The Long Home (10 page)

The old man was at a loss. For a moment he thought of Hodges’s grandfather digging for money on the Mormon place, perhaps some genetic quirk had encoded it in the third generation, a trait so degenerated by now that nothing remained save the compulsion to dig at random just on the offchance someone might have buried something worth replevying.

Oliver rose as stealthily as he could, even so his knees popped and he stood still and silent until he saw the boy hadn’t heard. Then he moved cautiously toward the ladder and climbed down it. When he eased into the moonlit piglot Hodges was still digging. Oliver approached within a foot or so of his back. “Hidy,” he said. The boy dropped the shovel as if electricity had coursed through it and leapt five or six inches into the air. When his feet touched earth they were already pedaling as if he rode an invisible bicycle and he was almost immediately at the fence. Oliver caught him as he was scrambling over the topmost slab and lifted him, kicking and squirming and cursing, and set him back to earth.

“Let me alone,” the boy was yelling.

“Whoa, young feller. Hold on a minute here. Noboby aims to hurt you. I just want to know what you’re up to.”

Hodges was trying to jerk his arm free. “None of your Goddamn business. Now let me alone.”

“You’re young Hodges, ain’t ye?”

“What’s it to ye?”

“Well, they don’t call ye Hodges, do they? What’s ye first name?”

“Yeah, I guess you’d like that, wouldn’t ye? Me tell ye my name so’s you could run straight to the law with it.”

“Hell, son, I don’t need no name. I got you in the flesh, right by the seat of your britches. I’s just askin to be polite.”

“My name’s Clifford.”

“All right. That’s some better. And just so you’ll know, I ain’t never been one to run overquick to the law. Now, you reckon if I turn you aloose you can control the impulse to jump that fence?”

“I ain’t done nothin.”

“You move right pert for a feller just takin the night air. Ain’t none too qualmy about these copperheads neither.” Oliver released his grip on the boy. “Now, what’s my hoglot got you can’t dig up nowhere else?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Oliver had been wanting to smoke but had been afraid of setting the hay in the barnloft afire. Now he packed the bowl of his pipe and struck a kitchen match on his thumbnail and lit the tobacco. When he spoke his voice was furred by the smoke. “What was you diggin for?”

“It ain’t none of your business.”

“Well. I reckon it’s your shovel. But it’s my lot and my hogs been standin around losin sleep and watchin you diggin like a fool. Now, what is it? Do you just like diggin or is there somethin particular about my hoglot that appeals to you?”

The boy seemed to be considering, there was a shrewdness to his features, a transparent cunning. Oliver watched the play of thought on the small freckled face. Half is better than nothing, the face was thinking. Oliver grinned. The face was already trying to devise a plan for cheating him out of half of whatever it was he didn’t even know about yet.

“Well. I guess we could split.”

“I don’t see why not.”

The boy squatted on the earth before him. In the moonlight they were dwarfed by the dark shape of trees above them. A warm wind smelling of summer going overripe came looping up the hollow across them. Faint surcease scented with rich opulence, the ripe pears and musk of honeysuckle. An owl called lonesome from a hollow negated by dark.

“Well. It’s pigs.”

“Pigs?” the old man asked in disbelief.

“Hell, yeah. I’d a thought a man as old as you are would have figured it out hisself by now.”

“Boy, you’ve lost me. Figured out what?”

“Diggin up them pigs.”

Oliver felt like a participant in some surreal conversation in which the answers bore no relation to the questions, lines had been fragmented and shuffled indiscriminately. “They Godamighty. Is that what you been doin out here of a night? And them sacks… ”

Hodges nodded. “To tote em home in,” he said.

“Lord God, boy. You don’t dig pigs up out of the ground like taters or somethin.”

“You want em all for yeself,” the boy said craftily.

“Whoever told you pigs were dug?”

“My mama did and I don’t know what cause she’d have to lie.”

“I see,” Oliver said.

