“I’m goin to tell Mama,” Hodges said. He arose and took up the burlap bag and shovel and hurled them over the fence and clambered after them. “Keep ye damn pigs,” he said. “I don’t mind ye bein greedy but I hate to be took for a fool.”
Oliver grinned to himself. “You watch for snakes,” he called. After a while he could hear Hodges scurrying down the embankment, a small bright angry thread in the pastoral tapestry of night sounds. He hunkered still in the barnlot awhile listening and then he arose and went on back toward the house.
6
The horses had been gone for three weeks before Cecil Blalock even learned where they were. He had covered almost all the county asking and had come to think they must have started back toward west Tennessee, where he had bought them, for everyone in the county knew him and he could not imagine anyone just putting his up Morgans and not telling him. Blalock was the only man in the country who raised Morgans.
“You hear about them fine Morgans Hardin’s got?” a man in the poolroom asked him.
“No. What sort of Morgans are they?
“Big stallion and two mares. Finelookin horseflesh.”
“Where’d he get em?” Blalock asked, though by now he knew.
“He told me he found em.”
“The hell he did,” Blalock said.
This was late on a Saturday evening and by good light on Sunday morning he was up and breakfasted and had the sideboards on the truck. A redhaired woman clad in a slip stood in the door and watched him make ready to leave. “You be careful,” she called but he didn’t say if he would or he wouldn’t.
He had turned in at the yard and was backing toward the outbuildings when Hardin stopped him.
“You tearin my yard all to hell Blalock. Ain’t you had no raisin? I never heard you say you could cross it or kiss my ass or nothin.”
Blalock looked down from the driver’s seat of the truck, his face tight and angry. He had been about halfmad all night anyway and he wanted his horses but an innate sense of caution had made him hope Hardin would still be asleep. By all odds he should have been after Saturday night but here was Hardin all wide awake and cleareyed at six o’clock of a Sunday morning, playing the country squire, smiling upon him despite the harshness of his words, a benign smile so transparently crafty it would not have deceived a child.
“I come for my horses.”
“Can you prove they’re yourn?”
“You know damn well I can.”
“I sort of thought you could. Get out awhile and we’ll talk about it.” He crossed over to the porch and stepped onto it. He hitched up his dress slacks and squatted not on the porch but on the heels of his shiny shoes.
“There ain’t nothin to talk about. I come after em. Figure up what I owe for their keep and send me a bill.”
“Whatever you say, you’re the doctor. I guess we could dicker about it. I figure you owe me somethin in the neighborhood of eight hundred dollars.”
Suspecting some defect in his hearing, Blalock sought clarification. “Eight hundred dollars? For what?”
Hardin arose and crossed the branch. Curiously birdlike, a graceless bird all joints and angles. Imprints of his shoulderblades through the thin yellow dress shirt he wore, morning sun off a gold cufflink when he pointed across the stream.
“I had me a fine corncrop there and they done wiped me out before I knew they was on the place. They came in the night.”
Apoplectic with rage Blalock swung open the door and leapt out. He slammed the door so hard the truck rocked on its springs and he strode past Hardin and across the stream and up the stony bank. Past the tilting dead cornstalks all he could see was Spanish nettled and sawbriars and great slabs of white limestone. He turned. Hardin was watching him amiably, a grin on his crooked face, hand pocketed and thumbs tucked in the loops of his trousers.
“And where is this fine corncrop?” Blalock asked.
Hardin had a sharpened kitchen match in his mouth for a toothpick. He withdrew it and threw it away. “I thought I said,” he told Blalock. “It’s gone. They eat it. They wiped me out.”
“Why, there ain’t a Goddamned thing out here but rocks and sawbriars. You couldn’t hire a fuckin stalk of corn to grow here.”
Hardin was deferential. “I admit it don’t look like much now,” he said. “But you ought to have seen it before your horses got in it.”
Blalock climbed back down the abutment and this time waded right through the branch. He was watching Hardin’s pocket trying to see did he have a gun there but he couldn’t tell. If he did it was a small one.
“If you think I’m givin you eight hundred dollars for a few bales of hay you’re crazy as hell. I’ll give you what I think’s fair and you can like it or not. Just whatever suits you. And I’ll tell you another thing. Anybody else would’ve let me know where them horses was. It takes a damn sorry feller to put up another man’s stock and not say a word about it. Especially a stallion worth as much as that one.”
“How’d I know whose they was? They ain’t got no license plates on em like say a automobile nor collars like a coonhound, and this old free-range shit has about played out. Most everybody keeps their stock up nowadays.”
“I do keep em up, Goddamn it. Somebody cut my fences.”
“Well.” Hardin shrugged. “It wasn’t me.” He walked back toward the truck and Blalock stood awkwardly for a moment and then followed.
“Why don’t you buy your own damn horses and leave mine alone?”
“Well, I’ll make you another deal. I’ll count you out five one hundred dollar bills for that horse right here and now. Then we’ll go have a little drink and forget we ever had words.”
“That horse ain’t for sale and you know it. And even if it was that wouldn’t make a down payment.”
“Whatever you think. Whether you go loaded or unloaded is all the same to me.”
“I’ll go loaded or by God, know the reason why?”
Hardin turned. “All right,” he said. “This is the reason. If you so much as trespass a foot farther onto my property, so much as open a gate or cut my fences, they will carry your dead ass out of here on a stretcher. They will load you up and haul you away. Do you understand me?”
“You’re crazy, you’re the one that’s goin to be hauled away.”
“Not so crazy I don’t know whose property we’re standing on.”
“Nor me either,” Blalock said. “Thomas Hovington’s.”
Watching the yellow eyes fade to slits Blalock thought for a second that he was a dead man. Had Hardin been carrying a pistol perhaps he would have been. There was a moment when things could have gone either way, and then his eyes widened a little and Hardin said, “Like I said it’s on you. You can bet or fold.”
“I’m suin you,” Blalock said. “I’m gettin a lawyer right now.”
“That’s fine. I’ll get me one too and while our lawyers is dickering back and forth and runnin up the tab, the price on the horse is goin down and the corn’s goin up.”
“I can’t talk to you,” Blalock said. He opened the door on the truck and climbed in. “I’ll be back,” he said. “I’ll get them papers and I’ll be back.”
“That don’t surprise me,” Hardin said.
There was a faint wash of light on the window curtains, a cessation then of the sound of an engine somewhere down the road. Hardin rose on his elbows and peered at the phosphorescent hands of the clock. It was after one o’clock. He lay back stiff and silent, listening, thinking, Well, why not? If they’re goin to try it they’ll try it now. Hovington’s dead and buried. He had always known without articulating it that Hovington was a kind of insurance policy as long as he lay dying. He knew the curious decorum of county folks, their superstitious fear of death and dying, and he had slept a little better at night, had not been afraid of the windowlights being shot out, the house being torched. That policy had lapsed now, and he thought of another, the Winchester leaning in the corner, a 30–06 in a land of.22-caliber squirrel rifles.