and Music had given the black gum three or four good licks with the ax to make a notch, Regus called out that there was a bunch of damned bees beginning to swarm all over hell up toward the top of the tree. Regus himself was sitting some distance away with the bucksaw resting across his knees and his hands folded behind his head.

Music looked up at them and said yeah, the ax was probably jarring them a little, but honeybees weren’t like hornets; they didn’t find you right away. Having said that, he took just one more swing with the ax before the first bee stung the back of his neck and he jumped and swore.

“Say what?” Regus asked him.

But Music merely left off chopping and stepped around the back side of the tree. He looked up at the bees. There was a good deal of activity going on up there, but it seemed to him to be mainly formless and random.

“Just a stray,” he told Regus; but when he’d gone back to work on the notch again, he had taken no more than a half dozen swings when honeybees began to drop like rain, and he was stung on top of the head, on the cheek, and arm, and neck again, the last two bees popping him while he ran, swatting at them, past Regus and across the branch into the cornfield.

“Hey, bee man,” Regus called after him, “are ye sure them things ain’t hornets?”

Music bathed his stings in the cool water of the branch before he came back to where Regus was sitting in quiet amusement watching the small cloud of honeybees slowly thin and disappear back into the black gum. It seemed a good time to admit that he hadn’t actually ever cut a bee tree himself, but only seen it done. There had been a real bee man in Shulls Mills, he told Regus, who had many hives of bees he had captured and made his own; and he’d watched him cut a bee tree and rob it. The bee man had always taken both the bees and the honey. He’d always had a new hive with him, and he’d cut some honeycomb and put it in the hive he’d made, and he’d find the queen and urge her into the hive, and the other bees would follow. And after dark he’d come back and plug the hole in the new hive, pick it up, wild bees and all, and carry them home.

Regus wanted to know why they hadn’t built a hive then, if that’s the way it was done. But Music said it was the wrong time of year, and they’d have to feed the bees through the winter, and anyway, he wasn’t so sure he could find the brood chamber and the queen, even if the damned big-assed tree falling didn’t kill her. Also he’d already been stung enough to suit him, and he didn’t have a head net or gloves; and when he got the bee tree down and split, he wasn’t going to paw around in there any more than he had to.

For a while then they talked quietly about the easiest way to get the honey, deciding, at last, to fell the tree and run and come back after dark when the bees had settled. They would bring torches and deal with the bees as they came out. It seemed a shame to Music, somehow, to burn honeybees, but he could see no way around it if he wanted Ella and Regus to have honey. The bees would die in any case, if they were robbed so close to winter.

When at last the bees had quieted, Music and Regus crept down to the tree and used the bucksaw like a crosscut. It was not so disturbing as the blows of the ax had been. They took very slow, even strokes, and there was little commotion above them until the great tree popped and groaned. But when that happened, the black gum seemed to sigh a cloud of honeybees from the hole near the top, and Regus let go of his side of the bucksaw and ran like a thief. Music stayed long enough to give the bucksaw three more strokes and to get stung once again just as the great tree started to fall, and then he pounded after Regus through the slash and second growth, across the branch and into the cornfield.

Back at the house they made torches of rags tied with wire around the ends of long sticks. They cleaned out the washtub and put a grain scoop and a half-gallon can in it to carry back to the tree. They got two wedges and a mall from the barn so that they would be able to split the hollow part of the black gum to get at the honeycomb. The ax and the bucksaw had already been abandoned at the site and were, therefore, waiting on them. Finally, after they had eaten their supper and Music had read the Bible to Ella, they soaked the bulky heads of the torches in kerosene and nervously and with many misgivings went off to rob the bees.

It was a long, difficult, sticky, painful process. Mostly from honeybees that had had their wings burned away but were not dead, Music got seven new stings and Regus got four—wingless honeybees crawling to the attack, sometimes even up inside the legs of their trousers. And when at long last it was over and they were home again, they had a washtub a little more than a third full of honey, although even that was littered with broken comb, bits of wood, and drowned bees. Still, Ella Bone was so surprised and happy with it, she clapped her hands and whooped. And the following evening—after she had cleaned the honey as best she could and put it away in quart mason jars—Music got to take a jar of it to Merlee, and one of the dressed-out rabbits, too, which had been soaking in slightly salted water in the springhouse and was consequently bleached almost as white as snow.

17

THE YOUNG UNIONIZER
KILLED

THE NEWS HAD gotten out that he and Regus had turned the unionizers loose down at the Bear Paw. Merlee had heard it, she told him; and if she knew about it, then it wouldn’t be long until Kenton Hardcastle and his gun thugs knew, if they didn’t already. She had been afraid and would not be consoled or comforted. She did not want him to sneak into the coal camp and see her ever again. “I don’t want ye shot,” she’d said, “and if you come here again, I won’t lie down with ye another time. I swear it!” She would come to him, she told him. She knew where he lived, for she had seen Regus’s place many times on her way to Valle Crucis. “Aunt Sylvie can look after the baby. Listen,” she’d said, “I can whistle for you. I’ll come and hide outside yer house and whistle like this,” and she’d folded her hands together as though she’d caught something small and precious in them; and while he looked on amused with her great seriousness, she’d pressed her lips to her thumbs and blew, lifting the fingers of one hand and closing them down again so that a soft, two-noted sound, such as a mourning dove might make, stirred the dark kitchen where they stood. “I can do it loud,” she’d said.

