|
|
Olan Dees ran his acorn-shaped head through
the open door and whooped. “Captain,” he called to the empty
office. At my post in the laboratory under the canopy of the pine
forest I heard the scratch of Captain Bryant’s chair pushed back from
the kitchen table where he worked in the building below and the whack
of it striking the floor behind his startled heels. I did not
wait to be called, swinging down the metal stairs at a run. Olan
still squalled as I crashed through the back door just behind the
captain. We stood in bemused silence for a moment, watching
Olan’s zealot face slobbering like a calf pulled too soon from the teat. “Damn it, Olan,” the captain shouted. “Dry up, now.” Olan’s dark eyes turned dusky under his pinched brow. “Lum,” he said meekly. “Lum, he’s asleeping.” “What?” the captain shouted. “Asleep?” Then he choked and sputtered. Rocking on the balls of his booted feet like an unbalanced walking doll, he breathed in short coughs. “Asleep,” he said again. “He never said nothing,” Olan protested. “He’s just under the ridge. I seen him from down by the tower. Lum, he’s flat of his back up there on the ground asleeping.” Olan’s head bobbed and sidled like a drowsy snake in the sunshine, and his black eyes turned flat as if he watched some distant point behind us. “He can’t sleep up there,” Captain Bryant said. “Red bugs’ll eat him alive.” Then the captain stilled the slight sway of his body, and presently he turned to me with round and outraged eyes. Together, without even the awareness of starting, we ran. Olan, still slouching in the door, raised one hand before his slack bewildered face as we rushed toward him. Quickly we passed him, still running, beginning now to pant as we pushed up the sandy ridge through the lanes of chevroned pines left in striated ranks by the turpentine hands who once lived in the camp before the Government took over most of the Kisatchie Wold. Beyond the greenhead above us a second fire tower gleamed faintly yellow in the morning sun, guarding the southern slope. Despite his greater weight and years, the captain simply outran me, his shoulders thrown back to balance the paunch of his midriff, his legs churning, creating the incredible illusion that he was stood still, marking time, while I caught up. Blossoms of white dust opened beneath his feet, drifting away in the furious air like spores of trampled Devil’s Snuff Boxes. We wallowed up the hill, grunting and sweating now, and on across the ridge beneath weeping astringent pines. At the crest of the ridge, Captain Bryant stopped short, his dusty wake rolling in dry breakers about his legs. I panted up behind him, my feet nerveless on the torn rooted ground. Below us an old game trail wound through huckleberry brush diagonally along the far slope, clinging to a narrow shelf as it descended gently into the valley beyond. The tower stood in a curve of the trail fifty yards below us on a flat of wiregrass scattered over an outcrop of silver sandstone. The captain stood quietly, heaving for breath and staring at the trail below us. In a curve, nearly concealed by brush, Christopher Columbus Crittenden lay serene and unmoving in the thin grass, his broganned feet in precise and rigid juxtaposition, his scarred cracked hands crossed in ironic repose upon his sharp still chest. He wore faded blue denim overalls with the redbird emblem bright and irreverent on the bib and an equally faded cap like locomotive engineers used to wear. His eyes were carefully closed, and his straight hard lips smiled faintly as if with a minor pain. His face in the dappled light had no luster. Blowflies dived ponderously about the pinched nostrils of his long nose and the ragged bleeding wound in his neck. “Best you find Olan and get him on up here,” the captain said to me, but when I turned to take the path back I almost stepped on him squatted in the trail behind us, his long bony knees resting comfortably in his armpits. Absently he smoked a cigarette made of uncut tobacco twisted in rough paper. The smoke was yellow and sulphurous, the color of Olan’s stained teeth. I started and jumped, then cursed him indecently. Olan’s face, calm and patient now, betrayed no resentment. “Poor old Lum,” he said. “Poor old thing.” The captain turned and shouldered past me. “Olan, you climb the tower.” he demanded. “You get up that ladder and keep a sharp eye.” “No, sir!” Olan replied. “The door stomp’s the longest thing I ever clumb. I am for a fact just naturally ascared of long places.” “Then find me a towerman, and get him up here before fire breaks out all over the Goddamned wold.” Bitter outrage swelled the warm folds of the captain’s face, and he stared with angry resentful eyes after Olan, stumbling in his peculiar disjointed gate down the hill through the heat waves below us. Slowly, we walked back to the office and took up our work again. II
