Hardcastle (5 page)

The woman he had seen through the window might have been fifty or so, but it was difficult to tell. Although her hair was a rich red-brown without any grey, her face was a net of wrinkles; and though she looked ruddy and strong, she carried her head at a peculiar angle, as if she were slightly deaf or bent with rheumatism. “Howdy,” she said to Music.

“Ma’am,” Music said, but the woman’s attention seemed to bend around him toward the rifle pointed at his spine. The man had shut off his carbide lamp and taken off the cap it was clipped to. He was taller than Music by a head and had hair the color of a lion’s mane.

“What’s this here?” the woman asked.

“Jumped this feller outten a haystack, Momma,” the man said. He took one of the two chairs from under the kitchen table and set it by the door to the breezeway. “Sit ye down,” he said to Music, and Music sat, anger slowly beginning to bristle along his scalp. He had been caught in the wrong, and the man had the privilege, maybe even the obligation, to curse him and run him off, but not to draw the thing out like this.

The man ambled to the other end of the room, put the gunnysack, Music’s paper parcel, and the little rifle down on the sideboard. He dragged the other chair from beneath the table for his mother. She sat too, her head cocked to one side as though she were listening to something beneath the floorboards of the house. Settling himself into a curl under the table, the hound tasted the inside of his mouth and sighed, his lips fluttering softly. The man leaned back against the sideboard, crossed his arms over his chest, and looked at Music.

What the hell, buddyroe, Music thought and speculated on the man’s strength and the distance between them. He was rawboned, lean, and Music guessed he’d be awkward but tough as hickory. He wished they weren’t so far apart. It would take two, perhaps three, steps to reach him, and although he no longer had a weapon in his hands, there was the butt of the pistol showing just inside his open jumper. Finally there was the woman, who might get knocked about and hurt. He thought about trying to get away, but the odds of that seemed longer yet. His chair was propped against the door to the breezeway, and there would not be enough time to get up, turn around, snatch the chair aside, and get out. No, he thought, it would be better to take the man’s gun away. As though he were shifting for comfort, Music leaned his weight a little forward, taking some of it upon the balls of his feet; but somehow, though he was tuned to make a sudden leap, he made no further move. Whatever there was of forbearance and good sense sitting in the central chamber of his brain did not abdicate as it often did. Perhaps it was the woman with her head tilted humbly to one side, her large, chapped hands folded in her lap, her eyes looking somewhere in the vicinity of his shoe tops; perhaps it was his sense of wrongdoing; or the complicated but somehow benign atmosphere of that place; but for some reason the possibility of action drained away. Music scratched the back of his head, wiped his mouth, sniffed. “Well,” he said at last, “I got in your springhouse for a fact and drank me some milk.” He made a gesture toward the cement sack with his forefinger. “If you look in my poke yonder, you’ll find two turnips and a handful of pole beans I grubbed outta your garden.” He inclined his head toward the far-off field. “I expect that haystack I bedded down in needs fixin if it ain’t to molder.” He took a deep breath and raised his eyebrows quizzically. “I think them’s the damages,” he said. “I trust they ain’t none of em shootin offenses.”

As though Music had not spoken, the man said, “What business ye got in Switch County?”

“No business,” Music said. “Didn’t know that’s where I was.”

The man wrinkled his brow, tilted his chin to the side. “That don’t seem hardly likely,” he said.

“I been through lotsa places I couldn’t name,” Music said. “I’m headed to Virginia, and this here place is in my way. If I didn’t come through here, I’d have to come through somewhere else.”

“That makes a right smart of sense to me,” the woman said.

“You ain’t heard of the National Miners Union, I reckon,” the man asked.

“Lots of poor stiffs are trying to organize these days,” Music said.

The woman rocked herself ever so slightly back and forth in the chair.

“That yer answer, is it?” the man asked.

Music frowned, confused, wondering if he was beginning to catch the drift of things. “I’ve heard of the United Mine Workers and the West Virginia Mine Workers, I guess,” he said, “but I don’t know that other outfit.” He thought of the one-armed man, the way the niggers had acted in that Mink Slide place, the trouble and killings he’d read about in the newspapers at one mine or another, in one state or another. Hellkatoot, he thought.

