Child of God (2 page)

F
RED
K
IRBY WAS SQUATTING
in his front yard next to the watertap where he used to sit all the time when Ballard came by. Ballard stood in the road and looked up at him. He said: Hey Fred. Kirby lifted his hand and nodded. Come up, Lester, he said.

Ballard came to the edge of the cutbank and looked up to where Kirby was sitting. He said: You got any whiskey?

Might have some.

Why don’t you let me have a jar.

Kirby stood up. Ballard said: I can pay ye next week on it. Kirby squatted back down again.

I can pay ye tomorrow, Ballard said.

Kirby turned his head to one side and gripped his nose between his thumb and forefinger and sneezed a gout of yellow snot into the grass and wiped his fingers on the knee of his jeans. He looked out over the fields. I cain’t do it, Lester, he said.

Ballard half turned to see what he was looking at out there but there was nothing but the same mountains. He shifted his feet and reached into his pocket. You want to trade it out? he said.

Might do. What ye got?

Got this here pocketknife.

Let’s see it.

Ballard opened the knife and pitched it up the bank at Kirby. It stuck up in the ground near his shoe. Kirby looked at it a minute and then reached down and got it and wiped the blade on his knee and looked at the name on it. He closed it and opened it again and he pared a thin peeling from the sole of his shoe. All right, he said.

He stood up and put the knife in his pocket and crossed the road toward the creek.

Ballard watched him scout along the edge of the field, kicking at the bushes and honeysuckle. Once or twice he looked back. Ballard was watching off toward the blue hills.

After a while Kirby came back but he didn’t have any whiskey. He handed Ballard his knife back. I cain’t find it, he said.

Cain’t find it?

No.

Well shit fire.

I’ll hunt some more later on. I think I was drunk when I hid it.

Where’d ye hide it at?

I don’t know. I thought I could go straight to it but I must not of put it where I thought it was.

Well goddamn.

If I cain’t find it I’ll get some more.

Ballard put the knife in his pocket and turned and went back up the road.

A
LL THAT REMAINED OF THE
outhouse were a few soft shards of planking grown with a virid moss and lying collapsed in a shallow hole where weeds sprouted in outsized mutations. Ballard passed by and went behind the barn where he trod a clearing in the clumps of jimson and nightshade and squatted and shat. A bird sang among the hot and dusty bracken. Bird flew. He wiped himself with a stick and rose and pulled his trousers up from the ground. Already green flies clambered over his dark and lumpy stool. He buttoned his trousers and went back to the house.

This house had two rooms. Each room two windows. Looking out the back there was a solid wall of
weeds high as the house eaves. In the front was a porch and more weeds. From the road a quarter mile off travelers could see the gray shake roof and the chimney, nothing more. Ballard trampled a path through the weeds to the back door. A hornetnest hung from the corner of the porch and he knocked it down. The hornets came out one by one and flew away. Ballard went inside and with a piece of cardboard swept the floor. He swept up the old newspapers and he swept out the dried dung of foxes and possums and he swept out bits of brickcolored mud fallen from the board ceiling with their black husks of pupae. He closed the window. The one pane left tilted soundlessly from the dry sash and fell into his hands. He set it on the sill.

In the hearth lay a pile of bricks and mortarclay. Half an iron firedog. He threw the bricks out and swept up the clay and on his hands and shinbones craned his neck to see up the chimney. In the patch of rheumy light a spider hung. A rank odor of earth and old woodsmoke. He wadded newspapers and set them in the hearth and lit them. They burned slowly. Small flames sputtered and ate their way along the rims and edges. The papers blackened and curled and shivered and the spider descended by a thread and came to rest clutching itself on the ashy floor of the hearth.

Late in the afternoon a small thin mattress of stained ticking forded the brake toward the cabin. It was hinged over the head and shoulders of Lester Ballard whose muffled curses at the bullbriers and blackberries reached no ear.

When he got to the cabin he pitched the mattress off onto the floor. A frame of dust plumed from under and rolled out along the cupped floorboards and subsided. Ballard raised the front of his shirt and wiped the sweat from his face and from his head. He looked half crazy.

By dark he had all he owned about him in the barren room and he had lit a lamp and set it in the middle of the floor and he was sitting crosslegged before it. He was holding a coathanger skewered with sliced potatoes over the lampchimney. When they were nearly black he slid them off the wire with his knife onto a plate and speared one up and blew on it and bit into it. He sat with his mouth open sucking air in and out, the piece of potato cradled on his lower teeth. He cursed the potato for being hot while he chewed it. It was raw in the middle, tasted of coaloil.

