Child of God (16 page)

Cotton here said it sounded like a good idea to him, the sheriff said. Keep people in line.

The old man studied the rowing deputy. Don’t believe it, son, he said. They was a bunch of lowlife thieves and cowards and murderers. The only thing they ever done was to whip women and rob old people of their savins. Pensioners and widows. And murder people in their beds at night.

What about the Bluebills?

They was organized to set against the White Caps but they was just as cowardly. They’d hear the White Caps was ridin out someplace, like Pigeon Forge, they’d get out there and take up the boards in the bridge and lay in the bushes where they could hear em to fall through. They hunted one another all over the county for two year and never met but one time and that was by accident and in a narrow place where neither bunch couldn’t run. No, those were sorry people all the way around, ever man jack a three hundred and sixty degree son of a bitch, which my daddy said meant they was a son of a bitch any way you looked at em.

What finally happened?

What finally happened was that one man with a little guts stood up to em and that was Tom Davis.

He was a wheelhorse wasn’t he, Mr Wade.

He was that. He was just a deputy under Sheriff Millard Maples when he busted up the White Caps. He made three or four trips to Nashville, paid for it out of his own pocket. Got the legislature to pass a bill attaching the Circuit Court to the Criminal Court over in Knoxville so that they’d have a new judge in Sevierville and then he started after the White Caps. They tried ever way in the world to kill him. Even sicked a big nigger on him one night comin back from Knoxville. In them days you could go by steamboat and this nigger come off another boat in the middle of the river and pulled a gun to shoot him. Tom Davis took the gun away from him and just brought him on in to jail. By that time White Caps was leavin the county in droves. He didn’t care where they went. He brought em back from Kentucky, from North Carolina, from Texas. He’d go off all by hisself and be gone weeks and come in with em on a string like a bunch of horses. He was the damnedest man I ever heard of. Was a educated man. Had been a school teacher. There had not been a Democrat elected in Sevier County since the Civil War, but when Tom Davis run for sheriff they elected him.

You don’t remember the flood of 1885 do ye? said the deputy.

Well, bein as that was the year I was born my memory of it is somewhat dim.

What year was it they hung them two, Mr Wade.

That was in 99. That was Pleas Wynn and Catlett Tipton that had murdered the Whaleys. Got em up
out of bed and blowed their heads off in front of their little daughter. They’d been in jail two years appealin and what not. There was a Bob Wade implicated in it too that I’m proud to report is no kin of mine. I think he went to the penitentiary. Tipton and Wynn, they hung them on the courthouse lawn right yonder. It was right about the first of the year. I remember there was still holly boughs up and christmas candles. Had a big scaffold set up had one door for the both of em to drop through. People had started in to town the evenin before. Slept in their wagons, a lot of em. Rolled out blankets on the courthouse lawn. Wherever. You couldn’t get a meal in town, folks lined up three deep. Women sellin sandwiches in the street. Tom Davis was sheriff by then. He brung em from the jail, had two preachers with em and had their wives on their arms and all. Just like they was goin to church. All of em got up there on the scaffold and they sung and everbody fell in singin with em. Men all holdin their hats. I was thirteen year old but I remember it like it was yesterday. Whole town and half of Sevier County singin I Need Thee Every Hour. Then the preacher said a prayer and the wives kissed their husbands goodbye and stepped down off the scaffold and turned around to watch and the preacher come down and it got real quiet. And then that trap kicked open from under em and down they dropped and hung there a jerkin and a kickin for I don’t know, ten, fifteen minutes. Don’t ever think hangin is quick and merciful. It ain’t. But that was the end of White Cappin in
Sevier County. People don’t like to talk about it to this day.

You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said.

The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don’t. I think people are the same from the day God first made one.

As they ascended the courthouse stairs he was telling them how an old hermit used to live out on House Mountain, a ragged gnome with kneelength hair who dressed in leaves and how people were used to going by his hole in the rocks and throwing in stones on a dare and calling to him to come out.

