Child of God Read online

Shoot, said Ballard. I was just teasin ye.

  Why don't you go on.

  I guess you too young to know when a man's teasin ye.

  You ain't even a man. You're just a crazy thing.

  I might be more than you think, said Ballard. How come you wear them britches?

  What's it to you?

  Ballard's mouth was dry. You cain't see nothin, he said.

  She looked at him blankly, then she reddened. I ain't got nothin for you to see, she said.

  Ballard took a few wooden steps toward the sofa and then stopped in the middle of the floor. Why don't you show me them nice titties, he said hoarsely.

  She stood up and pointed at the door. You get out of here, she said. Right now.

  Come on, Ballard wheezed. I won't ast ye nothin else.

  Lester Ballard, when Daddy comes home he's goin to kill you. Now I said get out of here and I mean it. She stamped her foot.

  Ballard looked at her. All right, he said. If that's the way you want it. He went to the door and opened it and went out and shut the door behind him. He heard her latch it. The night out there was clear and cold and the moon sat in a great ring in the sky. Ballard's breath rose whitely toward the dark of the heavens. He turned and looked back at the house. She was watching from the corner of the window. He went on down the broken driveway to the road and crossed the ditch and went along the edge of the yard and crossed back up to the house. He picked up the rifle where he'd left it leaning against a crabapple tree and he went along the side of the house and stepped up onto a low wall of cinderblock and went along it past the clothesline and the coalpile to where he could see in the window there. He could see the back of her head above the sofa. He watched her for a while and then he raised the rifle and cocked it and laid the sights on her head. He had just done this when suddenly she rose from the sofa and turned facing the window. Ballard fired.

  The crack of the rifle was outrageously loud in the cold silence. Through the spidered glass he saw her slouch and stand again. He levered another shell into the chamber and raised the rifle and then she fell. He reached down and scrabbled about in the frozen mud for the empty shell but he could not find it. He raced around the house to the front and mounted the spindly steps and came up short against the door. You dumb son of a bitch, he said. You heard her lock it. He leaped to the ground and ran to the back of the house and entered a low screened porch and pushed open the kitchen door and went through and into the front room. She was lying in the floor but she was not dead. She was moving. She seemed to be trying to get up. A thin stream of blood ran across the yellow linoleum rug and seeped away darkly in the wood of the floor. Ballard gripped the rifle and watched her. Die, goddamn you, he said. She did.

  When she had ceased moving he went about the room gathering up newspapers and magazines and shredding them. The idiot watched mutely. Ballard ripped away the chickenwire from around the stove and pushed the stove over with his foot. The pipe crashed into the room in a cloud of coalsoot. He snatched open the stove door and hot embers rolled out. He piled on papers. Soon a fire going in the middle of the room. Ballard raised up the dead girl. She was slick with blood. He got her onto his shoulder and looked around. The rifle. It was leaning against the sofa. He got it and looked about wildly. Already the ceiling of the room was packed with seething tiers of smoke and small fires licked along the bare wood floor at the edge of the linoleum. As he whirled about there in the kitchen door the last thing he saw through the smoke was the idiot child. It sat watching him, berryeyed filthy and frightless among the painted flames.

  BALLARD WAS WALKING THE road near the top of the mountain when the sheriff pulled up behind him in the car. The sheriff told Ballard to put the rifle down but Ballard didn't move. He stood there by the side of the road straight up and down with the rifle in one hand and he didn't even turn around to see who'd spoke. The sheriff reached his pistol out the window and cocked it. You could hear very clearly in the cold air the click of the hammer and the click of the hand dropping into the cylinder locking notch. Boy, you better stick it in the ground, the sheriff said.

  Ballard stood the butt of the rifle in the road and let go of it. It fell into the roadside bushes.

  Turn around.

  Now come over here.

  Now just stand there a minute.

  Now get in here.

  Now hold your hands out.

  If you leave my rifle there somebody's goin to get it.

  I'll worry about your goddamned rifle.

