Текст книги "A Land More Kind Than Home"

Автор книги: Wiley Cash

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Текущая страница: 16 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Jess Hall

T

WENTY

–T

HREE

WAKE UP, JESS,” SOMEBODY SAID. THEY HAD THEIR hand on my shoulder, and they shook me a little bit and tried to get me to open my eyes. I rolled away from them over to my other side and pulled the covers over my head and closed my eyes even tighter to keep out the light that came in the window.

“Wake up,” I heard Daddy’s voice saying. “You’re already late for school. Wake up.” He put his hand on my back and pushed on me and I bounced a little on the bed, and then he pulled the covers down and the sun came in the window and hit me right in the eyes.

“I’m awake,” I said, but I knew he didn’t believe me because I still had my eyes closed.

“You ain’t going to have time to eat nothing,” he said. “We’ve got to leave right now.”

“All right,” I told him, but I still had my eyes closed. I heard him go back down the hall to his bedroom. I kept my eyes shut just as tight as I could. Before I knew it I was falling asleep again.

“Get up, Jess!” he hollered from his room, but I’d pulled the covers up over my head again and I was just about asleep by the time I even heard what he was saying in there. It didn’t seem right having Daddy come in there to wake me up, and it made me wish that Mama was there to do it. It made me wish that Stump was there too so he could get up before me and go to the bathroom first so I could keep my eyes closed just a little while longer. I laid there and thought about that, and before I knew it I was falling off to sleep again.

I heard a car coming down the driveway from way up on the road, and I could hear the sound of the gravel crunching under the tires and kicking up and bouncing off the fenders.

I heard my daddy’s bare feet walking down the hall to the front room, and I was afraid he was going to come in there and yank me up out of the bed, but I heard him open the screen door instead. It slammed shut behind him, and the sound woke me up and I opened my eyes and looked around at all that darkness under the covers. I listened for my daddy to come back inside and wake me up, and when he opened the screen door I heard his voice inside the house, but it sounded like he was far away from where I was laying in bed with those covers pulled up over my head. “Goddamn,” he said as he ran past my bedroom on his way back to his and Mama’s room. “Stay in the bed, Jess!” he hollered. “Goddamn,” he said again.

I laid there under the covers and listened for him to say something else, but he didn’t say nothing. I could hear him in the back bedroom. He was in there opening and slamming the drawers on his dresser like he was tearing them apart looking for something.

“Who’s here?” I hollered from under my sheets.

“Stay right there,” he said.

I heard him pass by in the hallway again, and it sounded like he was dropping things and they were rolling down the hallway toward the kitchen. I lifted the covers off my head and laid there and looked up at the ceiling and listened, and then I heard him push open the screen door and run down the steps into the yard. The door slammed shut behind him. I could hear him yelling something out there, and I could hear somebody yelling back. Then I heard a gunshot.

I tore the covers off me and sat up in the bed, but I didn’t hear nothing else, and I wondered if I’d heard all those things in a dream.

“Daddy!” I screamed. I waited for him to say something.

It was quiet outside, and I sat there wide awake and listened. My heart thumped against my chest, and I could hear it beating in my ears too. Then I heard another shot.

I jumped up out of the bed in my jockeys and ran out to the hall, but I stepped on something and it rolled under my foot and I fell and landed on my back and hit my head on the floor. I looked over and saw the shells for my daddy’s shotgun rolling all over the hallway.

I got up and ran to the screen door and pushed it open, and when I did I heard another gunshot, and I saw my daddy fall on the ground in front of somebody’s old car. The sheriff stood by his police car with his gun out in front of him, and my daddy just laid there in the gravel. Blood squirted up out of his neck and sprayed all over the hood of the car and turned it red. The sheriff saw me and hollered something, but I was screaming too loud to hear what he said. He put his gun in his holster and came out from behind his door and ran up the driveway through the gravel. He stopped on the other side of that old car where somebody was sitting on the ground inside the open door. He bent down and said something to them, and then he ran up the porch steps to where I stood. He wrapped his arms around me like he was hugging me, but I didn’t want him to because I knew he’d shot my daddy. I fought with him, but he held me even tighter and I couldn’t get him to let me go. My jockeys were wet, and I knew I’d peed myself.