When he had eaten the potato he rolled himself a cigarette and lit it over the quaking cone of gas at the rim of the lampchimney and sat there sucking in the smoke and letting it curl from his lip, his nostrils, idly tapping the ash with his little finger into his trouser-cuff. He spread the newspapers he had gathered and muttered over them, his lips forming the words. Old news of folks long dead, events forgotten, ads for patent medicine and livestock for sale. He smoked the cigarette down until it was just a burnt nubbin in his fingers, until it was ash. He turned down the lamp until just the faintest orange glow tinged the lower bowl of the chimney and he shucked out of his brogans
and his trousers and shirt and lay back on the mattress naked save for his socks. Hunters had stripped most of the boards from the inside walls for firewood and from the bare lintel above the window hung part of the belly and tail of a blacksnake. Ballard sat up and turned up the lamp again. He rose and reached and prodded the pale blue underside of the snake with his finger. It shot forward and dropped to the floor with a thud and rifled over the boards like ink running in a gutter and was out the door and gone. Ballard sat back down on the mattress and turned the lamp down again and lay back. He could hear mosquitoes droning toward him in the hot silence. He lay there listening. After a while he turned over on his stomach. And after a while he got up and got the rifle from where it stood by the fireplace and laid it on the floor alongside the mattress and stretched out again. He was very thirsty. In the night he dreamt streams of ice black mountain water, lying there on his back with his mouth open like a dead man.

I
REMEMBER ONE THING HE
done one time. I was raised with him over in the tenth. I was ahead of him in school. He lost a softball down off the road that rolled down into this field about … it was way off down in a bunch of briers and stuff and he told this boy, this Finney boy, told him to go and get it. Finney boy was some bit younger’n him. Told him, said: Go get that softball. Finney boy wouldn’t do it. Lester walked up to him and said: You better go get that ball. Finney boy said he wasn’t about to do it and Lester told him one more time, said: You don’t get off down in there and get me that ball I’m goin to bust you in the mouth. That Finney boy was scared but he faced up to him, told him he hadn’t
thowed it off down in there. Well, we was standin there, the way you will. Ballard could of let it go. He seen the boy wasn’t goin to do what he ast him. He just stood there a minute and then he punched him in the face. Blood flew out of the Finney boy’s nose and he set down in the road. Just for a minute and then he got up. Somebody give him a kerchief and he put it to his nose. It was all swoll up and bleedin. The Finney boy just looked at Lester Ballard and went on up the road. I felt, I felt… I don’t know what it was. We just felt real bad. I never liked Lester Ballard from that day. I never liked him much before that. He never done nothin to me.

B
ALLARD LAY IN THE NIGHT-
damp with his heart hammering against the earth. He was watching a parked car through the sparse pale of leaning weeds that rimmed the Frog Mountain turnaround. Inside the car a cigarette flared and lapsed and a latenight D J commented with mindless chatter on the seduction in the rear seat. A beercan clattered in the gravel. A mockingbird that had been singing stopped.

He came from the roadside ducked in a loping run, a shadow that washed up against the cold dusty hind-fender of the automobile. His breath was shallow, his eyes wide, his ears pricked to sort the voices from the ones on the radio. A girl said Bobby. Then she said it again.

Ballard had his ear to the quarterpanel. The car began to rock gently. He raised himself up and chanced one eye at the windowcorner. A pair of white legs sprawled embracing a shade, a dark incubus that humped in a dream of slaverous lust.

It’s a nigger, whispered Ballard.

O Bobby, O god, said the girl.

Ballard, unbuttomed, spent himself on the fender.

O shit, said the girl.

On buckling knees the watcher watched. The mockingbird began.

A nigger, said Ballard.

But it was not a black face that loomed in the window, that looked so enormous there behind the glass. For a moment they were face to face and then Ballard dropped to the ground, his heart pounding. The radio music ended in a muted click and did not start again. The door opened on the far side of the car.

Ballard, a misplaced and loveless simian shape scuttling across the turnaround as he had come, over the clay and thin gravel and the flattened beercans and papers and rotting condoms.

You better run, you son of a bitch.

The voice washed against the mountain and came back lost and threatless. Then there was nothing but silence and the rich bloom of honeysuckle on the black midsummer night air. The car started. The lights came on and swung around the circle and went down the road.