“Well,” the man said, “they’re makin a ruckus in Harlan County and down in Pike and Perry and Bell.” He studied Music, seeming to grow more embarrassed all the time, his neck flushing red even to his ears, like some overgrown schoolboy who had been made to recite when he didn’t know his lesson. “I won’t monkey with ye,” he said at last. “Are you a unionizer or no?”

Music felt his own ears warming with embarrassment, as though being a unionizer was so far from the truth there was no good way to argue the matter. It was as if someone had accused him of being a fence post or a pinto pony just to hear what he would offer to the contrary. “I been knockin around out west,” Music said, “knockin around most everywhere, it seems to me. But for every fellow that’s got a job”—he made a vague motion with his hand—“there’s three more lookin. No, mister,” Music said, “I ain’t no organizer for your union, nor much of anything else. I’m just tryin to get back home to Shulls Mills, Virginia.”

For some moments no one spoke, until the woman, sitting woodenly in her chair and looking at no one, said in a soft, almost dreamy voice, “I expect yer a-thinkin we’re right cross.” She sighed. “Leastwise that’s the appearance I’d put on us. My folks come from Virginia,” she said, “just over to Big Stone Gap.”

The man rubbed his chin uncomfortably. “If yer what ye claim, I’m right sorry to be a-diggin in yer business,” he said. He shifted his feet. “Still yet, I probly ort to carry you to the sheriff and let ye tell yer story to him.”

“You some kinda law?” Music asked.

“More’s the pity,” the woman said. “Mine guard is what he be, and a deputy sheriff into the bargain. Ye hungry, I reckon?”

The warm, sweet smell of biscuits and gravy and the complicated odors of other foods had been with him since he entered the kitchen, although he’d had no chance to acknowledge them and what they were doing to his stomach. “I don’t want to trouble you,” Music said.

“Shaw,” the woman said and rose. She went to the woodstove, removed one of the lids and poked the fire up, added a stick or two of wood from the box beside the stove, and went to the cupboard over the sideboard. “Twon’t be fancy,” she said. “I wasn’t studyin company.”

“I thank you, missus,” Music said.

The woman made him no reply. The man dragged up the chair she had vacated and sat heavily down. He propped his elbows on the table, massaged his face, and, with a sudden wry expression, laughed. “I ort to believe ye, I reckon,” he said. “Don’t seem any man’s luck would run so poor, and him an organizer, as to land smack in a mine guard’s lap.”

“Set up to the table,” the woman commanded Music. “They’s coffee still hot, and the rest’s a-comin.” Music did as he was told, and she placed a chipped, enameled tin cup before him which bathed his face in steam and another before her son.

“How long ye been on the road?” the man asked.

“I don’t know how to answer,” Music said. “I ain’t been home in better than two years, but I’ve been most of that time in Chicago.” While the man listened patiently and the woman labored over the stove, he told what he could about Chicago; about learning the electrician’s trade, and about hard times catching him there. He did not know how to tell why he’d stayed, or how rough and lean it had been. With some embarrassment, he told the story of traveling all the way to Salt Lake City, Utah, because he’d heard there was an electrification program going on there and linemen were being hired for big money; and how, finally, when he learned that no such thing was true and caught himself one morning sifting through the garbage cans behind a hotel, looking for something to eat, he had thought, at last, of going home. He did not tell them it was hard to remember he had a home, that even as he sat before them, he was not certain he had the right to return. When he had left home in the beginning to seek whatever he sought, hadn’t he renounced it? Struggling to get by day after day and month after month, hadn’t he lost even a proper memory of it? He did not tell them that, for he didn’t understand it himself; and, like taking hold of twenty-three hundred volts or being robbed, it was, in any case, too personal a thing to tell.

“Regus,” the woman said from the stove, “you ain’t goan carry him to the sheriff, aire ye?” She was rounding off a plate with navy beans and some sort of meat in a white gravy.

The man called Regus frowned and ran his forefinger back and forth under his nose. He looked at Music. “I’d hate to think you wuz guying me,” he said, “and me swallowin it. Hit ain’t no folks anywhere that’s believed as many lies as them in Kentucky. I reckon we don’t ken the difference.” He shifted his feet under the table and sighed, inclining his head toward the woman at the stove. “Nawh,” he said at last, “I reckon I ain’t.”