  THE MAN BEHIND THE DESK had folded his hands in front of him as if about to pray. He gazed at Ballard across the tips of his fingers. Well, he said, if you hadn't done anything wrong what were you scoutin the bushes for that nobody could find you?

  I know how they do ye, Ballard muttered. Thow ye in jail and beat the shit out of ye.

  This man ever been mistreated down here, Sheriff?

  He knows better than that.

  They tell me you cussed deputy Walker.

  Well did you?

  What are you lookin over there for?

  I was just lookin.

  Mr Walker's not goin to tell you what to say.

  He might tell me what not to.

  Is it true that you burned down Mr Waldrop's house?

  No.

  You were living in it at the time that it burned.

  That's a ... I wasn't done it. I'd left out of there a long time fore that.

  It was quiet in the room. After a while the man behind the desk lowered his hands and folded them in his lap. Mr Ballard, he said. You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in.

  BALLARD ENTERED THE store and slammed the iron barred door behind him. The store was empty save for Mr Fox who nodded to this small and harried looking customer. The customer did not nod back. He went along the shelves picking and choosing among the goods, the cans all marshaled with their labels to the front, wrenching holes in their ordered rows and stacking them on the counter in front of the storekeeper. Finally he fetched up in front of the meatcase. Mr Fox rose and donned a white apron, old bloodstains bleached light pink, tied it in the back and approached the meatcase and switched on a light that illuminated rolls of baloney and rounds of cheese and a tray of thin sliced pork chops among the sausages and sousemeat.

  Slice me about a half pound of that there baloney, said Ballard.

  Mr Fox fetched it out and laid it on the butcher block and took up a knife and began to pare away thin slices. These he doled up one at a time onto a piece of butcherpaper. When he had done he laid down the knife and placed the paper in the scales. He and Ballard watched the needle swing. What else now, said the storekeeper, tying up the package of meat with a string.

  Give me some of that there cheese.

  He bought a sack of cigarette tobacco and stood there rolling a smoke and nodding at the groceries. Add them up, he said.

  The storekeeper figured the merchandise on his scratchpad, sliding the goods from one side of the counter to the other as he went. He raised up and pushed his glasses back with his thumb.

  Five dollars and ten cents, he said.

  Just put it on the stob for me.

  Ballard, when are you goin to pay me?

  Well. I can give ye some on it today.

  How much on it.

  Well. Say three dollars.

  The storekeeper was figuring on his pad.

  How much do I owe altogether? said Ballard.

  Thirty-four dollars and nineteen cents.

  Includin this here?

  Includin this here.

  Well let me just give ye the four dollars and nineteen cents and that'll leave it thirty even.

  The storekeeper looked at Ballard. Ballard, he said, how old are you?

  Twenty-seven if it's any of your business.

  Twenty-seven. And in twenty-seven years you've managed to accumulate four dollars and nineteen cents?

  The storekeeper was figuring on his pad.


  Ballard waited. What are you figurin? he asked suspiciously.

  Just a minute, said the storekeeper. After a while he raised the pad up and squinted at it. Well, he said. Accordin to my figures, at this rate it's goin to take a hundred and ninety-four years to pay out the thirty dollars. Ballard, I'm sixty-seven now.

  Why that's crazy.

  Of course this is figured if you don't buy nothin else.

  Why that's crazier'n hell.

  Well, I could of made a mistake in the figures. Did you want to check em?

  Ballard pushed at the scratchpad the storekeeper was offering him. I don't want to see that, he said.

  Well, what I think I'm goin to do along in here is just try to minimize my losses. So if you've got four dollars and nineteen cents why don't you just get four dollars and nineteen cents' worth of groceries.

  Ballard's face was twitching.

  What did you want to put back? said the storekeeper.

  I ain't puttin a goddamn thing back, said Ballard, laying out the five dollars and slapping down the dime.

  BALLARD CROSSED THE mountain into Blount County one Sunday morning in the early part of February. There is a spring on the side of the mountain that runs from solid stone. Kneeling in the snow among the fairy tracks of birds and deermice Ballard leaned his face to the green water and drank and studied his dishing visage in the pool. He halfway put his hand to the water as if he would touch the face that watched there but then he rose and wiped his mouth and went on through the woods.

