The young men were mostly furloughed or shellshocked soldiers or over-the-hill sailors far from any seas and they would be inside drinking and trying to get the girl to ride down the road with them. Finally drunk they settled for whatever whore chanced to be in attendance or even Pearl herself should the need be acute.
Winer was comfortable with the old men but he could never become comfortable with the soldiers, there was an air of desperation about them. They acted as if time were the commodity they were shortest on, as if they did not have the leisure to take life as it came but were eternally seeking shortcuts, must twist each moment until it suited their purpose, bend every event to their own amusement. Something had to be happening for them every minute. They were wound too tight, Winer thought. He knew why and he didn’t guess he blamed them but he thought they were wound too tight anyway. They reminded him of a war being fought that had heretofore been just a disembodied voice in a radio and he knew that unless things changed it would not be long before he was fighting it too.
All the soldiers looked alike to Winer and he thought if he ever saw one sober he might think about them differently but around Hardin’s he wasn’t likely to. All the ones he saw were a little drunk and a lot belligerent. They always wanted to fight the sailors but if there were no sailors they’d fight each other.
One afternoon he paused nailing weatherboarding on the walls when a fight erupted inside and boiled out the back door, the old men picking up their jars or jellyglasses or whatever and retreating to more neutral territory. Two soldiers were rolling in the yard and when a stringyheaded blond broke a beerbottle over the topmost one’s head a girl with red hair knocked her down with a two-by-four and fell upon her. Winer, watching their exposed white thighs and rent clothing, ultimately counted eighteen participants and he wondered how they kept up with who was fighting whom and which side they were on.
They fought all over the backyard pulling hair and cursing and falling over one another. Winer swung himself onto the top plate the better not to be mistaken for a participant. Hardin tried to yell them down, then he saw Wymer moved among them like dogs snapping at the heels of milling cattle, first with blackjacks then Hardin slipping on his Sunday knucks and wading in.
When they subsided no one seemed to know what the fight had been about and they all went back inside to discuss it save one soldier sitting crying in the grass with his jaw hanging crazily. He sat there awhile by himself and then he got up and hobbled around the corner like a very old man. Winer went on back to work and after a while the old men came up from the branch laughing and seated themselves again.
Leo Huggins sold throughout a three-country area what he described as waterless cookware. He canvassed the backroads in his old green Studebaker, sitting with housewives on their porches, beseeching, wheedling, his eyes black and glossy with whatever obsession bulged behind them, the present one being that this waterless cookware was the only thing of moment in all the world.
He’d demonstrate it in the comfort of your own home. He’d have you invite the neighbors over and he would go into the kitchen and prepare and serve a meal in these marvelous pans. Many a husband came in hot and sweaty from the sawmill to find his yard clotted with cars and the house full of folks he hadn’t expected. Huggins’s Studebaker likely blocking the driveway. Huggins himself humming busily in the kitchen, his sleeves rolled up, supper on the stove. The wife sitting waiting with mounting apprehension, wondering how she had let herself be talked into this.
So there were times when Huggins had to depart in haste, the meal left halfprepared, the pots and pans abandoned until another day when the husband was once again at work.
“Your mama tell me you a wood butcher.”
“I reckon.”
“I reckon it’s all right if you can make any money at it,” Huggins said, then turned the conversation neatly to himself. “I never could make a livin at public work. Had to do what I could with my brains.”
And your mouth, Winer thought, then immediately decided he wasn’t being fair, that he did not know Huggins well enough to criticize him and was not giving him a chance. Yet he caught himself staring at the big white hands that did not look as if they’d ever done an hour’s labor, the fingers soft and freckled as bleached sausages, the still upturned palms tender and virginal as a baby’s.
Huggins fell to talking about himself. He liked this topic of conversation, figured the rest of the world was afflicted in a like manner. He had come up from nothing in Arkansas, he told Winer and his mother, from folks who never had nothing nor wanted nothing, folks in shotgun shacks with cracks in the floor so you could keep an eye on the chickens, and he figured if he was ever going to be anything he had to do it on his own hook. He had begun by selling fancy overpriced coaloil lamps to the colored folks in the underside of Little Rock, later taking on a line of bibles with Negro Jesuses.
Winer sat only halflistening to this oral history. He had worked hard and his shoulders ached from nailing and he kept yawning. Weariness seemed to have crept up from his ankles and he could still hear and feel the rhythmic swing of the hammer in some dreamlike part of his mind. Amber Rose’s face drifted unbidden into his thoughts and would not leave. Huggins’s car was paid off free and clear, he learned, there was no man in all the world who could claim Huggins owned him a dime. Winer stared across the yard wishing himself elsewhere. The day was waning, the blue timberline across the field already an indecipherable stain, the sedge washed by broad swaths of failing light.
The trio formed a curious tableau on the porch of the unlit house, teacher and disciples perhaps, the boy pretending to listen, the man preaching softly the arcane gospel of himself, speaking so earnestly he might have been imparting hidden knowledge of the workings of the world or spinning a web to draw them into some dadaistic conspiracy. The woman sat in her chair, still, unrocking, hands momentarily stayed from their darning. Her eyes were downcast to her lap, the yellow lids slick and veined with a delicate blue tracery of capillaries. She seemed rapt, transfixed, and Winer realized that he did not know her, felt a brief and bitter stab of regret that he had never tried to learn her. She was less real to him than the yellowing daguerreotypes of other strangers in her own picturebox.
Hardin had square, boxlike hands with thick fingers and he kept the nail cut straight across almost into the quick. The nails were hornlike and scrupulously clean. He was forever paring them when he spoke with Winer.
“Where did you get that knife?”
“Lord. son, I don’t know. I had it I guess ten or twelve year.”
“Let me see it a minute.”
Hardin handed him the knife handle first.
The grips were bone the color of oxblood. CASE, the trademark said. Winer sat for a time holding it. “This is my father’s knife,” he said.
“Seems like I did find it somewheres.”
A small, irregular W was filed into the base of the blade the way all tools were marked but Winer would have known it anyway. The knife was an integral part of the memory of his father, the knife and the black slouch hat and the cold, remote way the eyes had of looking at the world. But they had never looked at Winer that way. The knife was wound up with the way his father had glanced at him when he started to town or to the field to plow. Winer the child would be hesitant, uncertain whether he should go or stay. “Well are you comin or not?” his father would ask. “You know I can’t get nothin done without you to supervise.”
He smelled the knife.
“What’d you do that for?”
Winer flushed. “I don’t know. He always had a plug of tobacco in the same pocket with the knife. The knife always had crumbled-up chewing tobacco inside it and it always smelled just like old Red Ox twist.”