and solving little neighborly fights. Serving papers. Things like that.”
“I hadn’t thought about it much.”
“Even back in here there are what you might call earth-shaking matters.”
Sam looked at the top of the window to his right. The light was fading, and he wondered if he could stay around long enough to sleep in the barn. He might even get up in the morning and drive back to Helena. “You know everybody around here, then.”
“I know their animals, too.”
“I’m looking for a family named Cloat.”
The constable’s expression froze. In the dim room his eyes, deep set and dark, glimmered like two stars reflected in a narrow well. “I have the feeling you’ve got a story to tell me.”
“That’s right.” He took several swallows of water, which had no taste at all, and said what there was to say. He ended by explaining that each year he thought more about the missing pieces of his life, and that talking to the Cloats, maybe just seeing them, might help him fill in the blank areas. When he finished his story, the space in the window was lavender sky.
“You think that by looking at them you’ll figure them out?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you look at a mountain, can you tell what’s inside all that rock?”
“Sir?”
“I’m sorry.” Soner made a dismissive motion with his hand. “You going back there to kill some of them?”
“I hope not.”
“Why else would anyone look up a Cloat?”
“To find out things.”
Soner nodded. “Yes, of course. You’re on a quest for knowledge only. That makes you lucky.”
Sam blinked. “How’s that?”
“The Cloats go through life incurious about anything at all, whether history or music or the well-being of their own blood.”
“Maybe they’re the lucky ones.”
Soner shook his head. “No. They’re like animals, interested only in what’s in front of them at the moment. But there’s one thing that makes them different from animals.”
“And what’s that?”
“Revenge.” The constable was quiet for a long time. Then he reached out and lit a Rayo lamp with a match. “Come on,” he said, hoisting the lamp. “Let’s fix supper.”
They went into a long rear kitchen and lit more lamps. Sam got the kerosene stove hot and found a skillet while Soner brought in eggs and a smoked ham and snap beans from his garden. There was a pitcher of buttermilk under a cheesecloth and some hard bread. The little stove cooked slow, but within an hour they sat down to eat, and Soner said a blessing. He asked Sam to tell him about his work on the
After the dishes were put away, the constable poured them some old sour mash in glasses of the good water and they went out and sat on the porch in rush-bottom rockers. The dark was so total the mosquitoes couldn’t find them.
“Mr. Simoneaux, you can spend the night in the upstairs bedroom. It should be cool enough for sleep in about an hour. But do not for any reason come down before daylight. There’s a chamber pot under the bed. Do you understand?”
Sam nodded. “What’s your bedside firearm?”
He heard Soner take a long draw from his glass and then a knocking sound as he set it on the floor. “An eight-gauge Greener double-barrel. I loaded the shells myself.”
“Good Lord. What’s in them, buckshot?”
Soner chuckled. “My father was a watchmaker in Memphis. He died when I was young, and I was left for years with boxes of used watch parts, little steel gears, balance wheels, winding stems, case-hardened screws. I loaded a whole box of eight-gauge shells with the stuff, jammed it in tight.”
“Damn. You ever fire one off?”
“No. I call it my time machine. You know, when somebody dies their soul travels one of two ways-back where they came from or forward toward what they deserve, and whoever comes against my Greener will make the journey.”
“Is it something everybody around here knows about?”
“Oh, yes. Even the clan of Cloats you want to find.”
“I’d like to drive out and meet some of them.”
A little laugh came out of the darkness as Soner reached down for his drink. “I think ‘meet’ is too nice a word, son.”
“I figured they’d be a bad bunch.”
“The family has fallen off considerably in the past twenty years. When your family experienced their unfortunate meeting they were in their heyday. Usually, a meeting with a Cloat entailed a straight razor across the throat or a.45 slug in the back of one’s cranium. If you were a man. Women dealt with other initial penetrations. The Cloats aren’t your ordinary bad-seed murderers. Even on a cold day they stink like whoresex. They violate their animals. If they kill someone in their camp, they’ll feed his carcass to their hogs. But nowadays, well, I hear less and less about them as the years go on. But still there’s not a lawman in a hundred miles who would go in to find them. They came into this part of the world in the 1830s, run out of Georgia, I believe, along about the time Island Sixty-five began to form in the big river. They worked up and down the Natchez Trace cutting throats before crossing the river over to this side. Some settled back in the inland swamps for a time, but by the war they’d all moved out on the island.”
“Have you had any run-ins with them?”
“Yes.” The word came after a long pause, freighted with meaning.
Sam took a long drink. “Not as bad as my family’s, I hope.”
There was another pause. “In 1901, Aubrey Bledsoe bought a quart of whiskey off the Cloats on Saturday morning and was dead by four o’clock. The Bledsoe men, good people who used to live south of here, rode up and asked me if I could locate the still. I was a good tracker in those days, and if I could find it, I could do the busting up. I saddled a horse for Island Sixty-five, which is connected on this side of the river, and located it in two days along with three fly-ridden Cloats around it, killed by their own whiskey. They’d galvanized that cooker with a hundred pounds of lead solder, and added xylene to the batch to jack it up. They must’ve gone stark raving mad before they died because they were naked and had painted designs on their backs and stomachs and all over. With mercurochrome, for I found the empty bottles.”
“Designs?”
“Like caveman pictures, but nasty. I don’t want to tell you about it. I had a fire ax in my saddle holster and gave the still a good chopping, then turned it over and put a hundred blows into the bottom of it. The next day I told the Bledsoes the story, and good people that they were, they were satisfied that somehow justice had been done.”
“Was that the end of it?” He imagined the sorrow of the Cloats at losing three of their own.
Soner squirmed in his rocker, and Sam guessed he was crossing his legs. “The next morning I woke up and every hog, chicken, and cow I owned had its throat cut. My wife was bawling, and my son, who was six then, just stood in the yard and stared. They left me one horse, so I saddled up and rode over to the Bledsoes. All their animals were down, even the beeves in the big field, one man dead in the yard and the women howling like a hurricane. Mrs. Bledsoe, the grandmother, asked me who I left with my missus, and like a flash I understood how stupid I was, how much I could still underestimate inborn cruelty.” Here Soner stopped, and they listened to the deep throbbing of a steamboat whistle ten miles away.
“Were they safe?” Sam prayed they had been.
“Son, I’ll not inflict more of this story on you than you need to know. But you require a certain amount of preparation for your meeting tomorrow. Let’s just say that two Cloats, Batch and Slug, were standing in my backyard wearing muddy dusters when I rode up, flies in their beards around their toothless smiles. They made
