Child of God Page 6

  She needs some things to go with it.

  What all does she need? the girl said.

  She needs some drawers, Ballard blurted out.

  The girl coughed into her fist and turned and went back up the aisle, Ballard behind, his face afire.

  They stood at the counter he'd been studying all along from out of his eyecorner and the girl tapped her fingers on the little glass rail, looking past him. He stood with his hands still crammed in his rear pockets and his elbows out.

  They's all these here, said the girl, taking a pencil from behind her ear and running it over the counter rail.

  You got any black ones?

  She rummaged through the stacks and came up with a pair of black ones with pink bows.

  I'll take em, said Ballard. And one of them there.

  She looked to where he was pointing. A slip? she said.

  Yeah.

  She moved along the counter. Here's a pretty red one, she said. Would go pretty with this dress.

  Red? said Ballard.

  She held it up.

  I'll take that, said Ballard.

  What else now? she said.

  I don't know, said Ballard, casting his eye over the counter.

  Does she need a bra?

  No. You ain't got them drawers in the red have ye?

  WHEN BALLARD REACHED Fox's store he was half frozen. A bluish dusk suffused the barren woods about. He went straight to the stove and stood next to the dusty gray barrel of it with his teeth chattering.

  Cold enough for ye? said Mr Fox.

  Ballard nodded.

  Radio says it's goin down to three degrees tonight.

  Ballard was not for smalltalk. He went around the store selecting cans of beans and vienna sausages and he got two loaves of bread and pointed out the baloney in the meatcase that he wanted a halfpound of and he got a quart of sweetmilk and some cheese and crackers and a box of cakes. Mr Fox totted up the bill on a scratchpad, assessing the items on the counter from over the tops of his glasses as he went. Ballard had his parcels from town tucked tightly in his armpit.

  What about that boy they found up here yesterday evenin? Mr Fox said.

  What about him, said Ballard.

  HE GOT A FIRE GOING IN THE hearth and with wooden fingers undid the frozen lacings of his shoes and levered them from the shank of his foot, banging the heels on the floor until they came off. He looked at his feet. They were a pale yellow with white spots. When he went into the other room he could hardly feel the floor. He seemed to be walking about on his anklebones. He went out barefooted and fetched in the ladder and climbed up and looked at the girl. He came back down with the rifle and stood it by the fireplace. Then he opened the parcels from town and held up the garments and sniffed at them and folded them away again.

  He opened a can of beans and a can of the sausages and set them in the fire and he put a pan of water on to make coffee with. Then he put the other things away in the closet and sitting on the edge of the mattress pulled on his shoes again. With the axe in his hand he went clopping across the floor and out into the night. It had begun to snow again.

  He hauled wood until the room was a huge brush pile with old pieces of stumps and whole lengths of fencepost with sections of rotted wire hanging from their staples. He worked at it until well past dark and got a good fire going and sat before it and ate his supper. When he was done he lit the lamp and went into the other room with it and climbed the ladder. Muttered curses, sounds of struggle, ensued.

  She came down the ladder until she touched the floor with her feet and there she stopped. He paid out more rope but she was standing there in the floor leaning against the ladder. She was standing on tiptoe, nor would she fold. Ballard came down the ladder and undid the rope from around her waist. Then he dragged her into the other room and laid her on the hearth. He took hold of her arm and tried to raise it but the whole body shifted woodenly. Goddamn frozen bitch, said Ballard. He piled more firewood on.

  It was past midnight before she was limber enough to undress. She lay there naked on the mattress with her sallow breasts pooled in the light like wax flowers. Ballard began to dress her in her new clothes.

  He sat and brushed her hair with the dimestore brush he'd bought. He undid the top of the lipstick and screwed it out and began to paint her lips.

  He would arrange her in different positions and go out and peer in the window at her. After a while he just sat holding her, his hands feeling her body under the new clothes. He undressed her very slowly, talking to her. Then he pulled off his trousers and lay next to her. He spread her loose thighs. You been wantin it, he told her.

