The Amulet

  Grimly, Emmons gave chase. He was awkward in run­ning, in climbing over the fence, in trying to load his rifle again as he ran across the uneven earth of the pecan or­chard. He had to stop several times to retrieve shells that bounced out of his shirt pocket. The dog kept always a few dozen yards ahead of him, and when Emmons paused, the dog turned back and began to howl.

  But despite Emmons’ hurry and his flailing limbs, and his sweating back, the man’s face was set and express­ionless—as blank as the gold-and-jet surface of the amu­let bouncing on its chain around his neck.

  Made curious by the gunshots, a number of black field hands had gathered in twos and threes at various fence posts within sight of Emmons and the dog, and among themselves discussed that the dog might be rabid, or won­dered what it had done to make Emmons so angry. As they watched, however, Emmons’ jerky movements and his feverish chase of the dog made them nervous, and they realized that they had much more to fear from the man with the rifle than from the dog. The field hands—men, women, and children—who had been weeding the rows of cotton and peanuts, moved swiftly along the fence, well out of Emmons’ way, and then circled back toward the barn and outbuildings of the farm where they were em­ployed. Emmons and the dog were headed that way, but there was much more protection in buildings than in open fields and orchards.

  Emmons would raise his gun to fire; the dog would stop a moment, then suddenly leap to one side, or behind a tree, and the shot would miss him. The game had become stylized, and the crazed hunter and his canine prey pro­gressed slowly and lurchingly toward the barn, crossing the several acres of low cotton and peanut plants.

  All the black workers that had been gathered around the barnyard had scattered, retreating around the back of the building, or into a neighboring field of corn where they dropped to the ground below the level of the yard-high plants. A brave few climbed into the upper platforms of the barn, where hay was stored, and stared down through cracks between the planks, watching to see if Morris Emmons was going to be successful in killing the dog. They all abandoned the baling machine into which they had been feeding the last cuttings of the winter ground cover; the machine, set just inside the great front door of the barn, hummed softly, its gears turning against nothing, the wire inside poised to wrap securely the shredded dry grass.

  The barking dog stopped just at the entrance of the barn, snarled fiercely at the approaching Emmons, and then turned inside into the darkness. Without hesitation, Morris Emmons stepped into the barn, but unable to ad­just immediately to the dim light inside, he peered about a couple of times, not able to see much of anything. The dog had stopped barking, and Morris was confused by the sounds of cats that made their home in a near corner and by the shuffling of the very nervous men on the platforms above him. Emmons lifted the rifle to his shoulder, and turned around slowly, with the intention of shooting the dog as soon as it came within his vision.

  The dog snarled behind him, and Morris whirled sud­denly, sliding on the damp straw beneath him. Before he could regain his balance, the dog had leaped against his chest, propelling him backward and into the maw of the baling machine. In a moment, full of screams, Emmons was drawn by studded treads into the interior of the ma­chine. The rifle fired once.

  Two farmhands from above climbed swiftly down a lad­der, and stared with real horror at the man’s legs disap­pearing into the contraption. The machinery ground harshly, with muffled difficulty for a few moments, and then suddenly, with loud whistling and even louder grat­ing, it began to spew out silver-dollar-size bits of bloody flesh, torn clothing, and mangled metal. The baling ma­chine ground to a broken halt while one booted foot still protruded from the hopper.

  One of the farmhands rushed out of the barn, calling for help. The dog rushed out after him, still barking. The other farmhand, a strapping black man in his mid-forties, stood still, glanced around to see that there was no one around him. Then he stopped and retrieved the piece of jewelry that had been flung out of the machine and at his feet. He glanced at it briefly, wiped the blood from it with the tail of his shirt, and then placed it in his pants pocket.

  The female farmhands timidly entered the barn to de­termine what had happened to Morris Emmons. When they saw the single foot in the baling machine, they screamed, and ran back out into the sunlight, declaring how that foot was a great deal worse to look at than a whole churchful of open coffins.

  Chapter 50

  Morris Emmons had paid Jack Weaver half the sum for the pigs in cash when the distraught farmer had come to him the day of Merle Weaver’s death, and had promised that the remainder would be available at his store some­time Thursday afternoon. Jack was to go by and get it then and also confirm that, according to the bargain, all the murderous animals had been slaughtered.

