As the sun rose, pink and oozing through the woods like a leaky blood blister, Sunset discovered she too was bleeding. Not only from the wounds Pete had given her, but also from the fresh ones she’d gotten from her daughter, scratches and bites, additional damage from mosquitoes and ants. Sleeping on the ground had gotten dirt in the wounds and made them itch. Her side and stomach hurt, and she didn’t even remember being hit there. Maybe had, maybe hadn’t, might have just rolled on something, a root or rock.
She was sitting on the bank of Sawmill Creek, where she and Karen had spent the night beneath a big elm tree. She was sitting there feeling the morning sun, looking at her daughter, lying where she had finally cried herself to sleep, angry and confused, her hands clenched, her face squeezed up like a fist, damp leaves mashed against her cheeks and overalls.
Sunset turned away from Karen, studied the creek, watched as black button-sized bugs skirted over the water and some long-legged spider things ran over its surface as if imitating Jesus in a hurry.
The water was clay red from the storm, looked like blood, and it was flowing fast and loud along the new lines of the bank. The tornado had knocked all manner of stuff ass-over-heels, torn up trees, caused the old high line of the embankment to break up. When the warm wind blew, Sunset could smell fish rotting.
She tried to concentrate on the water and not think about Pete, but she couldn’t do it. She repeated the events over and over in her mind, trying to find a place where she might have done something different. Kept thinking she’d wake up and it would be a bad dream. But that didn’t happen. She was wide awake, sitting on the bank of Sawmill Creek sticky with sweat.
She lifted her hand to wipe her face, discovered she was still holding the gun. She had held it while she was telling her daughter what happened, held it while her daughter, in a moment of savage confusion, had hit her with her fists, clawed her with her nails, and bit her.
When Karen wore out, fell to the ground crying, Sunset tried to comfort her, tried to explain, but Karen put her hands over her ears and made a noise so she wouldn’t have to hear it.
Finally, Karen fell asleep to hide from Sunset and the world, and Sunset lay down and slept a little, her finger off the trigger, but the gun still in her hand, the smell of the powder still in her nose, the sound of the shot still in her head.
She put the pistol in the pocket of her mother-in-law’s loose housedress, and having it out of her hand, even if it was close, made her nervous.
She was suddenly glad she hadn’t had it with her the day she fought Pete’s girlfriend, Jimmie Jo French. She found out Pete was running around on her and blamed it on Jimmie Jo. Confronted her out front of the company store at Camp Rapture, went at her like a tiger. If she’d had the pistol with her then, the undertaker might have been wiping Jimmie Jo’s ass and that wouldn’t have been something she could have lived with, killing Jimmie Jo in a fit of jealousy.
She realized now Jimmie Jo was no more to blame than Pete. What she had been really angry about at the time was she had heard rumor Pete bought Jimmie Jo nice things. Clothes, even jewelry. Pete never bought her anything. She thought for a while she might not be good in bed, and had done her all to fix the problem, thinking she’d make it so he’d like how he was getting it at home and get over Jimmie Jo, but that hadn’t changed things. He stayed angry all the time, slapping her, punching her, forcing her legs apart while he rammed her like he was trying to poke a hole through a concrete wall, and if he liked it, she couldn’t tell, it was just a thing he did, finishing up, getting off her like he was disgusted.
And he hadn’t given up Jimmie Jo. Sometimes he came in smelling of her, not even bothering to clean the smell off before coming home, not caring if she knew, maybe happy she did. Sunset could never figure for what crime she was being punished.
Sunset wondered where Jimmie Jo was now. If she’d heard about Pete being killed, and how she felt about it. “Howdy.”
Sunset looked up. A man was standing nearby. Sunset stood, felt like wires were being pulled inside of her and the wires had hooks and the hooks were hitched to her vitals.
She studied him. He didn’t look like trouble. They never look like trouble, she thought. Pete hadn’t looked like trouble when he started courting her when she was sixteen. He seemed fine enough and a good choice when they first married, until two weeks later, the night she had a cold and didn’t want to bed him and he made her, and made her many times thereafter.