The woman took a pan of biscuits from the oven, propped three of them precariously atop the food on the plate, and set it before him. The odor was so delicious Music felt dizzy. “You get to it now,” she said, “fore hit cools.”

The woman went off into the front room, Regus sipped his coffee, and Music began to eat. The food was even better than it smelled. He was sure, in all his life, he had never eaten anything so good. The meat—he thought it was rabbit to judge by a wide, flat thigh and skinny shank he could see—was cooked in a white gravy, mildly sweet, very peppery and fine; and the biscuits and beans, too, were delicious. Presently the woman reappeared carrying a large, black, leather-bound Bible pressed against her breast as though it were an infant. “Mister,” she said, not quite looking at him, her head tilted to one side after her fashion, “can you read writin? I mean ye no offense if ye can’t,” she added.

“Yes’um,” Music said through a mouthful of food. He was confused—he had been since the man and dog had startled him awake—but he felt blessed, as well, with great good fortune.

“Now, I thought you could,” the woman said. “I’d not have ast if I’d had airey notion ye couldn’t.” She put the Bible down gently on the table and folded her large, rough hands into her apron. “I’d take it as an awful favor if you’d read me a mite of the Gospel after ye’ve had yer supper. I ain’t a-chargin ye to eat by it. Hit’s just so long since I been to a church meetin,” she said.

Music bobbed his head and swallowed. “It would be my pleasure, missus,” he said.

Across the table from him, Regus rubbed the palms of his hands together thoughtfully. “I’ll be back directly,” he said and rose. Beneath the table, the hound scrabbled up and brushed past Music’s shins to follow the man out upon the breezeway.

Music gulped down coffee and stuffed his mouth with food. The woman took the coffeepot from the stove and filled his cup again. “I’bleve you wuz near perished, son,” she told him; and as if he were one of her own, and without asking his preference in the matter, she replenished his nearly empty plate with what remained in her pots and pans. Music took a scalding sip of coffee and determined to slow himself down, but he could not. The woman began to heat some water on the stove. “I’ll not have ye think,” she said, keeping her back to him, “that I’ve been a-beggin your pardon for my son. I ain’t,” she said, her voice calm, but full of such quiet conviction that he paused over his plate, his jaws packed, part of a biscuit arrested halfway to his mouth. She turned toward him, her head to one side, her eyes focused on a point no higher than his shoe tops but with the power, somehow, to make him go still inside, as though she looked him dead in the eye. “Regus Bone’s as good a man as ere ye’ll chance to meet,” she said. “Hit’s the times that makes us ill and sets us all agin one another.”

His mouth, stuffed as it was, went as dry as if he had been chidden. He swallowed three or four times to make room for speech, seeming to swallow each time whatever he was going to say before he quite knew what it was. The woman continued to look in the neighborhood of his shoes. He had no notion how he could feel penetrated by such indirection. “Eat your victuals, son,” she said at last and turned back to her labors just as a sudden pounding came from the other side of the house. There were three heavy blows and the pounding ceased. “Now what do ye reckon he’s a-doin?” she remarked, scraping the remaining scraps of food from her pans into a slop bucket.

As hungry as he had been, as good as the food was, he had eaten past his appetite. Still, slowly, grimly, as though he could make up for past hunger, he put the food inside himself and braced to keep it there over his stomach’s objection. The pounding took up once more, and after three blows, abruptly stopped again. Music pushed part of a biscuit around his plate, gathering every last morsel, feeling sick from the richness of the gravy, the salt and pepper, which he was not used to. Outside on the breezeway the man’s footsteps rumbled woodenly, the dog’s claws clicked, and something heavy was dropped roughly down. Regus came in, crossed the room, and sat down again at the table. The hound slinked beneath it, circled and collapsed, his elbows rapping against the floor like sticks.

“What was all the fuss and a-poundin?” the woman asked.

Regus did not answer. He took his cup of coffee between his large chapped hands. “You’ll bed down in the front room acrost the dogtrot,” he said to Music.

“Hit ain’t fittin,” the woman said.

“Hit’ll do,” Regus said.

The woman turned from cleaning skillets and pans as though to argue, but she did not; instead she folded her hands into her apron for a moment and then, seeing somehow that Music’s plate was empty, she took it from the table. “Yore coffee’s ice-cold,” she said to Regus.