  Jack Weaver, then, thinking of other things, pulled his pickup onto the red-dirt area in front of Morris Emmons’ gas pumps. He got out of his truck, scratching down on the back of an envelope a list of items he needed for the remainder of the week. The farmer was beneath the awn­ing that protected the pumps and shaded the front of the store before he saw Jim Coltrane’s corpse spread before the screen door. A pool of blood had flowed out beneath the body, and the tire tracks of a vehicle had spread and splattered the liquid farther.

  The farmer put his hands over his face and leaned against the ethyl pump for support. He had not one co­herent thought. He could not think who might have done it, could not think what he ought to do next, could not even decide whether he himself might be in danger. He shook his head without understanding, and turned only with the approach of an automobile. It was a highway patrol car, with two officers in the front, and another man in the back. This last proved to be Mal Homans who jumped out and ran over to the corpse crying, “See, he’s dead! Morris Emmons went and killed him! No good reason! No reason at all! Pulled out a shotgun and blew him to hell!” Mal Homans shook his head dismally, and stared at Jack Weaver and the two officers. The two po­licemen stood over the corpse, carefully avoiding stepping in the blood, and appeared to be at as much of a loss as the two farmers.

  A second car soon came up and two women, so similar in appearance, that they were distinguished only by their dresses, stepped out and approached the body. They were both determined and solemn, and so alike in demeanor that Jack Weaver could not tell which was the widow, and which only the sister-in-law.

  “Ya’ll watch out!” cried Mal Homans suddenly, “he’s probably still in there!”

  The two women retreated to their car, got in and drove off without having spoken a word, either to each other or to anyone else. Jack Weaver and Mal Homans hurried to the pickup truck, and stood on the side away from the store. They peered through the window of the cab, and watched as the two officers carefully made their way around to the back of the store, surreptitiously peering in the windows.

  “They gone get their heads blowed off, I know it!” cried Mal Homans, in great agitation.

  “What happened?” stammered Jack Weaver.

  Homans ignored him. “You hear a shot, we gone get in this truck and ride straight out of here, and we not gone look back, ’cause that man is out of his mind.”

  “What happened?” the farmer repeated, and then be­fore the other could reply, Weaver suggested, “Let’s get out of here now. Let’s leave this place.”

  Homans shook his head. “I want to see if them men get killed. They are crazy to stick their heads in front of the window like that. If I was Morris Emmons inside there, and I had already killed one man, I wouldn’t stop for no highway patrol.”

  “Morris Emmons killed Jim?”

  Homans nodded distractedly, then said, “No reason. Didn’t have no reason for doing it. I don’t know why he did it. We was in there in the back, looking at them pigs that went and killed—” Homans broke off, realizing who it was that he was talking to. Weaver looked down at the ground, troubled, but then raised his eyes bravely. Homans continued: “We was in the back, and then we come out, and was
about to go. Emmons told Jim to make the dog shut up, and then he shot him dead. Didn’t even give him a chance to make the dog get quiet. Then he tried to kill the dog too! Dog got out and Morris began to chase that dog like there was no tomorrow! I don’t know if he got him. I ran out the side door, and snuck ’round the edge out here”—he pointed at a fence around the property behind which was a thick hedge of crepe myrtle—“and I saw Morris was gone. I run out here, and made sure that Jim was dead—and he was—so then I jumped in the truck and got the hell out. Got goddamn glass in my ass, and near ’bout run poor Jim over. Went straight home, and called the patrol. Them crazy men—you wouldn’t catch me doing anything like that . . .”

  The two highway patrolmen had just entered the build­ing when Sheriff Garrett and Deputy Barnes drove up from the direction of Pine Cone. They hopped out of the car, the deputy with his gun drawn and waving unsteadily in the general direction of the two farmers.

  “They’re in there!” cried Mal Homans. “Don’t know if Morris is in there with ’em or not.”

  The sheriff and the deputy advanced cautiously on the building, but the two patrolmen sauntered out, shaking their heads and shrugging. All the law officers then gath­ered round Mal Homans and listened to his story told again, and every few seconds they glanced uneasily toward the corpse.