“It makes me madder’n a wet hen,” the captain said as we were taking supper that evening beneath the fuming light of the kerosene lamps. “They kill each other off like they thought it was life’s highest honor to shoot their neighbor in the back.” He paused, swallowing, pursing his lips around his heavy dentures. His eyes peered unseeing into the shadows over my shoulder. He grumbled deep in his throat in protest. “And then they leave the cadavers laying around all over the country for us to pick up after them. Like we got the time to run all over creation cleaning up all the dead folks they can throw out for us to find. I’m a good mind to let the next one be.” Until that very moment I had been at a decided disadvantage, although I had for weeks showed an interest in his problem. After all, I was the stranger here and knew next to nothing about the people of these hills. I don’t understand,” I said. “What’s the argument about? Why do they kill each other? They work together; they worship together; they send their children to school together; they buy from the same peddlers; they all came out to help bury this one; they act almost decent in the daylight.” The captain mumbled to himself, shaking his disheveled head. His wiry hair stood in stiff tufts on his thick red skull as if he had run through a brier patch bareheaded. “Heaven knows,” he said. “It’s a cinch they don’t know.” “Who, then?” I asked. Who does know?” “What?” the captain said, blinking in confusion. “You know, who knows how the feuding started?” “Like’s not, over whiskey or women. Probably whiskey.” “They make whiskey or just sell it?” “Both!” The word exploded from his mouth. “Both, but they never drink the stuff, themselves. Against the Bible. Against their interpretation of the Bible. Whatever it was started the killing happened so long ago none of them choose to remember it, anyway. They don’t want to remember now because if they did they might be shamed into stopping the killing, because whatever it was – probably a quarrel over that blue shoat the Quicks’ old granddaddy traded to the Freidais’ granddaddy for his girl wife near a hundred year ago – it couldn’t be worth all the dead and widowed and orphaned since then. Fact is, they like killing; they like the smell of blood and gun powder just like some people like the smell of light bread baking. You ever see little boys playing tag? They’re like that. Oncet they got started there’s no way to stop them short of some sort of violence done all of them together. They can’t just stop. It’d take an army, and we’re just not in the army business.” The captain sat tense and silent for a time, his hooded eyes blinking in ponderous rhythm with his heavy jaws. Some growing instinct cautioned me to keep quiet, as the suspicion grew in my mind that he had broken some code of silence imposed on him by the people of the ridge. Finally, the waiting became too heavy a weight to carry. “I can’t make any sense out of it. How do they keep it straight? I mean, there doesn’t seem to be any clear family lines between sides. They all seem to be feuding with everyone else. Now I’ve been here nearly two years, and three of them have died. The first was a Quick, I believe, then the next one was a Guantt, and now Columbus Crittenden.” The captain searched my face with his shy diffident gaze behind which the hill people hide their secrets. He was one of them, really, different only because as a boy orphaned in one of the endless catastrophes that beset these people, he had been taken in by the Warrington Trust in New Orleans. Mr. Warrington raised him and trained him to work and found him a place at the university and lobbied the government for his first job with the Forest Service. Yet he never lost his propensity for abiding loyalty. He simply transferred it to Mr. Warrington first and then to the government. His was apparently the only way one of them could evade the blood feud. He spoke now, and welling emotion tightened his voice, leaving it slightly high pitched, the same voice an informer would use to give away his confederates. “Just before you came, they was a Freidais knifed in the back in his cow lot. Then the Freidais they hung a Quick in revenge. He’s the first one you knew about. Next, the Quicks dumped a Guantt out onto old man Freidais’ door stomp. He was dead, of course. And now Lum, he was a Quick through his granddaddy, his mama’s daddy. Like’s not, a Freidais shot him. At least the Quicks’ll think it was, and the Freidais’ll let them even if