Part 15 (1/2)

She had later brought her two sisters to live with them, and they had proved her equals in harlotry, for one had borne twin boys of somewhat indeterminate race, and though they were now several years old-he could not put an exact figure to it-they had been raised with no more guidance than a pair of feral hogs, and neither the mother nor anyone else in the household had yet taken the trouble to name them, making reference to them singularly only by hooking a thumb in the direction of the intended boy and saying, That'un.

Junior claimed that the sum of his marital experience had caused him to believe that he should have married a thirteen-year old and raised her to suit himself. As it was, he claimed to lie awake many a night thinking that every moment till his death would be gloom and that his only recourse would be to cut all their throats in their sleep and then put the shotgun to his own head or take to the woods and eventually be hunted down by dogs and treed and shot like a c.o.o.n.

This put something of a damper on Veasey's glee, and in a moment Junior returned the bottle to its place and took up the saw again. He led them down the road a bend or two to his house, which sat off below the road in a damp swale. It was a large structure, batten-sided and in such poor repair that an end of it had fallen off the stacks of flat river stones that served for foundation. As a result, it stood tipped up as if it were in the process of diving into the earth.

The yard was littered with pyramidal gamec.o.c.k dwellings made from unpeeled sticks tied together with honeysuckle vines. Inside, bright birds glared out the slots with cold s.h.i.+ny eyes that saw the whole world as little other than opportunity for an adversary. Thin white smoke rose from the chimney, and a black pillar of smoke swelled skyward from some other source behind the house.

As they left the road to descend into Junior's bottomland, a three-legged, patchy-haired dog of the terrier kind clamored out from under the porch and ran low to the ground and completely soundless on a trajectory straight to Inman, who had learned to heed a silent dog more than a barking dog.

Before it got to him, Inman kicked and caught it under the chin with a boot toe. The dog collapsed and lay motionless in the dirt.

Inman looked to Junior and said, What was I to do?

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-All are not thieves that dogs bark at, Veasey said.

Junior just stood and looked.

The dog eventually rose shakily onto its tripod and in a series of vague tacking maneuvers made its way back under the porch.

-I'm glad he's not dead, Inman said.

-I don't give a s.h.i.+t one way or the other, Junior said.

They walked on down to the house and into the kitchen and dining room. Junior immediately went to a pie safe and took out another bottle and three tin cups. The floor to the place was ramplike in its tilt, and when Inman went to sit in a straight chair at the table, he had to clench to the floor as best he could with his feet to keep from skidding with gravity to the low wall. In the chimney corner was a bedstead, and Inman could see that they had not even tried to s.h.i.+m it level but had only made the modest effort of turning it so that the head was to the high side.

There were pictures cut from books and newspapers hanging on the walls, but some were hung parallel to the c.o.c.ked-up floor, some to a more abstract line that might have been arrived at with a spirit level. There was a fire smoldering in the fireplace, and a Dutch oven sitting in the coals putting out a smell of rank meat cooking. The hearth was at such a rake that the smoke in its rise banked off the sidewall before finding the way up the chimney.

With all one's expectations of the world's plumb line so thrown off, even pouring a dram of liquor from the bottle into a cup became a puzzler, and when Inman went to do it, he missed the gla.s.s entirely and wet his shoe tops before he found the proper range and lead. When he had succeeded in filling the gla.s.s, he took a drink and reached to set the cup on the dinner table and noted that little b.u.mpers sawn from birch limbs had been nailed around each place at the table so that the plates and cups would not slide off the low side.

Veasey walked around supping from his cup and looking at the place, trudging uphill and down.

Then an idea struck him.

-We could rig levers under the down end and soon set this thing right, he said.

Levers seemed to have come to occupy the foreground of his thinking, as if he had discovered a machine that could be applied to all the puzzles that might be thrown at a person. Stick a lever under anything wrong and make it sit right and square to the world.

-I reckon we could lever it, Junior said. But it's been this way so long, we've got the hang of it now.

It would seem queer to live in a place without a grade to it.

They drank on awhile, the liquor going fast to Inman's head, for he had eaten nothing but the pods since last evening's spa.r.s.e supper. It hit Veasey's empty stomach harder, and he sat with his head c.o.c.ked oddly, looking down into his cup.

Shortly a girl of eight or ten walked in the front door. She was a slight child, thin at ankle and shoulder bone. Her skin was the color of heavy cream, her hair brown, falling below her shoulders in crisp ringlets. Inman had seldom seen a prettier child.

-Your mama here? Junior said.

-Yep, the girl said.

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-Where's she at? Junior said.

-Out back. Was a minute ago.

Veasey looked up from his cup and examined the child. He said to Junior, Why, I've seen white children darker complected than that. What would you make her to be, octoroon or less?

-Octoroon or quadroon, makes no difference. She's a n.i.g.g.aroon is all I can see, Junior said.

Veasey suddenly stood and wove his way to the bed. He lay down and pa.s.sed out.

-What's your name? Inman asked the girl.

-Lula, she said.

-No, it ain't, Junior said. He turned to the girl and glared. Say what it is, he said.

-Mama says it's Lula, the girl said.

-Well, it ain't. That's just the kind of cathouse name your mama would come up with. But I do the naming here. Your name is Chast.i.ty.

-Either makes a fine name, I'd say, Inman said.

-No, said Junior. My name throws the other one into the shade, for mine commemorates what a wh.o.r.e her mama is.

He drank off what was left in his cup and said, Come on. Without looking to see if Inman followed, he led Inman out onto the front porch and sat in a rocker.

Inman walked out into the yard and cast back his head to look at the sky. It was coming on evening and the light was thin and slanting, and a portion of moon and the beacon of Venus stood in the eastern sky. The air was dry and there was a chill in it and Inman took a deep pull into his lungs and the smell and feel of it brought a thought to his mind: fall's right now on me. What the air told was that the wheel of the year had turned yet another notch.

-Lila, Junior called.

In a minute a young woman came wandering around the corner of the house and sat on the porch steps directly between Inman and Junior. She drew her knees up high and examined Inman with a critical eye. She was a towheaded, ample-haunched thing in a cotton dress so thin and bleached from Was.h.i.+ng that a man could very nearly see the texture of her skin through its parchment-colored fabric. The dress had once been a print of little flowers in files but they had faded out till what was left looked more like characters, faint scribble from one of the vertical languages.

The girl was, in all her lines, circular, and the lower halves of her pale thighs were on full display where the dress hem fell back against the steps.

Her eyes were the pale color of harebell blossoms. She went about with her head not combed. Her feet were bare and briar scratched, and there was something about her that spoke of oddity so much that Inman found himself clearing his mind by adding up muddy toes on one of her round feet to check if the mystic five would indeed be the sum. Junior drew a cob pipe with a clay stem from his pocket. And with it a great wizened pouch of tobacco. He filled the pipe and thrust it into the hole of 2004-3-6.

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his mouth. He dangled the pouch for Inman to examine.