— You know Earl has gone and bought that old colored dummy back from whoever Mr. Urquhart sold it to and put it back out in the shed. Here we are scraping by, Earl putting everything he can back into the business and not even giving me enough to buy groceries half the time, and he up and pays somebody two hundred dollars for an old nigra dummy. It’s crazy!
That afternoon she went out to the shed but it was locked. She could barely see, tears blurring her eyes. She put her lips to the little crack beside the hasp lock and whispered, — Frank? Nothing. But such a chilled breeze came out there against her lips it scared her. She went on back to the house and there was nothing there, no sound in there and no light. Bedding thrown off onto the floor, stuffing in the mattress hanging out, her little flour sack full of dollar bills gone. And on the kitchen table a gold tooth with a little blood at the root, and nothing else.
Blood
OUT AT THE lake in February to split some firewood, Earl remembered a day when he was maybe fourteen or fifteen, and like this raising an ax (in their backyard, then) for stovewood, some kind of old flivver goes by, and froze him like a statue. By God I’ll have me one of those one day, and get the hell out of Dodge, he said to himself. Said to his father one day, If I had me a car, I’d be out on my own and you wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore. Junius says, Let me tell you something, an automobile is like a woman and you’ll be ready for one when you’re ready for the other. I’m ready, Earl’d said. You’re ready, Junius said. You’re ready, you say. Let me tell you what you’re ready for then. You’re ready to be beholden to maintenance for the rest of your life. Maintenance, son. Once you got a woman or an automobile, you don’t work for yourself anymore. You work for maintenance.
Now, in his fifty-fifth year, raising the ax above his head and thinking in that moment nothing but strike, split, you motherfucker — angry then at he didn’t know what, just everything — just at that moment it felt like his chest collapsed, everything in him, his entire weight and substance, compressed down within its walls, and an instant later ran up his arms and out into nothing. Then he was on the ground. Knowing somehow he lay there beside the pile of split chunks he’d cut, his face in the iron-rich clay of a gouge a miss had made in the topsoil. Thinking why would this happen to me as I’m chopping a fucking piece of wood for the fire. It had always been the time he smote his enemies, with an ax to a piece of hickory or oak. It helped him to keep things in perspective, helped him remember not to choke every son of a bitch that just happened to piss him off.
You didn’t fuck with an Urquhart is what Papa had always said. And that included whether you were family or not. The time he rode to town with him in the wagon and they came upon Aunt Phoebe and Uncle Thad coming the other way and stopped beside each other in the wide road. Junius and Uncle Thad were talking.
Aunt Phoebe said, — Not now, not with Earl in the wagon.
— I don’t care, he can’t talk to me like that, Uncle Thad said to her, but looking at Papa.
— I’ll talk to you any way I like and when I like, Papa said. -And I’m telling you if you do it again I’ll kill you.
— It’s not your cross to bear, Junius, Aunt Phoebe said. -Come on, Thad, let’s go. Hup, she said, and tried to take the reins from Uncle Thad and Uncle Thad hit her in the face with the ends of the reins, not hard but it scared Earl.
— Papa, he said.
Papa said nothing but locked the brake on their wagon, handed the reins to Earl, and started to get down when Aunt Phoebe screamed out her husband’s name. Papa leapt sideways away from Uncle Thad off the wagon and Uncle Thad had a knife. He was down off their wagon now too and was holding the knife out in front of him toward Papa.
— Papa, he whispered.
— Tell him to put up the knife, Phoebe, Papa said. He said it quiet. -Tell him to put up the knife or I’ll kill him now.
Aunt Phoebe had kept shouting Uncle Thad’s name, and now she was screaming at him, Put up the knife, Put up the knife. Uncle Thad walked toward Papa and Papa pulled out the little pistol Earl knew he always carried in his jacket pocket and fired into Uncle Thad’s chest. Both teams bucked and Earl held tight to theirs. Uncle Thad stumbled backwards against the wheel of their wagon and vomited red onto his shirt. Aunt Phoebe fell across the seat reaching down for him and when the reins fell from her hand their team bucked forward. Papa stepped aside out of their way and dropped his pistol in the road to catch Aunt Phoebe as she fell from the wagon seat. She fought from his grasp and ran to Uncle Thad lying in the road and fell down on him screaming his name. And then she was screaming at Papa, You killed him, You killed him.
Then Papa went away for a while to the penitentiary. Sundays, Mama took him, Rufus, Levi and little Merry on the train to see him. The engineer got to know them and let Earl ride up front and blow the whistle when they arrived. Papa’s head was shorn and he wore baggy striped pajamas and would talk to them in a room with only a table and some hard-bottom chairs in it. He would hug Earl and the little ones and sometimes he would cry and they would all cry, too, except for Mama, who kept her face still and hard and would hardly speak until sometime the next day maybe after dinner and then she would be more like herself again and would come into Earl’s room when he’d just fallen asleep and start talking to him. I hope you won’t be like your papa, she’d say. I hope you won’t carry on drinking, fighting, running with whores. I pray to God.
He didn’t like the drinking, either. When Papa finally came home after two years he took it right up again. After all we did to get you out, Mama said. After all that, you haven’t changed. He would do it at home, then, sitting in the chair on the porch drinking straight from a bottle in his one pocket, the pistol back in the other like he’d never killed Uncle Thad with it. His friend the sheriff had given it back to him, said You might need it. He sold insurance then and made good money, never drank during the day, but at night. They never saw Aunt Phoebe anymore unless they went to Cuba in Alabama, where she’d gone to live with Uncle Thad’s and Mama’s family over there. Papa wouldn’t go along. When they came home he’d say something ugly. Uncle Thad and Mama were brother and sister. Sometimes I think that’s why he didn’t like Thad, Mama said. Like he thought one of them had to be the family big shot. Your papa don’t like nobody cutting his territory, business or pleasure or blood, none of it.
He, Earl, didn’t like the drinking but what can a boy say about something like that. He fought other boys. Papa praised him for it, in word or gaze. Once when he fought after school in second grade he knocked the boy’s front tooth out and brought it home and put it on his dresser. Mama wouldn’t go into his room, told him to throw it away. Papa told her to leave him alone, she couldn’t understand a boy’s ways. They fought. He never hit her. That’s why he argued with Uncle Thad, he told Earl. He hit Aunt Phoebe. Man hits a woman’s no better than a dog, a sick weak dog, he said. He’s a coward. Never be a coward, he said. Don’t ever let anybody get away with crossing you, they’ll never let you walk upright again.
Didn’t need the lesson, it was in his blood. What it didn’t do, like it did later with Levi and later with Papa, too, was turn to meanness. But just hot blood. Couldn’t help it. Almost lost his job with the New York company that first time for catching a man up by his collar at lunch in the park one day. They’d gotten hot dogs from one of those vendors, taken them to the park, and the man said something about his accent. He had the man down on a pile of rocks and shoving a hot dog into his mouth before a New York cop pulled him off. Man said, No, I don’t want to press charges, I’m going to have his job. I’ll have his ass. He went for him again. No, let him go, the man said, I’ll take care of that son of a bitch.