“He was a good crank cook.”
“So I’ve heard. Maybe that was it, they needed some batches run and wanted him for it.”
Ree said, “This fella with the money have a name?”
“Nope. He must’ve left it in his other pants.”
“What’d he look like?”
Satterfield glanced around the yard, up at the house, up the hill to the timber, said, “The plastic sack of cash is all I recall, kid.” He dropped his cigarette to the snow, rubbed it with the sharp glossy toes of his pretty town shoes. “You probly got this place about another thirty days, kid. That’s my guess.”
There was a sound in Ree’s head like a world of zippers zipping shut, and a sudden tilt factor engaged every place she looked. The creek shifted heights in her eyes and swayed overhead floppy as snapped string, the houses beyond warped skinny as ribs and knotted together in bows, the sky spun upright like a blue plate set on edge to dry. She had a feeling within of tipping over, tipping over somehow to dribble down and away, down and away bleakly to a place beyond reach.
She lunged at Satterfield, grasped the fuzzy lapels on his sheep coat, tugged.
“That’s it? That’s it? There ain’t nothin’ I can do?”
He pried her fingers loose, stepped backwards.
“No. No, I don’t think there’s nothin’ left to do.” He swatted his hair a couple of times, then began walking slowly toward the bridge, carefully placing his steps between snow and mud. He stopped at the bridge and stared at the clear water below running south, then turned back to her. “Nothin’ unless you can prove he’s dead. That’d sure ’nough turn things around. Dead men can’t be expected to show in court.”
Ree stood there wobbling in her soul until Satterfield reached his car. She turned to go up the porch steps with her thoughts twirling and saw Gail standing in the open doorway with her arms crossed. From inside came clanging voices as the boys excitedly examined the rich plunder of groceries, slamming cans into the cupboard, loudly staking claim to favored foods. Gail’s face pinched with concern so the freckles seemed to gather in a blot, and her eyes were narrowed. She said, “I heard that last thing he said, Sweet Pea, and don’t you do it. I know the way you are, how you go about things, and I’m sayin’, don’t you go back there.”
Across the creek the white car began to move, pulled onto a mudflat between houses and circled about in a hurry to leave. Mud sprayed from the rut to daub the front porches.
Ree fell as much as sat to the top step, knees wide, chin down, and said, “How else is it goin’ to happen?”
Chapter 24
REE WALKED down the Hawkfall hill with nothing watching her back but the sun. She kicked her boots scuffing loudly along the road and looked at thin smoke rails rising from chimneys below. Twice she turned about to stare toward home, but the antique truck was already beyond sight. Snow piles still lined the road, melting, but the fields were fast becoming mud acres with tattering white borders. Cows walking near the fenceline made sucking sounds as each hoof was pulled from the holding mud. Pouring sunlight rubbed the cowhides shiny and raised sweat on Ree’s face. Mamaw’s coat felt too heavy in the turning weather but she kept it on all the way down the slope and into the meadow of old fallen walls.
Disappearing snow left the old tossed stones plain amidst the puny winter weeds and spreading muck. Some stones were stacked two high and some lay in close clusters with stunted oak growing from the narrow spaces between. Cows had been grazed in the meadow and they’d walked bare paths into the grass and around the stones. Here and there small pieces of shattered stained glass glinted surprise colors from the cow-path mud.
The drive up to Thump Milton’s house was wide enough for two cars to pass and coated with pea gravel. The gravel gave way underfoot so that each step sounded like a shovel digging. Trees lined the drive and many birds sang from the limbs but their songs were not the same. Near the dun house there were two cars and two trucks parked. A redbone hound resting in a truck bed stood as she approached and barked.
The house door opened and Mrs. Thump looked out. She closed the door briefly, then came outside carrying a steaming cup. Mams hung to the belly of her stout frame and heaved as she advanced. Two other women stepped onto the porch behind Mrs. Thump and both had postures and chins that suggested they were her close relatives. Mrs. Thump’s white hair was done up in big pink rollers held in place by a mostly yellow scarf.
Ree reached for the steaming cup, smiling, and said, “I’m not really—” And the world flushed upside down in her eyes while her ears rang and she staggered, then the world flushed again and again and she stumbled across the gravel. One of Mrs. Thump’s rollers had jerked loose and dangled springy around her head as she pulled her big hand back to whack Ree another in the face, and Ree swung a fist at those blunt teeth in a red mouth but missed. The other women closed in with boots to the shins while more heavy whacks landed and Ree felt her joints unglue, become loose, and she was draining somehow, draining to the dirt, while black wings flying angles crossed her mind, and there were the mutters of beasts uncaged from women and she was sunk to a moaning place, kicked into silence.