  Old woods and deep. At one time in the world there were woods that no one owned and these were like them. He passed a windfelled tulip poplar on the mountainside that held aloft in the grip of its roots two stones the size of fieldwagons, great tablets on which was writ only a tale of vanished seas with ancient shells in cameo and fishes etched in lime. Ballard among gothic treeboles, almost jaunty in the outsized clothing he wore, fording drifts of kneedeep snow, going along the south face of a limestone bluff beneath which birds scratching in the bare earth paused to watch.

  The road when he reached it was unmarked by any track at all. Ballard descended into it and went on. It was almost noon and the sun was very bright on the snow and the snow shone with a myriad crystal incandescence. The shrouded road wound off before him almost lost among the trees and a stream ran beside the road, dark under bowers of ice, small glass-fanged caverns beneath tree roots where the water sucked unseen. In the frozen roadside weeds were coiled white ribbons of frost, you'd never figure how they came to be. Ballard ate one as he went, the rifle on his shoulder, his feet enormous with snow where it clung to the sacks with which he'd wrapped them.

  By and by he came upon a house, silent in the silent landscape, a rough scarf of smoke unwinding upward from the chimney. There were tire tracks in the road but they had been snowed over in the night. Ballard came on down the mountain past more houses and past the ruins of a tannery into a road freshly traveled, the corded tracks of tirechains curving away into the white woods and a jade river curving away toward the mountains to the south.

  When he got to the store he sat on a box on the porch and with his pocketknife cut the twine that bound his legs and feet and took off the sacks and shook them out and laid them on the box with the pieces of twine and stood up. He was wearing black lowcut shoes that were longer than he should have needed. The rifle he'd left under the bridge as he crossed the river. He stamped his feet and opened the door and went in.

  A group of men and boys were gathered about the stove and they stopped talking when Ballard entered. Ballard went to the back of the stove, nodding slightly to the store's inhabitants. He held his hands to the heat and looked casually about. Cold enough for ye'ns? he said.

  Nobody said if it was or wasn't. Ballard coughed and rubbed his hands together and crossed to the drink box and got an orange drink and opened it and got a cake and paid at the counter. The storekeeper dropped the dime into the till and shut the drawer. He said: It's a sight in the world of snow, ain't it?

  Ballard agreed that it was, leaning on the counter, eating the cake and taking small sips from the drink. After a while he leaned toward the storekeeper. You ain't needin a watch are ye? he said.

  What? said the storekeeper.

  A watch. Did you need a watch.

  The storekeeper looked at Ballard blankly. A watch? he said. What kind of a watch?

  I got different kinds. Here. Ballard setting down his drink and half-eaten cake on the counter and reaching into his pockets. He pulled forth three wristwatches and laid them out. The storekeeper poked at them once or twice with his finger. I don't need no watch, he said. I got some in the counter yonder been there a year.

  Ballard looked where he was pointing. A few dusty watches in cellophane packets among the socks and hairnets.

  What do you get for yourn? he asked.

  Eight dollars.

  Ballard eyed the merchant's watches doubtfully. Well, he said. He finished the cake and took up his own watches by their straps and took his drink and crossed the floor to the stove again. He held the watches out, tendering them uncertainly at the man nearest him. You all don't need a wristwatch do ye? he said.

  The man glanced at the watches and glanced away.

  Let's see em over here, old buddy, said a fat boy by the stove.

  Ballard handed the watches across.

  What do ye want for em?

  I thought I'd get five dollars.

  What, for all three of em?

  Why hell no. Five dollars each.

  Shit.

  Let's see thatn, Orvis.

  Wait a minute, I'm lookin at it.

  Let's see it.

  That there's a good watch.

  Let me have it. What will ye take for thisn?

  Five dollar.

  I'll give two and won't ast ye where ye got it.

  I cain't do it.

  Let me see that othern, Fred. What's wrong with em?

  Ain't a damn thing wrong with em. You hear em runnin don't ye?

