gauge. I had the box of shells for it with me, and I sat down on the floor and laid the shotgun across my legs and set the box of shells nearby.
“Surely,” Mama said, “he’s given up by now.”
“He don’t give up,” the old woman said. “He might take a break, get bored, or decide to go off and look at something he ain’t seen for a day or two, but he’ll come back.”
“You’re just going on old stories,” I said.
She shook her head. She licked her lips, said, “I heard tell my mama and daddy knew Skunk’s mama. That after the slaves was freed, she used to work for our family, doing laundry and stuff, cooking. She lived in a shack on the back end of her former master’s property, Eval Turpin. The master was long dead, but his grandson, Justin, lived there without no living kin. But them that had been slaves he let live on the farm, let their children and their children’s children live there, too. He didn’t hire them or pay them nothing, cause he didn’t have nothing himself. Like my family, when cotton wasn’t king no more, his family went broke, and stayed that way.
“One of the women living there was named Mary, and she got with baby by a half-Comanche nigger, and had a child. She called him Absalom. He wasn’t never right, would stir the ground with a stick, killing ants, just grinning. That’s what Daddy said. Said he talked all the time, but a lot of it was nonsense. He was even suspected of killing one of Daddy’s prize coonhounds by feeding it meat with broken glass in it. Daddy said he never knew for sure, but suspected it. Said that old dog was just as good a dog as there was, and followed Absalom around like he was the boy’s pet, and then the boy did that to him. Probably just to see him suffer.
“When Absalom was little, his daddy, the half-breed, got tired of hearing his babble, and held him down and pulled out his tongue with a pair of pliers, and run off, and wasn’t never seen again. Wasn’t but a few years later, when the boy was ten or so, his mama got scared of him. Said she’d wake up at night and he’d be standing over her, just looking down at her the way he looked at those ants. One morning she gathered him up and took him out in a boat. It was the boy’s birthday, and she later said she thought that was about the right time to do it. She told him they was going fishing, but what she did was she shoved him out of the boat, and pushed him in the water, leaned out of the boat and held him under.
“My daddy said she done it and didn’t feel bad about it, because she thought there was something in that child that was wrong, and that she was doing what she ought to do. What God would have wanted her to do. She said she could see that boy’s eyes looking up at her from beneath the water, looking up through the cracks of her fingers as she held him down. She said his eyes was cold as marbles. He didn’t drown, though. She took a boat paddle to him and hit him some licks with it, and he floated off. She thought he was dead. But he ended up on shore, and he lived. Stayed out in the woods like a wild animal. He lived in such a wild way he got a stink about him, and that’s how he come to be called Skunk.”
“I done told them this story,” Jinx said.
“Well, then,” the old woman said, “if you told it like I told it, then you told it true.”
“The pliers part was new,” Jinx said.
“That’s the little detail that matters,” said the old woman.
“You didn’t mention about how he lives in places where he hangs up bones and such, and they rattle in the wind.”
“I ain’t never heard that part,” said the old woman.
“You didn’t tell nothing but a story most everyone tells,” Jinx said. “I don’t believe your daddy knew Skunk or his mama. I think you’re just yarning.”
“I’m telling it like it was told to me,” she said. “From white men, reliable and truthful.”
“Ha,” Jinx said.
“Now, here’s some more details,” said the old woman. “After Skunk was grown, after everyone thought he was dead and rotted away in the woods, he come back. He was a young man by then, and somehow he had survived. Daddy said one morning Justin Turpin went down to Mary’s shack cause he was starting to take up with her in secret, but when he got there she was skinned and nailed to the side of the shack like a deer hide. She was just a head and a skin, and he had put a boat paddle between her teeth. He hadn’t never forgot, and that’s how everyone knew who it was. What had been inside her was outside of her, piled up on a chopping block in the yard, and it was still warm. Turpin had missed Skunk by just a few minutes. Her hands was gone. Chopped off. They say he does that now all the time, when he kills someone, on account of his mama’s hands holding him under that water, and him trying to come up, and those hands holding him down. I can’t vouch that’s the reason, but that’s how folks guess at it. He don’t like the thought of hands because a pair almost drowned him.
“Anyway, in time he got to be known about, and it got known, too, that he was a tracker and a killer if you paid him with the things he wanted. I thought by now he might really be dead, but if you’re telling your story true, I reckon he ain’t.”
“No,” I said. “He ain’t. But we haven’t seen him in days.”
“He’s like the heat, wind, rain, and the earth,” the old woman said. “Days to him ain’t nothing. He ain’t one for time. He does what he does cause he’s been asked, and he’s getting something out of it. Shoes, or food, or hats and such. Or at least that’s his reasons if you look at the surface of the thing, but you scratch them reasons a little, it’s got more to do with him doing it because he likes it. He got him a taste of killing, and for him, it was sweet. Once he sets out on the job, he’s going to finish it, come hell or high water, even if he takes his time about it. And now you done brought this stone killer to my door.”
“Thought you wanted company,” Jinx said.
The old woman shook her head. “I figure it don’t matter. The hand of fate is already laid upon me. I’m going to die soon.”
“You old fool,” Jinx said. “You’re near three hundred years old. Of course you’re going to die soon, and should have been dead already.”
“Let’s be quiet before we wake Terry up,” Mama said. “Let’s let him rest.”
23
It was early morning, the sun leaking light through the edges of the shutters like river water, but that wasn’t what brought me awake. It was the screaming.
I sprung to my feet, holding the shotgun. The screaming was coming from the bedroom. The door was still open and I could see Terry, awake and aware now. Feeling pain and knowing he had lost an arm and hadn’t had a say in the matter. He was sitting up, trying to throw a foot out of bed.
Jinx was on the bed with him, holding him back by his good arm. But he was showing some serious strength for a worn-out, one-armed fella.
Me and Mama rushed in there, tried to comfort him, but it wasn’t no use. He went on like that, screaming and yelling about his arm, struggling. It took all three of us to pin him to the mattress. Finally he was just so weak from all that had gone on, he fell back on the bed unconscious.
The three of us was shaken bad. We made sure he was all right, not bleeding from the stump, then went out and closed the door.
“He woke up screaming for me to put his arm back on,” Jinx said. “I tried to tell him we had to do it. I hope I was telling him right.”
The old woman in her rocker, her back to us, hadn’t stirred through any of this. That infuriated Jinx.
“You don’t care about him or nobody,” Jinx said to the old woman’s back. “You could hear him scream all night, and it wouldn’t be anything to you.”
The old woman didn’t respond, just sat still in her rocker.
Jinx was really mad. She went around front of the rocker, started to say something to her, and stopped. The look on Jinx’s face made us come around to look at her. We looked closer at the old woman, seen her mouth was hanging open. Her eyes looked like they was filmed over with candle wax. She was dead.
“That figures.” Jinx put her hands on her hips. “She didn’t die bad at all. She just went in her sleep after three hundred and fifty million years of meanness.”
“Poor thing,” Mama said.
Jinx looked at Mama with a look of confusion, shook her head. “You white people are something.”