“Hold on, son,” the sheriff said. “Just hold on, now. Let’s go back inside.”

“Daddy!” I hollered.

“Hold on,” he said again.

“Why’d you shoot my dad!”

“Let’s just go back inside.” I heard sirens coming toward the house from up the road, and I fought with him again, but he still wouldn’t let me go. Somebody out there in the driveway was screaming, and I thought it sounded just like Mama.

Clem Barefield

T

WENTY

–F

OUR

BY THE TIME I ROUNDED THE CORNER ON MY WAY UP TO Ben’s house, I saw that he’d already come down the porch steps and taken a stand at the top of the driveway in front of Chambliss’s old car, the same one I’d seen him working on out in his barn the day before. Ben had on an old white T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, and he’d raised his double-barrel shotgun eye level and had it pointed at Chambliss’s driver’s-side windshield. He stood there frozen stiff, like he could stay that way forever, and I blasted my siren once to get his attention. He raised his head just enough to look over the roof of Chambliss’s car, and he watched me roll slowly up the driveway toward him.

My siren must have gotten Chambliss’s attention too, because his red taillights went white when he put his old car in reverse, and I heard his tires crunch on the gravel when he began to back away from Ben and down the driveway toward me. He put his arm across Julie’s seat and turned around and looked at me through his back window. It struck me as strange then, and it’s even more troubling to think about now, but he smiled at me. It was almost like he was proud to be playing the good guy all of a sudden—somebody who I’d come out to protect now that Ben Hall had finally made him the victim.

And then all that blood on the windows. It seems like I saw it happen before I even heard it. Chambliss’s face was there on the other side of the window, his eyes narrowed like he was concentrating on staying in the gravel and not veering into the wet grass. And then I couldn’t see his face at all, and I realized I couldn’t see through that glass window either. By the time my ears had registered the shot I knew I was looking at bits of Chambliss’s brain and skull where they’d been blown up on the back window from the force of the blast. His car kept on rolling back toward me though, faster and faster, until I put mine in park and braced myself for the impact. His car slammed into mine and rolled up over my bumper and into my grille, and when it did Chambliss’s trunk flew open and I saw where he’d packed a half-dozen of those little wooden crates I’d seen inside his barn. A couple of them tumbled out onto my hood, and I looked at them through the smoke that poured out of my radiator. Then I heard another shot blow out what was left of Chambliss’s front windshield, but with his trunk open and the steam gushing from under my hood I couldn’t see a thing.

I opened my door and used it for cover, and I stepped out onto the gravel and drew my sidearm and pointed it at Ben. He’d walked down the driveway following Chambliss’s car as it rolled backward, and now he was standing right in front of its bumper. When he saw me draw and take a position behind my door, he pointed his gun at me. I wondered if he’d had time to reload, but I knew better than to assume that he hadn’t.

“You need to drop that gun, Ben,” I said. He looked at me like he didn’t know who I was for a minute, and then his eyes registered some kind of recognition and he held them on me. “This thing’s over,” I told him. “Put it down and let’s go inside and talk about this. Ain’t nothing else for us to do. You know that.”

It was quiet, and the two of us just stood there staring at each other. Suddenly the passenger-side door of Chambliss’s car creaked open and I heard Julie tumble out into the driveway. I couldn’t see her, but I could hear her breathing heavy in short, quick breaths, and I listened as she crawled slowly through the gravel like she was trying to get away. Ben waited until she’d gotten out from behind the open door, and then he took that shotgun off me and pointed it at her.

“Don’t do that, Ben!” I hollered. “Look at me! Turn that back on me!” I could hear Julie sobbing over there on the far side of the car, and I could hear her struggling to get away from him. “It ain’t going to be worth it,” I said. “I know it won’t. You know it too.”