  Later he hauled her back into the other room. She was loose and not easy to handle. Her bones lay loosely in her flesh. He covered her with the rags and returned to the fire and built it high as it would go and lay in the bed watching it. The flue howled with the enormity of the draw and red flames danced at the chimney top. An enormous brick candle burning in the night. Ballard crammed brush and pieces of stumpwood right up the chimney throat. He made coffee and leaned back on his pallet. Now freeze, you son of a bitch, he told the night beyond the window-pane.

  It did. It dropped to six below zero. A brick toppled into the flames. Ballard stoked the fire and pulled his blankets about and composed himself for sleep. It was bright as day in the cabin. He lay staring at the ceiling. Then he got up again and lit the lamp and went into the other room. He turned the girl over and tied the rope around her and ascended into the attic. Again she rose, now naked. Ballard came back down the ladder and took the ladder down and laid it by the wall and went back in and went to bed. Outside the snow fell softly.

  HE WOKE IN THE NIGHT with some premonition of ill fate. He sat up. The fire had diminished to a single tongue of flame that stood near motionless from the ashes. He lit the lamp and turned up the wick. A shifting mantle of smoke overhung the room. Thick ribbons of white smoke were seeping down between the boards in the ceiling and he could hear a light crackling noise overhead like something feeding. Oh shit, he said.

  He got up, the blanket shawled about his thin and angry shoulders. Through the rives in the boards above him he could see a hellish glow of hot orange. He was pulling on his jacket and shoes. With the rifle in hand he went out into the snow. There in the trampled weedlot he stood looking up at the roof. A crazy-looking gaggle of flames shot up alongside the chimney and subsided again. A rabid crackling from the loft. Clouds of steam were coming off the wet roof and hot pins of light drifted downwind in the blowing snow.

  Kiss my goddamned ass, said Ballard. He stood the rifle against a tree and hurried back inside and gathered up his bedding and hauled it out into the snow and dove back in again. He collected his cookware and his little pantry and brought them out and he got the axe and the few tools he owned and what other odds and ends of gear he had stowed in the empty room and flung them into the yard and raced back in and got the ladder and stood it up into the hole and looked up. Huge orange boils of fire were pulsing in the loft. He climbed up the ladder and poked his head through the hole in the ceiling. Instantly he felt his hair singe and crackle. He ducked and patted at his head. Already his eyes were red and weeping from the smoke. He squatted there at the top of the ladder for a few minutes squinting up at the fire and then he climbed back down again.

  When he went back outside he had the bears and the tiger in his arms. The roof was now afire. Above the steady roar of it you could hear the old riven oak shakes exploding into flame row on row at the far end of the house with a kind of popping noise. The heat was marvelous.

  Ballard stood there in the snow with his jaw hanging. The flames ran down the batboards and up again like burning squirrels. Through the flames of the roof you could see the pinned framing in a row of burning A shapes. Within minutes the cabin was a solid wall of fire. The few panes of glass crackled and fell from their sash in a myriad rupture and the roof dropped with a whooshing noise down into the house. Ballard had to step back, so great the hea
t was. The snow about the house had begun to draw back leaving a ring of damp ground. After a while the ground began to steam.

  Long before morning the house that had kept Ballard from the elements was only a blackened chimney with a pile of smoldering boards at its feet. Ballard crossed the soggy ground and climbed onto the hearth and sat there like an owl. For the warmth of it. He'd long been given to talking to himself but he didn't say a word.

  IT WAS STILL DARK IN THE morning when he woke with the cold. He'd piled dead weeds and brush to lay the mattress on and gone to sleep with his feet to the embers of the house, snowflakes falling on him from out of the blackness of the heavens. The snow melted on him and then in the colder hours of morning froze so that he woke beneath a blanket of ice that cracked like glass when he stirred. He hobbled to the hearth in his thin jacket and tried to warm himself. It was still snowing lightly and he knew not what hour it might be.

  When he had stopped shivering he got his pan and filled it with snow and set it among the embers. While it was heating he found the axe and cut two poles with which to hang the blanket to dry.

