Hardcastle (43 page)

“Fools is what we are,” Regus said. “The operators have played us for fools from the first day we walked into the mines to make their money for them.”

“You were a mine guard, not no miner,” Tom Loflin said.

Regus considered Loflin for a long moment. “I was a miner until I came here, and my poppa was a miner before me. Maybe I wasn’t no fool when I went to work for Hardcastle, but I’ll thank ye not to remind me of it further, if you think to call me friend.”

“You know as good as any what he’s done fer us,” Lewis Short said, frowning at Loflin from under his eyebrows. “He taken us in and stood by us. They ain’t no reason to bring up such as that.”

“Maybe,” Clifford Smith said, “but I’d like to know, Mr. Regus Bone, if you intend to stick with the union or if you don’t.”

“Hell, son,” Regus said, “they just ain’t gonna be no union to stick to, not this time around. Even that little guinea knows that. He won’t say it straight out, but he knows it. There won’t be anything to stick to before long but this here tent city.”

“Then what do you mean we ain’t whipped?” Loflin said. “You said we wasn’t whipped.”

“I mean we’ll truck that grub up from Knoxville, and we’ll take our picket line down to visit the scabs and goons in Elkin every single goddamned day,” Regus said. “Ha, we can’t make Hardcastle hire us, and we can’t make him pay us good money, but we can sure as hell make him spend it.”

Bydee Flann was looking at the ground, shaking his head slowly and steadily and much more in sadness, it seemed to Music, than disagreement. “I’d like to stand with ye,” he said. “I’d wager my life fer you boys, I reckon ye all know that; but a man’s faith ain’t for wager. I’ll pull my watch tonight same as the next man, and me and mine will leave out tomorrow.”

“Where do you expect to go?” Charles Tucker asked. “There’s shelter and grub here. We’ll ask ye to do nothin agin yer conscience.”

“I reckon, Lord help me, hit’s agin my conscience to be beholden to that National Mines outfit for my victuals and a roof,” Bydee said. “But I will pray for all of ye here.”

“We’d have you stay, Preacher,” Regus said.

Bydee shook his head. “They’ll be a shack down at the Bear Paw until the Lord shows me where to go and what to do.”

“Ha,” Turl said, “they’s nigger Communists down at the Bear Paw, and they done took everything with more than two walls and a roof a-standin.”

“No,” Bydee said, “that Italian told us when he brought us home that those poor coloreds all moved into the main drift of the old mine after the night riders attacked them. There will be some sort of shelter.”

“So,” Turl said, “they done gone back to livin in a cave like they done in Africa. Ha, what do ye know?”

“Ha, yerself,” Clifford Smith said. “If the drift ain’t full of water, it might beat this place here. They’d have high ground on any night riders. It’ud be easy to guard and hard to attack; and, hell, they’ve got the whole mountain over em to keep the rain and snow out.”

“I’d have you stay, Preacher,” Regus said again, as though he didn’t even hear Turl or Clifford Smith.

“Hit ain’t in me,” Bydee Flann said, “but may God bless you for your charity.”

Regus rubbed his face with one of his big, knob-knuckly hands and seemed about to say something else to Bydee, but, if so, he must have thought better of it, for he merely shook his head. “All right then,” he said finally, “I’m ready to be down on the picket line in the mornin. I hate to think of them mine guards loafin around, smilin and pickin their teeth, or them scabs feelin so smart and righteous.” He ran his forefinger back and forth under his nose, and his eyebrows assumed their old humorous posture. “Ha,” he said, “the next time a union comes to town, old Kenton Hardcastle might just decide it’s way yonder cheaper to live with it. Sure, he might just ast to join up, hisself.”

A few of the men snorted with laughter, and for a moment Music thought a little of squatterville’s spirit might return, but there wasn’t much joking and boasting. As for himself, his edginess would not leave him and had begun to afflict his stomach like a great hunger or sadness.

Regus decided to put the three who had come back from Chicago on the first guard shift, for they were weary from their travels and would soon be done and allowed to rest. Bydee was given Regus’s little nickel-plated derringer since, although he apologized for it, he said he could not shoot a man in any case. Still, Regus merely told him to stay in squatterville and shoot the derringer in the air if he got wind of trouble. Clifford Smith and Worth Enloe, who had no such compassion for night riders, were posted as road guards. Turl, Lewis, and Tucker would take the second shift, and Regus, Music, and Loflin would take the last one. Although, as it turned out, they were hit before the road guards even quite got out of camp.

