‘How you doing, Sheriff.’I said it calm as a cat’s purr and looking straight into his gray eyes.
‘I’m looking for Holland Winchester,’ he said. ‘You seen him?’
‘No,’ I said, keeping my eyes fixed on his.
He let that stand without a word edgewise.
‘Well if you see him, tell him he’s got his momma worried.’
‘I’ll do that, Sheriff,’ I said.
He didn’t say no word more, just turned and limped out of the field but I could tell he had his suspectings about me. I knew I’d be seeing him again and that next time he wouldn’t be so easy satisfied. I knew me and him was just getting started.
I hoed another hour and then went to the house. Amy didn’t say a word but she hugged me. I hadn’t reckoned how much I’d needed that hug till right then. We held each other a long time, long enough that I checked out the window to make sure Sheriff Alexander hadn’t felt need to wander my land some more.
I told Amy what she needed to know. Then we set down at the table.
I made myself eat all of what filled my plate. I knew I’d need all the strength I could gain up the next day or two but the field peas and potatoes had no flavor. The cornbread stuck in my throat like sand. Amy pushed her portion around the plate with her fork. She managed a few bites only after I reminded her she was eating for the young one too.
Amy looked bone tired and for the first time I glimsened how she’d look when she wasn’t young and pretty anymore. I knew that wouldn’t be far along, because life on a hill farm wears down a woman faster than a man, at least on the outside. Momma once told how she’d stared in the looking glass one day and not realized herself for a second. ‘Who is that old woman staring at me,’ she’d thought.
She’d been all of thirty years old.
‘I’ll start on a baby crib tomorrow evening,’ I said, because I’d as lief give Amy a happy thought on a day when me or her hadn’t had many.
I gave her a smile or at least as close to a smile as I could counterfeit.
‘Go lay down for a while,’ I said. ‘You and that baby need some rest.’
‘I think I will,’ Amy said and went on to the back room.
I stepped out on the porch. I wanted to study some about what I was going to say if Sheriff Alexander showed back before dark with some questions. But he didn’t show and after a while the sun fell behind Sassafras Mountain and shadows stretched out till they wasn’t shadows anymore. The lightning bugs moved low across the yard like little lanterns. Cicadas sang in the trees and down by the river bullfrogs jabbered at one another on the banks. I got up from the steps and went inside. I undressed quiet as I could and eased into bed.
Amy’s back was to me but when I nudged up close and laid my hand on her belly, she turned. Her hand touched the back of my head and led my lips to hers as she laid her flesh against mine. We hadn’t in several months, not since I’d got my suspicions about her and Holland Winchester. Amy’s bosoms felt fuller now, like they was already filled with baby milk, and her belly was curved and firm.
For a little while it was like I was drifting away from everything that had happened since Holland came into the yard that morning. Each thought-picture of Holland dying or dead that seemed nailed inside my head got smaller and smaller till it was near no longer there. It must have been the same for Amy. Her breath was deep and fast as mine. We cleaved together like we was drowning and could only be saved by each other.
I slept a few hours, a sleep so black and deep beyond even dreams. I woke in the dark. For a moment I laid there not even recollecting what had happened yesterday. Then it all came rushing on me like a dam broke open and I knew no matter how long I laid there I’d not gain a wink of sleep more. Amy didn’t stir as I slipped on my overalls and brogans.
I walked out to the well and drew water to splash the sleep off my face, then took a step toward the barn out of habit but there was nothing waiting in there for me now. I sat on the porch steps and went over again what I’d say when the law showed back up. Sheriff Alexander would want to talk and there’d be a sight more to it than‘Have you seen Holland Winchester?’
After a while first light came drizzling through the trees. I spotted the Dog Star between the white oak’s branches. To its right was another star my daddy always made claim was the planet Venus.
I got up when I heard Amy making breakfast, my back stiff from all I did the day before. I forked my biscuit and gravy down quick, then stepped out on the porch.
‘Do you have to go so soon?’ Amy asked.
‘I want the sheriff to find me in my field,’ I said, ‘out in the open like a man with nothing to hide.’
