Hardcastle (38 page)

“Cal,” the sheriff said, “why don’t you slip in beside that old boy there. Henry,” the sheriff called to one of the other men, “bring yer shotgun and climb up on the running board here. Old man Cox’s farm ain’t but about a quarter mile down the road, and I reckon he’d loan you a couple of pitchforks.” The sheriff stepped back and looked up at the load of hay. “You boys take this here
alfalfa
down by about half and poke around a little, and if it ain’t nuthin but cow food, I reckon you can sling it on again. These gentlemen won’t mind givin you a ride back. Otherwise, I expect to see em hog-tied when you get here.”

“This ain’t no way to treat folks,” Music said, but his voice sounded thin in his ears, and his chest felt as hollow as if it were missing half its parts.

“Now, that’s right,” the sheriff said, “and if you boys ain’t haulin nothin but hay, you’ll find out I can make as pretty an apology as you’re likely to hear. Take em on,” he said to the man called Henry.

Cal crowded in beside Music, who tried to scrape the Walker Colt, musette bag, and Regus’s miner’s cap with him toward the center of the floorboard, but he couldn’t manage it. Still, they remained covered with the rag, and perhaps the man couldn’t feel through the soles of his shoes what was underfoot. Henry climbed up on the running board. “All right,” he said.

When they had gone about fifty yards, Music said, “This just ain’t no way to treat folks. I don’t see how people around here could vote a man like that in.”

“It’s the coal interest that’s mostly put him in,” Cal said, “and that’s what he looks after.”

“We’ve done spent half a dollar driving this load around all day, and now we’ve got to unload it and load it back and scatter it about. It ain’t right,” Music said. “I’d just as soon go on and sell it to you fer two dollars as do that. Wouldn’t you?” he asked Regus.

Regus scratched his chin and looked at him, trying to read in his eyes what he was up to. “I guess,” he said at last.

“I don’t know,” Cal said. “Hit’s three and a half or four miles to my place, and I don’t want him on my ass.”

“Well, if we’re gonna have to unload the stuff anyway to prove it’s what it is, we might as well unload it into yer barn. But I guess if you can’t afford to cross the sheriff …” Music said.

Henry leaned down into the half-open window. “Turn right just past that sycamore up yonder,” he said.

Regus began to slow down to make the turn.

“Well, hell,” Cal said, “a few minutes one way or the other, twon’t make no difference. Keep on.”

When Regus speeded up, Henry ducked down again. “What in hell you doin? I said to turn this truck off!”

“We gonna put this hay in my barn,” Cal told him.

“The hell, you say,” Henry said. “I don’t want that son of a bitch on my ass.”

“I’ll tell him whose ass to get on,” Cal said. “It won’t take but a little bit.”

“I’ll tell him I was agin it,” Henry warned.

“I’ll tell him myself,” Cal said. “The son of a bitch.”

Music got out his tobacco and papers and offered them to Cal, who shook his head. With a great deal of effort, Music rolled his cigarette and then pretended to search his pockets for a match, closing his hand, at last, around the derringer and cocking it before he drew it from his pocket and shoved it under Cal’s jawbone. “If you say one word,” he whispered, his mouth nearly too dry to speak, “I’ll shoot the top of your head off right now!” Instantly Cal stretched toward the ceiling and his body turned rigid as a post.

“What in hell we gonna do now?” Regus whispered.

“Hellkatoot,” Music whispered back, “I don’t know, but we’ve got one of them. Drive and maybe we’ll think of something.”

But Music couldn’t think of anything. He seemed to himself to be thinking furiously, but it was as if the machinery in his head, the wheels and gears, refused to mesh. Still, it didn’t matter, for a moment later Henry leaned down to the half-open window and said, “We got to change places; I’m near froze to whatinhellyouletmegit!” and tried to bring the ungainly length of the shotgun to bear upon the three of them in the cab while Regus opened his door and jammed his shoulder against it, trying to knock Henry off the running board. The truck careened from one side of the road to the other, and for a moment Music thought Henry was gone, but he must have had a firm grip on the bed of the truck behind the cab, for in the next moment the butt of the shotgun came crashing through the window, breaking off the top part of it and slamming Regus in the side of the head. “I’ll shoot,” Music reminded Cal, who stiffened his legs against the floorboard as though he were trying to run his head through the roof. The truck almost turned over. Regus fought to control it and Henry, who—apparently having decided it would be easier to beat Regus to death with the butt of the shotgun than to get the long barrels through the window, or maybe realizing that to shoot Regus and Music was to shoot Cal as well, jammed together as they were—clung to the side of the truck like a spider and thrashed away. But somehow Regus caught and held the stock of the shotgun as Henry jabbed it in the window, and the truck slewed to a stop off in the shallow left-hand ditch, which loosened Henry’s grip, at last, and sent him spinning off the front fender and into a patch of blackberry briars and old broomstraw. “You sucker!” Regus said, kicking the door of the truck open, getting out, and dragging the shotgun through the window all in the same motion.