Chapter 25
WORDS WERE reaching her but none that she understood. The pain was dense and dazzling and traveled her body in pounding waves. It had been only black in her spirit until small slices of dull light began creeping toward the center of awareness from the rim, but her first brightened thoughts were jumbled and ungraspable. There were shovels, she heard shovels, several shovels digging around her, then she was hefted aloft and flying along in agony until crashed to a new ground that smelled of straw and feed sacks. She screamed landing. Her ears hummed ugly noise and her nose felt thickened. She tasted blood, spit marbles to the straw. Her tongue moved along the slick in her mouth to a leaking vacancy where two teeth had been.
“She’s crazy to’ve come here—wouldn’t you say that means she’s crazy?”
Only one eye would open.
“Her momma’s crazy, so there’s a good shot of her bein’ crazy, too.”
The women stood over her, spires of menace wearing lipstick and scarves. They saw her eye open and she sat up, aching in her ribs, her legs, her everywhere. Her teeth lay dirty in the straw, broken from her mouth, cap and root, and she stretched their way, fumbled both onto a palm, made a fist around them. She mumbled, “I ain’t crazy. I ain’t crazy.” She spluttered blood and dropped her teeth into a pocket of Mamaw’s coat. Her words were wounded in her mouth, crippled in shape but flung hard as a dying wail. “And I ain’t never goin’ to be crazy, neither!”
Mrs. Thump stepped closer, into plain view, with her hair rolled back into place beneath a snug scarf. She seemed grim and unruffled.
“You was warned. You was warned nice’n you wouldn’t listen—why didn’t you listen?”
“I can’t listen. I can’t just listen.”
She moved her head slowly, wobbling as she aimed her good eye, and saw that there were others in the barn. Shapes milling by the open double door, wearing man hats, smoking, watching in silence. One of the man hats stepped near. Megan squatted, patted Ree’s face, and said, “Whatever are we to do about you, baby girl? Huh?”
“Kill me, I guess.”
“That idea has been said already. Got’ny other ones?”
“Help me. Ain’t nobody said that idea yet, have they?”
The sightless eye was fattened shut and stretched tight. She felt the swelling and tried to pry the eyelid open, but could not even sense daylight through that eye. Blood had to be spit and came out in heavy wads trailed by stringy drools that lapped onto her chin and cheeks. With her tongue she could feel shreds of her own meat broken from inside her lips. Her skirt was thrown up and her legs were decked with bruises that colored uglier as she watched.
Megan said, “I tried to help you some the other day, and this is what come of that.”
Near the door the small crowd began to part, make way, and though nobody spoke hi
s name, Ree knew Thump Milton had come into the barn. Ree could tell a hatted shape was stepping toward her, a shape wearing an olden sort of farmer’s winter cap with stretch earflaps and a stovepipe crown. Megan glanced at the advancing hat, then stood and quickly moved aside.
Thump Milton loomed over Ree, a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched. His spade beard was aged gray but his movements were young. He crouched, grabbed her chin, and turned her head from side to side, inspecting the damage. He was bigger than she’d thought, hands strong as stormwater rushing. His eyes went inside you to the depths without asking and helped themselves to anything they wanted.
He said, “You got somethin’ you need to say, child, you best say it now.”
His voice held raised hammers and long shadows.
Ree could feel the sting of piss drying on her legs and a thicker expulsion mushed in her panties. There were pigeons watching from the rafters. Smells of sweat-soaked leather, spilled feed, and scared calves. Ree turned aside and vomited blood and lunch toward a slop bucket but spewed wide. When she looked up at Thump Milton, the women and the other hats from the doorway had come to stand close behind him. She recognized Little Arthur, Spider Milton, Cotton Milton, Buster Leroy, and one of the Boshell men, Sleepy John.
She spoke low with her head down, the words lamed by spatters of red wet and slow limping from her mouth. She said, “I got two little brothers who can’t feed theirselves… yet. My mom is sick, and she is always… goin’ to be sick. Pretty soon the laws’re takin’ our house away n’throwin’ us out… to live in the fields… like dogs. Like fuckin’ dogs. The only hope I got to keep our house is… is, I gotta prove… Dad’s dead. Whoever killed him, I don’t need… to know… that. I don’t never need to know that. If Dad did wrong, Dad has paid. But I can’t forever carry both… them boys’n Mom… not… without that house to help.”
