string tie.”
“Scrape the horse shit off your shoes.”
“I’ll use them new brown boots we got out that house in McComb.”
“Whoa. Nobody’ll know you.”
THEY RODE to the little station in Fault, and Billsy took both horses back. In two days, Ralph was walking the neighborhoods of Graysoner, Kentucky, his thumbs under his suspenders as if he owned the place. It was after nine a.m., when most men were at work, most women busy getting the day’s shopping done before the heat set in. He’d spent an hour down at the farrier’s, getting the information he needed from the old-timers hanging around the forge who told about the trails of ten or fifteen years before, when the automobile had been a thing unknown. He listened to what they said about the hatchet-back ridge south of town and the passes that threaded over it. The next day he walked down the alley behind Acy White’s house and saw what looked like a hired girl in poor clothes and the child rolling a ball in the short grass. When he passed the fence, he tipped his hat and smiled as best he could. The woman, robust-looking with a narrow back straight as a kitchen chair, smiled back at him, and he moved down the street. “Well, now,” he said to himself. “Gray eyes.”
Skadlock went down to a hotel where steamboat men stayed and washed up in the restroom at the end of the hall. He slicked his hair back with oil and put on a fresh shirt. He got a haircut in the shop in the lobby and passed small talk, gradually sliding the conversation around to the woman who worked in the middle of the block on Bonner Alley. He didn’t want to use Acy White’s name. Ralph understood that local barbers knew everything in a small town since chitchat was their stock-in-trade, more so than bartenders and whores. The barber snipped his scissors three times in the air and looked into the middle distance. “That gal lives somewhere down the hill in Ditch Street. I’ve seen her walking that way after seven when she’s finished up at Mr. White’s house. Damned if that ain’t a place for the rats. The tannery leaves its slops out in the canal, and they’re all over in there, up and down.”
“She’s married to that foreman at the tannery, ain’t she?” Skadlock held up his boot and pretended to look at it.
“If she is, I don’t know it. Mr. White says she lives alone in one of those red tarpaper shacks this side of the boiler house.”
Realizing that his hair was being cut by the only barber in town, he changed the subject. “You know, I ate in a cafe the other day that put sugar in its cornbread.”
The barber quickened to the comment. “I know it. I guess somebody in New York thought it was a good idea. Me, I like the old pie-shaped cornbread with bits of crackling in it, salty as sweat.”
“Yessir. How about dodgers?”
The barber spoke solemnly for five minutes about his grandmother’s corn dodgers and blackberry jelly while Skadlock figured the schedule for the rest of the day.
FROM WHERE HE STOOD between two willow saplings half a block to the north, he saw her leave the backyard gate and enter the alley. He slipped out onto the sidewalk and affected a lazy saunter down the hill in the direction of Ditch Street and soon heard her come up behind him. He imagined she’d want to hurry home and put her feet up after working for the rich folks all day. When she came alongside, he pretended to be startled. “Hey,” he said. “I saw you somewheres today, didn’t I?” Her face was fairly narrow, her chin small, but a tough smartness hid deep in those pale eyes.
She gave him a quick glance, the kind of look she’d normally give a big strange dog, but she slowed down. “I was out behind the house where I work, and you was traipsin’ up the alley.”
“That’s right. You was playin’ ball with a kid had too much clothes on for this heat.”
She began to match his gait. “Ain’t that the truth. Missus ain’t happy less she’s got a week’s salary on that kid’s back mornin’, noon, and night.”
“You her nursemaid or something?”
Vessy raised her chin a bit. “I’m rightly the cook. But I watch the girl some.”
Skadlock stopped walking. “Cook, you say. You cook everday?”
“Yeah. I believe that’s what a cook does. It’s what I’m cut out for, anyway.” They started out again down the hill, walking slower. “You in town lookin’ for work? I heard some old boys say they heard the tannery’s hiring.”
He shook his head. “Naw. I just come to buy somethin’ for one price and sell it for another.” He practiced a smile on her.
What she saw was on the border of frightening, but she ignored his expression. “Like a horse trader.”
“Somethin’ like.”
“Well, my brother, when he was alive, he traded in mules and always went barefoot.” She gave him a longer look, noted his boots.
“I usually trade to advantage,” he told her.
He walked with her to the start of Ditch Street, a narrow lane of greasy dirt shooting off from the cobbles of the respectable street they’d come down. “So long, miss. It is ‘miss,’ ain’t it?”
“Yep,” she said ruefully. “Miss. Or maybe ‘missed.’”
HE LAY ON his single bed that night and looked at the ceiling, sipping from a pint of his own white-hot stock and thinking where he might run into her again. He was hungry and tired of the food he’d brought from home, bread he could drive tacks with and cheese that smelled like feet. Longing suddenly for his mother’s skillet-fried marsh hen with garlic, he was stunned by the thought that she would never cook for him and Billsy again. “Well, damn,” he said to the ceiling. Ralph never felt sentimental about one thing in his life, but at the present moment he felt heart pangs when he remembered the old woman pushing around a cut-up bird in a smoking skillet. He wondered long why she did it.
The next afternoon he met Vessy at the head of Ditch Street and spoke with her for another ten minutes. He noticed powder stuck to the sweat on her face and thought he detected the smell of violets or Sen-Sen. Later that night he showed up at her place, where they sat on her teetering porch in dry-rotted wicker chairs. They talked for an hour or so before he offered her a pour out of his flask. She sniffed at the inch of liquid in her cloudy water glass, then took it all down in a slug. “All fire and no ash,” she said approvingly. “Sure ain’t no singlings.”
“I figured a east Kentucky gal would know a good sip.”
She looked at him. “What exactly you do for a livin’ there, Ralph?”
“Oh, people hire me out to do things. Find things. Make things.”
“I bet some of them things flow in a bottle.”
“Could be.” He poured her another sip, and with this, she took her time, staring at him over the glass.
THE THIRD DAY was Saturday. That night he took her to a cafe and they each ate a plate of chops and vegetables. Walking back to her place, he asked about the child and she told him what she knew. They drank a pint between them sitting at the rough wood table next to her bed, and he leaned over and gave her a lasting kiss that she took as though it were a long-awaited letter from the mailman. Then she said, “Well, Mr. Ralph, that’s all right, but just to get things straight, you can kiss on me all you want, but I ain’t spreadin’ my legs for no man. I seen too many left with a big belly watchin’ a feller’s back walkin’ away.”
He lit a cigarette and looked past her at the bed, then he kissed her again as if he liked the taste of it. He straightened up in his chair and gave her his cigarette and watched her take a drag. “All right. You tell me how you think they got that little girl.”