Long afterwards they would agree it had been an awful failing to expect trouble to come from the highway and nowhere else. Still, it wasn’t merely because that’s where the first attack had come from. It was always the miner who had to sneak about being careful not to be seen, who had to avoid the public way. Men with badges traveled the highroad and came right up in your face, not from a lack of imagination, but because they had everything on their side: the legal rights, the power, the gall. And long afterwards, too, Music wondered about his awful presentiment, if that’s what it had been. For Ella, who was gifted in such matters if anyone was, had none until the first pistol shot made her heart grow cold.

He and Regus were climbing the washed-out wagon road, and he was no more than a step behind, when Fetlock barked from beneath the dogtrot. Having been confused and all but cowed by the comings and goings of those in squatterville, Fetlock seldom made a sound and would allow anyone to approach the house without a challenge, but bark he did. And even if it was only one clipped remark, like a hammer blow, it caused Music to drop back another step. The hair at the nape of his neck beginning to rise, his eyes coming around toward the elderberry bushes across the springhouse branch, he was not completely taken unaware when the volley came from just that spot. Nor was there any doubt that Regus had been hit; Music saw how his head was tossed and how he fell without any effort to right himself. Just as, in the next instant, he knew with absolute certain knowledge that the jerking of Regus’s broad, bony shoulder and the trembling of his arm were aimless reflex winning out over an effort to draw a weapon. He saw all that with utter clarity, despite the darkness, despite his own death, which missed him by no more than an inch, tearing the air beside his cheek, and missed him a second time, plucking, as though with regret, at the coattail fanned out behind him as he dived into a tire rut in the washed-out road.

He was aware of the commotion and the shouting in squatterville and of Ella Bone appearing on the dogtrot with the kerosene lamp from the kitchen, but only as a kind of inconsequential background, an irrelevant climate surrounding what had happened to Regus, and surrounding him as he thumbed back the hammer of the ancient Walker Colt. He did not need the notch in the hammer nor the blade at the end of the barrel, didn’t even see them; nor did the deafening reports, the successive recoil, or the nimbus of fire fanning out from the cylinder distract him in the least. As much by instinct as by sight he located the dark shadows where the muzzle flashes had been, and his first shot struck one of them down. The second dark shadow scuttled to the side and fired on him twice, but he tracked it with the long barrel of the Colt, thumbing back the hammer and firing again and again until he saw the indistinct contortions of its fall and heard the branches crack and break under it as it went down. And through it all he had been as innocent of fear as he was of bravery or mercy or remorse.

When he scrambled up to where Regus was lying, Ella was already there. But Regus stayed only a moment. “So, Momma,” he said, but all at once his back began to dance against the ground, and his breath rattled out.

There was no time for any promises, even if Music had been the sort to make them and had had them ready. And although he saw it come, the news of Regus’s death didn’t seem to reach all the areas of his understanding for months or even years afterward, so that it took a very long time to come to the end of his grief.

SWITCH COUNTY, KENTUCKY,
SUMMER 1979

IN THE SUMMER heat he walks down the road into Elkin, her small, soft fist gripping the forefinger he has stuck down for her to hold. She is four, the youngest of his grandchildren up from Knoxville for a visit, and when they get into town, she will have a soft drink, or a Popsicle, whichever strikes her fancy more. He would have bought her a treat in any case, but now it will be, in some part, a reward for forgetting so easily what her older brothers were so curious and worked up about.

“Pappaw,” she says, “will you carry me?”

He looks down at her and sees that she is flushed, that under her eyes and across her upper lip there is a fine mist of sweat, and he swings her up and sets her astride his shoulders and walks on. She is a small, light life to carry, and in that alone she seems to offer a gentle, if not quite perfect, absolution for an old man’s crimes. For long periods of time he is able to forget them, to put them away so completely that now they seem not quite retrievable. And why should they be? For who would want to remember them as though they were something to be celebrated? He decides he will try to explain that to his grandsons, and maybe to their father as well, when he and his wife come back from their vacation to collect their children once more. He will call him aside, yes, and tell him plainly that there are some things a fellow doesn’t strut and crow about.

