Child of God (17 page)

No one spoke to him. A nurse came with a tin tray and helped him to sit erect, Ballard still trying to use the missing arm to fetch his balance. A cup of soup, a cup of custard, a quarterpint of sweetmilk in a waxed cardboard box. Ballard prodded at the food with his spoon and lay back.

He lay in a waking dream. The cracks in the yellowed plaster of the ceiling and upper walls seemed to work on his brain. He could close his eyes and see them anyway. Thin fissures traversing the otherwise blank of his corroded mind. He looked at the swaddled nub that poked from the short sleeve of the county hospital gown. It looked like an enormous bandaged thumb. He wondered what they’d done with his arm and decided to ask.

When the nurse came with his supper he said: What’d they do with my arm?

She swung the tabletop and set the tray on it. You got it shot off, she said.

I know that. I just wanted to know what all they done with it.

I don’t know.

It don’t make a damn to you, does it?

No.

I’ll find out. I can. Who’s that feller at the door all the time?

He’s a county deputy.

County deputy.

Yes, she said. What about the man you shot?

What about him?

Don’t you even want to know if he’s dead or alive?

Well.

He was unrolling his silver from the linen napkin.

Well what? she said.

Well is he dead or alive?

He’s alive.

She watched him. He spooned up some applesauce and looked at it and put it down again. He opened the carton of milk and drank from it.

You really don’t care one way or the other do you? she said.

Yes I do, said Ballard. I wish the son of a bitch was dead.

H
E ATE, HE STARED AT THE
walls. He used the bedpan or chamberpot. Sometimes he could hear a radio in another room. One evening what appeared to be some hunters came to see him.

They talked for a while without the door. Then the door opened and the room filled up with men. They gathered about Ballard’s bedside. He’d been asleep. He struggled up in the bed and looked at them. Some he knew, some not. His heart shrank.

Lester, said a heavyset man, where’s them bodies at.

I don’t know nothing about no bodies.

Yes you do. How many people did you kill?

I ain’t killed nary’n.

The hell you ain’t. You killed that Lane girl and
burned her and that baby down in the house and you killed them people in them parked cars on the Frog Mountain.

I never done it.

They were quiet, regarding him. Then the man said: Get up, Lester.

Ballard pulled at the bedcovers. I ain’t allowed up, he said.

A man reached and pulled back the covers. Ballard’s spindly legs lay pale and yellow looking on the sheet.

Get up.

Ballard tugged at the hem of his nightgown to hide himself. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat there a minute. Then he stood up. He sat back down again and gripped the little table. Where we goin? he said.

Somebody in the back of the crowd said something but Ballard didn’t catch it.

Is that all of a thing you got to wear?

I don’t know.

They opened a closet and looked in but there were only some mops and a bucket. They stood there looking at Ballard. He didn’t look like much.

We better get out of here if we’re goin. Earl’s likely gone to fetch the sheriff.

Let’s go, Ballard.

They raised him up and pushed him toward the door and closed ranks behind him. He looked back once at the bed. Then they were going down the wide hospital corridor. Past open doors where people in bed
watched him leaving, the linoleum cold under his feet and his legs wobbling a bit as he went.

It was a cool clear night. Ballard’s eyes went upward to the cold wash of stars that lay beyond the polelamps in the hospital parking lot. They crossed the black asphalt, damp from recent rain, and the men opened the door of a pickup truck and motioned Ballard in. He crawled up in the cab and sat with his bare legs together in front of him. Men got in on either side and the motor started and the lights came up and the lights from other cars and trucks down the parking lot. Ballard had to shift his knees like a child for the man to get to the gear lever. They pulled out of the parking lot and down the street.

Where we goin? said Ballard.

We’ll all know when we get there, said the driver.

They drove out the highway toward the mountains, a caravan of trucks and cars. They stopped at a house. A man left the car behind Ballard and went to the door. A woman let him in. Inside under the glare of a naked bulb he could see the woman and some children. After a while the man came out again and came down to the truck and handed in a bundle through the window. Tell him put these here on, he said.

The driver handed the bundle to Ballard. Put them on, he said. It was a pair of overalls and an army shirt.

He sat in the truck with the clothes in his lap and they started on up the road again. They turned off onto a dirt road and wound through low hills with black pines sprocketing across the headlights in the
curves and then they took another road, grass growing in it, coming at last out onto a high meadow where the remains of a sawmill stood in the starlight. A shed with the windows stoned lightless. Stacks of gray lumber, a sawdust pile where foxes lived.

The driver of the truck opened the door and stepped out. Other vehicles pulled alongside and men began to crowd about. A subdued sound of voices and cardoors closing. Ballard alone bareshank in his nightshift on the seat of the truck.

Let Otis watch him.

Why don’t we just take him up here.

Let him set there.

How come he ain’t put them clothes on.

The truck door opened. Ain’t you cold, said a man.

Ballard looked at him dumbly. His arm hurt.

Tell him put them clothes on. He wants you to put them there clothes on, the man said.

Ballard began to sort through the bundle for arm or leg holes.

Otis you watch him now.

Reckon we ort to tie his hands.

You could tie his hands to one of his legs like a mule.