  When day came he was sitting in a nest of weeds he'd made on the hearth and he was sipping coffee from a large porcelain cup which he held in both hands. With the advent of this sad gray light he shook the last few drops out of the cup and climbed down from his perch and began to poke through the ashes with a stick. He spent the better part of the morning stirring through the ruins until he was black with woodash to the knees and his hands were black and his face streaked with black where he'd scratched or puzzled. He found not so much as a bone. It was as if she'd never been. Finally he gave it up. He dusted the snow from the remainder of his provisions and fixed himself two baloney sandwiches and squatted in a warm place among the ashes eating them, black fingerprints on the pale bread, eyes dark and huge and vacant.

  WITH THE BLANKETLOAD OF provisions over his shoulder he looked like some crazy winter gnome clambering up through the snowfilled woods on the side of the mountain. He came on falling and sliding and cursing. It took him an hour to get to the cave. The second trip he carried the axe and the rifle and a lardpail filled with hot coals from the fire at the house.

  The entrance to the cave was no more than a crawl-way and Ballard was slick with red mud down the front of him from going in and out. Inside there was a large room with a bore of light that climbed slantwise from the red clay floor to a hole in the roof like an incandescent treetrunk. Ballard blew up a flame from wisps of dry grass with his coals and assembled the lamp and lit it and kicked at the remains of an old fire in the center of the cave beneath the roof hole. He came dragging in slabs of hardwood from the upright shells of dead trees on the mountain and soon he had a good fire going in the cave. When he started back down the mountain for the mattress a steady plume of white smoke was rising from the hole in the ground behind him.

  THE WEATHER DID NOT change. Ballard took to wandering over the mountain through the snow to his old homeplace where he'd watch the house, the house's new tenant. He'd go in the night and lie up on the bank and watch him through the kitchen window. Or from the top of the wellhouse where he could see into the front room where Greer sat before Ballard's very stove with his sockfeet up. Greer wore spectacles and read what looked like seed catalogs. Ballard laid the rifle foresight on his chest. He swung it upward to a spot just above the ear. His finger filled the cold curve of the trigger, Bang, he said.

  BALLARD STAMPED THE snow from his shoes and leaned his rifle against the side of the house and tapped at the door. He glanced about. The sofa lay mantled in snow and over the snow lay a fine stippling of coalsoot and cat tracks. Behind the house stood the remains of several cars and from the rear glass of one of them a turkey watched him.

  The door fell open and the dumpkeeper stood there in his shirtsleeves and suspenders. Come in, Lester, he said.

  Ballard entered, his eyes wheeling about, his face stretched in a china smile. But there was no one to see. A young girl was sitting on a car seat holding a baby and when Ballard came in she got up and went into the other room.

  Get over here and warm fore ye take your death, said the dumpkeeper, making for the stove.

  Where's everbody at? said Ballard.

  Shoot, said the dumpkeeper, they've all left out of here.

  The mizzes ain't left is she?

  Aw naw. She's a visitin her sister and them. Ever one of the girls is left savin the least'n though. We still got two of the babies here.

  How come em to all leave of a sudden like that?

  I don't know, said the dumpkeeper. Young people these days, you cain't tell em nothin. You ort to be proud, Lester, that you ain't never married. It is a grief and a heartache and they ain't no reward in it atall. You just raise enemies in ye own house to grow up and cuss ye.

  Ballard turned his backside to the stove. Well, he said. I never could see it.

  That's where you're smart, said the dumpkeeper.

  Ballard agreed mutely, shaking his head.

  I heard you got burned out over at your place, the dumpkeeper said.

  Plumb to the ground, said Ballard. You never seen such a fire.

  What caused it?

  I don't know. It started in the attic. I believe it must of been sparks from the chimney.

  Was you asleep?

  Yeah. I just did get out of there.

  What did Waldrop say?

  I don't know. I ain't seen him. I ain't lookin for him.

  Be proud you wasn't like old man Parton up here got burned down in his bed that time.

  Ballard turned around and warmed his hands at the stove. Did they ever find any of him? he said.

