Smonk or Widow Town Part 7

Meanwhile, Mrs. Tate p.r.o.nounced the judge guilty despite his citing precedents and quoting the law in English and Latin and calling upon various prophets and heroes of the Old Testament as well as Homer, Sophocles, George Was.h.i.+ngton, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Buffalo Bill Cody who was a close personal friend. He reminded Mrs. Tate that she was a female, not a judge, as she bade the widows bind his hands. They scissored off his outer clothes and took his shoes and shoved him in undergarments wrung with sweat off the porch and past the gunwagon down the narrow alley to where his knees gave way as he beheld the town's rickety gallows.

Ye can't hang me! he cried. Ye can't!

You're right, said Mrs. Tate behind him.

At her command four widows seized his ankles and dragged him through the dust and upended his legs and two widows above from the gallows floor lowered a noose and hauled him into the air with a pulley through the trapdoor until he was hanging upside down. A dozen or so ladies began to pelt him with rocks and hit him with sticks of firewood like a pinata while two others over at the store backed a team of oxen toward the machine gun.

The judge swore and threatened and cajoled and shat hot mud down his back and stammered and tried to bribe them. His sour unders.h.i.+rt fell over his face as rocks bounced off him. At the creak of the gunwagon he cried, What's that noise I hear? Is it the sound of my own demise? Two ladies unhitched the oxen and led them to safety while several others mounted the buckboard and puzzled over the operation of the giant gun, handing its steam hose one to another with no idea of its function. Mrs. Tate was the one who discerned that the lock fit in the side slot. She stood on a peach box and used both hands to latch back the bolt and two fingers to squeeze the trigger which was easier than she'd thought.

The instant thunder brought screams from the ladies but removed the judge's right arm at the elbow and splintered one of the gallows-posts. The judge began to shriek and wriggle as the dirt stained beneath him and the widows nodded to one another and drew broom straws to establish a fair order and took turns at the trigger disintegrating the judge as a haze of steam rose from the water jacket and they fanned it with their hands and the gun hammered like a locomotive boring through the last tunnel to h.e.l.l. The widows fired and fired and fired and fired until the final cartridge hull clattered to a stop on the wagon floor and what was left of the judge resembled a steaming ma.s.s of afterbirth, blue and dripping. The silence of the world shocked them all.

6.

THE ORPHANAGE.

IN THE MEANTIME, THE CROW HUNTER'S HORSE SHE'D TAKEN HAD bucked Evavangeline and fallen itself and then risen in a spray of gravel and legs and with dirt on its rump fled wobbling and whinnying like a sissy-horse, taking all those saddle-bagged guns with it.

She rose and dusted her pants and tied a bandanna around her head and walked several miles, pausing in a field to snap a section of sugarcane from a stalk. She shucked it but it was dry as kindling, like chewing sawdust. She walked on as the day's colors drained, coming upon a modest homestead, a mud cabin with a chimney composed of flat white stones and off to the side a rickety stick shelter with no pretensions of being a shed. In the pen alongside stood the same sissy-horse that had thrown her. She looked at it for a long time. It had that certain aloofness horses have. But beside it was a pony she noticed, black with a white star on its forehead.

Hey, she said to it.

Behind her there was a pump and a watering trough. An arbor with cl.u.s.ters of grapes which she stuffed in her mouth. All around was flat land here, with the woods miles behind her and sugarcane everywhere. The horizon east to west had grown murky with heat and overhead was the whitest sky she had ever seen. It was like the sun had exploded. The light running out.

She crossed the yard and half a dozen children surrounded her. They touched her clothes gently, as if she were an angel. They purred like kittens. They smelled like soap and blueberries. She felt her womb clench as if somebody had pulled shut the drawstrings of an empty sack. The children cooed at her. They seemed to float. Maybe this was how you got knocked up. She shut her eyes. They were rubbing her arms and legs and bottom though not lecherously, except perhaps for the oldest boy, who had a knife handle sticking out of his boot.

She woke in a dark room and sat up in bed wearing a clean nights.h.i.+rt. She felt fresher than she could remember. Her hair wet. Her underarms burned, so she reached and felt them. Shaved. She felt her calves. Shaved too. She put her hand between her legs.