Beside the road a fence is lush with a burden of honeysuckle, and he steps down into the ditch and plucks a piece of the vine covered in blossoms. “Do what Pappaw does, Darlin,” he tells the little girl, “and ye’ll get somethin sweet,” and he bites off the stem end of one of the flowers and sucks the nectar out before he passes the thick tulle of blossoms up to amuse her. But as he walks along the road with the child astride his neck and flowers of honeysuckle sifting down around him, a bit of his old anger comes back to gnaw at his stomach. The anger is no longer quite so pure, but it remains. And he remembers well enough his time in the Switch County jail waiting for his trial, and he remembers the trial too. Perhaps he would have lost if the National Miners Union hadn’t sent a lawyer over from Pikeville to defend him, but there is no gratitude in him. He knew, even then, whose interest the lawyer had come to defend. A few months later, when it was clear the union was broken, the organizers and lawyers and all the rest of the National Miners Union people vanished like smoke. Nor did Arturo Guido Zigerelli ever once show up in Switch County again. Still, that was smart too. For if the people around there were used to men killing each other for one reason or another and found the business between William Music and the Burnsides too close to call, they might have hanged Zigerelli.

Even Turl and Tom Loflin had gotten five years in the penitentiary for blowing up the power plant at Elkin in the wee hours after Regus was killed. But, of course, they couldn’t plead self-defense.

“Why are you laughing, Pappaw?” she asks him, bending around to stare at him owlishly from above and a little to one side.

“I don’t know,” he answers her. “I didn’t know I was.”

“Would you like a honeysuckle?” she asks him.

“Absolutely,” he tells her, and while she reaches down the small trumpets of honeysuckle to his lips and he takes them by touch, he thinks of the mockery of his trial: the prosecutor trying him more for being a member of the National Miners Union than for killing the Burnsides, and his own lawyer trying harder to defend the union than the shooting. They were both the same, those lawyers, he thinks; strutting and posing like senators giving speeches, and the truth nowhere in them. He nibbles her small, silky fingers and she giggles.

“Don’t bite me, Pappaw,” she says.

“I can’t help it,” he says. “Ye’ve made me so hungry, I’ve got to snappin.” But oh, he thinks, when Bydee Flann and Charles Tucker and Ella Bone gave testimony, they turned that trial around. He remembers absolutely the way Ella Bone looked, coming forward to testify on Merlee’s arm, her worn hands folded into her dress front, her head held humbly to one side. She and Bydee and Charles Tucker, at least, were an embarrassment to both attorneys; and for a little while what had been a stage for wild invention became merely a crowded, slightly too warm, country courtroom where one could smell the rank tobacco in the spittoons, the odor of unwashed bodies, and the mustiness of clothing ordinarily packed away for special occasions. A place where, momentarily, the humble truth appeared and grieved.

When they get into Elkin, he reaches up and takes her hands and swings her around and down to the ground. “Now,” he says, “what do ye crave, Missy? Will ye have a cold drink or a Popsicle or what?”

“I want a Popsicle, an orange one,” she tells him, and together they climb the steps to the gallery. It is Green’s Supermarket now, not the Hardcastle commissary, but it is the same building; and inside, the wooden floor pops and groans as it did, and it even entices the nostrils with the same smells, never mind that it is air-conditioned. He buys the five pounds of sugar Merlee has sent him for and two orange Popsicles, which he and his granddaughter eat sitting in split-bottomed chairs on the gallery. Now and then people pass by and speak to him, inquire after his grandchild and tell him she is pretty. They call him Mr. Music, for none of them date back to his time or are so familiar as to call him Bill, although there are a few left alive who do so.

But he isn’t paying much attention to them. Because of the mood he is in, he looks out on what used to be Hardcastle company housing and tries to resurrect it in his mind. It is hard, for there are some dowdy shops and stores where the first row of houses used to be; yet behind them, a few of the shacks remain. They are painted now, and one or two of them have additions built on, and there are some trees and grass. When he and the little girl walk back, he knows he will look toward the place where the tipple and power plant once stood, and he will try to resurrect them as well, and that will be even more difficult, for no trace of them remains, and even the mountain, which rose above them, is being unwound from strip-mining. Peeled like an apple.