She put her hand in her pocket. She was glad she had the gun.
“You two hoboing?” the man said. “Don’t see many women on the road.”
Sunset said, “We’re not on the road.”
“That’s good. You’re a good bit away from the rails.”
“So are you,” she said.
“Guess I am.”
The man wore a crumpled wool hat. It looked too big for him. He took it off and smiled at her. She noted he was nice-looking and maybe not as young as he first appeared. He had a little sack tied to his belt. Over one eye was a small black bruise.
“I’m looking for work. Some bo’s told me there was a sawmill hiring.”
“I don’t know if they’re hiring,” Sunset said, “but you follow the creek west a ways, and you’ll see it.”
She started to say he would have to talk to her father-in-law, Mr. Jones, or the Captain, but she couldn’t make the words come out. He wasn’t her father-in-law now. She didn’t have anyone but Karen and Karen hated her. Well, maybe she had Marilyn. The whole thing with Marilyn hitting her, then hugging her, had not quite registered yet.
“That girl,” he said, “she ain’t dead, is she? You didn’t shoot her? I seen you put that gun in your pocket. You ain’t gonna shoot me, are you?”
“That’s my daughter. She’s sleeping. We had a storm come through. Tore up our home.”
“Reckon I caught the tail end of that one. I was in a boxcar at the time. Kind of scared me. Thought the damn thing was gonna turn over. You hunting? A pistol ain’t the best for squirrels.”
“No. I’m not hunting.”
“Well, nice to meet you. If your daughter was awake I’d say nice to meet her. Storm bang you up like that?”
“It was a storm, all right.”
“My name’s Hillbilly.”
“Mine’s Sunset. Daughter’s name is Karen.”
“You sure got pretty hair. Your daughter’s got pretty hair too, but it ain’t the same as yours. Yours is fire, hers is a raven’s wing.”
“She got her daddy’s hair,” Sunset said.
“Reckon I’ll go on now, see if I can get that job.”
“You don’t look like a sawmill hand.”
“Ain’t. Just need work. I’m a musician. I sing and play guitar.”
“Where’s your guitar?”
“Got broken. I’m trying to make enough to buy me one.”
“Good luck.”
“Thanks. See you around?”
Sunset thought a moment. She really wasn’t sure about anything, but she said, “Yeah. I’ll be around. See me again, hope I’ll look better than I look now. I’m not normally this ugly.”
“And I’m not normally this dirty. But I’m always this ugly.”
She thought: False modesty. He knows he looks good.
Hillbilly tipped his hat. “Well, you take care now.”
And away he went.
The sun grew large and yellow as the yolk of a fresh egg, turned the air hot as a gasoline fire. The heat stuck in the woods like glue, became gummy, and the gum got all over God and creation.
By ten in the morning every working man in the camp was exhausted, underarms dripping with sweat, crotches itching with it. Water barrels were sucked dry and the mules wanted to give it up. Even the oxen, normally steady as Job, were starting to wobble and froth.
That morning Jones had ice delivered to his house in washtubs, sent over a temporary basket coffin he borrowed from the camp store’s owner. The basket coffin was put on the sitting room floor by Zack and another colored man named Hently, and they poured ice from the tubs into it. They removed Pete’s clothes, and his smell filled the room. They placed him on the ice in the basket and put ice on top of him until the odor was quenched and he could not be seen, except for one finger that extended from the chipped ice and pointed up, as if the corpse were about to make a suggestion.
Over at the mill houses, unlike usual, no one was talking about the heat.
“I don’t think a woman ought to just be able to shoot a husband, she wants to,” Bill Martin said. “Get that started, things in ever kind of way will get turned over and sat on. Hell, get so I tell my wife to get my breakfast ready, she’ll want to pull out a gun.”
“Working with you,” said Don Walker, “makes me want to shoot you sometimes.”
“You’re a regular Fibber McGee. Except you ain’t funny.”