Least ye left me my thatch, she said.

Why was you dressed like a man?

The voice had come from the rocking chair beside the window. Now she could discern the woman's outline-weak chin, big overbite-as it rocked. She understood that she'd been hearing the creak of the chair for hours. The sound had been her sleep.

Go to bed, William, the woman hissed out the window. Yer disobeying the Bible.

Who you? Evavangeline asked.

An orphan keeper. Do you want to stay here? the woman asked. Our man's lost. Gone. For days now. His horse come home so we think he's dead.

I was escaping, Evavangeline said.

From who? Who from?

A evil man.

The woman stopped rocking. Can you tell me the particulars of him?

Evavangeline's instinct urged her to lie, so she described not the veteran but, instead, the strange man she'd heard about from the dice-playing n.i.g.g.e.rs on the river. They say he killed his momma when he was born. Say he bombed bridges in the War. They say he never sleeps and knows the devil by first name. Say he likes to drank the pee of young girls. They say he has white blood, n.i.g.g.e.r blood, Indian blood, all three. That he can see in the dark.

The woman left her rocking chair and came to sit beside the girl on the bed. You mean ole Smonk, she said. Minute there I thought you was gone describe me my own husbandman. He wasn't a good man, not no more. Not since the weather got so contentious. Like the saying goes, if you seek him, check h.e.l.l first. But you can stay, we got room. She set her hands on the girl's thighs, her thumbs nearing Evavangeline's privates. She leaned in and feathered her lips against the hot skin of her throat.

You exhausted and wounded, the lady whispered. I done tended ye hurt places. I been feeding ye broth and tea. Come dawn you'll feel like a brand new girl. Things always look better in the light of day. You can stay with us if ye want to. But sleep now, the woman said, thumbing Evavangeline's magic pea better than any man, her voice like a fiddle bow pulled real slow over the gut. Sleep.

But she couldn't sleep, even after the d.y.k.e had left her in spasms and shut the door. She lay awake tingling, wondering if she was an orphan or not. The earliest thing she could remember in the days before Ned was the gypsy witch named Alice Hanover. Days she rarely let herself think of now. How she would watch the old witchwoman perform her black magic, pantomiming her spells into existence, into beings you could only see in the blackest pitch of night. Rising up out of the ground they would stamp whatever they had for feet and look about with their horrible innocence, their skin blacker than the night around them. When they moved it looked as if darkness were swallowing itself. The old woman would summon these things indiscriminately and for the highest bidder and let them loose on whom her employer told with money her only thought. Sometimes these summoned would execute their sentence upon the intended and then, instead of dishappening back underground, be taken by a wind and remain lost in the world. It happened more the older Alice Hanover got. They were glints now, the girl knew, half here, half someplace else, the shadow of a tree moving when the tree was not, the thing that b.u.mps you in the dark.

Once, she'd gone with Alice Hanover to hex a whole family. Perhaps the witchwoman, who bragged she was a hundred-sixty years old, had sensed her own end drawing near and, despite her hatred of every other person, thought it necessary to bestow her knowledge on a student. Otherwise her spells would be gone forever, a language when its last speaker dies.

In the gal's memory she and Alice Hanover were shreds of shadow sliding under that night's halfmoon, figments creeping through the bright-blooming cotton to the edge of the homestead, the pair peering through a log fence so recently cut it still smelled green. The witch clucked her tongue and the dog fell dead on the porch. Evavangeline watched the old woman close her eyes and point her gnarled left trigger finger and begin to spin her right hand, palm cupped and suddenly full of water. In a clear quiet voice Alice Hanover spoke words Evavangeline had never heard uttered before nor since. They were--, ---, -and --.

For a moment the night hushed, as if it had noticed them.

Then blades of gra.s.s began to whisper, cotton bolls nodding on their stems.

