Hell at the Breech Read online

  HELL AT THE BREECH

  A NOVEL

  TOM FRANKLIN

  For Beth Ann

  and for Claire

  And the children of Mitcham Beat were warned that if they ever heard the whinny of horses and the squeak of good leather, they had better run and hide.

  —THE MITCHAM WAR OF CLARKE COUNTY, ALABAMA

  Harvey H. Jackson III, in collaboration with

  Joyce White Burrage and James A. Cox

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  While there was a Mitcham War in Clarke County, Alabama, in the 1890s, and while the gang that called itself “Hell-at-the-Breech” did exist, and while a number of murders occurred, both by certain members of the gang and by certain men riding against it, the author has taken great liberties in the writing of this novel. Each character is fully a creation of the author’s imagination and in no way represents any person, living or dead. Anyone interested in reading more about these events is directed to the excellent book The Mitcham War of Clarke County, Alabama, by Harvey H. Jackson III, in collaboration with Joyce White Burrage and James A. Cox.

  Contents

  EPIGRAPH

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  A SACK OF PUPPIES

  September 1897

  “HE WAS WITH US”

  August 1898

  OVER THE DITCH

  September 1897 to July 1898

  DIRTY WORK

  August to October 1898

  INTO THE BREECH

  November 1898

  HOOVES, AND THE CREAK OF GOOD LEATHER

  November 29 and 30, 1898

  CODA

  CHRISTIANS 1887

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY TOM FRANKLIN

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  A SACK OF PUPPIES

  September 1897

  DAWN CREPT UP OUT OF THE TREES, defining a bole, a burl, a leaf at a time the world he’d spent the night trying to comprehend. But what would daylight offer except the illusion of understanding? At least in darkness you were spared the pretending. Behind him in the cabin where he and William had lived since the death of their parents came the morning stirring of the Widow Gates, the clatter of logs as she arranged them in a tepee in the fireplace. He should have gone and done that for her.

  Her soft, clucking voice reached his ears.

  Was she talking to herself? No, to the dog who’d had her puppies the evening before. Ever the midwife, the widow had aided the dog as she’d delivered, with a wet rag cleaning the pups so the bitch would be free to push and whine, the old woman stolidly taking the halfhearted nip from the dog, who was confused by the pain. He turned his head to better hear, to learn what she might confide to the dog, but her voice was too soft.

  Get up and go on in there, he thought, help her get breakfast made. Act like nothing’s wrong.

  But he didn’t. He continued to sit with his feet on the steps as the earth redefined itself around him, same as it had the day before and the day before that and as far back as his memory went, as if this dawn were no different from any other. The ground shifted and twitched with early sparrows; he studied them on their twig legs, invisible in the leaves until they moved. He remembered walking home from the meeting at the store earlier, his face to the sky, searching between branches for the white globe of the moon. How unlike itself the world seemed at night, when trees lurked dark and hulking and the birds of the day disappeared who knew where.

  His head had begun to ache. He leaned forward and cupped his palms over his ears and closed his eyes, elbows on knees. He was in that position when her legs appeared beside him.

  “Macky.”

  He turned and looked at her ankles through the bars of his fingers. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “Where’s William?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Still over at the store, I reckon.”

  She set a croaker sack on the porch by her feet. The bag was moving. From inside, behind the closed door, there came a scratching. A whine.

  “How long you been up?” she asked.

  He couldn’t stop watching the bag. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  “That’s what I said, Granny.”

  Her quick hand knocked his hat off. He left it where it lay.

  “You’ll not snap at me, boy, not after—”

  “I’m sorry.” His cheeks had grown hot, she had never hit him.

  She reached for his head again, gently this time, but he rose and moved off and stood on the bottom step, facing away from her, gazing out at the just-born yard that lay stretched and steaming before them. The trees were nothing more than trees now and the sparrows just sparrows.

  “How many did she have?” he asked.

  “Six that lived. The runt died.”

  She stood holding the sack, then raised it for him. He took it from her; he could feel them moving, hear them crying.

  “Drowning’s quickest,” she said.

  “I know.”

  He heard the widow scraping back across the porch with her cane and heard the door close. Frantic toenails of the dog clicking on the floorboards. As he walked away she began to bark. He went faster, having forgotten his hat, holding the bag out from his side and trying not to feel them or hear them.

  At the creek he knelt on the big shale rock where he and William fished. Leaves floated past in the water. It was a deep creek, good for diving and swimming except for the moccasins and snapping turtles. Once they’d caught an alligator snapper the size of a saddle, had lugged it in thinking they’d hooked a log. Then it was sitting on the bank gaping at them, a rock come to life, its shell bony and jagged and mossy green, its head as big as a man’s fist. It kept turning its snout side to side with its mouth open and trying to back up, its tongue a black wormy blob. They couldn’t afford to lose their hook, but retrieving it seemed impossible with the turtle alive. After some discussion they’d overturned it and, with great care, cut its throat, dragged it far from the water and left it lying on its back. Next day they’d returned to find it somehow still alive, its horned feet kicking feebly at the sky, mouth working open and closed.