Amy reached her hand and touched my arm, like after all of what had happened she needed to be sure I was flesh and blood, like she reckoned all of this a dream.
I picked up the hoe and the .12 gauge.
‘If this ain’t nothing but a dream I’m in it with you,’ I said.
The high grass at the field edge darkened my brogans with dew. The sun hadn’t livelied up the grasshoppers so they just hung on the stalks when I brushed past. Wisps of fog curled off the river. I laid down the shotgun and got to my work.
As I hoed cabbage my mind was on last night, how good it had felt to be one flesh again with Amy, how it had been a kind of first step back to the way things had once been between us. I recollected how it had been that December morning when Doctor Griffen had showed up for his weekly visit. He poked my legs like always but this time my leg muscles quivered, as like he’d jolted electricity into them.
‘I think he’s going to be all right,’ Doctor Griffen said. ‘It’ll be a slow healing but he’ll get there.’
‘Thank you, God,’ Momma said, falling to her knees praying out loud in front of Doctor Griffen and me and Daddy.
But it took a while. Daddy had to build me crutches to perch my arms on. It was a slow going at first but after a couple days I’d got to hobbling around the house pretty good. Doctor Griffen checked me again a week later.
‘You don’t need those crutches anymore,’ he’d said.
But I did, because I doubted my legs after so long a time. It had been another week before I took my first steps, holding onto the porch railing when I did, then finally letting go. That was how it was with Amy after months of doubting her. I had learned to trust Doctor Griffen and my legs. Now I had to gain up trust in Amy and my own heart.
I saw the first buzzard when I finished my third row, so high up it was no bigger seeming than a gnat.
The next time I looked there was four. They came down slow, tightening their circle the way you’d tighten the lid on a mason jar. Or a noose around a neck, and that thought didn’t set very well with me. You knew they’d come, I told myself. You’d counted on it. Still, seeing those buzzards sent a tremble through my bones.
I hoed the last of the cabbage, then laid the hoe and shotgun at the end of the first tobacco row. I kneeled down and rubbed a green leaf between my finger and thumb, the same way you’d rub a dollar bill, because that’s what it was, money. Which was the why for giving over my best piece of land to it and the why for though the beans and corn might not make it we’d get through the winter, provided I was around to harvest and cure it. But we’d be eating a lot of cabbage come January and February and we’d be eating it by lamplight.
I started topping the tobacco, pulling off what worms I found, a good many as it turned out, everyone of them big as my thumb. The sun climbed up over the trees and sweat slicked my arms and face.
It wasn’t long before I heard a bloodhound giving tongue over at Mrs. Winchester’s. In a couple of minutes it came out of the woods with a couple of men following. The dog went right for the white oak there in the yard, poked its nose to the very spot where Holland had laid. It circled for a couple of minutes around the white oak but you could tell the trail had gone cold. One of the men leashed the bloodhound and they walked back toward Mrs. Winchester’s.
Then I saw the
other men, moving out of the woods like a army, sticks in their hands like rifles. It seemed a hundred of them, moving through the yard and into the pasture and woods behind the house. Like the buzzards, it wasn’t nothing I hadn’t expected but it was still a bothersome sight.
I tried to put my head down and tend to my tobacco but I kept peeking toward the house. Soon enough the men who’d followed the bloodhound into the yard came back out of the woods. A fourth man was with them now and I could tell from the black preacher’s hat it was Sheriff Alexander. They passed some words then split up.
Three men walked towards me. They didn’t have the dog with them and their hands hauled things now. The lead man was Bobby Murphree. The man behind him I couldn’t put a name on but the last one was Tom Watson, who’d gone to school with me and Holland.
Sheriff Alexander went up on the porch. Amy came to the door and they talked a minute before he stepped inside. I didn’t like that for I wanted them in my sight but there was no more than nothing I could do about it.
Bobby Murphree and the other man only nodded when they passed. They was shutmouth and serious. It was obvious they had suspicions against me. But Tom Watson lagged behind them a ways.