“I ast her where they come from and she said the old sow rooted em up in the hogpen.”

“And you not havin a hogpen…”

He sat in ruminative silence, just smoking his pipe and listening to the crying of the nightbirds, somewhere far and lost and streaking down the night the whistle of a train. “And what’d you figure, just kindly eliminate the sow? Bypass her sort of? Just dig the pigs up ahead of her and sell em?”

“Yeah. A person’s smartern a hog ain’t he?”

“We won’t argue about it,” Oliver said. “I suspect folks listening to us might work up evidence for either side.”

He sat watching the boy. This diminutive hog rustler, self-confessed and unrepentant thief of unborn swine. He with his fallow burlap bags and eye cocked to livestock futures. Oliver saw little that was lovable. He had a moment of clairvoyance, an insight of weary foreknowledge stabbed with regret. He knew that Clifford Hodges would always be slipping in at night and digging up somebody else’s pigs. He would always be playing the longshot or taking a shortcut, figuring the angles in somebody else’s game. And he would never have a game of his own. If he lived until he was grown he would be shot then or shoot someone else in a failed inept holdup. He and a cohort halfmad as they looked aghast at each other across the body of a fallen grocer or gaspump operator. If he won the game he’d be in Brushy Mountain penitentiary, if he lost the graveyard. Oliver felt pity for him, a commiseration for the things that had been and the things that were yet to be. He wished for words to encourage him, but none came. And his own life did not lend itself to examples.

“Well, what about it?”

“What about what?”

“About them pigs. Are we goin to split like we said or are you goin to dig em up after I leave and keep em for yeself?”

“Boy, they ain’t no pigs there to dig.”

“You done got em.”

“Goddamn it. Son, that ain’t where pigs comes from. I done told you that.”

“So you say.”

“Well, there’s a considerable body of evidence to back it up.”

“Then where does the old sow get em?”

Oliver took deep breath. “All right,” he said. “They grow here in the sow. Then when they’re big enough, when they’re made, they come out.”

“Come out,” the boy echoed. He was shaking his had, staring at Oliver in wonderment. “Everbody says you’re crazy and by God you are,” he said. “You’re crazy as hell. I never heard such a crock of bullshit in my life.”

“Well,” the old man said, “don’t blame me for it. It’s not like I laid it out or anything. It’s always been like that.”

“I’m goin to tell Mama,” Hodges said. He arose and took up the burlap bag and shovel and hurled them over the fence and clambered after them. “Keep ye damn pigs,” he said. “I don’t mind ye bein greedy but I hate to be took for a fool.”

Oliver grinned to himself. “You watch for snakes,” he called. After a while he could hear Hodges scurrying down the embankment, a small bright angry thread in the pastoral tapestry of night sounds. He hunkered still in the barnlot awhile listening and then he arose and went on back toward the house.

The horses had been gone for three weeks before Cecil Blalock even learned where they were. He had covered almost all the county asking and had come to think they must have started back toward west Tennessee, where he had bought them, for everyone in the county knew him and he could not imagine anyone just putting his up Morgans and not telling him. Blalock was the only man in the country who raised Morgans.

“You hear about them fine Morgans Hardin’s got?” a man in the poolroom asked him.

“No. What sort of Morgans are they?

“Big stallion and two mares. Finelookin horseflesh.”

“Where’d he get em?” Blalock asked, though by now he knew.

“He told me he found em.”

“The hell he did,” Blalock said.

This was late on a Saturday evening and by good light on Sunday morning he was up and breakfasted and had the sideboards on the truck. A redhaired woman clad in a slip stood in the door and watched him make ready to leave. “You be careful,” she called but he didn’t say if he would or he wouldn’t.

He had turned in at the yard and was backing toward the outbuildings when Hardin stopped him.

“You tearin my yard all to hell Blalock. Ain’t you had no raisin? I never heard you say you could cross it or kiss my ass or nothin.”