  The bag lay pulsing. He put a hand over it and defined beneath the cloth a trembling body no larger than a field mouse, legs, tail, head—eyes that would still be closed, mouth seeking the warm purple teats of its mother. This dog had given birth four times in her life, and until now the old woman herself had done this deed, at first telling the boys she was giving the puppies to a colored family, until the morning they’d followed her to the creek and seen the truth. She’d explained then that while they could afford to feed one dog for the purposes it served, her litters were too much.

  He looked into the creek. Another Mack Burke watched him from the water and they locked eyes and rolled up opposite sleeves and gathered the mouths of their sacks in their fists. He looked away from his reflection and submerged the bag, then loosened his grip so that cold water rushed in. He left it under for two full minutes, then let go of the sack and sought its other end, pulling it out of the water, not looking at what still things spilled from its mouth, nudged by the slow-moving creek.

  He stood up on the rock and his reflection stood with him and rolled down its sleeve as he rolled down his and turned when he did and was lost. He wrung out the bag as he walked and at the cabin laid it out to dry on the porch. He took up his soft hat and when he opened the door the dog lurched past his thigh and flashed over the porch into the yard, scattering the sparrows. The widow came to his side, her wrists and hands white from flour, and together they watched the dog circle the yard with her nose furrowing the leaves, the circle widening until she’d le
ft the yard entirely, headed for the creek. He didn’t have to follow to know she would stop searching only when she reached the water’s edge, that she would spend the day and the night there, standing in the creek to her shoulders, shivering, whining, recovering perhaps one of the drowned puppies and carrying it in her mouth to a warm secret pocket of the forest, nosing the cold soggy thing to her dribbling teat and waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.

  “HE WAS WITH US”

  August 1898

  I

  THE COTTON CROP WAS LAID BY, three weeks until picking, and now were days of waiting when men saw to the maintenance of their equipment and gave their mules and wives time to rest, their bodies time to mend.

  On a Friday at dusk a farmer called Floyd Norris and his three young sons were under the low roof of the porch of their cabin, the man holding an unlit pipe in his teeth and repairing a trace, the boys watching, their hands flickering here and again in unconscious imitation of the father’s. Stacks of flat rocks held up the house, and underneath the porch a pair of slender black-spotted dogs lay in identical poses, their long snouts on their forepaws. Inside, Norris’s wife sat on a stool nursing a baby of five months in one arm and with the other working the churn handle up and down. When a fly landed on the baby’s bald head she blew it away. Presently she heard the dogs go to yapping from under the house and, stretching her neck to look through a space in the logs where a clump of mud had come out, accidentally dislodged the baby’s lips from her nipple. When he began to fuss and wave his arms, she adjusted his head and her cheek twitched as he reattached himself and resumed his sucking.

  What she saw through the hole was two of them in their hoods walking through the hip-high cotton. Stepping carefully, not damaging any of the plants. The baby at her breast had closed his eyes and hummed as he suckled, the fly had settled again on his forehead. She stopped churning and leaned her face closer to the wall and called, “Alvin. Alfred. Arnold.”

  The boys on the porch looked at their father, then at the white-hooded pair coming toward them.

  “Go on,” he said, setting aside the pliers and the trace.

  The boys obeyed, rising, brushing at flies, their necks ringed with dirt. Inside, their mother told them to sit and play by the hearth but not to touch the kettle over the fire. She kept her eye against the wall.

  The hooded men passed through the shadow the barn cast and paused at the edge of the houseward path between high rows of bushy cotton and faced the two snarling dogs. They held shotguns but did not move to use them. Their overalls were identical to Norris’s, but neither wore a shirt beneath and their shoulders were red and scaly from the sun. One wore no socks, his white ankles showed below his cuffs. The hoods were cloth bags bearing vague blue lettering and with jagged eye and mouth holes, tied at the neck with string and darkened with sweat.

  One of the dogs advanced on them, sideways, its head low and lower jaw aquiver in its growl, its hackles rippling over its back. Norris whistled a single note and the dogs snapped their heads to face him and unbowed themselves and trotted in tandem back toward the house and up the steps to the spot on the boards where he pointed. “Sit on down,” he said, and they did, their tails thumping the porch but their hackles still raised. “Quiet,” he said.

  The hooded men crossed the yard and stood before him, their shotguns held so casually they might have been out to shoot dove.

  “Sorry ’bout the disguises, Floyd,” one said, teeth showing through his mouth hole.

  The second one remained quiet, just the slight flutter of the hood at his nose. He kept picking at the cloth with his fingers.

  “Hell,” Floyd said. “No need for apologies. Y’all are carrying on in dangerous times. If I didn’t have these young ones to look after, I’d be out yonder with you.”