“Get out,” Music told Cal, and got out with him, holding the barrel of the derringer against the hinge of his jaw just under his ear. For a moment none of the four of them moved, and then Regus and Music looked at each other.

“Jesus,” Regus said.

“Hellkatoot,” Music said. He looked up and down the road curving away in the evening sun. No one was in sight in either direction. “Let’s tie em the hell up and get gone,” he said. He poked Cal under the ear with the derringer. “Go sit in them briars with your buddy.”

Quickly, while Regus held the shotgun on the two men, Music cut any spare rope he could find from the load of hay. “Stand back to back,” he told the two men when he’d gathered as much rope as he could. He bound their wrists together tightly and then their ankles and, having some rope left over, bound their arms again just above the elbows. “Christ,” he said to Regus when he was finished and got a chance to look at him, “your left eye is closing up. Can you see out of it?”

“Some,” Regus said. He walked around in front of Henry, who was facing away from the road, and began to go through his pockets.

“So,” Henry said, “you ain’t just communists, but robbers too.”

Regus stood still and considered him a moment and then began to go through his pockets again. When he found, at last, a half dozen shotgun shells, he put his face up close to Henry’s and said, “Since you ain’t got the shotgun you tried to beat my head off with, you don’t need no shells,” and then stepping in front of Cal, he gave him a gentle push in the chest, which caused the two men to fall over as stiffly as a chopped tree.

“Oooof!” Henry cried from the bottom. “Goddamned briars! Get off!”

“Now just how the hell can I get off?” Cal said, looking straight up into the sky.

“Let me drive,” Music said, “and you stay down outta sight. One man with a straw hat on, driving a load of hay, won’t look as suspicious as two.”

“You still think yer gonna fool somebody, do ye?”

“We might,” Music said.

“Don’t leave us here; we’ll freeze to death!” Henry cried, his voice somewhat muffled and breathless.

“I expect the sheriff will be along in an hour or so,” Regus said.

“But he’ll turn off way back at Cox’s place,” Cal said.

“That’s true,” Regus said, “but then he’ll come on along, I’ll vow.”

“But hit’ll be dark by then,” Henry cried in his muffled voice.

“Well, you’ll need to yell out,” Regus said.

“Dammit,” Music said, “get in the truck and let’s go.” Regus got in. “See if you can get down in the floorboard,” Music said. While Music backed the truck up, Regus tried to situate himself in the floorboard, but there wasn’t room. “Okay,” Music said, “but if we see anybody and when we come to towns, bend down low.”

Regus unwrapped the Walker Colt from the rags, blew the dirt from it, and wiped it on his shirt sleeve. “All right,” he said, “but you wear this damned hand cannon, cause we can’t stand a close look anyway; and if we git one, I aim to shove this shotgun in their faces, and you might as well show that thing too, and maybe that will persuade them to let us pass on. I’m gettin kindly tired of this horseshit.” Gently he felt his left cheek and eyebrow and shook his head. “What in hell made you say we were going to Francis when we’d done already got into Kentucky? You might have known Francis was in Virginia.”

“I don’t know,” Music said. “I was going to make up a name where we were going, but I got excited, and it just came out.”

“And I’ll be damned if I didn’t think you was gonna sell the hay to that feller. What would you have done, Bill Music, if you’d struck a bargain?”

“I wasn’t gonna strike no bargain, and I about had that sheriff convinced hay was all we had till you opened up.”

“Yeah, well …” Regus said, but he didn’t finish; he merely got out his tobacco and pocketknife, cut himself a chew, and letting out a long whistling sigh, bit the chew off the blade of his knife.

“You know,” Music said, “now that I think about it, once I had old Cal pinned to the roof, you could have drawn that thirty-eight and stuck it in Henry’s belly and saved everybody a lot of trouble.”

Regus sighed again. “You just took me a little by surprise,” he said and grimaced. “Goddam,” he said, “it hurts to chew.”