they didn’t.” The captain paused and leaned forward, resting an elbow on the table between us, his forefinger raised like an auctioneer counting final bids. He spoke carefully as if he sought to instruct a neophyte, young and inexperienced. “You see, there are two clans, basically, the Quicks and the Freidais. Everybody in the watershed, save you, is kin and aligned to one or the other by blood or marriage. Sometimes by blood and marriage. To my sure knowledge there ain’t never been nobody kin to both the Quicks and the Freidais the thirty-seven year I been here but one man, and he don’t count.” After a pause, in haste, I asked, “Who was he?” The captain fell silent, his body still, watchful. His eyes focused on my face, level and expressionless. “Oh!” I said. “Forget I asked that.” The captain nodded briefly and continued. “It don’t do no good to be neutral because then both sides count you as one of them so you have twice as many secrets and worries and bad nights to get through. But then you don’t want to be one of them either.” “Look, now,” I said, alarmed. “I’m not taking sides in this.” “It wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t let you, anyway. You’re different. You’re government. Sort of like a stud mule in a horse herd; you’re impotent.” The captain’s face darkened, and his brows hooded his round eyes, as the wick in the lamp burned down. “They’d no more kill in cold blood than they’d breed without passion,” he said quietly. “You’re safe, cold, never in heat because you operate out of a reasonable system in which men regulate their competition, not out of revealed Word like the Holy Writ with all its passion and murder and retribution. When they kill it’s out of hate and passion, like some men take their women.” The captain pushed his plate away and began to roll a cigarette. Outside in the soft butter-colored night whippoorwills called to each other among the oak hammocks across the valley: Chip-fell-out-of-the-white oak. We sat silently for a time listening to the throaty voices calling and answering. “Can’t the law do anything to stop them?” I asked. He stared at me with his wide blank eyes as if I had suddenly spoken in unknown tongues out of one of the brush arbor churches that dotted the landscape. “Worse than useless,” he said finally. “In the first place, there ain’t enough sheriffs and deputies and marshals in the whole state, let alone the parish, to keep an eye on them all. You can’t even make an example of the ones you caught because they read Scripture that excludes example in favor of revelation. Besides, all of them – the Quicks and the Freidais – they vote for the same man for Sheriff, and he always wins. It ain’t likely he’ll come off out here to bother them; he can’t and stay in office long. No, the onliest thing I can see to do is sick them on each other ever chainst, then soon’s there’s just one of them left standing, we can hang him for murder.” He paused again, smiling slightly at his effort at humor, and he puffed noisily on his cigarette. “Only, it’s a black shame,” he said in near admiration. His face relaxed, and his eyes shined, his lips pursing in mock anticipation. “You know, they make the best corn liquor any man ever hoped to drink.” “You mean moonshine whiskey?” “Yes, moonshine,” he drawled in a sleep filled voice, still smiling. “Triple twisted.” III
The day after we buried Lum Crittenden, the captain came in for breakfast dressed in his best uniform and wearing his tall riding boots, the formal regalia of foresters in that day. Later he cranked the camp’s Model A Ford truck and drove into Reau Gaulle along the rutted Mamie Trail to the nearest telephone to make his report to the Forest Service. He left me in charge of the camp, with instructions to thin a stand of pine saplings planted two years earlier. The men marched in more-or-less good military order to the site of the day’s work with adzes across their shoulders like short swords. They galloped along in the steaming heat trailing a soft murmur, and at the crest of a low hill I lined them out and pushed them across the plantation. They had clear instructions to take out every other sapling, but the line promptly broke, some of the men lagging to the rear with hands on hips and faces slack as though they listened to distant thunder. Others scurried forward with furtive glances over their shoulders. At the far side of the pine stand we regrouped and prepared to make another sweep across the shallow valley. By this time I had begun to shout my instructions, even adding choice curses for emphasis. Suddenly I was confronted by one of the younger men, a long-nosed sallow-faced youth with dishwater colored hair combed up in