Hardcastle (7 page)

Without speaking to them or inviting them in, she scuffed away into the bowels of the house, from which, presently, they saw an old man in a starched white shirt waving a Panama hat to signal he meant to meet them in front. They rounded the house again and mounted the wide veranda, waiting until the colored woman opened the door and held it and the old man came through.

He was the sort of old man whose chest had receded while his belly grew proud, so that the front of him seemed to be all britches with a set of shoulders riding on top. “Sit. Sit,” he said, waving his hat toward two white, wingback, wicker chairs. They sat, but he did not. Still, he seemed absolutely at rest, as though, splayfooted, his chest collapsed over his belly, he had achieved a perfect balance of stresses. He shook his hat thoughtfully at Regus for a moment. “Regus Bone,” he said.

“That’s right,” Regus said and spat over the railing into the yard.

Kenton Hardcastle plopped the hat on his head. “Well, state your business then, Mr. Bone.”

“I’ve brought the extra man to pull my shift with me, if ye’ll hold still for him,” Regus said.

Hardcastle turned to Music and gave him a look of cold, insulting appraisal. “What’s your name and where you from?”

“Bill Music,” he answered. “I come from Shulls Mills, Virginia.”

“I pay damned good wages,” Hardcastle said, “and I generally like a big bastard for my money.” He studied Music a moment more, as if sizing him up for a fight. “But if a feller is downright mean and don’t scare a whit, he might do.”

Somehow Music got the notion that Kenton Hardcastle used himself as the absolute measuring stick by which to judge a man’s mettle. Hardcastle’s age and shape being what they were, it was almost, but not quite, laughable. “Hell,” Music said, smiling in spite of himself, “I’m fearless.”

“That’s what I need,” Hardcastle said. “I won’t have a guard on my payroll that a miner can run over. If you don’t have iron, you don’t draw wages from me. Have you got what I’m lookin for?”

“If I don’t, I’ll leave,” Music said.

“I’ll see to it,” Hardcastle said. “I expect to get a hard case for my money and I expect something else: when I ask you to do a thing, no matter what it is, I want it done right then, no excuses and no questions. Do you understand me?”

“Yessir,” Music said, although he was beginning to wonder if he did.

“These are bad times, and I’m in a fight,” Hardcastle said. “There’s unionizing scum all over this state, and many a smart coal man will lose his operation and his holdings if he can’t be tough. But, by God,” he said, “that won’t happen here! You’ll keep a keen eye out or answer to me. And you’ll not let a single one of those seditious sons a bitches get anywhere near Hardcastle Coal Company. You understand me?”

Since he didn’t know what else to do, Music nodded and said that he understood.

“All right,” Kenton Hardcastle said. “I’ll call the sheriff and the mine foreman.” Perhaps in lieu of a handshake, he fetched a cigar from his shirt pocket and made poking motions toward Music with it until Music understood and took it. “Mr. Bone will tell you what you need to know,” he said and waved them away.

When they were back in the Model T, Regus chuckled softly. “That old sucker never give me no cigar when I hired on, but then again I never thought to tell him I was fearless.”

Music turned to look at Regus and saw in his face an expression so completely without spite or malice that he laughed himself, as much with relief as anything. “Christ,” Music said, “I guess I thought I was making a joke.”

“Ha,” Regus said, “if you want Kenton Hardcastle to know yer jokin, ye’ll have to tell him, for he’ll never guess otherwise.” He turned the Model T out of Hardcastle’s driveway and back toward the center of Valle Crucis. “Well, now we’ve got another prince of a feller to see,” he said and spat out the window.

The prince of a fellow turned out to be as surly a man as Music had ever met. After the first ten minutes in Sheriff Hub Farthing’s office Music began to wonder just how much three dollars a day was worth to him; he had been arrested and thrown in jail by friendlier men. Still the sheriff swore him in and, stiff with anger, slapped a badge down on the edge of his desk for Music to pick up. He was still trying to get his mind around being a deputy sheriff when Farthing—a wide, if not quite fat, man who seemed to be all over, uniform and all, the color of ripe wheat—pointed a finger at him and told him he was a deputy sheriff only as a favor to Kenton Hardcastle and only for the purpose of keeping unionizers, foreigners, and goddamned miners in line; and if he shot up anybody, he’d better make damned sure it was one of those and that he did the shooting on company property, or anyway close enough to drag the goddamned carcass back on company property.