Blalock looked down from the driver’s seat of the truck, his face tight and angry. He had been about halfmad all night anyway and he wanted his horses but an innate sense of caution had made him hope Hardin would still be asleep. By all odds he should have been after Saturday night but here was Hardin all wide awake and cleareyed at six o’clock of a Sunday morning, playing the country squire, smiling upon him despite the harshness of his words, a benign smile so transparently crafty it would not have deceived a child.

“I come for my horses.”

“Can you prove they’re yourn?”

“You know damn well I can.”

“I sort of thought you could. Get out awhile and we’ll talk about it.” He crossed over to the porch and stepped onto it. He hitched up his dress slacks and squatted not on the porch but on the heels of his shiny shoes.

“There ain’t nothin to talk about. I come after em. Figure up what I owe for their keep and send me a bill.”

“Whatever you say, you’re the doctor. I guess we could dicker about it. I figure you owe me somethin in the neighborhood of eight hundred dollars.”

Suspecting some defect in his hearing, Blalock sought clarification. “Eight hundred dollars? For what?”

Hardin arose and crossed the branch. Curiously birdlike, a graceless bird all joints and angles. Imprints of his shoulderblades through the thin yellow dress shirt he wore, morning sun off a gold cufflink when he pointed across the stream.

“I had me a fine corncrop there and they done wiped me out before I knew they was on the place. They came in the night.”

Apoplectic with rage Blalock swung open the door and leapt out. He slammed the door so hard the truck rocked on its springs and he strode past Hardin and across the stream and up the stony bank. Past the tilting dead cornstalks all he could see was Spanish nettled and sawbriars and great slabs of white limestone. He turned. Hardin was watching him amiably, a grin on his crooked face, hand pocketed and thumbs tucked in the loops of his trousers.

“And where is this fine corncrop?” Blalock asked.

Hardin had a sharpened kitchen match in his mouth for a toothpick. He withdrew it and threw it away. “I thought I said,” he told Blalock. “It’s gone. They eat it. They wiped me out.”

“Why, there ain’t a Goddamned thing out here but rocks and sawbriars. You couldn’t hire a fuckin stalk of corn to grow here.”

Hardin was deferential. “I admit it don’t look like much now,” he said. “But you ought to have seen it before your horses got in it.”

Blalock climbed back down the abutment and this time waded right through the branch. He was watching Hardin’s pocket trying to see did he have a gun there but he couldn’t tell. If he did it was a small one.

“If you think I’m givin you eight hundred dollars for a few bales of hay you’re crazy as hell. I’ll give you what I think’s fair and you can like it or not. Just whatever suits you. And I’ll tell you another thing. Anybody else would’ve let me know where them horses was. It takes a damn sorry feller to put up another man’s stock and not say a word about it. Especially a stallion worth as much as that one.”

“How’d I know whose they was? They ain’t got no license plates on em like say a automobile nor collars like a coonhound, and this old free-range shit has about played out. Most everybody keeps their stock up nowadays.”

“I do keep em up, Goddamn it. Somebody cut my fences.”

“Well.” Hardin shrugged. “It wasn’t me.” He walked back toward the truck and Blalock stood awkwardly for a moment and then followed.

“Why don’t you buy your own damn horses and leave mine alone?”

“Well, I’ll make you another deal. I’ll count you out five one hundred dollar bills for that horse right here and now. Then we’ll go have a little drink and forget we ever had words.”

“That horse ain’t for sale and you know it. And even if it was that wouldn’t make a down payment.”

“Whatever you think. Whether you go loaded or unloaded is all the same to me.”

“I’ll go loaded or by God, know the reason why?”

Hardin turned. “All right,” he said. “This is the reason. If you so much as trespass a foot farther onto my property, so much as open a gate or cut my fences, they will carry your dead ass out of here on a stretcher. They will load you up and haul you away. Do you understand me?”