a shock like an old paint brush, standing slipshod, his adz idle at his knee. “I don’t rightly covet my place none,” he said, and his eyes wandered off to the far horizon. “What?” I shouted in exasperation. I was hot. A flood of sweat stung my eyes and dripped in annoying blobs off the end of my nose onto my shirt. “You don’t what?” “Hamp Hines,” he said, inclining his head at a gaggle of men watching us with averted eyes. “I don’t covet no place next to him.” I looked at the ragged line of blue-denimed men. They favored as if they had a common ancestor who had implanted with his seed the same gestures and expressions to go along with the bland speech patterns in each of his progeny. “Which one is Hamp Hines?” I asked. “The fur end,” the boy answered. At the far end of the line a replica of the young man before me slouched, disinterested. “What’s wrong with working by him? Work too hard for you?” The boy’s face tightened and the muscles in his back tensed. I had the vague sense that I may have gone too far. “I can work good as airy damned Quick you ever seen,” he said defiantly. The sweat, hot on my face and now soaking my shirt, turned cold and soggy. “You’re a Freidais?” I said, incredulous. The boy nodded briefly, a frown flitting across his face. “And you mean there are Quicks in this crew?” The boy’s gaze wandered over the double knots of idle men. They were quiet in the morning sun, some of them smoking, nearly all of them squatting on their heels. “Eight of them,” he said. “And you let me bring you all out here all mixed up together with adzes in your hands? With sharpened tools you can chop each other’s skulls over with? And you not say a word to warn me?” Anger reinforced with fear rose up in me like spring sap, and I began to shout. “I don’t give a good Goddamn if you kill off the last man here as long as you do it at night. If I have to tote a pistol there won’t be any killing on my tour, you understand?” The boy watched me with bland incomprehension. I turned toward the men. “You understand?” I called to them, and each of them nodded, but they averted their eyes, calm and dispassionate, almost as if they had no personal interest in my affairs. “I don’t crave to be no bother,” the boy said in quiet embarrassment. “I just don’t covet working next to Hamp Hines none, is all.” “Good!” I said a bit too sharply. “I’ll fix that right now.” My voice betrayed my nervousness, but I turned stoutly to the men again. “All right, pay attention. We’re changing the lineup. Everybody who’s a Quick, over here on my left. All you Freidais, on my right. I’ll take the middle row between you all. You all keep your distance, you hear? I’m going to depend on you because I don’t have time to stand around figuring out which one of you is hoping for the chance to knock your neighbor in the head. You understand me?” Again the men inclined their heads, expressionless, then they lined up according to their own calculations, and we pushed out into the pine thicket again. The line held firm this time, and we forged ahead with swinging adzes and falling saplings. At the far end of the valley we turned again and assaulted the stand of young pines through the long sweating day with the sharp scent of turpentine in the hot air about us. IV
Three days passed before Carlos de Blieux showed up at the camp. Under the circumstances, he made good time. He had had to leave Natchitoches, ford the Red River at Grand Ecore, cross the bottom land plantation belt along gravelled roads, take a ferry across the lake this time of year, and find his way up into the hills of an obscure lumber camp only recently acquired by the Forest Service. At mid-day he strode, as much as his stature would permit, into the office and demanded Captain Bryant. “I am the deputy coroner for Natchitoches Parish,” he announced. “I am here to hold the inquest for Christopher Columbus Crittenden. My name is Doctor de Blieux.” “Any assistance the Forest Service can offer,” the captain said, smiling faintly. “First, Captain Brown …” “Bryant,” the captain corrected him, and then when the coroner looked up, annoyed, he added: “That’s Captain Bryant.” “Captain Brine,” de Blieux began, nodding his head in a jerking motion, as though it were too heavy for his small body. “The first thing I require is a jury, five good men and true, as they say. They must be capable of being sworn. That’s important, Captain, because we don’t want convicted felons or Holy Rollers or any of their ilk who won’t be sworn because of religious scruple. Just five good men who can swear to do their duty without fail or prejudice.” “I already have them lined up,” the captain said. He allowed the hint of a smile to flit across