‘I’ll not hold it against you if you did kill the son of a bitch,’ Tom said out the corner of his mouth. ‘I’d of been likely to do it my own self given half a chance.’
I didn’t say a word to that. I just kept on topping the tobacco plants, not looking in their direction till they’d disappeared down the riverbank. The sun looked midmorning but I was already tired and thirsty. I didn’t want to leave my field though for that might look queer. I kept on moving down the rows, pulling off leaves and worms and keeping my head down best as I could.
The ground trembled under my feet when the first stick of dynamite went off. It was loud enough to raise the dead but the dead was already raised up in that white oak. There was another big boom a few minutes later. You could easy enough follow them as they worked their way downriver. It seemed they didn’t walk no more than a few feet before they lit another stick of dynamite. They seemed likely to blast every puddle the dog days had left in that river.
Then I saw Sheriff Alexander. He was wearing his uniform today, letting me and everybody else know he hadn’t come up here to trifle. Momma had once recollected us and the Alexanders was kin on her side. I wondered if he recognized us as relations.
I stood tall and watched him come as another dynamite stick boomed downriver. He knew well as me that I’d spotted him. There was no use of counterfeiting I hadn’t.
Sheriff Alexander stepped past where my hoe and .12 gauge laid. I knew right then Amy had said never a word he could get me on. He stood at the end of the row I’d been working, not looking at me but across the river. He looked like he was twice reading something to make sure it said what he thought it said.
He finally looked my way.
‘Looks to be something dead over yonder.’ I never gave it a glance.
‘It’s my plow horse. He broke his leg yesterday.’
I said it pretty as a potato bug and I didn’t stumble a word. He didn’t reckon me to say anything like that. I could tell by the way he rechecked the sky it set him back, that the message he’d read up there wasn’t near as clear as it had been a few seconds before.
‘That’s some hard luck,’ Sheriff Alexander finally said.
‘Yes sir,’ I said. ‘It is.’
‘Is it in the river?’
‘No, back in the woods a ways.’
‘We’ll go over and have us a look-see directly.’
He looked at the tobacco plants, his glasses slipping a little down his nose.
‘You’ll make some good money this fall,’ he said.
‘I reckon.’
‘So you didn’t see Holland yesterday?’ he asked, changing the subject slick as a peeled onion.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Your wife said she hadn’t either, but I got cause to wonder about that.’
Sheriff Alexander pursed his lips to say something else but didn’t get a chance. The other men came stumbling up the bank toward us. Bobby Murphree was in the lead, Tom Watson and the other man following him.
‘Bring up anything?’ Sheriff Alexander asked.
Tom Watson opened his canvas pack.
‘Nothing but this,’ he said, lifting up the big brown I’d tried to catch for two years. He reached it out to Sheriff Alexander, his finger hooked in the gills.
‘Twenty-three inches long,’ Tom Watson said, joggling it on his fingers. ‘Five pounds if it’s a ounce.’
‘Did you see what was drawing them buzzards?’ Sheriff Alexander asked, nodding at the tree line.
The men turned toward the river.
‘Damn,’ Bobby Murphree said. ‘I guess we was looking down when we should of been looking up.’
Bobby Murphree didn’t know the truth of that but I wasn’t about to help him notion it. In a couple of minutes him and Tom and the other man left, taking my .12 gauge with them. It was just me and Sheriff Alexander again, the way I reckoned he wanted it.
Sheriff Alexander bent his knees and squatted. I could hear his knees pop and he gave a grunt as he put out his hand to balance himself. He was letting me know he’d be visiting a while. He took his nose rag from his back pocket and cleaned his glasses. He wiped face though there wasn’t more than a drop or two of sweat on him, just expecting there to be because he’d lived down in Seneca too long. He was used to a place where the air got thick like water and sweat lathered your skin if you did anything more than sit and fan yourself. He’d forgot that up here you had to be working to break a full sweat, in the dog days.
Sheriff Alexander didn’t put his glasses back on right then. He just looked up and let his gray eyes fix on me like a hawk’s eyes on a meadow mouse.
