Doc hadn’t the time to be shy. He snatched the chamber pot from under the bed, stuck his swollen member into it and glared defiantly at the girl while the echo of his release pinged off the pot. She openly observed his tool as she might have done a passing cockroach, too disinterested to reach over and squash it. With the pressure off, Doc’s tool receded and he furiously tucked it back into his skivvies, blotching the flannel with the last remaining drops.
“Lizzie, what’s that goddam thing on the back stairs?” he demanded. Doc never cursed in the house, so he knew that she knew how mad he was.
“Thing?” she asked. Never heard of it.
“Well, never you mind, girl, you go get me Carpy, right now. Don’t say anything but that I want to see him pronto.”
She nodded dimly and escaped, the bed half-made. Doc put down the brass pot. While he waited for the household retainer, he sat back on the bed. The matter on the back stairs was too perplexing to dwell upon, and his thoughts drifted.
Outside, the field workers were singing a “holler” about not goin’ down to the well no more. Doc smiled vaguely at their singing, which brought back memories of other times on the bed: Sally on their wedding night, drunk and catty; Carpy’s mother, laid back on it, willing to let him fuck her. The halcyon days of youth—it had all been ahead of him then.
Carpy was six years older than Bubba. Not nearly so dark as his mother, he neither much resembled his squat father. Muscular, yes, but long-muscled and trim. The only obvious trait of Doc’s he’d acquired was the tendency toward baldness. Carpy’s mother died shortly after his birth. His true parentage was kept from him, from the workers, and from Sally (who found out anyway and promptly stopped sleeping with her husband). She mistreated Carpy wickedly, never with any explanation or any apparent cause.
The most Doc dared for his eldest son was to teach him to read so that he could be promoted to the highest household position, that of overseer. It paid a tiny wage, but Doc had secretly hidden funds in a bank account for Carpy. He had rationalized this to himself over the years so as not to have to face the obvious conflict with his duties as a Cyclops. Unlike his old man, Carpy treated those dozens beneath his command with utmost kindness and compassion—a gentle foreman, fond of Lizzie, but secretly, hopelessly, in love with Psalmody. She was built like a goddess. Her breasts alone stuffed his brain full of immoderate thoughts, and thank God for that or he might have zeroed in on the rest of her.
Psalmody liked to run, decades before jogging would come of age. She refused to ride in the family Ford, preferring to race it along the dirt roads, barefoot, in loose-fitting boy’s clothing. The sweat on her upper lip did things to Carpy that he couldn’t explain. Certainly he had seen enough sweat in his life. Even Bubba registered her exudence of sexuality, but his elder half-brother was way ahead of him. Rarely, after all, were women excited by the vision of a loved one picking his nose. Carpy, a man of position and responsibility, never would do such a thing publicly; whereas Bubba’s excavated mucous adorned chair arms, walls and the undersides of tables throughout the house. The thought of his hands on her would have made Psalmody faint. She was looking for someone of intelligence, of original thought, and pretty soon, too, or she would go crazy in this prison-farm. Everything that mattered to her existed somewhere else other than Mound City and its predatory environs. Although she didn’t realize it, Carpy’s gentle nature had already played upon the strings of her heart. History has a way of swinging around for another looksee.
Carpy had no idea what the monstrosity confronting him might be, nor how it might have arrived. “It’s like a big arrow was shot through the roof. Impossible stuff,” he called it. “Mr. Doc, nobody in this house can be responsible. Fact, I don’ know anybody who could. My word on that.”
Of course Doc ought to have guessed that no servant had hauled the thing in here. His mind tried to put together an explanation: Too large to have been dragged and lacking a corresponding hole in the ceiling for Car-py’s “arrow,” the odd cylinder must have been assembled in place, brought in through the back door. The cause for this blasphemy remained an enigma, but the method at least he could resolve to his own satisfaction. He ordered that the thing be removed. “Break it into little bitty bits if you have to.”
Carpy pushed hard against a polished fingerplate, which raised one of the connected pads a little ways. Deep below them, the earth seemed to belch out a flat, sonorous note. Carpy backed up against the wall. He and Doc traded worried looks. “Gonna take all the hands,” he said, “everybody from the fields just to nudge this thing.”
“Then, we gonna deal with it later,” replied Doc. “Not messing about the workday over this little damn problem.”
“Yes, sir, that seems best.” Carpy withdrew past him, back up the steps. He peered down into the sarcophagal blackness of the instrument. Was that the top of a pale head way down inside there? The thing was some kind of sign, like chicken blood or a hanged man. This was a blight upon the family.
Halfway up the stairs, Doc found himself confronted by his wife. Sally had a way of looking at him that reduced his stature. That he was standing on a lower step of the stairs didn’t help, either. He tried to take control of the situation quickly. “Damndest thing I ever seed,” he said as he leaned back over the rail. Sally gave the thing a quick look. “Clarinet,” she said sagely, “but you’d have to stand on the roof to play it.”
“What the hell kind of clarinet is that?”
Sally replied, “A big clarinet.” She moved to let him up.
Muttering, Doc stepped around her and headed for his room at full tilt. There, Lizzie had already removed the chamberpot and finished making the bed. The child did look after him well. He thought again of Carpy’s mother, but dismissed the memory as both provocative and immaterial. Sally trod solemnly along the hall. He sensed her lingering in the doorway, and he turned around. He walked over and started to close the door. “I have to git dressed if you don’t mind.”
“You’ve dripped on yourself,” she indicated, staring at his crotch.
Doc shut the door. He listened to her move off. “Sally,” he said softly, “you are workin’ my last nerve.”
Once he had finished dressing, Doc went down to breakfast. He had barely scooped up his first forkful when a cry from outside stopped him. His name upon the air brought Doc running out to the porch. Sausage in his mouth and a checkered napkin bibbing his neck, he towered over Ed Rose, who stood in a panic on the ground. Ed blurted, “You gotta come quick, Doc. You gotta see this thing.”
Doc told him to calm down. He threw off the napkin and followed his foreman into the fields. The steamy Mississippi morning pumped the sweat out of him as he waded through waist-high cotton plants. Branded workers had stopped their business to watch as the man himself strode past them. Ahead, a cluster of them surrounded “the thing.”
It had crushed rows of plants but no one had been hurt. It was a thin gold tube, far longer than the thing inside the house, and it had spread a blue stain in a band over some of the cotton. The tube stretched out twenty yards before curving back—a piece from something much larger and more grotesque. In the flattened cotton the shape of the whole instrument could be discerned, as if it had slept there overnight and then moved on at daybreak, leaving the sloughed hand slide behind. Doc walked in its rut while trying to formulate an identity for the thing. He had trouble.