Her words were met with silence, an electric moment of utter silence, then Thump Milton stood and left the barn. Mrs. Thump and two of the men went with him. The others began to gather again near the doorway, whispering. Cigarettes were lit and funny things were said. The crowd chuckled at funny things she couldn’t hear and there was a great ugly roaring in her ears. Megan moved on the fringe of the crowd, and twice it seemed like she might’ve nodded Ree’s way.
Ree lay back on the barn floor, feeling the pitiful squish of her own voiding, and stared up. The pigeons in the rafters were awful quiet. Auction signs from long ago had been nailed to the underside of the hayloft floor and Ree stared at them but couldn’t make the signs hold still long enough to read any of the items for sale. She felt rude swishing in her belly and rolled over to spew but didn’t. Blood trickled from the side of her mouth to her earlobe and she wondered if Dad was lying on his side, too, or dead in a different position.
That redbone outside barked again, and a man in the doorway said, “Who’s this comin’ up here in such a big toot?”
Little Arthur said, “Is that truck green?”
“Looks green to me.”
“Aw, shit—that’s Teardrop’s truck. Teardrop her fuckin’ uncle—who the hell called him?”
The man said, “I don’t know, but I gotta go quick get somethin’ from my car. I ain’t standin’ here naked when that motherfucker walks in and sees her beat silly over there.”
Ree sat up and one of the women took two steps toward her and hissed, “Now look what you did!”
The truck door slammed and she heard digging steps cross the pea gravel.
Little Arthur said, “Hey, Teardrop, what—”
“Where is she?”
“Don’t get all excited.”
“She in there?”
The women and the hatted men made way for Teardrop. He had his right hand jammed deep into the pocket of his slashed leather jacket. The sun came from behind so his face was blurred by his own shade. His head was bare and his eyes moved quickly through the crowd. He took a few steps toward Ree and abruptly stopped.
Little Arthur said, “She was told, man, and didn’t listen.”
Teardrop seemed to stand straighter as he looked at Ree but his expression did not change. His gaze lingered on her face, her legs, the fresh and drying blood threads crisscrossing her cheeks and chin and neck. He turned to Little Arthur, spread his feet.
“You hit her?”
Little Arthur draped an arm toward the small of his back. His shirt bunched as he put a hand to his belt. He said, “What’ll you do if I did?”
“Say yes’n see.”
Mrs. Thump stomped back into the barn and stepped up, waving her hands.
“He never! No man here touched that crazy girl!”
“No man did?”
“I drubbed her good myself.”
Teardrop said, “You never drubbed her that way by yourself.”
“Me and my sisters, they were here, too.”
The crowd began to step aside and make way again, and Thump Milton returned to the barn. Buster Leroy and Sleepy John walked beside him and both carried shotguns, barrels pointed up, fingers near the triggers. Thump Milton strode forward with no hesitation to within an arm’s length of Teardrop. His quick pace had stirred the barn dust and he stood in a billow of whirling motes. He looked directly into Teardrop’s eyes and said, “Explain yourself, Haslam.”
Teardrop stared back and did not truckle. He pointed with his left hand as he spoke. “I ain’t never said a single fuckin’ word about my brother. I ain’t asked nobody about my brother, nor looked for him, neither. What Jessup done was against our ways, he knew it and I know it, and I ain’t raised no stink at all about whatever became of him. But she ain’t my brother. She’s my niece, and she’s near about all the close family I got left, so I’ll be collectin’ her now and carryin’ her on out of here to home. That suit you, Thump?”
“You’re willin’ to stand for her, are you?”
“If she does wrong, you can put it on me.”
“Agreed. She’s now yours to answer for.”
“This is a girl who ain’t goin’ to tell nobody nothin’.”
A near wooden post looked useful and Ree crawled to it. The rough wood rasped on her hands as she pulled herself upright and everything she saw moved in slow circles. Moans droned from her chest of bones. Shit leaked from her panties and she felt runnels of yuck on her thighs. She fluffed her wadded skirt loose and down. She swayed on her feet and realized that Thump Milton and Uncle Teardrop had turned to watch her.
Thump Milton said, “Put the girl in Haslam’s truck. Carry her if you got to.” He faced Teardrop again and said, “Is this over now?”