“You get any other ideas about what that badge can fetch you in Switch County and I’ll yank it quicker than a cat can lick its ass,” the sheriff said.

Hellkatoot, Music told himself when they were again in the Model T and on the way to Elkin, it’s a depression and a man would be a fool to turn down three dollars a day. But the affairs of the morning had left him dizzy and confused. He took out his pocketknife, divided the cigar Hardcastle had given him, and gave Regus half, wondering just what he had gotten himself into and shaking his head in disbelief.

“Hub Farthing’s got all kinds of kinfolks scattered around this county he’d like to see have yore job,” Regus said and laughed. “Hell, mine too. So don’t expect him to take a shine to ye. But old Kenton Hardcastle believes in hiring mine guards that ain’t known in the county. The miners won’t be bluffed so easy by a feller they’ve known all their lives. No,” Regus said, “they’ll run over them and face them down if they’s a row.” Regus chuckled and shook his head. Kenton Hardcastle was a clever old scalawag, he explained. Clever enough to make three fortunes, even if he had lost two of them and grown both mean and nearly crazy trying to keep from losing it all. “But he will,” Regus said. “Ain’t any money in coal no longer, not even fer the hotshot operator like him.”

The times were gone, Regus said, when a man could make a killing in the coal business. Hell, it wasn’t 1920 anymore. In the spring of that year coal had brought as much as fourteen dollars a ton right at the tipple, he said; and he himself had often made close to fifty dollars a day, working, as he was, nearly a six-foot seam of Pocahontas coal. He laughed and said he’d had to take thought and study how to get rid of his money in those days, but he’d done it. When he could take a number-three coal shovel and load thirty ton a shift—if he didn’t mind threatening to whip the motorman a dozen times a day in order to get empty coal cars, and didn’t mind working so hard he’d spit black cotton—he’d seen no virtue in not buying anything that pleased his eye. Oh, he’d gotten rid of his money, he said. He’d never known anyone dumb enough to dig coal who was smart enough to save his money, and that included operators. He looked over at Music and grinned. “The depression around here started in the fall of 1920,” he said. “We got nearly a ten-year lead on the rest of you folks. Oh,” he said, “hit picked up for a bit in ’26 when the miners overseas struck, but that didn’t last. Only just long enough fer a lot of fools to throw down their plows and take up a pick and shovel and then git caught and commence to starve like the rest of us.”

“How’d you wind up in Switch County at a job like this, if you don’t mind me askin?” Music said.

“Accident and bad luck, ye’d have to call it.” Regus switched the cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other, squinting and grimacing from the heat so close to his lips. Finally he plucked the butt from between his teeth, inspected it, pinched away the coal, and folded it into his mouth like a chew of tobacco. After a moment he raised his eyebrows in surprise and pleasure, spat out the window, and told about a slate fall in a Harlan County mine where he had once worked. He had been eating lunch in the main drift with his working buddy, two other miners, the motorman, and the brakeman when the top let go without a sigh from the slate or one creak from a timber. A hunk of slate about the size of a coal car had come down on his buddy, a fellow named Lon Harmon. The brakeman had been pinned too, and broken up, and lost a leg as a consequence. But he himself had only gotten bruised and had his scalp laid open; for when the top let go, he had scrambled and thrashed about trying to get out of the way, and somehow everything had come down just right, so most of the weight was resting on what had already fallen and very little on him, although he was buried to the waist. He hadn’t even gone out, for there was never a moment when he couldn’t hear the motorman crying, “Great God A’mighty, great God A’mighty!” over and over again, even after the roof quit coming down around their ears, so that finally Regus had shouted, “Shut up, you damned fool, and dig us out!” spewing pieces of the raw turnip he had been eating from his mouth. Straight away the motorman began to weep and dig, telling later how he’d thought it was teeth and jawbone that Regus had been spitting, what with his scalp torn and his face covered with blood.

It had taken them a long and awful time to get the slate off Lon Harmon, Regus said, but it never mattered for he was mashed flat as a toad on the highway. Those had been pretty good days when the pay was all right, so he had bought the little shirttail farm in Switch County from Harmon’s widow, who had no money to speak of and wanted to go back to her folks over in West Virginia. It had been Harmon’s old place before he quit it and went to digging coal.