They drove on, deciding to avoid Leslie County altogether since the sheriff might call ahead once he found out what had happened. And anyway, the long way home wasn’t much longer. And much to their relief they discovered that one man in a straw hat driving a Model T truck full of hay did fool people—no doubt the broken window helped a little too—for twice more they passed armed men and were not waved down.

Still, when they crossed the Switch County line, Regus said he was, by God, home and through riding with his head down between his knees. Instead he sat straight up in the seat with the shotgun cradled across his chest, and Music didn’t argue since, no doubt, the truck would have been recognized at first sight in any case. But they drove right through Valle Crucis and into the ragtag squatterville below Regus’s house without being challenged, and days went by before they found out what a cold night Sheriff Farthing and half a dozen special deputies had spent just below Mink Slide, waiting for them to come back the way they had gone.

22

THE PICKET LINE

BELOW REGUS BONE’S homestead the winter grass was trodden into the earth and the earth trodden into a substance hard as pavement as the citizens of squatterville began to settle in. Tents went up. Squares of canvas were cut away and patched with tin and sheet metal to accommodate stovepipes. Clotheslines were strung. Tubs, washboards, tables, and chairs were cached about outside. And here and there tents grew crude additions or roofed front porches, some made of cardboard, some made of lumber and corrugated iron painfully carried and dragged all the way through the woods from the Bear Paw coal camp, where scavenging reduced the tipple to a skeleton and one or two of the tumbledown, unoccupied shacks all but disappeared. One ambitious fellow collected empty food tins and cans and stamped them into the earth to make a colorful metal floor for his shelter, which caused the value of empty cans to rise so sharply he couldn’t beg enough to pave his front stoop as he had planned. A wit put up a sign naming the uneven row of tents where he dwelt “Easy Street.” The next morning those who lived a little way up the hill raised a sign of their own, calling their string of tents “Silk Stocking Row.” And every morning, when the five o’clock whistle blew, a tough and plucky group marched down the road from squatterville to harangue the miners still working for Hardcastle and to plague and bait the mine guards as well.

As for Music, the new spirit of the evicted miners astonished him. He wouldn’t have thought one truckload of goods, which plainly wouldn’t last forever, could put so much fight in them. He wondered if what he witnessed and felt in himself wasn’t merely false courage. Still, it fooled everyone concerned, even Sheriff Hub Farthing. For certain, when the sheriff and his deputies arrived on the picket line that first day and ordered the striking miners off the main street of Elkin, neither he nor his men seemed prepared for the jeering that followed. All the white strikers were armed, and so were many of the blacks who had come up from the Bear Paw to join them. For the first time in months their bellies were full. And when the sheriff threatened to arrest and jail them, he was hooted down before he could even finish his say. He was told the law by men who had no idea what the law was. The main street of Elkin was the public way, they told him, and many among them cocked their pistols and rifles and leveled their shotguns at Hub Farthing, deputies, and mine guards alike. If it was a bluff, it was the best kind. Music himself wasn’t sure and drew the ancient Walker Colt and rested the ball of his thumb anxiously on the hammer while his innards jittered and he waited for someone on either side to do something untoward. For a little while the sheriff considered the men on the picket line—whether to accustom himself to their new behavior or try to stare them down Music couldn’t say—but, at last, Hub Farthing seemed to think it best to let the strikers keep the main street of Elkin. He had a quick conference with the mine guards, left his two deputies to stand with them, and climbed back into his car.

When he pulled away toward Valle Crucis, the ragged men on the picket line laughed and hooted and shook their fists. And when he did not return that day, or the next, or the one following, even Regus began to think they had won some sort of victory. “Boys,” he said, “be damned if it don’t look like ye faced that bastard down.”

In the first few days the union men persuaded three miners to trade their company shacks for tents on Easy Street and Silk Stocking Row, although there was no doubt that one of the three, a man named Glen Dunbar, joined them because he could get no more credit at the commissary. Dunbar wasn’t much of a miner, and he had five hungry children and a shiftless wife, and Music wondered, from time to time, how many victories like Dunbar squatterville could afford to win. But he needn’t have worried, for after those first three converts, relations between the union men and the miners still working for Hardcastle began to harden and grow bitter. The men on the picket line lost patience with arguing and pleading, and when the working miners sifted through them to trudge on toward the tipple and drift mouth, names were called after them they didn’t care to answer to. And, finally, those who crossed the picket line had to risk rough handling.