‘I’m going to lay it all out on the table for you, Billy,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll let you have your say.’
Sheriff Alexander put his glasses back on. They made his eyes bigger, not so much anymore like hawk’s eyes as owl’s eyes.
He went at me pretty lively for a few minutes, trying to rile me, get me to say something I’d not meant to. But I didn’t rise to his bait.
‘Let’s go have a look at that horse,’ he finally said.
We waded the same shallows where I’d crossed Sam, then walked down the river and into the woods. If you can get through this you’ll be O.K., I said in my mind. I kept telling myself that till we stepped into the stand of yellow poplar.
Buzzards covered Sam like a quilt. You couldn’t see a bit of hide and there was a dozen other buzzards skipping and flapping around looking for openings to poke their beaks in. More was up in the trees. I could hear them flapping and rustling up there but how many I couldn’t say. I kept my eyes looking down.
Sheriff Alexander put the nose rag to his face and waded in amongst the buzzards, kicking at them till they scattered enough to give him a gander. Then he stepped back and the buzzards closed back in on Sam like knottyheads on stickbait.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ he said, and I didn’t argue otherwise.
We crossed the river and I stepped back into the field to finish topping the tobacco.
Sheriff Alexander watched me a couple of minutes. I wondered if he recollected what it was like not to have a steady paycheck, to work months and not know if you’d make money that year or not. I wondered if he recollected how it’s a different sun in August, a sun that lays heavier on a man’s shoulders, like maybe the Dog Star’s mashing its weight down on you as well. Maybe he did remember. Maybe that was why he lived and worked in town.
‘I got to go back to Seneca for a while,’ he finally said. ‘But I got one question I’ve been puzzling over. How’d you get a horse with a broke leg across that river?’
That was a question I hadn’t figured to be asked. Sheriff Alexander’s eyes watched me and didn’t blink. Owl eyes, I thought, wise eyes that don’t miss a thing. I had to think out
a answer and put a bridle on my tongue till I was sure I had it. Cicadas sang in the trees, making it harder to crosshair my mind. I finally rooted up a likely seeming answer.
I could tell what I spoke didn’t satisfy him but he just walked on up the field edge to his car. Sheriff Alexander drove back to Seneca and I went to the house for noon-dinner.
They came back in the afternoon. Five cars of searchers flocked in my yard, Sheriff Alexander giving them their orders. Then it was like a army again, this time wading across the river and moving up the slope of Licklog Mountain. Sheriff Alexander and Bobby searched at the house while Tommy Watson and another man was grappling in the river some more. I stayed in my field, topping and worming my tobacco, trying my best not to act like I knew there was thirty men searching every inch of my farm to get me in the chair.
I quit my work before they did, walking back to the house for my supper. The gloaming set in before they gave up. The searchers came straggling back out of the shadow of Licklog Mountain. All they had to show for their work was chigger bites and beggar lice. They piled back in their cars and Sheriff Alexander and Bobby Murphree got in their car too. Amy was putting up the supper dishes but I lagged by the window as Sheriff Alexander’s law car bumped down the washout. As I watched I figured me and Amy had got through the tangliest part of the briar patch. If we could hold on to our story a couple more days we’d be O.K.
Then I saw the brake lights come on, glowing red in the gloaming like blood. Sheriff Alexander turned the car around.
‘He’s coming back,’ I told Amy.
In that second I felt feather-legged as the moment I’d shot Holland. I knew he’d thought of something, something that wouldn’t wait for a tomorrow. He came up on the porch and knocked on the door jamb. He knocked confident.
‘Come on,’ he said, and nodded me toward the car where Bobby Murphree poked around in the trunk, ‘and bring a lantern. We need to go back over to where that horse is.’
When he said that I felt my heart start beating against my ribs like a quail caught in a snare. Calm down, I said to myself. I glanced at Amy and saw there was some scared in her too. For a second I thought of going for the ax next to the kindling. But it was just that, a thought. I’d killed one more man than enough for me.