  WHEN HE GOT TO THE HEAD OF the hollow he rested, watching behind him the while. The tracks he followed had water standing in them and they went up the mountain but they did not come back down. He lost them later and found some different ones and he spent the afternoon in the woods stalking about like any hunter but when he returned to the cave just short of nightfall with his feet numb in the leaky shoes he had not found any of the whiskey and he had not seen Kirby.

  He ran into Greer the next morning. It had begun to rain, a small cold winter rain that Ballard cursed. He lowered his head and tucked the rifle under his arm and stepped to one side to pass but the other would not have it so.

  Howdy, he said.

  Howdy, said Ballard.

  You're Ballard ain't ye?

  Ballard did not raise his head. He was watching the man's shoes there in the wet leaves of the overgrown logging road. He said: No, I ain't him, and went on.

  LORD THEY CAUGHT ME, LESTER, said Kirby.

  Caught ye?

  I'm on three year probation.

  Ballard stared around the little room with its linoleum floor and cheap furniture. Well kiss my ass, he said.

  Ain't it a bitch? I never thought about them bein niggers.

  Niggers?

  They sent niggers. That's who I sold to. Sold to em three times. One of em set right there in that chair and drunk a pint. Drunk it and got up and walked out and got in the car. I don't see how he done it. He might of drove for all I know. They caught everbody. Got old lady Bright up in Cocke County even and she's been sellin whiskey non stop since fore I was born.

  Ballard leaned and spat into a can sitting in the floor. Well fuck it, he said.

  I sure would of never thought about them sendin niggers, said Kirby.

  BALLARD STOOD AT THE door. There was no car in the driveway. A pale yellow trapezoid of light lay in the mud beneath the window. Within, the idiot child crawled in the floor and the girl was curled on the sofa reading a magazine. He raised his hand and tapped.

  When the door opened he was standing there already wearing his sickish smile, his lips dry and tight over his teeth. Hidy, he said.

  He ain't here, said the girl. She stood hiploose in the doorframe and regarded him with frank indifference.

  What time you expect him?

  I don't know. He's took M
ama to church. They won't be back fore ten-thirty or eleven.

  Well, said Ballard.

  She said nothing.

  Turned off cool, ain't it?

  It is standin here with the door open.

  Well ain't you goin to ast me in for a minute.

  She thought about it before she swung the door back. You could see it in her eyes. But she let him in, more's the fool.

  He entered shuffling, beating his hands together. How's that big boy? he said.

  He's crazy as ever, she said, headed for the sofa and her magazine.

  Ballard squatted before the stained and drooling cretin and tousled its near bald head. Why that boy's got good sense, he said. Ain't ye?

  Shoot, said the girl.

  Ballard eyed her. She was wearing pink slacks of cheap cotton and she sat in the sofa with her legs crossed under her and a pillow in her lap. He rose and went to the stove and stood with his back to it. The stove was enclosed waisthigh in a chickenwire fence. The posts were toenailed to the floor and the fencing was nailed down as well. I bet he could push this over if he wanted to, said Ballard.

  I'd smack the fire out of him too, said the girl.

  Ballard was watching her. He narrowed his eyes cunningly and smiled. He's yourn, ain't he? he said.

  The girl's face snapped up. You're crazy as shit, she said.

  Ballard leered. Steam sifted up from his dark trouserlegs. You cain't fool me, he said.

  You're a liar, the girl said.

  You wisht I was.

  You better hush.

  Ballard turned to warm his front side. A car passed in the road. They both craned their necks to follow the lights along. She turned back and saw him and made a chickennecked grimace to mock him. The child in the floor sat drooling nor had it moved.

  Wouldn't be that old crazy Thomas boy, would it? said Ballard.

  The girl glared at him. Her face was flushed and her eyes red.

  You ain't slipped off in the bushes with that old crazy thing have ye?

  You better shut your mouth, Lester Ballard. I'll tell Daddy on you.

  I'll tell Daddy on you, whined Ballard.

  You just wait and see if I don't.