his wide pink face. De Blieux looked at the captain sharply, but he could detect no trace of contempt in the bigger man’s attitude. “Very good, Captain,” he said after a pause. “We can use your desk for a table, the bench?” The captain nodded his assent. “Then call your men, and let’s get started.” Captain Bryant swung his gaze toward me, and I left quietly to call the men. Outside, they waited, two of them squatting in the shadow of the office eaves and two more lounging slack and expectant beside the door. I motioned to them, and they marched into the office in single file. They uncovered and carefully smoothed their hair into place. They all wore a bemused air of protest draped over their faces like bee netting, pride concealed in the squint of their eyes. They stood about the desk behind the visitor’s rail and submitted quietly to the captain’s introduction. Olan Dees was there too because he had found the body, qualifying him as the lead witness, in fact the only witness. “He seen him first,” the captain explained to de Blieux, and the coroner nodded gravely. Olan’s cousin Anse Madox hovered nearby like an anxious broody hen. Removed from the pair by the captain’s wide bulk were three other men, Fate and Guantt Crumholt, brothers-in-law despite their surname inherited from an ancient common ancestor, and Jim Duplessie, a plump red-faced youth who wore a pompadour of blond hair above his forehead. De Blieux looked up as the captain finished speaking, and with exaggerated sarcasm he pointed a child-like forefinger at each of the men in turn, counting silently to himself. “I’m the fifth you’re after,” Captain Bryant said. “I’m here to break the tie.” “Now, let’s get down to business,” de Blieux said. “We’re here to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Mr. Christopher Columbus Crittenden. The circumstances, remember. It’s not a matter of assigning guilt; that we can safely leave to the discretion of the district court. How, when, and where he died, and by what agency? Those are the questions we are here to answer. Now, I’ll ask each of you to tell us any pertinent information you have gathered, then we’ll discuss the evidence and render a verdict. Understood?” The captain and the two pairs of men flanking him nodded gravely. “I don’t suppose any of these men can write well enough to act as scribe?” the coroner asked and was met with blank hooded faces. “I thought not. In that case I’ll keep the record. Let’s proceed. All of you raise your right hands.” Everyone in the room raised his hand, even the crewmen of the station, idle for the day, who had crept about the building and stood now peering into the open windows of the office. The coroner’s voice droned through the oath, and he heard a mumble of voices assenting. “Without objection, you’re sworn. Understand?” Everyone nodded again. “Now, suppose you tell the jury, Mr. Dees, just what you found on,” and de Blieux paused to consult the papers he had spread in a wide fan before him on the table, “the twenty-fourth day of August last.” Olan Dees told again in his shouting voice how he had found Lum Crittenden asleeping on the ridge trail under the fire tower and how he had reported it to the captain and went back with him to help carry the body home. “Poor old thing,” he finished. De Blieux’s gaze shifted to Anse Madox. “I don’t know nothing atall about it,” Madox said in a sort of high-pitched verbal terror. His eyes darted ceaselessly about the room. The coroner looked up sharply, annoyed, then he turned to Captain Bryant. The captain shrugged elaborately, then shifted his weight in his chair, telling about it, how he and the rest of us went up the trail and found Lum Crittenden peacefully laid out on the wire grass as if he were prepared for burial. The coroner listened in his impatient way, nodding his bulbous head. “Now, take Fate here,” the captain continued. “He seen Lum before he died.” The coroner paused, his hands stiff as a child’s mittens on the table before him. Finally, he turned to Fate Crumholt. The old man sat stolid as a toad frog in a straight chair he had dragged to the table with the toe of his cracked brogan. “You saw Mr. Crittenden? You spoke with him?” “I seen him at the Horse Pen bresh arbor Sunday a week,” Crumholt said evenly. “He holp me take in the tithe. When they all broke up he come out with Brother Bedgood, and I heard him tell the preacher he knew where the feller hangs his hat that knifed Lester Freidais in his cow lot . . .” “Freidais!” the coroner shouted, and he struggled to get his feet to the floor from the chair made for Captain Bryant to sit in each day. “Yes, sir! T’was Lester Freidais he spoke of.” De Blieux stared with