Hardcastle (41 page)

A little while later Lewis stepped through the tent flap, carrying his shotgun, and Music gave him Regus’s watch. “You’re welcome to this piece of canvas,” Music told him and took it from around his shoulders, which turned them icy and caused his teeth to chatter. “It won’t keep you dry, but it keeps the air from stirring around you so much.”

“Sure,” Lewis said. “The damned stuff leaks when ye touch hit. We been mostly all right, but Turl, the damned fool, tried soapin his tent to keep the rain out, and he’s near swamped.”

“Get him to move in where them folks left,” Music said through the unstable quaking of his jaw.

“He already has,” Lewis said. “Damnation if ye don’t look all used up, son. I’ll see you in the mornin,” he said, and raising his hand in a gesture of parting, turned away to wake the others and change the guard.

When Music got to the house, he was almost unable to light the kerosene lamp in his room. He thanked heaven for the dry clothes hanging just inside his door on a nail, and he fully meant to put them on and sleep in them, but by the time he had dried the cap-and-ball pistol, put it aside where he could reach it, and shucked, at last, out of his wet clothes, he thought it best to wrap up in his quilt and sit down on his straw tick to rest a moment. He did not rise again. He thought of Merlee and her lovely dress and how beautiful and shy it had made her. He heard her telling him again how she could make him run off with her; he heard the pleasant, snug sound of the rain against the house, a soft xylophone upon the roof and windowpanes; and he had no memory at all of lying down or having his thoughts plucked away by sleep.

During the night the weather cleared, and the next morning, after Music had done the milking and he and Regus had eaten their breakfast, they stepped out upon the dogtrot to a mild-as-spring day. Clotheslines were strung everywhere in squatterville, and the whole tent city was steaming with the first touch of the sun when Arturo Zigerelli’s Dodge drove up and the three men who had gone off to Chicago began to disentangle themselves from each other and the cramped confines of the car. They stood for a moment with the mud curling around their shoes and blinked at Easy Street and Silk Stocking Row before their families began to hail them and rush out to greet them. Zigerelli merely watched, one foot propped on the running board of his car, until he noticed Music and Regus on the dogtrot and started up through the mud and steaming tents. He came very slowly, as though he had walked many miles, and as he drew closer, they could see he truly had been beaten. A dark, crusted wound intersected one eyebrow and extended to the bridge of his nose. Both his eyes were discolored, and even his jaw was puffy and out of line.

When he reached the steps, Regus said, “Well, now, the sheriff promised we’d seen the last of ye.”

“And did you believe him?” Zigerelli asked.

Regus scratched the back of his neck, looking thoughtfully at the Italian. “I reckon I did not,” he said, “but it ain’t like I never been fooled.”

The Italian nodded solemnly. “And why are you not among the others to welcome the great travellers home?”

“We can let that wait a bit,” Regus said. “The last time them three fellers seen us, me and Bill was mine guards. Wouldn’t hurt to let them git use to a different notion before we butted in.”

“They know whose side you are on,” Arturo Zigerelli said. “I have told them.” He looked from one of them to the other with something disturbing and peculiar in his eyes. “It is Arturo Guido Zigerelli they see as their enemy at this moment.” The Italian shrugged his shoulders and turned his cupped palms toward them, then merely let his hands fall again to his sides. “I must tell you now a thing of great importance, and I wish you to believe I would have told you in the beginning if it had not been forbidden.” Without turning away from them, he tipped his head toward the tent city. “It is what those three are saying even now, although they have so little understanding they mistrust those who have come to them as brothers and comrades. The preacher, the Bydee Flann, believes in his heart he has seen the gates of hell and touched them. Yes, and that I will grow horns from my head and a tail. He has this conviction because he has learned that the National Miners Union is not the simple, weak, foolish effort he thought it was, but a part of the great struggle of communism against all those who enslave the poor. Yes, yes, I tell you now with pride, Arturo Zigerelli is a Communist,” he said and thumped himself upon the chest. “Are you now my enemies too? Do you see horns growing from my head?”