Regus mused a moment and snorted. “Hit was more disrespect for the dollar than charity that notioned me to buy it,” he said. “I never wanted it, ner thought about it until a year or so ago.” The chewed cigar appeared on Music’s side, tucked in Regus’s cheek like a walnut. Regus turned his head and spat out the window. “I was in a mine over in Letcher County that was strikebound and fast going to hell,” he said. “Hit was owned by Hardcastle’s brother-in-law, a feller name of Royce Perry. Little operation it was, with about enough contracts to keep it going just a little in the hole all the time. I was running a short-wall machine for him. But when they struck him, and he lost what few buyers he had fer his coal, and the drift commenced to fill up with water here and there, and the top to come down, hell, I knew he was gonna go under.

“When I started to get hungry, I let out to him that I was about to head over this way and try my hand at farmin.” Regus turned his head and spat out the window again and raised his eyebrows. “Turned out a mine guard had just been killed down to Elkin, and Royce got me the promise of his job. Royce was a-workin himself as a mine foreman for Consolidated Coal Company in Jenkins, last I heard. Lost all his holdings. You see how it is then,” he said, tucking the lump of the cigar into his cheek and looking at Music; “I’m about as new to Switch County as you be. Hell, what with me and Momma,” he said and laughed, “you may have more friends here than I do.”

Just at that moment they passed Regus’s homestead. Clothes fluttered from the clothesline which ran from the corner of the house to an old, blasted walnut tree, and Ella Bone straightened from a galvanized tub beneath the line to shake out a dress. When Regus saw her, he beeped the horn and he and Music waved. She turned and shaded her eyes with her hand to look after them, but didn’t wave back. “Momma did take to you,” Regus said, “but there’s one thing that tends to worry me about all this here, and that’s how we figure to arm ye.” He looked at Music and raised his brows and grinned. “I don’t reckon you got a pistol on ye I don’t know about?” he said.

“Never carried one,” Music said, and blushing, he added, “I never even fired one.”

“Hmm,” Regus said and rolled the lump of the cigar from one cheek to the other and back again, “well, we’ll have to sort something out.”

“I always hunted a lot,” Music said, “but it was with my daddy’s old hog rifle, a muzzleloader, don’t you know?” Suddenly he wondered what he was doing hiring on as a mine guard, a deputy sheriff, for Christ’s sake? He knew nothing about Switch County and coal mining, about guarding property against unionizers and Reds. How the hell was he supposed to recognize a unionizer if he saw one? What did he want with a job that would make everybody his enemy? He was suddenly homesick. He felt a longing simply to be on his way home, or anywhere, to have only the problems of finding shelter, a little something to eat, a freight to jump.

“You ever bark a squirrel with it?”

“No,” Music said, “never did.” Hell, Music thought, hold on a minute and let me think.

“Ever shoot any deer with it?” Regus asked.

“Four,” Music said.

“Any wild turkey?”

“A few,” Music said.

“Ain’t much game around here no more,” Regus said. “Most of it’s been killed off and put in the pot.”

The valley opened out a little to Elkin: the strings of shacks on the right; the commissary, movie house, depot, and school on the left; and across the river, the tipple, powerhouse, gobpile, the empty coal cars parked on the siding.

“We’ll see can we catch Bert Maloney without us having to get in that damned rathole mine,” Regus said. “Yonder’s his coupe down to the powerhouse.”

Regus turned left just before the commissary and crossed the plank bridge over the river. Under the Model T the planks clattered against the strippers like a volley of pistol shots. Music could get no space to think, and there was a giddy feeling in his stomach, as though he were on a swing in the middle of its downward arc.

Just as they pulled up beside the green Chevrolet coupe, the mine foreman stepped out of the powerhouse door. He was about Music’s height, but heavier-set. He wore broad green suspenders over a relatively clean khaki shirt, and upon his head was a miner’s cap with a carbide lamp clipped to it. Regus got out and walked around the front of the truck. “Bert, I’d like ye to meet the new mine guard,” he said. “This here’s Mr. Bill Music.”

Music stepped down from the cab of the truck and stuck out his hand.

“Hydee,” the mine foreman said and gripped it briefly. “I’ll hafta let Regus show you about and fill you in,” he said in a high, almost feminine voice. “We’re fixin to catch a visit from the state mine inspector; just got a call from Elsie Coal Company over the ridge.”