The Convict and Other Stories

But he hadn’t told his grandson the rest of the story, the part that had bothered him through the years, not because it was singular in itself, but instead because it was not—something that was in him that he had never come to understand.

On the way into Yoakum, with Hardin chained in the back of the wagon, the blood kept beating in his temples, his chest expanded with each breath that he drew, and he whipped the mules over holes that could have broken a wheel. Hardin was conscious, his manacled hands clasped on the front of his black coat like a preacher’s, his body swaying under the chains as the wagon bounced over the ruts, and when Hack looked back into his blood-flecked eyes, he felt a strange relationship with him that was based on neither fear nor hatred.

“You want to stop the wagon and do it proper between us?” Hardin said.

“I don’t want to see you get knocked off your own horse and go to hell in the same day.”

“If you just lock me in jail, you know you ain’t going to sleep tonight, Hack. You make the rules. Pistols or knives or shotguns.”

“Tell me, did you really kill them forty men?”

“Some of them was federal niggers, like your deputies. That don’t really count,” Hardin said. “I tell you what. Take these shackles off me, and we’ll use one pistol and you can hold it. That’ll make it even.”

“You’re a shit hog, Hardin, and that’s what I’m going to use you for in my jail. You’re going to clean slop jars and spittoons until I send you up to Huntsville pen.”

But even after he threw Hardin headlong into the cell and turned the key on him, the blood still hummed in his head, and his face was hot to his own touch. He left the mules in harness behind the jail and rode his deputy’s horse back to the house. He slipped the cinch on the saddle and let it fall to the ground, pulled the bridle over the horse’s head, and slapped its rump toward Yoakum. The Mexican woman (he thought her name was Marta) was at the back of the barn, mixing molasses and feed in a nose bag for the mare that had just given foal. There were dried flecks of blood and gossamer wisps of membrane in the hair of her forearms. She started to smile, then turned toward the stall when she saw his face. Her breasts were too large for the man’s denim shirt she wore, and her thighs were thick from doing stoop labor in the fields. Her flat, Indian face and obsidian eyes looked back at him again, and she tried to bend over into the stall and slip the straps of the nose bag around the mare’s ears before his hands took her shoulders and pulled her back. He pressed her down on the feed sacks, lifted her peasant dress over her hips, and pulled her bloomer underwear down over her legs. She went through it without choice, her face turned away toward the stall, and after he reached that heart-rushing moment and labored with his head pressed between her breasts, she pushed up softly at him with her palms.

“She’ll bite the foal if she don’t eat,” she said.

“No. Again,” he said, and felt the heat burn inside him throughout the morning.

It was a brilliant morning on the front porch, and the blowing clouds left deep areas of shadow, like bruises, on the soft green hills in the distance. His daughter ran her comb through his hair and touched at it with her fingers as she might at a child’s, then placed the Stetson back on his head and moved a white strand away from his eyebrow.

“You look right handsome, Grandpa,” she said.

“But we don’t want you chasing women when we get to town,” his son-in-law said.

He felt them take him by each arm and help him into the yellow convertible, then the front gate went by and the Angus grazing through the short grass in the front pasture, the windmill ginning in the hot breeze and the water pumping out over the trough, and finally the long white fence that bordered the field where his son kept his Thoroughbreds. The rocks clicked under the fenders, then the car rumbled over the cattle guard, and he heard the tires hiss along the soft tar surfacing of the road. The pines and oak trees were thickly spaced along the road, and he could smell the dry needles on the ground and blackjack burning in someone’s smokehouse. Somewhere beyond a watery pool on the bend of the road a train whistle was blowing.

“Where did you say Satchel-ass was at?” he said.

“In Korea, Grandpa. Don’t you remember when he sent the medal home?” his daughter said.

It’s inside him, too, he thought. It didn’t go into any of the others.

The road wound out of the woods and dropped over a hill, then the country flattened out into small farms and neat white houses with tin roofs and rose gardens. The billboards and the huge signs painted on the sides of barns flashed by him, the drive-in root-beer stand and the trailer park, then the prefabricated houses in a bulldozed field, and he tried to call back into memory what that part of the county had looked like before, but the convertible was going too fast.

His son-in-law pulled the car into the high-banked sidewalk with the old tethering rings set in the concrete and put a coin in the parking meter. It was Saturday, and the sidewalk was crowded with Mexicans, Negroes, and farm families, and most of the merchants had rolled out the awnings in front of their stores and put wood chairs by their doors. The sun was hot on the leather seat of the convertible. Hack looked through the front glass into the dark interior of the poolroom straight ahead. He could hear the click of the billiard balls and the laughter of drunk farmhands and cedar cutters and almost smell the bottles of beer set along the bar.

“We’re just going in the dime store, Grandpa,” Bonnie said.

He saw them walk away through the brightness into the awning’s shadow. A drop of perspiration ran out from under his hat and caught in his eyelash like a diamond. It was too hot in the car and he wanted to urinate. Then a large, gray man, with square shoulders and eyes as blue as a butane flame, was standing next to the car door.

“Why, hello, Mr. Holland, how are you today?” he said, and picked up Hack’s hand with his own. “Can I get you a glass of beer from the bar?”

“They won’t give me nothing to drink at home.”

“Well, I don’t expect Bonnie will mind. You wait here and I’ll be right back.”

The tall man stepped back on the high sidewalk in his cowboy boots and went inside the darkness of the poolroom. A moment later he returned with a mug of beer, the foam and ice slipping over his hand.

“After you finish this, Mr. Holland, just wave and I’ll bring you another one.”

“My grandson little Hack is fighting across the big water.”

“Yes sir, we heard about it. They give him the Navy Cross, didn’t they?”

“He’s a Holland. He’s the only one of the bunch that’s got the same thing inside him.”