“Where’d you get this?” Bessie asked.
Billy sipped his coffee. The grounds had been used and reused so many times, they barely even colored the water.
“Look at this place.” He waved a hand at their shanty. “We live in squalor,” he said. “Ain’t ye tired of it yet? This floor turnin to mud ever time it rains? Chinks fallin out. They’s goddamn drifts in the kitchen from snow blowin through the walls.”
“Where’d you get it?” Bessie asked again.
“I-I-I-I don’t think ye need to know. We’re rich, Bessie. Concern yourself with that. Oh, and this ain’t the only one.”
“What do you mean?”
He grinned. “That bar’s got a whole mess a brothers and sisters.”
Bessie dropped the bar on the bed and stood up. With her hands, she framed Billy’s acne-speckled face. He’d been trying for a mustache the last six months, but it looked patchy and ridiculous.
“I need to know right now what you done,” she said.
He swatted her hands away.
“What you mean, what I done? I’m providin for my f**kin family.”
“Billy, when you brought the high-grade home from the mine, I didn’t like it, but I let it go. Next thing I know, we got a half ton a ore in the root cellar. I said nothin. But that.” She pointed at the bar of gold. “You take it from the Godsend?”
“What if I told you I found it and—”
“I’d call you a black liar.” He jumped to his feet and grabbed Bessie’s arms and shoved her toward the kitchen.
She crashed into the washbasin and the shelves. A can of condensed milk fell on her head, jars of sugar, long sweetening, flour, and salt shattering on the dirt floor. When Bessie looked up, Billy stood over her, eyes twitching, face bloodred.
Harriet had disappeared under the table, but her crying filled the cabin. Billy ripped the oilcloth off the table, glared at his daughter. “Now you shut that f**kin yap, Harriet! I’m speakin to your mother, and I don’t wanna hear peep one out a you!”
The little girl buried her face in her dress to muffle her sobs.
“Your daughter, Billy!” Bessie screamed. “That’s your—”
Billy grabbed his wife by the ankles and dragged her toward the bed. He picked her up and slammed her onto the mattress, climbed on top of her, pinning her underneath his weight.
“L-l-l-l-listen, you ungrateful cunt,” he whispered, straining to hold her down. “By God, I’ll make you be still.” He slapped her twice. Bessie quit struggling. They lay pressed together, panting, Bessie trying not to gag at the fishy reek of Billy’s breath.
“It’s Oatha, ain’t it?” Bessie said. “He got you into somethin. You changed since you taken up his company.” Billy pressed his forearm into his wife’s neck and leaned into her windpipe.
“M-m-m-m-make no mistake,” he whispered. “One word, I’ll f**kin kill ye. Simple as that.”
“And your daughter, Billy?” she wheezed. “Gonna kill Harriet, too?” Bessie saw it happen. The madness spilled over in Billy’s eyes and she knew he would suffocate her. “All right, baby. All right.” She’d been digging her fingernails into his biceps, but now she let go and ran her fingers through his greasy sandy-blond hair. “Billy.” She couldn’t produce anything louder than a whisper. “Billy, I can’t breathe.”
It passed. He let up on his wife’s neck, but he still lay sprawled on top of her as she coughed and gasped for air.
“You gonna make me kill you one a these days,” Billy said.
All Bessie could do was stare into his twitching eyes. It wasn’t anger she felt toward him. Not anymore. Only fear and profound sadness, because so little about him resembled the person she’d married in West Tennessee at fourteen. That sweet and tender boy felt as distant as her father, long dead from stone on the chest.
Her eyes caught on the bottle of seashells in the window. She thought of that happy summer in ’89 when they’d taken a steamboat down the Mississippi to visit Billy’s brother on the Gulf Coast. It was the first and last time she’d seen the ocean, but she’d never lost the smell of it or forgotten the cool shock of salt water running under her feet that morning she and Billy had walked the beach together collecting those shells.
Billy rolled off of her and sat up.
Bessie touched the swelling knot on top of her head.
“You never beat me in Tennessee.”
“When’d you give me cause? Now . . . this gold. We got a problem?”
“No, Billy.”
“W-w-w-w-well, all right, then.”
He sighed and got up from the bed, walked back over to the table, knelt down. Harriet still had her head buried in her gingham dress, so all he could see of her was a battery of black curls.
“Come on out a there now, girl. Me and your mama is all right. Sometimes adults have to talk things out, find a remedy for a situation.” The little girl lifted her head, eyes still brimming with tears. “Come on now, honey. Your doll’s over there on the floor all alone. She’s upset, too. What’s her name?”
“Samantha.”
“You just gonna leave Samantha over there to cry by herself? Ain’t you her mama now?” As Harriet crawled out from underneath the table, Billy said, “Well, how’s about we crack open a can a oysters. It’s Christmas after all, ain’t it?” And Billy flashed Bessie his broken-tooth smile, Bessie thinking, I don’t know if it’s this town or Oatha that done it, but you ain’t the same. This thin air’s poisoned you. Ain’t my Billy no more. I’ve lost you.
TWENTY-ONE
Christmas morning, Oatha Wallace slung his oilskin slicker over the coat-rack and breathed in the smell of Joss Maddox’s cigarette.
“Comin down, huh?” she called out from behind the bar.
Oatha removed his slouch hat, beat the felt brim against his leg to dislodge the snow, and replaced it on the tangle of wavy black hair that fell to his shoulders. He strode to the pine bar, where Joss had already poured two tumblers of whiskey and uncapped a bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
“So,” she said. “How merry of a Christmas is it?”
He opened his coat, reached into the inner pocket. “We got there with both feet.”
When Joss saw the bar of gold, she went moist between her legs, reached out and touched Oatha’s hand. He drank both tumblers and took a long pull of beer. “Tell me, Jossy—”