Jerry you can put that jar right back where you got it from. This here is serious business.

Ballard had on the shirt and was trying to do the buttons. He’d never tried to button a shirt with one hand and he was not good at it. He got the overalls up and the straps fastened. They were soft and smelled of soap and there was room inside for a whole Ballard
more. He tucked the loose sleeve of the shirt down inside the overalls and looked around. A man squatted in the bed of the truck with a shotgun watched him through the rear glass. Up on the hill by the sawmill a fire licked in the wind and the men were gathered around it. Ballard pushed the button on the glovebox door in front of him and it fell open. He felt among papers, found nothing. He shut the door again. After a while he cranked down the window.

You ain’t got a cigarette back there have ye? he said.

The man leaned forward and held a pack of cigarettes up to the open window. Ballard took one and put it in his mouth. You got a match? he said.

The man handed him a match. How you fixed for spit? he said.

I never ast to come out here, said Ballard.

He popped the match on the dashboard and lit the cigarette and sat smoking in the dark, watching the fire on the hill. After a while a man came down and opened the door and told Ballard to get out. He climbed laboriously down and stood there in his overalls.

Bring him on up, Otis.

Ballard at gunpoint shuffling up the hill. He must pause to roll the cuffs of the overalls. At the fire he stood and looked down at his bare feet.

Ballard.

Ballard didn’t answer.

Ballard, we’re goin to let you make it light on yourself.

Ballard waited.

You show us where you put them people so they can be give a decent burial and we’ll put you back in that hospital and let you take your chances with the law.

You got it all, said Ballard.

Where’s them bodies at, Ballard.

I don’t know nothin about no bodies.

Is that your last say?

Ballard said that it was.

You got that cable, Fred?

Sure do.

A man stepped from the circle and came forward with a coiled and greasy braided steel cable.

You goin to have to tie that one arm down. Anybody got a rope in their truck?

I got one.

Ask him about that, Ernest.

Yeah Ernest.

The man turned to Ballard. What did you want with them dead ladies? he said. Was you fuckin em?

Ballard’s face gave a funny little jerk in the firelight but he said nothing. He looked about at his tormentors. The man with the cable had uncoiled a part of it along the ground. There was a ring spliced into the end of it and the cable was pulled through in a loop like an enormous rabbit snare.

You know he was, the man said. Just take him on.

Someone was tying a rope about Ballard’s arm. The steel cable slipped over his neck and rested on his shoulders. It was cold, smelled of oil.

Then he was walking up the hill toward the sawmill.
They helped him along, down the skids, stepping carefully, the flames from the bonfire stringing them in a ragged shadowshow across the upper hillside. Ballard slipped once and was caught up and helped on. They came to rest standing on an eight by eight above the sawdust pit. One of the men was boosted up to the overhead beams and handed up the slack end of the cable.

They ain’t got him doped up have they, Ernest? I’d hate for him not to know what was happenin to him.

He looks alert enough to me.

Ballard craned his head toward the man who’d spoke. I’ll tell ye, he said.

Tell us what?

Where they’re at. Them bodies. You said if I’d tell you’d turn me loose.

Well you better get to telling.

They’re in caves.

In caves.

I put em in caves.

Can you find em?

Yeah. I know where they’re at.

F
OR THREE DAYS BALLARD
explored the cave he’d entered in an attempt to find another exit. He thought it was a week and was amazed at how the batteries in the flashlight kept. He fell into the custom of napping and waking and going on again. He could find nothing but stone to sleep upon and his naps were brief.

Toward the end he would tap the flashlight against his leg to warm the dull orange glow of it. He took the batteries out and put them in again the hind one fore. Once he heard voices somewhere behind him and once he thought he saw a light. He made his way toward it in darkness lest it be the lights of his enemies but he found nothing. He knelt and drank from a
dripping pool. He rested, drank again. He watched in the bore of his flashbeam tiny translucent fish whose bones in shadow through their frail mica sheathing traversed the shallow stonefloored pool. When he rose the water swung in his wasted paunch.

He scrabbled like a rat up a long slick mudslide and entered a long room filled with bones. Ballard circled this ancient ossuary kicking at the ruins. The brown and pitted armatures of bison, elk. A jaguar’s skull whose one remaining eyetooth he pried out and secured in the bib pocket of his overalls. That same day he came to a sheer drop and when he tried his failing beam it fell down a damp wall to terminate in nothingness and night. He found a stone and dropped it over the edge. It fell silently. Fell. In silence. Ballard had already turned to reach for another to drop when he heard far below the tiny spungg of the stone in water like a pebble down a well.

In the end he came to a small room with a thin shaft of actual daylight leaning in from the ceiling. It occurred to him only now that he might have passed other apertures to the upper world in the nighttime and not known it. He put his hand up into the crevice. He pried. He scratched at the dirt.

When he woke it was dark. He felt around and came up with the flashlight and pushed the button. A pale red wire lit within the bulb and slowly died. Ballard lay listening in the dark but the only sound he heard was his heart.

In the morning when the light in the fissure dimly
marked him out this drowsing captive looked so inculpate in the fastness of his hollow stone you might have said he was half right who thought himself so grievous a case against the gods.