  “You know why we’re here.”

  He nodded. “What you want me to say?”

  “Just say Lev and William was here with you all afternoon tomorrow. They drunk with you a goodly amount of liquor, which they brung, and played dominoes on your porch.”

  “Who won?” Floyd asked.

  “Lev did. You don’t remember the scores.”

  “That might hurt your story. Lev can’t play worth a shit.”

  The hooded men looked at each other.

  “I’ll have to say they brung the dominoes, too,” Floyd said. “I don’t own me a set.”

  The one who’d spoken reached into his back pocket. He came out with a box and tossed it to Floyd, who caught it one-handed.

  “Don’t forget,” the man said.

  “Naw,” said Floyd. “I won’t.”

  The hooded man nodded, then he and his silent companion turned and went back through the cotton.

  Inside, the woman detached the baby with her finger and hung him over her shoulder and patted him on the back. Soon he burped. She laid him on the floor where he gaped at the ceiling and waved his arms and kicked his legs. She told his brothers to quit fighting and went out adjusting her dress.

  “It was them,” he said, opening the box of dominoes. In among the ivory-colored tiles, he found a silver dollar. He glanced behind him.

  “You’ll involve us all in their dirty work if you say what they told you to,” she said.

  “Be worse off if we don’t, woman.” He palmed the dollar and slipped it into his overalls. “Now go on get dinner going and send them young ones back out.”

  She shaded her eyes with a hand, watching the hooded men as they receded and grew indistinct in the far-reaching cotton. Before they entered the tree line across the field they stopped and looked back. She went cold inside. She thought of the Widow Gates, said to be able to discern ghosts from living folk and who often saw people no one else could see. The old woman would point into a field and say, There’s one.

  The hooded men had vanished now, into the woods and gone.

  “Damn it,” Floyd said, “I told you get on.”

  She looked at the back of his head. “You ain’t keeping that,” she said of the dominoes, and turned, went inside, and stepped over the wiggling baby on her way to the churn.

  II

  Joe Anderson rode his mule in the deep leafy shade of a bank of earth, the animal sinking in the loose sand with each step. It had come a good rain of late and the world seemed fresh. Grass hung off the top of the bank and sapling pines came out at an angle, you could see where children had climbed on them, swinging, a shred of rope dangling and moving in the wind. The woods were high all around, so green it felt almost cloudy, thrashers noisy in the bracken and sparrows flitting overhead, the ground slashed like paintbrush work with the shadow of pine needles.

  He stopped the mule and sat still for a moment looping the rein tighter and tighter around his hand so his fingers began to turn crimson. He looked to his right and then up, to the top of the bank, where two figures were gazing down on him, their shotguns held in repose. One wore a white hood, the other seemed to be a Negro, though odd-looking in a half-finished way.

  Only then did it occur to him to reach for his twelve-gauge, roped to the saddle behind him, but when his hand strayed back there the black fellow twitched the barrel of his own gun and said, “Ah.”

  The one in the hood rose from his squat and spread his arms for balance and scampered down the bank, bringing a small avalanche with him. He landed and stepped in the road.

  “Hidy, Mr. Anderson.”

  Anderson glared down from his mule. “I’m not fond of having shotguns brandished at me,” he said.

  The hooded man looked up at his companion, who remained in his crouch. “Says he don’t like having guns on him.”

  Without taking his eyes off Anderson, the other man leaned over the edge and let a long tendon of tobacco spit reach down off his lower lip. He jutted his chin and the spit broke loose. He said, “Tell him get down.”

  “You heard the man,” the one in the hood said. “Get on off. And keep your paws where I can see ’em.”

  When Anderson stood
against the bank, hands in the air, the dark-faced man took hold of one of the outcropped trees and with a rattle of branch and leaf fell more than climbed down. The mule had watched it all with an air of boredom, one eye closing and opening, its ears swiveling. It snapped viciously at a horsefly, then took a few experimental steps and looked back. Nobody moved to stop it, reins dragging the ground, so it took a few more steps at a halftrot and presently rounded a bend in the road.

  The men watched it go, the gunstock wagging in the air.

  The dark-faced one spat again. “Ain’t real dependable, is he? First sign of trouble off he goes.”

  You could see the man had painted his face with ash, his eyes eerie white holes in all that black. Sweat etched down his cheeks. The lobe of one ear shiny at the edges.

  Anderson squinted. “Lev James?”

  The man leaned in close. “Yeah,” he whispered. “I don’t like wearing no hood. I get antsy.”

  “You’ll be wearing the hangman’s hood before long,” Anderson said. He pointed down the road. “You’re accountable for that mule and that twelve-gauge.”

  “Now hold that tone of yours,” James said. “We could kill you right now, and nobody’d ever know it was us. Far as everbody’s concerned, me and my buddy here is somewheres else, playing dominoes.” He looked at the man in the hood. “How many games we play this afternoon?”