  At the end of the tale, Mal Homans pleaded, “Hey, cain’t we move him, ya’ll? He’s starting to draw the flies. Is the ambulance coming out here?”

  Sheriff Garrett nodded. “On their way now. Ought to have been here already.”

  “Where you suppose he could be? Morris, I mean. You didn’t see nothing, did you, Mr. Weaver?” asked the sher­iff.

  Jack Weaver shook his head. “That’s his truck I see ’round back. He didn’t take it. He must be around.”

  “He went after the dog,” said Mal lamely.

  All six men looked around themselves uneasily, and moved into the shade of the tin awning, where they weren’t such targets. “Maybe we ought just to go on inside and wait for the ambulance.” This suggestion was taken up, but just as the sheriff stepped through the door, he heard the radio in his patrol car. He sent Deputy Barnes to receive the information.

  Barnes moved warily out to the car, and actually lay down across the front seat before he took the receiver. A few moments later he hurried back across the lot to the store, motioning the men out.

  “Come on!” he shouted. “Morris Emmons is dead too!” He pointed out across the field. “Mr. Crane called in. Morris Emmons chased that dog through the peanuts, ran in the barn, and then jumped in the baler. Tore the damn thing up. Mr. Crane’s gone have to buy a new one. He’s real mad about it too.”

  The men winced. The two highway patrolmen got into their car, neglecting Mal Homans, and drove off in the direction of the neighboring farm.

  The sheriff turned to Homans and Weaver. “You two want to come? You might not want to see.”

  Mal Homans replied immediately, “Yeah, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. He killed ol’ Jim, and Jim was prac­tically my brother and he deserves whatever he got. He deserved it, and I want to see him in it.”

  Jack Weaver touched Homans on the shoulder, and said, “You go on. I don’t want to see nothing. I’ll wait here for the ambulance.”

  Homans glanced guiltily at the corpse of his brother-in-law; he had forgotten. “Yeah, I’d be mighty grateful, Jack, if you would. I just cain’t bear looking at poor Jim.”

  Jack said nothing, and stood stiff armed against his truck while the sheriff, the deputy, and Mal Homans drove off.

  A car drove up a few moments later, wanting gasoline, but Jack kept them back from the pumps and explained that there had been a terrible accident and that they would have to go on to the Shell station three miles up ahead. The two women inside demanded to know what sort of accident, but Weaver only shook his head.

  The farmer then went inside the store and came out with a large piece of canvas with which he covered the body of the slain man. He stood for a moment in the door­way, waiting for the ambulance, but when it failed to come he moved briefly to the back of the store, opened the door of the cooling room in the back, and stared at the wall laden with the heads of his own slaughtered swine. He recognized Louise, and made note that her jaw had been ripped open. That seemed fitting.

  He came out front when he heard the ambulance siren, and while the undertaker and the coroner made them­selves busy with the corpse of Jim Coltrane, Jack Weaver told them what he knew of the motiveless murder. “And you better put him over to one side, ’cause you got an­other stop to make over at Mr. Crane’s.” The coroner and the undertaker looked up curiously. “And you better take a couple of croker sacks, too, cause a stretcher is not gone do you no good at all . . .” The farmer was not try­ing to be humorous.

  Chapter 51

  On the short ride from Morris Emmons’ store to Mr. Crane’s farm, Sheriff Garrett questioned Mal Homans again on the possible motive for the unexpected murder. Homans again went over what had happened, and in the third telling, he mentioned the necklace that had fallen out of the sow’s mouth. He also recalled that it was Dean Howell’s wife who had been looking for it.

  “That’s just real peculiar,” said the sheriff thoughtfully.

  “Sure is,” chimed in the deputy. “I never heard of noth­ing worth having coming out of a pig’s mouth before. They say sometimes you cut open a fish and find a ring that somebody throwed off a ship or something, but hardly no­body—and for sure nobody around here—throws jewelry in the pigpen.”

  “So, anyway,” said Mal. “Jim and I put it ’round his neck, just making fun you know, calling him a goddamn hippie and like that, and he laughed, and then five min­utes later he went and blew Jim to kingdom come, and I don’t know why. I don’t know why he took out after that dog like he did either—but better the dog than me.”