I
N THE SPRING BALLARD
watched two hawks couple and drop, their wings upswept, soundless out of the sun to break and flare above the trees and ring up again with thin calls. He eyed them on, watching to see if one were hurt. He did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought. He left the old wagonroad where it went through the gap and took a path that he himself kept, going across the face of the mountain to review the country that he’d once inhabited.

He sat with his back to a rock and soaked the warmth from it, the wind still cold that shivered the sparse high mountain bracken, the brittle gray ferns. He watched an empty wagon come up the valley below
him, distant clatter of it, the mule pausing in the ford and the clatter of the immobile wagon rolling on regardless as if the sound authored the substance, until it had all reached his ears. He watched the mule drink and then the man on the wagonseat lifted one arm and they commenced again, now soundless, out of the creek and up the road and then again came the far muted wooden rumbling.

He watched the diminutive progress of all things in the valley, the gray fields coming up black and corded under the plow, the slow green occlusion that the trees were spreading. Squatting there he let his head drop between his knees and he began to cry.

O
N A GOOD MAY MORNING
John Greer turned out to dig a septic tank at the back of his house. While he was digging, Lester Ballard in frightwig and skirts stepped from behind the pump-house and raised the rifle and cocked the hammer silently, holding back the trigger and easing it into the notch as hunters do.

When he fired the shovel was coming past Greer’s shoulder with a load of dirt. Long after the crack of the rifle had died in the lee of the mountain he could hear the gong of turned doom that rang above the man’s head as he froze there with the shovel aloft on which had splattered in a bright medallion the small piece of lead, the man looking at whatever it was standing
there cursing to itself while it worked the lever of the rifle, an apparition created whole out of nothing and set upon him with such dire intent. He flung away the shovel and began to run. Ballard shot him through the body as he passed and stitched a falter in his pace. He shot him once more before he rounded the corner of the house but he could not tell where he hit him. He himself was running now, cursing steadily, working the lever of the rifle again, taking the corner of the house, one foot almost going from under him as he turned and making a vicious slash in the mud, the rifle now in one hand and his thumb hooked over the hammer, mounting the steps in a crazy sort of hopping gait and rushing toward the door.

He looked like something come against the end of a springloaded tether or some slapstick contrivance of the filmcutter’s art, swallowed up in the door and discharged from it again almost simultaneously, ejected in an immense concussion backwards, spinning, one arm flying out in a peculiar limber gesture, a faint pink cloud of blood and shredded clothing and the rifle clattering soundless on the porchboards amid the uproar and Ballard sitting hard on the floor for a moment before he pitched off into the yard.

Even though Greer was shot through the upper chest himself he wobbled from the doorway with the shotgun and down the steps to examine this thing he’d shot. At the foot of the steps he picked up what appeared to be a wig and saw that it was fashioned whole from a dried human scalp.

L
YING AWAKE IN THE DARK
of the cave he thought he heard a whistling as he used to when he was a boy in his bed in the dark and he’d hear his father on the road coming home whistling, a lonely piper, but the only sound was the stream where it ran down through the cavern to empty it may be in unknown seas at the center of the earth.

He dreamt that night that he rode through woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule’s barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed he’d never pass again. They rode
over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins like slender bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day that ever was and he was riding to his death.

B
ALLARD WOKE IN A ROOM
dark to blackness.

He woke in a room day bright.

Woke in a room at dawn or dusk he knew not which where motes of dust passing through an unseen bar of light incandesced briefly and random and drifted like the smallest fireflies. He studied them for a while and then raised his hand. No hand came up. He raised the other and a thin stripe of yellow sunlight fell across his forearm. He looked about the room. Some stainless steel pots on a steel table. A pitcher of water and a glass. Ballard in a thin white gown in a thin white room, false acolyte or antiseptic felon, a practitioner of ghastliness, a part-time ghoul.

He had been awake for some few minutes before he began to feel about for the missing arm.

It was not in the bed at all.

He pulled the sheet from about his neck and studied the great swathings of bandage at his shoulder apparently with no surprise. He looked about. A room scarce wider than the bed. There was a small window behind him but he could not see out without craning his neck and it pained him to do so.