“No, I don’t,” Ben said, and when he said that he turned his head and looked at me with a face I’d never seen on him before, and I can say that it was the only time in that boy’s life that I’d ever seen his daddy in him. He kept his eyes on me, but he called out to Julie.

“What about you, baby?” he said. “Was it worth it for you? What you did in our bed, what you did in that church; was it worth it?” He turned and looked down at her. “You’re always telling me that I need to get back into the Bible, and so I got it out and looked all through the New Testament, Julie, and I found a verse for you. In the book of Matthew, Jesus said not to kill, not to commit adultery. He also said, ‘You shall not steal.’ But my favorite is ‘You shall not bear false witness.’” His body braced like he was thinking about firing on her. “I reckon that part of Matthew probably wasn’t ever read out loud in your church. If it was, maybe y’all chose not to hear it. But I wanted you to hear it. I wanted to tell it to you.”

A noise came from inside the house, and out of the corner of my eye I saw the screen door fly open and Jess run out onto the porch. Before I could yell at him to get back inside, the screen door banged shut and Ben spun around toward Jess with his gun still raised. I reacted without even thinking about it and fired once and caught Ben in the right side of his throat. He dropped the gun and fell backward onto the gravel. I heard Jess screaming from up there on the porch, and I knew that he’d seen it.

“Hold on now, Jess,” I hollered at him. “You stay up there. You wait for me. Just hold on.” He kept on screaming out words I couldn’t understand, and then he folded his arms around his belly and hunkered down on the porch.

I kept my gun drawn and pointed it at the front of Chambliss’s car, and I crept around the driver’s side until I saw Ben laying there. His eyes were wide open, and his chest was heaving. He breathed heavily through his mouth, and I could hear a gurgling sound coming from his throat where he’d been shot. Blood had begun to soak the gravel around his right shoulder. I holstered my pistol and picked up the shotgun and broke it open. Both barrels were empty. I looked down at Ben. “Goddamn it,” I said. “Goddamn it, Ben.” He looked up into the sky and blinked like the sun was in his eyes. I sat the shotgun on the hood of the car and stepped around to the passenger’s side.

Julie was lying on her belly halfway into the grass like she’d crawled as far as she could, and when she saw me she screamed and backpedaled to the gravel and threw her back up against the side of Chambliss’s car. When she raised her left hand to protect herself from me, I saw that it had almost been blown clean off from where she must’ve tried to cover her face and duck when Ben shot at her through the windshield. Her cheeks and forehead were peppered with shot. I holstered my gun and bent down to her. When I tried to touch her shoulder, she drew away from me. I heard a siren coming down the road from the highway, and I remembered that I’d called Robby for backup before I left the house.

“It’s okay,” I told her. “It’s all over now. You’re going to be all right.” Her eyes were wild and terrified, and she wouldn’t look directly at me. I reached out slowly and took hold of her left forearm. Some of her fingers were missing. “You just keep this raised,” I said. I propped her elbow on her bent knee. “Keep that up, just like it is. I’m going to go inside the house and call the ambulance.” Robby pulled into the driveway and stopped his car behind mine. I stood up to make sure he’d see me. He got out and left his door open and ran up through the grass, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Julie sitting against the car. He looked inside where Chambliss’s body was laid out across the front seat.

“What the hell happened?” he asked. He drew his pistol.

“Put that away,” I told him. I pointed down to Julie. “You need to stay right here with her,” I said. “Make sure she keeps that arm up just like it is. I’m going in to call the ambulance. You stay with her.” He knelt down beside Julie. Her chest heaved, and she started crying.

I looked over the hood of Chambliss’s car where Ben lay in front of the bumper. I couldn’t hear him choking anymore. He’d rolled his head back and to the right like he was trying to get a look at the house behind him where Jess was still hunkered down on the porch. His eyes were open wide and fixed on whatever it was he’d been trying to see.