watering eyes at the old man. He stood now behind the table, his head even lower than when he sat in the chair. His jowls puffed out like the head of a spreading adder. Then he turned accusing eyes on the captain. “He was a Quick,” Captain Bryant murmured. “Lum, he was a Quick.” The coroner had begun to sweat profusely now. “You’re sure? he asked. “You’re sure he was a Quick?” The captain looked to either side as if to ask the opinion of his fellow jurors, then he nodded, his face bland, expressionless. “Who’d you think he was?” he demanded. “He had to be one or the other.” De Blieux remained standing only briefly, then he climbed back into the captain’s chair. He found the stub of a cotton factor’s pencil somewhere deep in the folds of his coat and stretched his short arms above his head, shooting his cuffs, and prepared to write. The edge of the desk cut into his armpits, and his chin left an egg shaped smear on the polished wood. He wrote laboriously, panting for breath. Presently, he finished, and he climbed down from the chair and stood behind the table, deftly impressing the paper with a small pliers seal he took from a blue velvet bag in his coat pocket. He stood a moment longer peering over the edge of the table. Then he slapped his demure child’s hand on the table top and announced, “Coroner’s Jury is hereby discharged.” He turned then and goose-stepped resolutely out the door and into the blast of the afternoon sun. The screen door banged shut and almost immediately de Blieux’s car engine roared into life. No one spoke. The men sat and stood in disarray, their eyes still averted. Finally, the captain stirred. “I have a jug here some place,” he said, beginning to dig through a bureau behind the table. I slipped quietly into the kitchen for the glass tumblers, but when I got back a few moments later, he was already drinking from the crock jug, elbowing it into position above his face with his long crooked arm. He lowered the jug and extended it across the table to me. The others sat quietly, disinterested, their eyes averted. Then one by one they rose to drink from the jug. They left quietly, the screen door flapping behind them. V
A week or more passed before I had the chance to talk with the captain alone. We sat at the supper table, enjoying the aftertaste of our meal with ready-rolled cigarettes. “I don’t understand,” I said as evenly as I could, hoping not to betray my idle curiosity. “Did de Blieux say what the verdict was? I thought he was going to tell us what his decision was?” “He needn’t do that,” Captain Bryant said quietly. “Only one verdict he could make under the circumstances. We all knowed that. Only one verdict when you get right down to it.” “Well, I certainly didn’t know about it,” I argued. The captain turned his tired gaze on me, and behind his eyes the color began to change like clotting blood. From inside his coat he took a folded sheet of paper and handed it to me. "I got this day before yesterday,” he said. I took the paper and read the crabbed hand of Carlos de Blieux, MD, Deputy Coroner, Parish of Natchitoches, State of Louisiana: Inquest, Christopher Columbus Crittenden Filed August 27, 1926 VERDICT OF JURY An inquisitation, taken at Sweet Home, on the 27th day of August in the year of our Lord, 1926, before the Deputy Coroner of the Parish of Natchitoches, upon view of the body of Christopher Columbus Crittenden, there lying dead. The jurors whose names are hereunto subscribed, having been sworn to inquire on behalf of the State of Louisiana, when and by what means said Christopher Columbus Crittenden came to his death, upon their oath do say: That Christopher Columbus Crittenden came to his death on August 24th in the year of our Lord, 1926, at about 4 a.m. as a result of gun shot wounds in the back of his neck, and that the said Christopher Columbus Crittenden came by the said gun shot wounds by the agency of his own hands. In testimony whereof, the Deputy Coroner and Jurors of this inquest do hereunto subscribe their names and upon their oaths, severally and collectively, the day and year above written. C. de Blieux, Deputy Coroner Jason Bryant, Foreman Anse Madox Jim Duplessie Fate Crumholt Guantt Crumholt A true Record, September 12, 1926 Seal “Suicide?” I said. “How could anyone claim it was a suicide?” “Yes,” the captain said in a quiet voice. “Any man who knows the name of a man’s killer and tells it, even to a preacher, takes his life in his own hands. But any man who knows the number of times a man twists his whiskey, and goes about telling of it. Why, that man has just committed suicide.” “Which did Lum Crittenden do?” I asked. “Both!” the captain said sternly. “He done both.” |
|