A Garden of Earthly Delights (2 page)

I.
C
ARLETON

Arkansas.
On that day many years ago a rattling Ford truck carrying twenty-nine farmworkers and their children sideswiped a local truck carrying hogs to Little Rock on a rain-slick country highway. It was a shimmering-green day in late May, the Ford truck ended up on its side in a three-foot drainage ditch, and in the hazy rain everyone milled about in the road amid broken glass, a familiar stink of gasoline and a spillage of hog excrement. Yet, among those who hadn't been hurt, the predominant mood was jocular.

Carleton Walpole would long remember: the skidding on the wet blacktop, the noise of brakes like a guinea hen's shrieking, the sick weightless sensation before impact. The terrified screams of children and women, then the angry shouts of the men. By the time the truck overturned into the ditch most of the younger and more agile of the farmworkers had leapt clear, while the older, the slower, most of the women and younger children, struggled with the tarpaulin roof and had to crawl out on their hands and knees like beasts onto the soft red clay shoulder. Another goddamned “accident”: this wasn't the first since they'd left Breathitt County, Kentucky, a few weeks ago, but it wasn't the worst, either. No one appeared to be seriously injured, bleeding or unconscious.

“Pearl? Where the hell are you?”—Carleton had been one of the first to jump from the truck, but he was anxious about his wife; she was pregnant, with their third child, and the baby was due soon. “Pearl! Pearl!” Carleton yelled. His heart was beating like something trapped in his rib cage. He was angry, excited. Always you feel that mean little thrill of relief,
you
aren't hurt.… Though once Carleton had been hurt, the first season he'd gone out on the road, his nose broken in a similar crash and the truck driver who was also the recruiter had set it for Carleton with his fingers—“See, a nose will begin healing right away it's broke. It ain't bone it's cart'lige. If you don't make it straight it will grow in crooked like a boxer's nose.” Carleton had laughed to see his new nose grown in just slightly
crooked at the bridge, but in a way to give his face more character, he thought, like something carved; otherwise, he thought he looked like everybody else, half the Walpole men, long narrow faces with light lank hair and stubbly bearded chins and squinting bleached-blue eyes that looked as if they reflected the sky, forever. When Carleton moved quickly and jerkily his face seemed sharp as a jackknife, but he could move slowly too; he had inherited someone's grace—though in him it was an opaque resistance, like a man moving with effort through water. Not that Carleton Walpole gave much of a damn how he looked. He was thirty, not a kid. He had responsibilities. With his broke nose, people joked that Carleton's looks had improved, he had a swagger now like his hero Jack Dempsey.

This time, Carleton hadn't been hurt at all. A little shaken, and pissed as hell, his dignity ruffled like a rooster that's been kicked. He'd been squatting on his heels with other men at the rear of the truck chewing tobacco and spitting out onto the blacktop road that stretched behind them like a grimy tongue. Where were they bound for?—Texarkana. That was just a word, a sound. A place on a map Carleton might've seen, but could not recall. How many days exactly they'd been on the road, he could not recall. How many weeks ahead, he'd have to ask. (Not Pearl. Used to, Pearl had kept track of such details, now she was letting things slide as bad as the other women.) Well, there was paperwork—somewhere. A contract.

Carleton wasn't going to think about it, not now. It was enough to console himself
I have a contract, I can't be cheated
because there'd been a season when he had not had a contract, and he had been cheated. Enough to think
I have a savings account
because it was true, alone of the sorry bunch of bastards in this truck Carleton was certain he was the only one with a bankbook, issued from the First Savings & Loan Bank of Breathitt, Kentucky. Not that Carleton needed to speak of it, he did not. He was not a man to boast, none of the Walpoles were. But there the fact was, like an underground stream.

Waiting for local law enforcement, waiting for a tow truck to haul the truck out of the ditch, goddamn. Everybody was excited,
talking loudly. Where the hell was Pearl? Carleton was helping women climb up out of the truck. A woman looking young as a girl herself handed him her two-year-old; with a laugh and a grunt he swung the kid over the side like she weighed no more than a cat. Carleton's upper arm muscles were ropey, and strong; his shoulders were narrow, but strong; his back and his neck were starting to give him trouble, from stoop-picking, but he wasn't going to give in to moaning and groaning like an old man. “Pa, hey.” There were Carleton's kids, banged up but O.K. Sharleen, shoving and giggling. Mike, only three, was bawling as usual, but he didn't look as if he'd been hurt—his face wasn't bleeding. Carleton picked him up and swung him around kicking, set him down out of harm's way by some women who could tend to him. There was a smell of spilled whiskey mixed with the smells of gasoline and hog shit and mud and it was like you could get drunk just breathing, feeling your heart beat hard. Carleton touched his face, Christ he was bleeding, some. Was he? He clambered down into the drainage ditch to wash his hands, and wet his face. Maybe he'd banged his lower lip. Bit his lower lip. Most likely that's what he had done, when the brakes began to squeal, and the truck went into its skid, those seconds when you don't know what the hell will happen next.