“The ambulance is going to be here soon, Ben,” I said, but as soon as I said it I knew it wasn’t going to make any difference for him.

I looked toward the house when I heard Jess’s feet coming down the porch steps. I didn’t want him finding his mother all shot up too, so I ran up the driveway and caught him before he got all the way out into the yard. I picked him up and carried him back up the steps, and he kicked his legs and threw his arms around like he was trying to fight me. Something warm came through the front of my shirt, and I knew that he’d wet himself and it had soaked through his underwear.

“You shot my dad!” he hollered. “Daddy!” He called out for his mother too, but she was crying and didn’t answer, and I wondered if she could even hear him.

“Come on, now,” I said. “Let’s go on back inside the house. The doctors will be here soon and they’re going to fix everybody up. It’s going to be all right.”

“You shot my daddy!” he said. “I saw you!” I could feel his whole body shaking like each sob was the last and hardest he might have inside him. I held him and tried to keep his head against my chest so he wouldn’t be able to look over my shoulder and see out into the yard. Once we got inside the house, I sat him down on the sofa and pulled the curtains closed behind him and shut the front door.

“Just sit right here,” I told him. He was still crying, and his whole body shivered. He pulled his feet up to his chest and wrapped his arms around his legs. “Sit right here and wait one second,” I said. “I’m going to make a phone call and have the doctors here real soon. It’s going to be all right.” I stepped back away from him and looked around the front room for a phone, but I didn’t see one. I looked back at Jess. “Where’s your telephone?” He just stared up at me without saying anything, so I kept my eyes on him and kept backing away toward the kitchen. I peered in the doorway and saw a telephone hanging on the wall right inside.

I took the phone off the cradle and held it to my ear, and when I went to slip my finger into the rotary I realized how bad my hands were shaking. I dialed 911 and stretched out the telephone cord and walked as far back into the front room as it would let me. Jess was still sitting on the sofa. He had his chin resting on his knees, and his eyes were closed. When the operator came on, I identified myself and told her that we needed a couple of ambulances immediately, and, just before I was about to hang up, I looked at Jess and thought about how his mama was sitting right out there in the driveway near the husband who’d just tried to murder her, and I made a decision that surprised me more than just about anything that had happened that morning.

“Wait,” I said to the operator. “While I got you on the line, can you put me through to James Hall, over in Shelton?” I listened while the number was dialed, and then I heard a soft click before it began to ring. It must’ve rung six or seven times before he picked up. I looked down at my boots and held the phone to my ear and listened as he fumbled with the phone on his end. The clock on the table by the front door said it was 8:33 in the morning.

“Yeah?” he said. I could hear him breathing heavy into the phone, and I imagined him on the other end, his eyes closed, hoping that I’d dialed the wrong number and wouldn’t be bothering him again once I’d figured it out. “Hello,” he said. He sounded like he’d either just woken up or maybe hadn’t even been to sleep yet, and I couldn’t help but wonder if he was hung over.

“Jimmy,” I said, whispering, keeping my voice as low as I could so Jess wouldn’t hear me. “It’s Clem Barefield.”

“Who?” I left the front room and walked all the way into the kitchen. I leaned against the counter and closed my eyes.

“It’s Clem Barefield,” I said again.

“What do you want?” he asked. I opened my eyes and looked around the kitchen and tried to think of what to tell him about what had happened.

“I’m over at Ben’s,” I said. “And Jess is here with me.” I paused because I figured he’d want to ask me some kind of question, but he didn’t say anything, even though I imagined that his eyes were open and he was wide awake now. “We had a little trouble over here this morning, and I just thought you should come down here and be with Jess. He needs somebody to be here with him right now, and I just didn’t know who else to call.”

“What’s happened?” he asked. His voice was clear and sharp, and I sensed something in it that hadn’t been there before—panic maybe, or fear, or both. “Why are you out there?”

“There was just some trouble,” I said. “We can talk about all that when you get here.”

“Let me talk to Ben,” he said.

