“I thought the story was they were worried about their womenfolks. That’s what I always heard.”
“Well, that was the tale but it was just so much horseshit. But then folks in these parts always had some curious idea about women. Had to be protected and all that. Sheltered. I never knowed one couldn’t take care of herself and I never knowed one to park her shoes under any bed she hadn’t crawled into by herself.”
“Did they have any women from around here at their camp?”
“They had two or three I think but they was here on their own hook. Nobody tolled em off or drug em screamin by the hair of the head.”
Below them came the faint slap of a screendoor and a man entered the back yard. He took up from against the weatherboarding a shovel and advanced onto a cleared area where a large rectangle was marked off by stakes and batterboards He pulled off his shirt and began to shovel earth from beneath the line. His back was very white. He worked fiercely for a few seconds then stopped and stood leaning with his foot cocked on the shovel studying the distance left to cover.
“Who all was it?”
“I doubt you’d remember any of em,” the old man said drily. “There was a good bunch of em. Tom Hovington’s pa, he was one. Not no ringleader or nothin, just one of the bunch. A follower, he was good at that sort of thing. Never had an idea of his own but was the first to jump when somebody else did. Kind of a suckass. They talked it up for a week or two before they done it. They come around the house and Pa, he run off. Pa never was much of a joiner. Old man Hodges was I guess the worst. He had a daughter down there. She would’ve been, let’s see, Motormouth Hodges’s aunt. She’d done run off with everbody else and maybe she figured she’d see if the Mormons had come up with some new way of doin it. That mob come up here long about daybreak and set in to whip em but them Mormon must’ve had mixed feelins about bein whipped. They started shootin back and forth and the whitecaps ended up killin ever one of em cept four or five women. They tied em up and whipped em, among other things.”
“How old was you?”
“Fifteen or sixteen. Old enough to know not to be here but not bright enough to come up and warn em. That’s always bothered me some.”
“Why didn’t anybody else let em know?”
“I guess everbody figured it was all blow. If Hodges’d killed all the folk he threatened this county’d be mighty thin settled. Anyway, folks thought they was just takin a hickory to em, that’s what the whitecaps was famous for. I doubt they knowed theirselves they was goin to be slaughterin people right and left. It just got out of hand.”
The boy did not reply, seemed lost in the subtle gradations of umber and burnt sienna, the dull green of rampant summer’s growth turning sullen and sulfurous with its coating of dust, the old house bleached field gray, somehow oblique and alien in the harsh light, the bracken darkening and becoming more luxuriant near the spring and the hidden dark orifice of the abyss.
He wondered what the truth was, secretly doubted there was any truth left beneath the shifting weight of myth and folklore. Truth had changed the way the landscape had changed to accommodate progress, altered by each generation to its purpose. He had learned from the talk of old men that there was no such thing as truth, truth was always shaded by perception and expectation. And the old man’s truth might not be Winer’s. Hodges had said that the old man himself had killed two mean, but Oliver had never spoken of it. Now that too was layered with time, had held truth only in the bright millisecond of all time it occupied, now there was the old man’s truth, the dead men’s survivors’ truth, the court’s truth, all of them separate truths men had sworn to. Winer disregarded them all.
“One thing about gettin old,” Oliver was saying. “You can watch another feller work and not feel guilty about it. Though whether or not what that feller’s doin qualifies as work depends on whether you’re payin or gettin paid.”
The man had forsaken the shovel for a mattock and was flailing at the earth. A darkhaired girl came out and took up the shovel with what from a distance seemed reluctance. The pale man ceased and stood gazing thoughtfully off into space then recommenced with renewed enthusiasm when a tall man came into the yard and stood watching them.
“I guess they’ll get it now,” the old man said. “There’s Old Nick in the flesh.”
“Hardin?”
“Whatever he’s goin by now.”
Winer turned as if to share Oliver’s jest but the leathery face showed no sign that the old man had not been serious.
“What do you suppose he’s buildin down there?”
“More room for his meanness, I guess.” Oliver braced himself on the handcarved stick and arose, gaunt and ungainly against the blue void, a figure himself of myth perhaps, an Old Testament patriarch marvelously transported to 1943 and finding the world not entirely to his liking. “The harder times get for everbody else the better they get for folks like Hardin,” Oliver said.
Motormouth’s wife Ruby had left him for what she described as good and all in August. Ruby was a bitch but there was no news in that. She had always been a bitch. He had divined that even when she had been a little girl in white crinoline and white shoes holding her father’s hand on the way to church she was already a bitch, though a more diminutive and less strident one. She had been a bitch in her cradle, a tiny, toothless bitch at her mother’s breast. Motormouth had known all this and had married her anyway, planning to reform her.
The ink had barely dried on their marriage license when she had cuckolded him. He had caught them at a deserted racetrack, naked in the backseat of an old Ford. She had been with a high school junior who was not even seventeen years old. He had been scared so badly he could not even get his pants on, had both feet stuffed into the same trouserleg and was just madly jumping up and down as if he were trying to drive himself into them and escape from sight. Motormouth had been appalled. “Why, he’s not even on the Goddamned football team,” he told her.
He used to get up in the mornings after she had left him and make himself a pot of coffee and just head out. He didn’t have a job anymore and he subsisted on whatever he could eke out. As time drew on his wants became simpler. He used to work some for Abner Lyle at the service station. He would patrol the main highway west of town. He had the old rustcolored Chrysler tricked out with a removable redlight and a siren and he used to cruise the highways like a predator, a hawk on the wing, riding the updrafts and scanning the earth for a victim. Motormouth’s victims were little-old-lady schoolteachers on vacation, elderly couples who appeared prosperous and looked as if they did not know much about automobiles.
“Looks like you about to run a wheel off,” he would tell them once he got them stopped. They always looked apprehensive even before he told them, for there was nothing reassuring in his appearance, Motormouth with his old junker like something from a junkdealer’s dreams, encrusted with blinking lights and reflector mudflaps and various animal tails descending from high, looping police antennas. Him with his cap in hand, puckish-faced hangdog, the bearer of bad tidings, wheelbearings shot, rearends about to fall out. His fey leprechaun’s eyes were halfmad and the lies strung from his mouth like spittle, a demented spider who would draw them into his web. “Just drive right slow to Abner Lyle’s fillin station,” he would tell them. “I’ll foller ye case ye have trouble.”
“Thank you,” they would say uncertainly.
“Lots of folks would just drive on and go about their business,” he would tell them. “But I believe in helpin my feller man.”
As autumn dew on he lived an increasingly precarious existence, sleeping wherever dark or exhaustion overtook him, a curious nomad, homeless as a gypsy, the old Chrysler parked in brush by the river’s edge, out of sight at some roadside table. He took to carrying soap and a razor and a change of clothing and he would just stay out for days at a time.