You’re right, said Mrs. Tate behind him.
At her command four widows seized his ankles and dragged him through the dust and upended his legs and two widows above from the gallows floor lowered a noose and hauled him into the air with a pulley through the trapdoor until he was hanging upside down. A dozen or so ladies began to pelt him with rocks and hit him with sticks of firewood like a pinata while two others over at the store backed a team of oxen toward the machine gun.
The judge swore and threatened and cajoled and shat hot mud down his back and stammered and tried to bribe them. His sour undershirt fell over his face as rocks bounced off him. At the creak of the gunwagon he cried, What’s that noise I hear? Is it the sound of my own demise? Two ladies unhitched the oxen and led them to safety while several others mounted the buckboard and puzzled over the operation of the giant gun, handing its steam hose one to another with no idea of its function. Mrs. Tate was the one who discerned that the lock fit in the side slot. She stood on a peach box and used both hands to latch back the bolt and two fingers to squeeze the trigger which was easier than she’d thought.
The instant thunder brought screams from the ladies but removed the judge’s right arm at the elbow and splintered one of the gallows-posts. The judge began to shriek and wriggle as the dirt stained beneath him and the widows nodded to one another and drew broom straws to establish a fair order and took turns at the trigger disintegrating the judge as a haze of steam rose from the water jacket and they fanned it with their hands and the gun hammered like a locomotive boring through the last tunnel to hell. The widows fired and fired and fired and fired until the final cartridge hull clattered to a stop on the wagon floor and what was left of the judge resembled a steaming mass of afterbirth, blue and dripping. The silence of the world shocked them all.
6 THE ORPHANAGE
IN THE MEANTIME, THE CROW HUNTER’S HORSE SHE’D TAKEN HAD bucked Evavangeline and fallen itself and then risen in a spray of gravel and legs and with dirt on its rump fled wobbling and whinnying like a sissy-horse, taking all those saddle-bagged guns with it.
She rose and dusted her pants and tied a bandanna around her head and walked several miles, pausing in a field to snap a section of sugarcane from a stalk. She shucked it but it was dry as kindling, like chewing sawdust. She walked on as the day’s colors drained, coming upon a modest homestead, a mud cabin with a chimney composed of flat white stones and off to the side a rickety stick shelter with no pretensions of being a shed. In the pen alongside stood the same sissy-horse that had thrown her. She looked at it for a long time. It had that certain aloofness horses have. But beside it was a pony she noticed, black with a white star on its forehead.
Hey, she said to it.
Behind her there was a pump and a watering trough. An arbor with clusters of grapes which she stuffed in her mouth. All around was flat land here, with the woods miles behind her and sugarcane everywhere. The horizon east to west had grown murky with heat and overhead was the whitest sky she had ever seen. It was like the sun had exploded. The light running out.
She crossed the yard and half a dozen children surrounded her. They touched her clothes gently, as if she were an angel. They purred like kittens. They smelled like soap and blueberries. She felt her womb clench as if somebody had pulled shut the drawstrings of an empty sack. The children cooed at her. They seemed to float. Maybe this was how you got knocked up. She shut her eyes. They were rubbing her arms and legs and bottom though not lecherously, except perhaps for the oldest boy, who had a knife handle sticking out of his boot.
She woke in a dark room and sat up in bed wearing a clean nightshirt. She felt fresher than she could remember. Her hair wet. Her underarms burned, so she reached and felt them. Shaved. She felt her calves. Shaved too. She put her hand between her legs.
Least ye left me my thatch, she said.
Why was you dressed like a man?
The voice had come from the rocking chair beside the window. Now she could discern the woman’s outline —weak chin, big overbite—as it rocked. She understood that she’d been hearing the creak of the chair for hours. The sound had been her sleep.
Who you? Evavangeline asked.
An orphan keeper. Do you want to stay here? the woman asked. Our man’s lost. Gone. For days now. His horse come home so we think he’s dead.
I was escaping, Evavangeline said.
From who? Who from?
A evil man.
The woman stopped rocking. Can you tell me the particulars of him?
Evavangeline’s instinct urged her to lie, so she described not the veteran but, instead, the strange man she’d heard about from the dice-playing niggers on the river. They say he killed his momma when he was born. Say he bombed bridges in the War. They say he never sleeps and knows the devil by first name. Say he likes to drank the pee of young girls. They say he has white blood, nigger blood, Indian blood, all three. That he can see in the dark.
The woman left her rocking chair and came to sit beside the girl on the bed. You mean ole Smonk, she said. Minute there I thought you was gone describe me my own husbandman. He wasn’t a good man, not no more. Not since the weather got so contentious. Like the saying goes, if you seek him, check Hell first. But you can stay, we got room. She set her hands on the girl’s thighs, her thumbs nearing Evavangeline’s privates. She leaned in and feathered her lips against the hot skin of her throat.
You exhausted and wounded, the lady whispered. I done tended ye hurt places. I been feeding ye broth and tea. Come dawn you’ll feel like a brand new girl. Things always look better in the light of day. You can stay with us if ye want to. But sleep now, the woman said, thumbing Evavangeline’s magic pea better than any man, her voice like a fiddle bow pulled real slow over the gut.
But she couldn’t sleep, even after the dyke had left her in spasms and shut the door. She lay awake tingling, wondering if she was an orphan or not. The earliest thing she could remember in the days before Ned was the gypsy witch named Alice Hanover. Days she rarely let herself think of now. How she would watch the old witchwoman perform her black magic, pantomiming her spells into existence, into beings you could only see in the blackest pitch of night. Rising up out of the ground they would stamp whatever they had for feet and look about with their horrible innocence, their skin blacker than the night around them. When they moved it looked as if darkness were swallowing itself. The old woman would summon these things indiscriminately and for the highest bidder and let them loose on whom her employer told with money her only thought. Sometimes these summoned would execute their sentence upon the intended and then, instead of dishappening back underground, be taken by a wind and remain lost in the world. It happened more the older Alice Hanover got. They were glints now, the girl knew, half here, half someplace else, the shadow of a tree moving when the tree was not, the thing that bumps you in the dark.
Once, she’d gone with Alice Hanover to hex a whole family. Perhaps the witchwoman, who bragged she was a hundred-sixty years old, had sensed her own end drawing near and, despite her hatred of every other person, thought it necessary to bestow her knowledge on a student. Otherwise her spells would be gone forever, a language when its last speaker dies.
In the gal’s memory she and Alice Hanover were shreds of shadow sliding under that night’s halfmoon, figments creeping through the bright-blooming cotton to the edge of the homestead, the pair peering through a log fence so recently cut it still smelled green. The witch clucked her tongue and the dog fell dead on the porch. Evavangeline watched the old woman close her eyes and point her gnarled left trigger finger and begin to spin her right hand, palm cupped and suddenly full of water. In a clear quiet voice Alice Hanover spoke words Evavangeline had never heard uttered before nor since. They were——, ———, —and ——.
For a moment the night hushed, as if it had noticed them.
Then blades of grass began to whisper, cotton bolls nodding on their stems.