Bill and Don hooked their mules to a sled full of logs. Don called to the mules, Hank and Wank, and they started to pull the sled away. Don and Bill stood out to the side and Don held the long reins and they walked alongside the mules as they pulled.
“Haw, you sorry bastards,” Don said to the mules, and the mules turned left.
Bill said, “You ought not talk to the boys like that.”
“These boys are lazy if you let ’em be.”
They met Hillbilly coming toward them. He smiled and waved a hand at them. Don pulled the mules to a halt.
“Excuse me,” Hillbilly said, “but I’m looking for work.”
“We ain’t the ones to talk to,” Bill said.
“Do you know who to talk to?”
“The Captain,” Don said. “But now ain’t a good time.”
“When will be?”
“Ain’t certain. His boy, Pete, got killed yesterday.”
“Accident?”
“Not unless you call getting shot in the head an accident,” Bill said. “Boy’s wife shot him. Pete was the constable.”
“Why’d she do it?”
“I hear he was beating on her.”
“Can’t say I blame her then,” Hillbilly said. “I don’t like a hand laid on me in anger.”
“She was his wife,” Bill said.
“Don’t give him no call for that,” Hillbilly said.
“What I been saying,” Don said. “Been telling Bill just that.”
“This woman shot him,” Hillbilly said. “She wouldn’t be a redhead, would she?”
“Hair don’t get no redder than hers,” Bill said. “How’d you know?”
“Just a guess,” Hillbilly said. “Redheads are known for shooting husbands.”
“I know a redhead that was known for other things,” Bill said. “Talk about fire in the hole.”
“All your goats got black or white or gray fur,” Don said. “Ain’t seen no redheaded ones, so you don’t know nothing there.”
“Keep telling you,” Bill said, “you ought to get on radio you’re so funny.” Bill turned back to Hillbilly, said, “Good luck, young man. Maybe the Captain will talk to you. We did lose a man last week.”
“Tree fell on him,” Don said. “Me and Bill had bets on how long before that ignorant sonofabitch got a tree on him. He’d cut and kind of saunter away when the tree was coming down. He sauntered a little slow last time. Tree jumped back on him. They’ll do that. Jump back. Drove that fella into the ground. Said the stuffing popped out of him like a Christmas turkey.”
“You got to be quick working here,” Bill said. “Not get no vines or limbs caught under your feet. I think that fella got some berry vines wrapped around his ankles. Get hired and don’t mind your work, you’ll be dead as him.”
“Thanks for the advice, gentlemen,” Hillbilly said. “If I was to talk to this Captain, where would I find him?”
“He ain’t staying at his house no more,” Bill said. “His wife done run him off and took sides with the daughter-in-law. He was in the mill house this morning, wearing the same old nasty clothes he had on yesterday. I don’t know that he’s really working. When you’re one of the big men, you can coast, your boy’s dead or not. You might have to talk to someone else about a job, though. There’s others can hire.
“It’s all a crying shame. Captain with his boy dead, his wife putting him out. He’s a nice guy too. He loaned me considerable money I ain’t paid back-”
“And don’t intend to pay back,” Don said.
“You don’t know that,” Bill said.
“You ain’t paid me the dollar you owe me.”
“I’m gonna. But I tell you, I owed his old lady, I don’t know. She didn’t want him to loan it to me. Said I was a bad risk.”
“You are,” Don said. “I want my dollar. I know that.”
“She said that right in front of me. A bad risk. Tell you, with this Sunset killing her husband, and him a law too, we don’t put an end to it, every woman in the camp and hereabouts is gonna feel they got the right to tell their men what-for over most anything they take a mind to. If it’s loaning money or holding out with the hot wet kitty.”
“Sunset,” Hillbilly said. “That’s what they call her?”
“On account of her long red hair,” Don said. “Before Pete whacked on her, she was a pretty good looker. Now she looks like Three-Fingered Jack looked.”
“Who?”
“Man took a beating from Pete,” Bill said. “But he died from it. They called him that cause he had three fingers.”