“So,” he’d told her, “you aim to treat me like an old dog then. You won’t let me in the house, but you expect to whistle me up any time you care to.”

But she would not be teased about it, and he knew she was right. Regus had already warned him that if he were caught, she could suffer for it too. And now that the word was out on him and Regus, it could only be worse. Even if he were seen coming out of her house, they might evict her. He himself had made her sign the contract which threatened it. And so, even though he had been smarter the second time he’d come to see her and hidden in the ditch until the new mine guard passed the commissary on his way to change shifts, he agreed not to come again. It had been five minutes until ten o’clock when the new guard had passed by; a ragged man in overalls he was, carrying a shotgun cradled across one arm like a hunter. At three minutes before two in the morning, when both mine guards were most likely in the powerhouse, Music had crept out of the camp, having spent six hours in Merlee’s shack with no more light than the fire on the coal grate could cast.

The next morning when he returned Regus’s pocket watch and derringer, he told Regus what Merlee had heard.

“Well,” Regus said, “I knew it would get out; I reckon there wasn’t never any doubt of that.” He pursed his lips thoughtfully and shook his head. “I did think hit might take a week or two though. Well, now,” he said and scratched absently at the tawny hair rising from his shirt collar, “well, now, I guess they ain’t much way to tell what Kenton Hardcastle will do when it gets to him. I wouldn’t be surprised to see some kind of visit though,” he said, and although Music couldn’t think why, there seemed to be light in Regus’s eyes at the prospect, and even the hint of a faraway smile on his lips. Regus walked to the end of the dogtrot and looked down at the highway. He snorted and shook his head. “I guess my poppa reared him a fool after all.”

Fetlock, roused by all the talk or the walking over his head, eased himself out from under the dogtrot in one long, smooth motion. He looked up at Regus, yawned, and, stretching first one hind leg and then the other out behind him, came over to Music to be petted.

Regus rubbed his palms on the thighs of his britches. “I don’t know,” he said, turning toward Music, “I may be blowin smoke, but if ye aim to hang around here, my friend, it might be a good idea to strap that horse pistol back on. I’m not sayin ye’ll need it, mind you, but I’d take it as a favor if you kept it handy.”

“Sure,” Music said, puzzled that giving Regus bad news seemed, in some strange way, to cheer him.

Wearing his shoulder holster once again and the blue having all but vanished beneath his eyes, Regus looked much more like himself by the time Music had finished milking and come in for his breakfast.

“Then why do I have to look at that fool contraption first thing in the mornin?” Ella was saying.

“Now, Momma, I expect yer right,” Regus said. “Likely when old Kenton Hardcastle finds out me and Bill turned them fellers loose, he’ll be interested in them and not us. But there’s a chance he might think he owes us a lesson.” Regus blew into his steaming coffee cup and gave Music a look across the brim of it. “I ain’t sayin it’ll happen, but if one of his goons was to show up with a stick of dynamite to pitch at the house, I wouldn’t want to have to look for my pistol.”

“Lord help us,” Ella said.

“Now, now, it ain’t like the old days with Poppa,” Regus said. “We ain’t on strike. We don’t work for Hardcastle Coal and ain’t demandin nothin of them. We ain’t joined no union. Fact is, we fixin to build a hogpen today, ain’t we, Bill?”

“That’s right,” Music said. “We’re going to start anyhow.”

“It’s just that I wouldn’t like bein took by surprise,” Regus said. “That’s all there is to this, Momma,” he said and patted the pistol butt hung just forward of his armpit, “all in the world there is to it,” and he sucked at his scalding coffee.

It was hard for Music to believe that the frail, trembling old man he had last seen would pay someone to throw a lighted stick of dynamite through Ella Bone’s kitchen window, never mind that he had been angry. At least that was the way Music felt when he and Regus went out to carry in Ella’s stove wood, but perhaps it was only because such thinking seemed out of place under the bright, guileless, morning sun in a barnyard where chickens clucked and pecked and the frost was retreating toward the shadows. “He might sic the sheriff on us for some damned thing or other I never heard of, but the son of a bitch wouldn’t try to blow us up, would he?” Music said.

“I couldn’t tell you,” Regus said. He sucked his teeth thoughtfully. “The old bastard might only damn us to hell and forget about us. Hit ain’t like it was with Poppa. This here is my place, not hisn. He cain’t, by God, evict us, can he? And I reckon, if hit comes to that, I can shoot a trespasser same as a coal operator can. Maybe that’s the way he’ll figure it too.”

Music split one last piece of kindling and left the ax in the chopping block. He gathered up the kindling while Regus stood by with an armload of stove wood. For some reason he could not keep himself from blushing. “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t shoot Miss Merlee, though,” he said. “She’s going to come out and see me this evenin.”