  I'll give you three for that there gold lookin one.

  Ballard looked from one to the other of them. I'll take four, he said, and pick your choice.

  What'll ye take for all of em?

  Ballard totted figures in the air for a moment. Twelve dollars, he said.

  Why hell, that ain't no deal. Don't ye get a discount on job lots?

  Is them all the watches you got?

  Just them three is all.

  Here. Hand him thesens back.

  Ain't you goin to get in the watch business today, Orvis?

  I cain't get my jobber to come down.

  What'll you give for em? said Ballard.

  I'll give eight dollars for the three of em.

  Ballard looked about at the men. They were watching him to see what price used watches would bring this Sunday morning. He weighed the watches in his hand a moment and handed them across. You bought em, he said.

  The watchbuyer rose and handed across the money and took the watches. You want thisn for three? he said to the man next to him.

  Yeah, let me have it.

  Anybody else want one for three? He held up the spare watch.

  The other man who had been looking at the watches straightened out his leg across the floor and reached into his pocket. I'll take if off of ye, he said.

  What'll ye take for thatn you got, Orvis?

  Might take five.

  Shit. You ain't got but two in it.

  This here's a good watch.

  WHEN BALLARD REACHED the river he looked about the empty white countryside and then dropped down off the road and under the bridge. Coming up the river were tracks not his own. Ballard scrambled up under the stanchions and reached up to the beam atop which he'd left the rifle. There for a moment he flailed wildly, his hand scrabbling along the concrete, his eye to the river and the tracks there which already he was trailing to the end of his life. Then his hand closed upon the stock of the rifle. He fetched it down, cursing, his heart
hammering. You'd try it, wouldn't ye? he wailed at the tracks in the snow. His voice beneath the arches of the bridge came back hollow and alien and Ballard listened to the echo of it with his head tilted like a dog and then he climbed the bank and started back up the road.

  IT WAS DARK WHEN HE reached the cave. He crawled through and lit a match and got the lamp and lit it and set it by the ring of stones that marked the firepit. The nearer walls of the cavern composed themselves out of the constant night with their pale stone drapery folds and a faultline in the vault's ceiling appeared with a row of dripping limestone teeth. In the black smokehole overhead the remote and lidless stars of the Pleiades burned cold and absolute. Ballard kicked at the fire and turned a few dull cherry coals up out of the ash and bones. He fetched dry grass and twigs and lit the fire and went back out with his pan and brought it in filled with snow and set it by the fire. His mattress lay in a pile of brush with the stuffed animals upon it and his other few possessions lay about in the grotto where chance had arranged them.

  When he had the fire going he took his flashlight and went across the room and disappeared down a narrow passageway.

  Ballard made his way by damp stone corridors down inside the mountain to another room. Here his light scudded across a growth of limestone columns and what looked like huge stone urns moist and illshapen. From the floor of the room an underground stream rose. It welled up blackly in a calcite basin and flowed down a narrow aqueduct where the room tailed off through a black hole. Ballard's light glanced from the surface of the pool unaltered, as if bent back by some strange underground force. Everywhere water dripped and spattered and the wet cave walls looked waxed or lacquered in the beam of light.

  He crossed the room and followed the stream out and down the narrow gorge through which it flowed, the water rushing off into the darkness before him, descending from pool to pool in stone cups of its own devising and Ballard nimble over the rocks and along a ledge, keeping his feet dry, straddling the watercourse at points, his light picking out on the pale stone floor of the stream white crawfish that backed and turned blindly.

  He followed this course for perhaps a mile down all its turnings and through narrows that fetched him sideways advancing like a fencer and through a tunnel that brought him to his belly, the smell of the water beside him in the trough rich with minerals and past the chalken dung of he knew not what animals until he climbed up a chimney to a corridor above the stream and entered into a tall and bellshaped cavern. Here the walls with their softlooking convolutions, slavered over as they were with wet and bloodred mud, had an organic look to them, like the innards of some great beast. Here in the bowels of the mountain Ballard turned his light on ledges or pallets of stone where dead people lay like saints.