Her skirt-tails ajostle, Evavangeline heard leaves rattle in the branches. She heard a horse nicker. A shutter bang open. The chickens started to cluck. Wind picked up and her hair stood on end and the breeze cooled her scalp. A light flickered on inside the shack and somebody screamed and the baby began to squall. Lightning cracked the starless dome of s.p.a.ce and showed the powderhorn of black air weaving over the cotton destroying all in its wake, barbed wire whipping and rocking chairs and corn cribs and cows and large snakes raining down, the funnel's great endhole snorting the face of the land, the gra.s.s on the cabin's roof standing and then the roof still in its shape rose and folded like a letter. And one by one among floating chairs and washpots the flailing enemies of Alice Hanover's customers rose screaming, even the naked baby and its doll made of corn shucks. Shorn from the baby's hands, the doll turned a child's eternity in the air then landed at Evavangeline's feet like a gift.

For a moment she considered it. She picked it up.

--, said Alice Hanover and unscrolled her smoking fingers.

Thus Evavangeline handed over the only toy she had ever touched.

Alice Hanover held it aloft in her flat palm like someone freeing a dove and let the wind claim it and the girl watched the scrub of doll lift from the gypsy's fingers into the air and striptease apart a shuck at a time until the lightning stopped and the wind died and the doll lay scattered in places unseen.

Later she lay awake on the ground by the wheel of Alice Hanover's wagon where she slept each night. She knew the gypsy was above, in the covered buckboard asleep on her ticking with her eyes open, and that she must move quick else the old crone would kill her with a grunt before Evavangeline could draw the blade over that warty throat and unriver its blood. She would never be able to do it, to get in the wagon, sink the knife. The gypsy was too wily. Evavangeline lay like a bruise on the cold skin of the earth, her ear to its dirt, her teeth clenched so tightly she could hear the ocean a hundred miles south, while above her the wagon planks creaked as Alice Hanover endured her slumber.

Evavangeline raised her fingers to the underside of the wagon's floor but didn't touch it. She felt the old woman's heat through the boards. She moved her fingers to the left, to the right. She pointed to a spot and jibbed her knife between the boards and through the old woman's ticking and her skin. Her onion of a heart. There was a squawk and lightning struck nearby. The knife kicked itself from between the boards and fell to the gra.s.s steaming. The wagon pitched and yawed and the night spoke words Evavangeline tried her best not to hear. It rained then snowed. The ground shook. Trees broke in half and fell all around. Worms squirted out of the dirt.

Then everything grew quiet and still. Blood ran between the boards and covered the girl, afraid as she was to come out.

She waited. And waited.

She stayed there hardening in witchblood for three days until hunger like a father's foot drove her back into the world. And weeks, months, years, later, now and again, with a huffing man driving her across the mattress or the ground, she would whisper two or three of the words of Alice Hanover. --she would say. -- --. The man would pause, breath held as the air changed, and say, What in the h.e.l.l.

Then, because she never recited all the words in their right order, the air would move again and the man would resume his thrusting and she would pinch b.l.o.o.d.y crescents in the skin of her arm to a.s.sure herself that this was real and she was alive and- You killed him, didn't you? the d.y.k.e said.

She stood backlit in the door holding a pair of boots in one hand and a pistol in the other.

Killed who? Evavangeline asked. She sat up.

My husband, said the d.y.k.e. These is his boots.

Evavangeline folded her arms. Well h.e.l.l Mary, she said. I might jest did. Killed him I meant. What did he look like?

The boots. .h.i.t the floor. He was a veteran!

Evavangeline leaned forward, her eyes gleaming in the light from the door. Was he also a crow hunter and a raper?

Sometimes! the woman shrieked. When he drank the devil's whiskey he loved to kill things! And rape them! But if he's dead and you ain't gone stay, then I got to feed all these younguns myself!

What about all that cane?

It's dried out. It's dead. We lost ever thing. Tate 'll foreclose on us less we git some money, fast.

Whose children did I see earlier?

My husband rounded em up to sell. He's supposed to deliver em tomorrow. But that ain't none of ye business.

The d.y.k.e raised her pistol but Evavangeline was already behind her. She kneed her in the kidney and the d.y.k.e turned, tearing Evavangeline's s.h.i.+rt and clawing at her eyes but the girl bit a swatch out of the d.y.k.e's neck and shoved her against a wall and clubbed her with a chamber pot when she bounced back and watched her sink in the corner. She bound and gagged the d.y.k.e then put her own clothes and the crow hunter's boots back on and crept through the house holding the pistol in one hand and an oil lamp in the other. She found the children sleeping on the floor in a room and woke them one by one and waited for them to put on their shoes, the ones who had them, and led them outside past the d.y.k.e and through the yard into the root cellar, slapping the oldest boy's hand from her a.s.s.

