Well if the man had been smart enough to file an order he’d have had his ass, had his job, but went to complain and then didn’t file an order and the manager says, Get your ass out of my office, you lying son of a bitch. Then calls Earl in and says Is it true, did you do that to him? And Earl says I’d do it again. Do it again, the manager says, and it will be your job. Just don’t kick ass of anyone going to give us any real business.
He hit a man one time was trying to hire away his help, after he opened the store in Mercury. Found him in the barbershop getting a shave, towel on his face, couldn’t see Earl come in. Snatched him out of the chair by the tie, dragged him out into the street like a leash dog and banged his head on the pavement a few times. Wanted to kill him, see his blood. You don’t come around trying to steal my help, he told him. Cop had to pull him off again, but it was one of his buddies, Pinkie McGauley, had a laugh and sent the son of a bitch on his way. Yankee, anyway, trying to start up a cheap line in a store on Front Street and good riddance. He’d hit horses, mules, with his bare fists. Hit a nigger woman over the head with a high heel when she sassed him, didn’t want her in the store in the first place then she says he’s not fitting her right. Well he never hit anyone or anything didn’t deserve it, just didn’t have it in him to swallow an insult. Take it as you would, he was a man you didn’t fuck with, like any Urquhart, but he wasn’t mean. Just quick-tempered.
He could hold a grudge but not like Papa. Aunt Phoebe finally grew ill from her grieving, dying an early death, and calls for Papa to come over to see her on her deathbed in Cuba, and Mama badgers him with Bible verses till he finally consents to get dressed and go over there, of a Sunday afternoon. They’re all there when Mama and Papa arrive, and Papa stands across the room. The others close to the bed. She’s ashy pale, trembly weak, motions for him to come closer. He’s got his hat in his hand, head cocked to one side like a fighter waiting for his opponent to get up after he’s knocked him down. He steps closer to the bed, stands there, looking at her like he’s studying her. No compassion in his hard blue eyes, just something like curiosity. That little cowlick of silver hair on the top of his balding head like a baby’s first locks.
The old homeplace there, little more than an old dogtrot. Brown burnt-up cornstalks in the field beside, it’s August and everybody’s drenched with sweat and powdered with dust from the drive over, the highway nothing but gravel and the road from it just red clay dirt all dried. Everybody standing around in the heat and flies buzzing against the screens.
Aunt Phoebe’s laid up on a stack of pillows.
— Well, he says after a minute, his voice kind of husky soft, I’m waiting. He looks again almost like what he is, her baby brother waiting on her word.
She has her speech prepared.
— I know I was wrong, she says. -I thought you didn’t have to shoot Thad but I know he would have come at you with that knife. I know he wouldn’t have stopped and you’d have had to shoot him anyway, and maybe gotten stabbed. But I couldn’t forgive you for taking him away. I loved him too much. I let him beat me because I loved him. But I know that couldn’t have gone on, either. Now I’m dying. I want to tell you I know you did it in self-defense, like you said to the judge. I’m sorry I didn’t say so. I knew you wouldn’t let little Earl into court. And I lied. I lied about the knife. But now I’m dying. I wanted to tell you how sorry I am for not telling it like it was and for you going to the penitentiary. I’m dying now and I need you to forgive me, Junius. Before I go to my maker.
Papa stands there a long time not saying anything. They’re all straining their ears, sweat running into their earlobes, they let it stand, still. Aunt Phoebe has started to cry, not making a sound herself but the tears trickling down her chalky face.
Papa says, — You can rot in hell, for all I care, Phoebe. I’ll never forgive you.
Aunt Phoebe’s mouth then looked like it’d already been sewn shut by the undertaker, cinched in. Her eyes seemed smaller as if receding with her old soul. They watched him place his hat on his head, walk out without looking back. His own sister. Last time she ever saw him, nor would the closed lids of her dressed corpse deflect the light of his image, nor her shade darken his thoughts but for a flitting second as if seeking some sentimental purchase and, finding none, would it pass into scattered fields of those souls whose lives on earth had found nothing but unhappiness.
Poor Aunt Phoebe. Poor Aunt Phoebe, he’d often thought. I should have known seeing her grieve that no one in this family would ever sow much love in the family garden, what passed for love anyway being just a few unswept and moldered seeds at the base of an otherwise empty grain bin. A clutch of dry and twisted hearts. His love for Birdie was one thing, one move in the right direction, a grasp at goodness the closest thing to which he knew was his mother, poor God-ravaged grackle of a woman that she was, squawking scripture to ward off the terror of eternal fire. When Birdie balked at physical love it fired in him a muted, enraged despair, as if the demons in the old woman his mother had infected his bride somehow between the courtship and connubial bliss. Why, aside from his general greed, would his father have become the biggest pussyhound east of the Mississippi? Because the pussy at home was about as receptive as just that, might as well try to hold down the housecat by the nape of its neck and fuck it — that was his guess, anyway, given all signs and signals in the air all his growing up life.
Still, it was in the blood. Only one of them didn’t cheat on his wife was Rufus, and that because he was a drunk half the time and a teetotaling holy roller the rest, and between being drunk on whiskey and drunk on Jesus he hadn’t the time or the inclination for fucking around. Papa had set Rufus up in the barbershop years before. You never had to worry about Rufus being mean, that was for sure, only drunk. Earl always suspected he had a big heart and it was some kind of self-loathing kept Rufus such a gentle and ineffectual sap.
So he, Earl, would work hard and do well, finally set himself up in business, and extend a hand to Levi, helping to set him up with his own shoe store, too. Never mind competition, which was admittedly part of the plan, that with Levi as competition they could control things, keep a share each of different stock, swap around, lob customers back and forth between the stores like tennis balls. Never mind, of course, that Levi would order on the sly the same stock Earl was getting and offer it at lower prices, wouldn’t put it out where Earl might see it but would sidle up to customers and happen to drop that he could get her this or that shoe a little cheaper than Earl, and sometimes that stock actually being Earl’s own, which Levi would get out of Earl’s store at night or Sunday mornings until Earl got wise and took away his key and slapped him around a little when he, Levi, called him, Earl, a liar.
Got into league with their sister Merry against him. Depended on Earl, the both of them, and the both of them hated him for it. Merry’d get drunk and drive around town shopping for dresses, purses, makeup, flowers, groceries, even whiskey and gasoline, and telling the merchants Send the bill to my brother Earl down at his store. He’d round up whatever hadn’t been unwrapped or worn or drunk or eaten or shot through a carburetor and fired out the tail and take it back, make her pitiful cuckold husband R.W. pay for some, and would end up paying himself for the rest. Then she’d laugh at him over it. Say What do you care, you got plenty of money, nobody’d ever squeeze a nickel out of you Earl if they didn’t steal it.