“I can’t let you do that right now, Jimmy,” I said. “Just get here as soon as you can. Jess needs you here.” I could hear him moving on the other end of the line, and I thought I heard him stumble. Then the sound of something falling to the floor. He whispered something to himself under his breath.

“Jimmy,” I whispered. “Are you okay to drive? I mean, you haven’t been drinking?” The line grew quiet, and I could tell that he’d stopped moving and was standing still. I could just barely hear him breathing.

“I’m going to pretend you didn’t ask me that,” he said. He hung up. I held the receiver to my ear until I heard the dial tone kick in, and then I turned and sat the phone back in its cradle. I understood that I’d just made the kind of phone call to Jimmy Hall that he’d never considered making to me, but that didn’t make me feel one bit better about making it, and for a minute I thought he might’ve had the right idea about trying his hardest to disappear all those years ago. I walked back into the front room and saw that Jess had his eyes open and was staring at me.

“Did you call my grandpa?”

“I did,” I said. “He’ll be here real soon.” I looked around the room and considered whether I should stand and wait or if I should sit with Jess or maybe even go back outside and get one of the paramedics to come into the house and sit with him once they arrived. Jess lay back against the sofa and folded his arms across his chest. He closed his eyes, and then he opened them slowly. They were full of tears.

“Did you call my grandpa because my daddy’s going to die?” I shook my head no and walked across the room toward him.

I thought about how I’d stared into that shotgun’s empty barrels just a few minutes before, and even though my hands were empty too I felt the heft of my pistol and the kick it gave when I fired. In my head, I heard myself say, I wish I could’ve done it all different, Jeff, but by the time I kneeled on the floor in front of him I’d caught myself. “Jess,” I said aloud. “Jess.”

THE AMBULANCES HAD KILLED THEIR SIRENS ONCE THEY’D PULLED up into the yard, and if somebody hadn’t known everything that had taken place out in the driveway that morning they would’ve thought me and Jess were just two strangers sitting together on the sofa and waiting for something to happen. I’d covered him with a blanket and gotten him a glass of water from the kitchen and some toilet paper from the bathroom, and I’d sat both on the coffee table in front of him, but he hadn’t touched either one. We’d hardly spoken since I sat down.

It was so quiet that you could almost make out the voices of the paramedics outside, and occasionally I’d hear Robby say something, but I couldn’t quite understand it. But I could just barely hear the sound of another car coming up the driveway from the road, and I listened close as it stopped and somebody opened and closed its door. I knew it was Jimmy Hall, and I stood up from the couch and walked to one of the windows that looked out onto the driveway.

Chambliss’s car sat facing the house. The doors on both sides were open, and I figured the paramedics had covered Chambliss’s body by now. I could see that they’d covered Ben too where he was laying out in the gravel by the front left bumper. They’d lined up two ambulances on the passenger’s side of Chambliss’s car, and I watched a couple of paramedics strap Julie onto a gurney and lift her into the open doors of the ambulance closest to the house. Robby stood by her, and I could tell that he was talking to her, but I wondered just how much she was able to hear.

Jimmy Hall must’ve parked his truck in front of the ambulances at the bottom of the driveway. I watched him as he made his way up through the yard past them. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his gray hair was matted down with sleep. He stopped for a minute and watched them lift Julie up into the back of the ambulance, and then he turned and stared at Chambliss’s car: the busted windshield, the blood-covered seats, the back window red with the same. When Hall walked past him, Robby turned like he was about to stop him from going any farther, but his eyes caught mine where I stood in the window. I raised my hand and motioned for him to hold off. Robby looked away from me and watched Jimmy as he walked along the side of Chambliss’s car toward the front bumper. He came around the bumper and stopped when he saw the blue sheet that covered Ben. Robby looked up at me again, and then he looked back at Jimmy Hall. He hadn’t moved yet, and Robby just turned and walked toward the cab of the ambulance that would carry Julie to the hospital.