  Sheriff Garrett was puzzled by the motiveless crime and the subsequent death of Morris Emmons in the baling ma­chine. He simply dismissed the part about the amulet as having nothing really of importance to do with the actual fact of the murder. Morris Emmons, the sheriff considered, knew what a baling machine was; he knew how the damn thing worked, and he knew that you weren’t, above all, supposed to jump inside it. The sheriff was as uncomfort­able now as he had been last week, with the deaths of the Shirleys and the Simses.

  Why had Emmons killed Jim Coltrane? Why had he killed himself? Why had he not killed Mal Homans? And Mal Homans, thought the sheriff, glancing in the rear-view mirror, had not been the more likable of the two.

  Sheriff Garrett and Deputy Barnes did not enter Mr. Crane’s barn happily. They had lost count of the number of maimed and disfigured corpses they had come across in the past week. It wasn’t something that they had yet grown used to, and they hoped that they never would.

  Garrett prodded the protruding foot with the handle of a shovel, and thought that investigation enough. He came back out into the sunlight, sweating not entirely from the heat, and prepared to wait for the coroner and the under­taker. “I think I’m just gone let them take care of this one,” the sheriff said in an undertone to the two highway patrolmen. “I mean, I don’t mind when they just get shot up, ’cause they’re in one piece, and you can pick ’em up and throw ’em in the backseat if you have to, but I don’t want to have to go around and start picking ’em up over all creation. You know what I mean?”

  The two patrolmen nodded, and indicated that since there was nothing else really to be done, they might just go on off and share a couple of beers. It was early in the day for it, but staring at corpses made a man thirsty. And they might need it, just to get through the remainder of the afternoon.

  The sheriff nodded and waved them off. While the dep­uty questioned Mal Homans again on everything that he had already said three times over, and attempted to give the farmer the impression that he was under suspicion for both deaths, the sheriff went over and talked to a number of the farm hands who had been witne
sses to the dreadful accident.

  The sheriff was best acquainted with Johnny Washing­ton. This man had spent a couple of weeks in the diminu­tive Pine Cone jail, under indictment for second-degree murder, and the sheriff knew him for a trustworthy man. Johnny had seen the accident from above, and was able to tell the sheriff that Morris Emmons’ death was entirely an accident, that the bird dog had pushed him off balance, and that, quite by accident, Morris had tipped over back­ward into the baling machine.

  “I’m pleased to hear it,” said the sheriff. “ ’Cause that makes a lot more sense than him coming over the fields over here in order to do away with himself in somebody else’s baling machine. Can’t be a clean way to go, can’t be easy to take, I don’t imagine . . .”

  “No, sir, Sheriff,” said Johnny Washington, “I don’t ’spect so.”

  The coroner and the undertaker arrived, and began cursing that this was going to be the most unpleasant job in a hectic week. While they went about their business, the sheriff tried to calm down Mr. Crane, who had come out complaining to the deputy and to Mal Homans about people committing suicide on his property without his per­mission, interrupting the business of the farm, destroying the machinery, giving the place a bad name and maybe even an evil spirit and so forth. He admitted without much prompting however that he had never cared for Morris Emmons much anyway.

  When Morris Emmons had been gathered up in two great green-plastic trash bags, and set heavily inside the ambulance next to the body of the man that he had killed, the sheriff and the deputy drove Mal Homans back to his home.

  “They find that necklace he was wearing?” asked Mal, when he could think of nothing else to say.

  “They didn’t say nothing about it,” said the deputy. “And I didn’t see nothing like it.”

  That was satisfactory to Mal, who didn’t care anyway, but the sheriff considered, “I should have asked Johnny Washington about that. But I don’t guess it really matters much. If Emmons had it on, then it probably got chewed up in that machine, and wouldn’t be no good to nobody anymore. And if he didn’t have it on, then it must have come off him, and somebody’ll find it some time. But I just wonder how something belonging to Sarah Howell come to be in the mouth of the pig that killed Merle Weaver. That don’t hardly make more sense than why Morris Emmons went and killed Jim, does it?”