Hillbilly thought: No shit.
“This time it was Pete done the dying,” Don said. “I ain’t one to feel sorry for him. Beating on a woman ain’t right. Unless, of course, it’s a whore. I had one take a couple dollars from me once, and when I got hold of her she got hers, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. Her face looked like a speckled pup I got through whapping her.”
“What about a place to live?” Hillbilly asked. He had looked the camp over. All of the houses seemed occupied and close enough together a man wanted to fuck his next-door neighbor’s wife, all he had to do was hang his dick out the window, she hang her ass out of hers.
“There ain’t really no places near. You can rent a tent from the camp store, make you a spot down the road a piece in the pines there. They ain’t gonna cut them trees for a few years. Too damn small.”
“Thanks again,” Hillbilly said, and wandered toward the mill house.
Just before he got there, it occurred to him he had been curious but had forgotten to ask why this Pete had given Three-Fingered Jack a beating in the first place.
He thought too about the redhead by the creek, knew she was the one who shot this Pete.
It was odd to realize she and he were both killers.
Sunset lay back down after Hillbilly left. She did so with the intention of resting a moment, but surprised herself by falling asleep. She awoke from her nap with a hand stroking her cheek.
For a moment she thought it was Pete, in one of his rare sweet moods, but then she remembered it couldn’t be Pete.
It was Karen.
“I didn’t mean to say all them things, Mama.”
Sunset managed to sit up. She had her hand in her dress pocket, had hold of the revolver. It was hard to open her hand and let it go. She had slept with it in her fist, her finger out of the trigger guard, just holding it by the hilt as if it were a club. She had held it so long and hard her hand was cramping and for a long moment she couldn’t extend her fingers.
“I just couldn’t take the beating,” Sunset said. “Wasn’t the first one he give me, Karen. You just didn’t know about it. He hit me so it wouldn’t show. Except this time. He was a good daddy to you, but he wasn’t no kind of husband to me.”
“Why did he do it, Mama? What did you do to make him hit you?”
“What did I do? If I’d have done something, got crazy mad, started beating on him and he got crazy too, I could forgive that and understand. Maybe I could understand if something bad happened to him that was my fault, or he was sick and not thinking clear, but it wasn’t nothing like that. Wasn’t just him hitting out at me. He really went to work on me. Did it because he liked to do it.”
Karen hung her head. “He didn’t never hit me. You’re the only one ever spanked me.”
“He loved you. He adored you.”
Sunset put her arm around her daughter’s shoulders. Karen let it rest there.
“He always told me good night,” Karen said. “He can’t do that no more. We can’t go fishing no more. And we always sang together. He taught me to sing. Said I was as good as Sara Carter.”
“Better.”
“You could have done something else. Didn’t have to kill him. You could have just left him.”
“I was going to, but I didn’t know how to tell you. Wish I had told you. It’s better than having to tell you what I told you last night. And I couldn’t just go and leave when it was happening, baby. Right then he wasn’t letting me go nowhere. I was afraid he got through I wouldn’t go nowhere again, ever. Look at my face, child.”
Karen turned to look. Sunset noted, painfully, that Karen resembled her father.
“My nose is broken, my lips are busted up. Lucky I got all my teeth. Can barely see out of my left eye. Think your daddy loved me, Karen?”
Karen started to cry, laid her head against her mother. Sunset held her like that for a long time.
When Karen stopped crying, Sunset said, “Your daddy wasn’t always bad to me. We had some good times. I loved him once. And I know he loved me. We met when I was sixteen and he was nineteen. That was too young. But we wanted one another and thought what we had was love, and it was, of a kind. But it was young love. We just wanted to play house, Karen. Thought being in bed together every night was love. Hear me? Keep that in mind you get all tied up with some boy and think you just can’t live without him around you and in you.”
“Mama, don’t talk like that.”