I watched Jimmy Hall as he walked toward that blue sheet, and I watched as he kneeled down beside it. I wanted to open the front door and holler at him, let him know that he shouldn’t do it, not because I was afraid that he’d damage the crime scene or contaminate the evidence but because I knew that he might not be ready, might not ever be ready, for what he’d see under there. But I also knew that fathers want to see what’s become of their sons, and sometimes they can’t forgive themselves if they don’t. He reached out his hand and touched the sheet, but I turned away before I saw him lift it. I figured I at least owed them both the respect of that one last private moment.

Jess had opened his eyes again and was sitting on the edge of the sofa. “What’s going on outside?” he asked.

“Your grandpa’s here,” I said. I stepped away from the front door and stood in the center of the room and waited. Jess looked over at me, and then he turned and looked at the door too. We could hear Jimmy Hall coming up the porch steps and then the sound of the screen door creaking as he pulled it toward him. He opened the front door and stepped inside the house. We stood staring at each other for a second, and then he looked over at Jess.

“Hey, buddy,” he said. I heard Jess shift his weight on the sofa, and then he sniffed like he was about to cry. He stood up, and Jimmy walked across the room toward him.

“Wait,” I said. I stepped in between him and Jess, and I looked down at the fingers on Jimmy’s right hand. They looked like somebody had taken his prints by dipping his fingertips in blood. He looked down at them too, and he turned his hand over and looked into his palm like he expected to be holding something that wasn’t there. I leaned toward him and tried to whisper, even though I couldn’t say it quiet enough to keep Jess from hearing me. “You need to wash that off your hands, Jimmy,” I said. “You can’t let him see that.” I looked at him and nodded my head toward the kitchen. He looked down at Jess, and he tried to smile.

“I’ll be right back, buddy,” he said. I heard his footsteps follow me out of the front room. I walked into the kitchen and ran the water in the sink. Jimmy came up beside me and put his hands under the tap. He still hadn’t said a word to me yet; he’d hardly even looked at me.

“Jimmy,” I said, “I can’t begin to tell you about what all happened out there this morning; I don’t know how to make sense of it myself. But I know that boy is going to need you right now. He ain’t going to have nobody else for a long time. It looks to me like his mama’s going to be all right, but right now it’s just you.” Jimmy picked up a yellow bar of soap from where it sat on the lip of the metal sink. He spoke without looking at me.

“Did you shoot him?” he asked. I sighed loud enough for him to hear me, and I looked away from him and through the window where I could see out into the fields that ran alongside the house. Ben’s burley had been cut and staked, and it sat out there in the fields waiting for somebody to haul it in. I knew it’d be ruined if it sat out there for too much longer. I looked back at Jimmy. He’d turned the water off and was drying his hands on a dish towel. “Did you?” he asked. He folded the dish towel neatly and dropped it by the sink.

“I did,” I said. “But I can promise you I tried not to, Jimmy. I would’ve moved heaven and earth to keep from doing it. I wish it wouldn’t have ended this way.” He raised his head and stood there staring out the window toward Ben’s fields.

“Me too,” he said. He turned and walked back into the front room. I followed him, but we both stopped when we saw that Jess had left his seat on the sofa in the corner of the room and opened the front door without us hearing him. He stood in front of it now with his back to us looking through the screen door. We could all see that the paramedics had strapped Ben’s body onto a gurney that was being loaded into the last ambulance. Although the blue sheet still covered Ben’s body, his bare white feet stuck out from under it.

Jimmy put his hand on Jess’s shoulder and turned him away from the door, and then he closed it softly, its hinges barely making a sound as it shut. He put his arms around Jess and pulled him toward him. Jess’s shoulders heaved, and although I couldn’t see his face, I figured he was crying. I heard the ambulance’s engine crank outside in the driveway, and then I listened as it rolled down through the gravel toward the road.

I thought about how I’d meant what I’d said to Jimmy, that I wished it all could’ve been different. I stood there and watched the two of them hold on to each other, and I found myself praying that maybe this time it would be.