“You’re crazy, you’re the one that’s goin to be hauled away.”

“Not so crazy I don’t know whose property we’re standing on.”

“Nor me either,” Blalock said. “Thomas Hovington’s.”

Watching the yellow eyes fade to slits Blalock thought for a second that he was a dead man. Had Hardin been carrying a pistol perhaps he would have been. There was a moment when things could have gone either way, and then his eyes widened a little and Hardin said, “Like I said it’s on you. You can bet or fold.”

“I’m suin you,” Blalock said. “I’m gettin a lawyer right now.”

“That’s fine. I’ll get me one too and while our lawyers is dickering back and forth and runnin up the tab, the price on the horse is goin down and the corn’s goin up.”

“I can’t talk to you,” Blalock said. He opened the door on the truck and climbed in. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I’ll get them papers and I’ll be back.”

“That don’t surprise me,” Hardin said.

There was a faint wash of light on the window curtains, a cessation then of the sound of an engine somewhere down the road. Hardin rose on his elbows and peered at the phosphorescent hands of the clock. It was after one o’clock. He lay back stiff and silent, listening, thinking, Well, why not? If they’re goin to try it they’ll try it now. Hovington’s dead and buried. He had always known without articulating it that Hovington was a kind of insurance policy as long as he lay dying. He knew the curious decorum of county folks, their superstitious fear of death and dying, and he had slept a little better at night, had not been afraid of the windowlights being shot out, the house being torched. That policy had lapsed now, and he thought of another, the Winchester leaning in the corner, a 30-06 in a land of .22-caliber squirrel rifles.

There was a long elastic interval between the faint hushing of the motor and any other sound so that he lay completely wide awake now, straining for any aberration in the night, his ears amplifying the whir of dryflies, and he thought, Well, is there anything or not? A carload of drunks? He immediately discarded that, he had never known drunks to remain so quiet. A courting couple, someone getting them a little? He had halfrelaxed when the first sound came, though less a sound than some suggestion of difference, of disquiet, some delicate change in the balance of the night, so that he was off the bed and halfway to the gun when the first firm step came on the porch. By the time the shoulder or whatever heavy it was slammed against the front door he was on the floor with the rifle in his arms and scrambling toward the back door aware of Pearl awakening in the bed behind him, her saying, “Dallas?” Then, “What is it, Dallas?” And of the girl crying out in the front room, the noise the latch made flying off and skittering across the linoleum. He was swearing running into and around dark objects that seemed conspired to snare him, as if the house and ultimately the night itself were aligned against him.

There were already two of them at the back door, garbed in white, faces obscured by masks, featureless save dark eyeholes. He felt hands clutch at him, jerk him forward, he could hear their grunts of triumph and something, a club or cudgel, caught him alongside the shoulder so that for an instant his left arm went dead and he was conscious of a great rush of relief, thinking, Sticks. The son of a bitches have just got sticks.

The moon was shining and the dusty yard gleamed lime mica. He was down in it for an instant, twisting a cheek against the ground, the cold rifle still beneath him, his elbows holding it against his naked stomach. “Help me hold him, Ray. The son of a bitch is gettin up.” He staggered up with one of them astride his back, an arm about his throat, and struck blindly with the barrel of the rifle, felt metal strike bone again and again till one of them said, “Can you get aholt of his fuckin gun?” The other man kept swinging the stick. The voice behind him said, “Goddamn, Ray, you hittin me, not him. Try to hit him just ever now and then.” A glancing blow to Hardin’s head knocked him halfsenseless and he felt his legs buckle.

He whirled and the man on his back slipped free. Hardin’s momentum spun him halfway around and he fell, sitting with one leg twisted beneath him, the rifle in his lap momentarily disoriented, seeing rising above him the gray bulk of the house and the play of flashlights at the windows, above the inkblack pyramid of the roofline the luminous fabric of the sky, all of it swimming sideways in a sick illusion of motion as if he alone was stationary, all the universe spinning dizzily past him.