Regus raised his hand and made patting motions in the air with it. “Wait now, wait a little,” he said. “You talk faster than a man can listen.” He looked at Music, both surprise and disbelief in his expression, and then, oddly, he simply sat down on the dogtrot. After a moment he began to wag his head and laugh. “Every time my poor, dumb poppa joined a union, they called him a Communist, a goddamned Red. Jesus, but they beat him over the head with it, and I’d vow he never in his life knowed what a Communist was, but he denied it all his days like a man would deny he was a son of a bitch.” Regus wagged his head again and wiped his face with one of his large, chapped hands as though he’d stepped into a spiderweb. “So,” he said to the Italian, “you claim to be the genuine article, do ye?”

“Yes,” Zigerelli said.

“Hell,” Regus said and turned to Music, “I ain’t a damned bit better off than my poppa. What do ye know about this communist business, Bill Music?”

“Why do you not ask one who can tell you?” Zigerelli said.

Regus patted the air with his hand. “We’ll get around to you,” he said. “I want to hear what Bill has to say.”

From the first moment the Italian had begun to talk, Music had felt dread, as though he had somehow guessed what was coming, but, even so, he had trouble believing what he had heard. “I don’t know anything about them,” Music said. “I know they had a revolution over in Russia and killed a lot of people, and once or twice when I was in Chicago, there’d be a man standing up on an orange crate, or some such place, going on about communism like a circuit preacher. Sometimes I’d hang around to see what he had to say, but usually a fight would start, or the police would come around and run the fellow off. They don’t think a fellow has a right to make his fortune and hold on to it. They think everything ought to belong to everybody, if I understood them. They don’t believe in God, and I guess they figure this here country is just about wrong from top to bottom.”

Regus sucked his teeth and looked at the Italian. “Do you own up to any of that?”

“If I understand what you are asking, I say yes to you; what Mr. Music says is much naked, but it is true.”

“Ha,” Regus said, “here I thought I was bein a fool for messin with a union.” He shook his head in wonder. “I guess I just didn’t know how many different kinds of fool I could be. There don’t seem to be no end to it. Ha,” he said, as though he couldn’t get over it. He got out his plug of tobacco and his pocketknife and cut himself a chew. He stared at the space of hardscrabble earth directly in front of the Italian and worked the quid of tobacco into his jaw. “Maybe I ain’t yet got it straight, but hit sounds like ye’ve set me and these other dumb suckers up for a fight, not just agin Hardcastle, but agin religion and the whole damned country. Is that the way you see it?”

“I believe the worker gets only crumbs, although his labor produces the whole loaf,” Arturo Zigerelli said, “and I believe he will get only crumbs until he makes a revolution against the capitalists who enslave him; yes, and rejects the god of suffering he has been taught to worship.”

“Ye won’t sell that line in Kentucky, bud,” Regus said. “Hell, not even to a coal miner.”

“To some of the young we have done so. Yes, and to a few of the others as well,” Arturo Zigerelli said. “For Bydee Flann and those like him, perhaps there is no hope. The Kentucky miner has valor, but no one is more innocent. Ah, Mr. Bone and Mr. Music, I know everyone will not throw off the yoke or give up the sad god of the cross at once,” Zigerelli said, “but we can teach them. I was not born a Communist.” Zigerelli smiled faintly, which made his lopsided jaw and the bruised, discolored flesh around his eyes look ridiculous. “I was as innocent of knowledge as any here. My good mother spent part of each day upon her knees, thinking to send messages up to heaven. And I too …”

“Did you know a young man was killed here night before last, and a woman and a little boy shot?” Music asked, his surprise and disbelief having boiled down, at last, to anger.

“I learned of it,” Zigerelli said, “as I learned of the attack upon your Negro comrades at the Bear Paw as well.”

