CHAPTER 10
THE FEUD
In the hurricane season of late summer, the heat and humidity were something to fear. Even at midday, mosquitoes hung outside the screens on a miasmal air so moist and sweet that it might have come on a south wind out of the tropics.
That summer we had a young Mikasuki squaw who’d been thrown out by her band for consorting with the moonshiner Ed Brewer. She was not exclusively for his own use, it seems, because he snuck in to the Bend one day, tried to rent her to our coloreds. Sip Linsey was a pious darkie of the old-time religion and Frank Reese was still pining for Jane Straughter, so those two boys had little use for a beat-up aboriginal with advanced alcohol and hygienic problems.
When Hannah got wind of what was going on, she grabbed Brewer by one arm and swung him off the dock into the current. “Flung that sumbitch clean off the Bend!” Green boasted. “Cut his boat loose, too, while she was at it. Never so much as ast if he could swim!” And Hannah said, “Well, that is correct, I never give enough thought to his future. If that croc got to him, he might not of had one.” But Green had seen him grab hold of his skiff, and probably he’d dragged himself ashore farther downriver.
Hannah gave that wild girl a good wash and named her Susie. She taught her a few chores to pay her feed, along with as much Baptist instruction as a redskin knowing nothing of our tongue might get a handle on. But seeing her slip into the outhouse must have set Cox thinking about certain details of what was taking place behind that door because he was awaiting her when she came out. The way he told it at the table-he thought it was pretty comical-he grasped her wrists in one hand and with the other yanked up her old rag of a shift. Held her squirming up against him until the mosquitoes swarming her bare bottom made her weep, and pretty soon she gave up and lay down for him. “Couldn’t resist me,” Leslie said. Hannah said, “She ain’t nothin but a child and you ain’t nothin but a raper. Hang your head in shame.”
That afternoon Earl Harden showed up in his new launch. Never hailed the house, just dropped someone off quick without tying up. By the time I reached the porch, he was back out in mid-river idling his motor, greedy to see what might take place when E. J. Watson realized who that stranger was. Ever since he went to Key West to accuse me in that Tucker business, Earl would only look me in the eye when he could not avoid it, then smile so hard that when he turned, the smile got left behind. I honestly believe that if that feller hadn’t been so scared of me, he would have waylaid me and shot me in the back.
Earl was jolly as could be with white men, he worked hard at it, but teasing him about his bad attitude toward Henry Short was putting raw salt on a leech. I liked to tease him: he had niggers on the brain. I used that word, too, of course, used it casually like most men, Henry Short included. But men who hated blacks like Earl twisted a sneer into it, a stink, the way a cat twists out its crap, leaving that nasty little point at the back end.
Awaiting me, the figure on the dock stood still, arms folded on his chest. His silhouette was black against the river shine but I knew him at once. Those big gun butts jutted upward from his hips like horns.
Waller came to the door behind me, napkin tucked into his collar. “Jesus,” he whispered. Hannah, huffing up behind, stared from one face to another for a clue. In the kitchen, Frank rose from his beans and went out the back door and came around to the corner of the house, then stepped back quick, out of the line of fire. Still watching the front, the figure on the dock raised one hand toward the black man in a kind of greeting.
I knew much better than to draw my gun. I worked it up out of its shoulder holster, let it slide down into my coat sleeve, having practiced that trick often enough to know how to do it undetected.
“Drop it,” he said. This pistolero had drawn on me so quick that I had no choice. At the dangerous clatter of a loaded weapon on the pinewood porch, everyone jumped.
Dutchy was grinning and I grinned right back, lest he imagine I was paralyzed by those big guns of his. And there and then, out of bone craziness or love of life, he flipped both six-guns and sprang into the air in a backwards somersault, landing in time to catch his weapons neatly on the spin, all set to shoot. One barrel was pointed at my heart, the other covered the dropped revolver on the porch in case it had occurred to me to grab it up, which it had not.
Laughing, he dropped his guns loosely in their holsters and came forward. The others backed and filled like cattle in the doorway. Retrieving my weapon, he dumped the cartridges into his pocket, tossed it back to me. “Damn if it don’t feel dandy to be back. Home is where the heart is, that right, Frank?”
Reese had been grinning right along, Green Waller, too. These fools were tickled to death to see this swarthy little criminal who had cost us so much wasted work and a year’s pay, and they caught their fool Boss, who had sworn to take his life, kind of smiling, too.
“Glad to see me, Mister Ed? Aim to invite me in?”
“There’s no free food for gunslingers around here,” I barked. “You aim to stay, you better change those fancy duds, start working off that thousand gallons of good syrup you still owe us.”
“Same ol’ Mister Ed! Talkin rough to a sensitive young feller that might take a mind to spoil another thousand.” Still grinning, he ambled over to the bunkhouse, hunted up his old coveralls. He put them on over his holster belt and reappeared, delighted.
Dutchy gave me all that time to get the drop on him. I didn’t do it, and a good thing, too. He’d put away one of his guns, but the other, although hidden, was rigged butt forward on his left side, ready to be drawn by his right hand, as I knew from the fact that his left gallus hung loose and the left flap of his coveralls, too. This boy knew I knew and grinned. “Same ol’ Mister Ed!” said Dutchy Melville.
“There’s a law against concealed weapons in this country,” I reminded him. “Might have to make a citizen’s arrest.”
“Well, I
“That’s the foreman, finishing his dinner.” Hannah Smith was awed by his keen hearing.
Lifting his hat, Dutchy greeted Hannah with a dandy bow-the first she had ever received without a doubt. Next, he saluted her hog reiver-“How do, Mr. Waller!” Green waved and smiled, nudging his woman, proud to be singled out by name. “And Frank, too!” That hard man raised both hands high and shook them in a single fist like that black champion Jack Johnson, who had whipped America’s “Great White Hope” back in July.
Standing there on his bandy legs in the hot sun of September, young Dutchy was set for anything that came his way. “Ol’ place lookin kind of run down, Mister Ed. But I reckon it’s as close to a good home as a poor outlaw boy could hope for so I sure am grateful for your hospitality.”
“You abused my hospitality. Don’t forget that because I won’t.” I had sworn a solemn oath this boy would die the next time he crossed my path, yet it seemed a great waste in a time of labor shortage to kill a man so full of ginger.
“Mister Ed, I won’t forget it and I don’t regret it cause you had it comin,” he answered cheerfully. “So I’ll just take my old job back as the foreman.”
I was dumbfounded. To feel so confident he would be welcomed! And in a way, of course, he was quite right; he had slipped past my guard. Maybe he knew that too much time had passed, that I had no real heart for revenge.
All this while, my foreman kept on with his eating, to demonstrate indifference to the visitor. When we came in, he looked up, sullen, interrupted in his chewing, and from the start, disdaining the other, he spoke only to me. Threatened by Melville’s dangerous glee, he instinctively disliked and feared him, while Melville understood in that same instant why the foreman had stayed inside. Each shifted his gaze slightly to one side, as dogs do, to avoid a tangle before everything was ready-before, that is, one had the other dead to rights.
Both dogs ignored my introduction, as if their acquaintance would be too short-lived to waste breath on civilities. In fact, Leslie belched when told the other’s name. “Ain’t this the little piece of shit that messed up all that