He could hear Pearl and the girl screaming, he was dimly aware that they had been herded into the yard. He heard blows without knowing where they were coming from, who they were directed against. One of the men dove behind the hood of the truck just as Hardin fired and simultaneously there was the whang of the bullet and then the more solid thunk against the engine block. He could hear running footsteps, they seemed to come from everywhere. A man was sprinting desperately for the road, bobbing in the moonlight. Hardin aimed, took a breath and held it, squeezed the trigger almost gently. The man did an eerily comic dance in the roadbed, his right leg flung out rubbery and unhinged, the knee shot away. Then he fell forward, balled up in the driveway. Hardin could hear him moaning. The man halfrose and began to vomit.

Hardin wiped the blood out of his eyes. The hair at his temples was wet with it. He could hear the brush popping in a diminishing flurry and in a multitude of directions. In a little while the car cranked somewhere down the road and he could hear the tires in the gravel. Hardin grinned. He thought, The first son of a bitch there took off with the car and left the rest of them to walk it. There’ll be some sore feet and mad whitecaps in Ackerman’s Field in the mornin.

“Shut it up,” he told the girl. She was sitting on the doorstep crying. She did not cease. Her face was hidden by her hands and twin wings of long black hair.

“Did they hurt you?”

“No.”

“Then shut it up.”

Pearl leaned her head against a porch support. Her eyes were closed.

“Are you hurt?”

“They hit my legs with a big old stick or something. They never done me and Tom thisaway. This never happened before.”

“Nor is it likely to happen again. Can you walk?”

“I reckon. Let me see about your head.”

“Let it go. Just help me load him in the car. Get a bedspread or quilt or somethin out of the house and put it in the back. Bastard’s bleedin like a hog with its throat cut.”

She arose, stood massaging the flesh of her thigh. She seemed dazed or drunken. “You ain’t aimin to kill him, are you? I can’t stand no more trouble.”

“Just get it like I told you.”

Hardin backed the Packard up to where the man lay and opened the right rear door. He knelt beside the man. Apparently he had passed out. He lay unmoving but Hardin could hear the steady rasp of his breathing. He took out the bonehandled Case pocketknife and tested the blade with a thumb, slit the pillowcase and folded it aside like a caul.

Pearl stood looking down, a quilt draped across her arm.

“Who is he, Blackwell, Blackburn, Blacksomethin. I’ve seen him.”

“Why, that’s Mr Blackstock,” Pearl said. “He runs the drygoods store in town.”

“He’ll run the son of a bitch out of a wheelchair now if he runs it at all. No, I ain’t goin to kill him. If I killed him I’d have to hide him, and I don’t want him hid. I want him where folks can see him, ever day of his life, right there in that drygood store. Get that quilt laid out in there.”

The man was heavy and slack, a seemingly boneless weight they could hardly handle. When he was almost in Hardin fell to swearing at him and shoved him the rest of the way in with the door, leaning his weight against it until he heard the latch catch.

“Where do you live, Slick?” Hardin asked, neither expecting nor receiving an answer, glancing upward at the rearview mirror and not seeing the man either, just the top of the upholstery and the back glass where fled a landscape in motion, a retreating moonlit world with a blacktop highway snaking down the middle of it. He looked forward again and the night was coming in wisps and tatters of fog like clouds blown past the speeding car. The countryside was remote, locked in sleep. Off the blacktop then and back to chert and past old man Oliver’s unlit house and the orchard of dead apple trees, tree on tree looming at him from the silver roadside, unpruned branches gnarled and twisted and dead, charred bone juxtaposed against the seamless heavens like some childhood witchwood of myth or nightmare. Taking the curve the headlights yawned across the unkept yard and touched the windowpanes with illusory life, leapt past the hedge of alders gleaming white as bone the road straightened here and he accelerated onto the long stretch to town.