“And, goddammit, not one of them had a hint of what your union was up to!” Music said. “How many do you think would have joined if they’d known?” Music started down the steps toward the Italian, but found himself facing Regus.

“Whoa now, Bill,” Regus said.

“If I’d had the choice, I would not have deceived you,” Arturo Zigerelli said.

Music started to step around Regus, but Regus caught him by the shoulders. “Bill, Bill, Bill!” he said, until Music was looking at him instead of over his shoulder at the Italian. “Hell, I don’t think it’s goin to matter,” Regus said with a faint, tired squint of a smile around his eyes. “I expect it wouldn’t make no difference if he was a Communist, a Baptist, a Democrat, or a goddamned airplane pilot. I reckon that’s the pity of it.”

“It matters to me!” Music said.

“No,” Regus said, “likely it won’t matter to any of us. What you gonna do? You gonna bend yer pistol barrel around the little guinea’s head? Looks like somebody else already done that once or twice. You gonna shoot him?”

Music didn’t know what he intended to do; he hadn’t thought about it. He took a deep breath. “Nawh, hell,” he said, “I ain’t gonna shoot him.”

“I understand your anger, Mr. Music,” Arturo Zigerelli said, “and I am sorry for it.”

“No, you don’t,” Music said. “I argued against taking you to the sheriff that first night down at the Bear Paw.”

“I see,” Zigerelli said. “But even now, if I were gone, another would come to take my place. And I think the sheriff would not have held me. Many times he could have put me in the jail, Mr. Music, but I think he wants to send me away with so much fear that no other will come here again. I think now perhaps he will kill me because I do not run away.”

“I think we need to set down and talk to this feller a little bit,” Regus said.

“You talk to him,” Music said, and he stalked back up the steps and out to the barn, where Ella’s laying hens clucked and blinked their idiot eyes at him while he fumed. The more he thought of the betrayed people of squatterville, the more helpless he felt; until, at last, he found himself, head in hands, sitting on the milking stool among the shavings of the plow, having lost all track of time. He had no notion whether one hour or three had passed, and what brought him around, even so, were the people plodding by the house and up through the pasture toward the small graveyard. The preacher, he realized, was going to hold the Tucker boy’s funeral, and he left the barn and followed like a man obliged to share their grief.

From the height of the land he could see—even though Zigerelli’s car was gone and the funeral had begun—men still remaining in squatterville, Regus among them, and they appeared to be arguing. But those who were gathered about the grave drew his attention. They had put on their best clothes. The men were shaved. The women were tidy and had fixed their hair. And even the children looked almost clean, their woolly heads wetted and combed. He himself was not clean, and his face was rough with stubble, so he kept his distance, although he would have done so in any case. He could hear only a word or two of what Bydee Flann was saying, and when the preacher bowed his head to pray, he could distinguish nothing, as though the rite were not meant for the likes of him, and he found that just and proper, after all.

The Tucker woman was there, looking so pale and worn out Music doubted she would have been able to stand upright if her husband hadn’t held her. Ella was there in a dark dress he had never seen. She looked strange without her constant apron and with her hair twisted into a bun and held with combs. But he would have known her anywhere, for her shoulders were as broad and square as any man’s, and her head, even bowed, was bent to one side as though the very earth spoke to her and she listened. Lewis Short was there, dressed in a black suit nearly as green and shiny in its worn places as the wings of a dragonfly. Worth Enloe. The consumptive woman. And there were others whose faces were perfectly familiar but whose names he had never learned. And he was there, William Music, who should have been merely passing through, who should have had no influence on their lives.

At last the little preacher lifted his head and raised up his Bible and began to read in a ringing voice.

Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God.

Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men.

For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.

Thou carriest them away as with a flood; they are as a sleep: in the morning they are like grass which groweth up.

In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth.

For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy wrath are we troubled.

Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret sins in the light of thy countenance.

For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we spend our years as a tale that is told.

The days of our years are three-score years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.

So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.