Up front, the driver of the old Ford truck with Kentucky license plates was shouting at the driver of the hog truck with Arkansas license plates. Carleton laughed to see, both these guys had fat bellies. Their driver had a cut eye. Carleton checked to see was anybody dead up front, lying in the road in the rain, sometimes you saw newspaper photos like that, and he'd seen one of a Negro man lying flat on his back in some place in Mississippi and white men banded around the body grinning and waving at the camera, and it made you sick-feeling but excited too, but the driver's kid brother, a smart-ass bastard who rode up front sucking Colas like a baby at a teat, was walking around unharmed, Carleton was disappointed to see. This kid started saying to Carleton, like Carleton had come to accuse him, “It wasn't our fault! It was that sonuvabitch's fault! He come around the turn in the fuckin middle of the road, ask Franklin, go ask him, don't look at me, it ain't none of our fault.” Carleton pushed the kid aside. He was taller than this kid, and taller than fatass
Franklin, and the less friendly he was with them, the more they were respectful of him, and maybe scared. For they seemed to see something in Carleton Walpole's face. The other driver was cursing at Franklin. He was a squat fattish man with a bald head and eyes like suet and he talked funny like there was mush in his mouth. The cab of his truck was smashed inward but the rear looked unharmed. Too bad, Carleton was thinking, the hogs hadn't got loose. Not a one of them had got loose. Christ he'd have liked to see that, hogs piling out of a broke truck and landing hard on their delicate-looking hooves (that were not delicate in fact but hard and treacherous as a horse's hooves) and squealing in crazed outrage as a hog will do then running off into the countryside. And some of those hogs weighing two hundred pounds which was a nice lot of hog. Carleton smiled to think of how that would've been, hogs running away squealing not taken to the slaughterhouse where the poor beasts were awaited. The hog driver was cursing and whining and half-sobbing holding his belly with his elbows like a pregnant woman clutching herself. This driver was alone with his truck: they could gang up on him, and he knew it, and there was the thrill of anticipation that they might, but it would maybe be a mistake, they were in Arkansas and not Kentucky and the local law enforcement was Arkansas, and you had to know it, you had to acknowledge it. So nothing would come of the possibility like a match that didn't get lit and dropped into hay. Not this time.

Carleton saw with satisfaction that the hog truck's motor was steaming beneath the wrecked hood, the left front fender twisted against the tire so you'd need a corkscrew to untwist it. How bad off their truck was nobody could see since it was lying on its side like a stunned beetle in the ditch.

The last time they'd had trouble like this, it had been raining too: outside Owensboro, Kentucky. Whenever there was an accident or motor trouble everyone was disgusted and angry and threatening to quit but a few hours later they forgot. It was hard to remember anything overnight. And if you moved on, after a few hours on the road you forgot what happened behind you in some other county or state or time. Franklin was promising now he'd make the purchase of a new truck, if they could get to Texarkana he would get
the money
by wire
he was saying, louder and more sincere than he'd made the promise last time, and Carleton shook his head, Jesus! you wanted to believe him even if you knew better.

There was a philosophy that said: The more accidents you had, the less in store for you.

Like the philosophy credited to Jack Dempsey: The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end. Because a man has only a fixed number of punches he can take in his lifetime.

“Pa? Momma wants you.”

It was Sharleen pulling at his arm. Carleton went with her to the back of the truck, worried now. What about Pearl? But there was Pearl squatting at the side of the road, on her haunches so she looked like something ready to spring, even with that watermelon belly. An older woman she was friends with was holding her arm. Women's faces lifting to his like this, Carleton steeled himself for reproach. Goddamn, he wasn't going to be blamed for this was he? This and every other goddamned thing?
Hadn't never wanted to marry. Not anybody. Hadn't never wanted to be anybody's daddy how the fuck did all this happen?

“Honey, you all right? I thought—I saw you—you were lookin all right.” Carleton didn't want to show any anxious concern for his wife in front of the other women gaping at him.

“Hell of a lot you care.”

Pearl spoke sullenly. Her face was a pale pretty moon-face: or would've been pretty if it wasn't that bulldog look Carleton hated. When he wasn't standing in front of her, Carleton could recall how pretty she'd been, and not that long ago. Pregnant with Sharleen, and her skin rosy like a peach. And she'd been loving with him then, even with her belly starting to swell. Not like now.

Pearl was younger than Carleton by three years. Fifteen when they'd gotten married, and Carleton had been eighteen. She'd been shy of him, and shivery in love if just he touched her sometimes, or rubbed his stubbly jaw against her skin. He'd been crazy for her too, he seemed to remember. Whoever he'd been.

Strange how Carleton couldn't see the change in Pearl day following day. A pregnant woman, her belly swelling up. Until by the eighth and ninth month it's a size you'd need a wheelbarrow practically
to transport. How their legs supported them, Carleton was stymied to think. Made him sickish and faint to think. Where Pearl Brody had been a hard-breasted hard-assed little girl he'd liked to wrestle with, the two of them shrieking and panting, there was now this sallow-faced sullen woman with hair she never washed, and her underarms stale and sour, body soft as a rotted watermelon and a mouth that was set to jeering.

“Hell of a lot
you care.
” It was like Pearl to say things twice, the second time with some emphasis meaning he hadn't comprehended it the first time. Trying to make him look stupid before others.

Before Carleton could mumble he was sorry, or better yet tell Pearl to shut her mouth, there she was pushing past him—“Bastard just takes our money, don't give a damn if he kills us.” She was on her way to yell at Franklin, a look in her eyes wet and shining like gasoline. “You men ought to do something, what the hell's wrong with you? All you do is drink, get
drunk.
”