Teardrop did not pull his eyes from Ree to address Thump Milton.
“If anybody lays even just one finger on that girl ever again, they better have shot me first.”
Megan and Spider Milton put Ree between them and shouldered her from the barn. Her feet dragged up dust and pigeons flew from the eaves. The crowd was silent as she was hauled across the pea gravel to the green truck, but that redbone barked once more and those birds in the trees still sang their different songs.
Chapter 26
THERE WAS an echo in her eye. She looked from the speeding truck, and everything she saw—house, fence post, goat, cow, songbird, or shining sun—had an echo of itself standing at its side. The echoes all wavered a little, and if the real object moved the echo might fall behind and disappear from sight for a second or two before catching up again to stand close and make shimmering doubles in her eye.
Uncle Teardrop stared into the rearview mirror until the truck crested a hump and on the downside he slammed the brakes, then backed off the pavement onto a vague dirt path. He sped backwards across deep jarring ruts in a fallow field, past a fallen barn and into a thicket of dead apple trees. In the orchard he’d found darkness in daylight, a veiled space between rotting trees with a view of the road from Hawkfall.
He opened his door, stepped from the truck
to bend and better reach under the seat. When he got back behind the wheel he held a paratrooper’s rifle with a folding wire stock and a long clip, and a shotgun with the barrel cut short and a small white handgrip. He laid the shotgun beside Ree, tapped a finger on her knee, said, “For if they come.” He leaned to her, turned her face up, and looked inside her mouth. He was sweating and his breaths were short. “That Gail girl really saved your bacon.” He raised her shirttail, twisted the very end into a thick coil and stuck the coil into her mouth. “Put this where you’re bleedin’n chomp down on it. Don’t talk or nothin’, just keep that thing chomped down good ’til the blood lets up.”
She could sense blood driven by heartbeats pulsing from the torn places beneath her skin. She saw four eyes and two ears and a flurry of blue drops on Uncle Teardrop’s face. She eased her hand toward the shotgun, located it by feel rather than by sight. She touched a finger to the cool barrel and clenched her jaw and nearly cried smelling the rising stink of herself.
Teardrop reached across to the glove box and grabbed a baby-food bottle of crank. He unscrewed the lid, set it on the dash, snorted from the bottle twice, banged the steering wheel, and said, “You got to be ready to die every day—then you got a chance.” He sat in shade cast by the limbs of a dry orchard, staring toward the road. “You own me now. Understand? You purty much own me now, girl. You do wrong, it’s on me. You do big wrong’n it’s me that’ll pay big. Jessup, he went’n did wrong, the poor silly shit. Jessup went’n turned snitch, and that’s only the biggest ancient no-no of all, ain’t it? I never thought… but he couldn’t face this last bust, couldn’t face a ten-year jolt. Plus there’s your mom, sittin’ home crazy forever. That was heavy on his mind. Them boys. You. He started talkin’ to that fuckin’ Baskin—but I want you to know, Jessup, Jessup wasn’t givin’ up no Rathlin Valley men. Huh-uh, huh-uh. He said he wasn’t. Wouldn’t do it. He said… shit, he said all kinds of… If I could do any of my days over, girl, that very first asshole I killed’d still be walkin’ around. But… hell, never been found and I’m… You’re forcin’ me out into the open, girl. Understand? You’re puttin’ me into the exact picture I been tryin’ to dodge. They been waitin’ to see if I’ll do anything. Watchin’. Listen… the way it is… the way I feel… is, I can’t know who killed Jessup. I can suspicion a man or two, have a hinky feelin’, but I can’t know for a certain fact who went’n killed my little brother. Even if he did wrong, which he did, why… it’ll eat at me if I know who they sent. Eat at me like red ants. Then… there’ll come a night… a night when I have that one more snort I didn’t need, and I’ll show up somewhere’n see whichever fucker done it sippin’ a beer’n hootin’ at a joke and… shit… that’ll be that. They’ll all come for me then… Buster Leroy… Little Arthur… Cotton Milton, Whoop Milton, Dog… Punch… Hog-jaw… that droopy-eyed motherfucker Sleepy John. But, anyhow, girl, I’ll help you some, take your back so you can find his bones, but the deal is, even if you find out, you can’t ever let me know who did the actual killin’ of my brother. Knowin’ that’d just mean I’ll be toes-up myself purty soon, too. Deal?”