Yall stay here, she said to them, till jest fore morning. If ye have to take a p.i.s.s, use that stew pot yonder. Come first light yall find ye way home.

You a wh.o.r.e? the oldest boy asked. He had the blondest hair.

None ye business, she said. What's ye name?

William R. McKissick Junior. My daddy was the bailiff over in Old Texas fore Mister E. O. Smonk killed him. I lit out cause I heard it was a woman who took in orphans and would let you screw the girls. The boy cast an evil eye on the children. But so far won't none of these here ones screw and they ain't fed us yet. I got me half a mind to git on.

Evavangeline knelt. She took his hard shoulders in her hands and looked in his eyes. She could see he had an erection by the way his pants stood.

If I goose ye one time, she said to him, will ye do something for me?

Ma'am?

If I take care of that there, she said, thumping his britches, will ye then repay me with a promise?

Oh, yessum! he cried.

She led him to a dim recess in the cellar. It smelled like potatoes. The other children followed and watched. She undid his pants and squirted him into the darkness. He made a croaking noise.

Now, ye promise, she said.

He seemed drunk, a sleepy smile, string of drool. Yessum.

From here on, you'll watch after these here other younguns. Help em get home and don't let nothing happen to any of em. And don't try to screw em neither.

But- Just do like I told you. Get em out of here fore first light.

Yessum, the boy said. Can ye do me that way one more time?

My lord. She reached forward and it was waiting for her, still bouncing from its rapid rise.

7.

THE TENANTS.

ON SMONK'S TRAIL, MCKISSICK AND GATES HAPPENED UPON A small flat-topped log barn dobbed with straw mortar and cotton, a thin man centered in its door whacking a wagon axle with a hammer. He stopped and rose from his haunches still holding the hammer and stood in the shade watching them walk up on the horse.

This here's Smonk's tenant farm, McKissick said. Which would make that feller Smonk's tenant.

How ye know? asked the blacksmith from behind him on the horse.

Never mind. It's a few things I know.

You ain't gone shoot him, are ye?

Not if I don't have to. Pipe down.

The bailiff halted the horse a dozen paces out from the barn.

The tenant farmer took off his hat and his hair kept the shape of its crown. Evening, he said.

Never mind that, McKissick said. We inquiring about Smonk. Eugene Smonk they call him.

I know of him, sure do, the tenant farmer said. He nodded at the b.l.o.o.d.y s.h.i.+rt. You want that looked at? Sister yonder's got the healing gift.

They followed his eyes uphill to a dim shack with a skeletal woman in a slip smudged against the wood like a wraith, her eyes black as snakeholes. A clothesline hung with undergarments st.i.tched down the hillside and several gray guinea hens ran screaming over the grit.

You only pay what ye think ye ought to, the farmer said. Plus the cost of her apothecary bottle, if ye know what I mean. He winked. She'll do ye, too. For half a dollar. I'm the one ye pay.

Naw, McKissick said. I met a fellow once in a field told me I could go in the house and lay with his two daughters, right in yonder, he said. I paid him and when I went in it was two fellers. I said where's the girls and they said what girls. I told em I'd paid the feller outside and they said what feller. We looked out the window and that feller was nowheres to be seen. I killed them two when they started laughing at me and then I tracked down that other feller and killed him in Bessemer.

Well, that's about the most I ever heard ye say, said Gates.

McKissick had lowered his eyes. He raised them now. I'm carrying this here gut wound back to the man give it to me. To the man took ever thing of mine. My farm. Land. Took my boy. A hunk of my flesh here. Wife. My very soul.

That sounds like Mister Smonk, all right, said the tenant. He lives two miles yonder ways. The big spread. You'll know it. He gestured around. He owns all this here land.

Does he own you too? asked the bailiff.

The farmer shrugged.

Say yer woman 'll do a bit of whoring? Gates asked.