“That’s the truth, and I got to talk that way now. We ain’t got time for pretty words, just the truth. You save yourself from getting married till you’re old enough to know who and what you want. That Jerry Flynn you’re seeing. He’s a good boy. But you’re too young to think about marriage, and so’s he.”
“I ain’t said nothing about marriage.”
“No. But you could be thinking it. I thought it when I was your age. Got married and your daddy wasn’t through with other women. He wouldn’t never have been through with other women. I don’t know any more to say. Wouldn’t know what to say he died some other kind of way. But like this. There ain’t no words… Do you hate me?”
Karen shook her head. “I don’t know how I feel… What we gonna do now?”
“You could go to your grandma’s. You could stay there till I could figure some things out.”
“I don’t want to go there by myself.”
“You been there by yourself plenty.”
“I know. But Daddy’s there. Can’t we just go home?”
“There ain’t any home, Karen. It blowed away.”
“Can’t we just go there anyway?”
“If I can walk that far. I’m getting so stiff I can hardly move. Get there, all you’re gonna find is the house is blowed away. There’s just the floor.”
“I want to go.”
They walked out to the road, caught a ride with a man driving a rickety transport truck full of squawking chickens. The man, who had four teeth poorly arranged in his mouth, looked at Sunset when she climbed in next to him, Karen by the passenger door. He said, “You been in some kind of accident?”
“You could say that,” Sunset said.
The man drove them most of the distance and let them out where they didn’t have to walk too far, which suited Sunset fine.
When they got there it was noon and they were both hungry and had nothing to eat. As Sunset had said, there was only the floor left and a few items strewn about. The chicken house out back was gone, except for two posts with a tangle of net wire between them and a twist of feathers and meat where the storm had driven a chicken through it. The outhouse was gone too, leaving only the deep pit full of stinking waste. The yard was no longer littered with fish. There were a few left and they had dried up and shriveled in the sun and they stunk to high heaven. As for the rest of the fish, it was obvious what had happened to most of them. There were coon tracks in the dirt where they had come to feed. It looked like every coon in East Texas had attended a shindig there, dancing and leaping to cricket-leg music by the light of the moon.
In the not too distant trees they could see clothes and lumber and snarled limbs. There was a gap where trees had been knocked down by the tornado, and there was the overturned car wedged between two abused oak trees.
The walk had actually helped Sunset. She was moving more easily, feeling some oil in her joints, but she was tired and ready to rest.They sat on the flooring of the house and looked around.
Karen said, “I don’t know what I expected. You told me it was all gone.”
“Yeah, honey. Long gone.”
“I’m so hungry.”
“We can pick blackberries.”
They went down by the creek where the berry vines grew thick and picked some blackberries and ate them as they went. The berries were warm and sweet and the vines were close to the ground. While they picked they were cautious to watch for snakes. After a while they went back to the flooring and sat on the edge of it and looked out at the day as the sun staggered past noon and began to tumble to the other side of the sky like a ball rolling downhill.
When Sunset felt strong again, they went and looked at the car. No doubt about it, it was ruined. Pete’s files were strewn around it. Sunset began picking them up.
“These might be important to the next constable,” she said.
Karen helped her. They tried putting the files back inside the wooden file cabinet, but it was too busted up. They gathered all the files, even those still in the cabinet, and put them in the car.
About two in the afternoon they went to sit on the flooring of the house again. Karen sang, a little halfheartedly, but her voice when it was perking was really sharp, and Sunset thought: Yeah, she’s good as Sara Carter, but with less nose in the notes.
After a while a truck came clattering down the little road in front of the house. Sunset looked up, saw the driver was her mother-in-law.
Karen broke and ran toward the truck, yelling, “Grandma.”
Sunset said, “Watch you don’t get run over.”
The truck slowed and stopped. Karen jerked open the door, grabbed her grandma and hugged her.
Sunset walked over, said, “How’d you know we was here?”
“Where else was you gonna go? Don’t you think you ought to come home?”
“I don’t think Mr. Jones would like that.”
“Honey, far as I’m concerned, there ain’t no Mr. Jones no more.”