Hell at the Breech by Tom Franklin

Author:Tom Franklin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Historical
ISBN: 9781402571930
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2003-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

II

On his birthday, Mack lay on his back on a burlap bag underneath the wagon, greasing its axle, surely God’s nastiest work. He could see the mare’s legs at the front, she would lift a hoof now and then and stamp and nicker, the air vivid and strangely lit around them with the energy of a coming storm. He lay on his side looking out at how the color of things seemed a shade wrong, as if light had somehow come too quickly at dawn and caught the earth unawares. Leaves not yet stripped by the late-fall chill rasped on their limbs and fallen ones scraped over the croquet court, through or around the wickets and over the road into the picked field which seemed in the strange light a place where thousands of men had bled and died. He’d heard if you stood on certain battlefields you could sense the deaths that had occurred there, the way the widow could feel a ghost in a room. Perhaps in killing a man you began to see this otherworldly light on a more regular basis, perhaps the soles of your feet became conductors of supernatural energy and you drew the death upward through your bones.

Around the corner someone walked up the steps. He heard footsteps over the porch. Then he heard the door open and simultaneously the bell. But it wasn’t somebody going in; Tooch had come out.

“Howdy, Floyd,” Tooch said. “You want to come in or just stand out here on the porch.”

Floyd said, “Well.”

The door opened again as they went inside. Mack slid out from under the wagon and pulled himself up using its sideboards.

Finished, he wiped his hands and sealed the grease keg, rolled it to its spot by the anvil. He used the horse to back the wagon into its place and unharnessed her, led her to the stall at the rear of the shed. He brushed her down, trying to calm her, her hair bristling as the first invisible rain side-wound its way under the shed and wet his cheeks and the backs of his hands. He told the mare she’d be fine and scratched her withers and set a bucket of oats before her and closed the stall door.

He paused on the porch before going in. Earlier in the afternoon Tooch had handed Mack his pocketknife and instructed him to sharpen both blades without saying why, though Mack had suspected the reason. As the storm gathered out beyond the trees across the field, he’d spent an hour on the porch steps oiling the knife and cleaning it with a chamois, and then with a new flintrock from the box under the counter he’d given it an edge like no knife had ever seen, had held it against the graying sky and imagined it could slice a rock like a potato, cut a rifle barrel into washers.

Inside he saw Floyd talking quietly to Tooch in the back. Both men looked at him as the bell rang but he’d learned to go about his work as if unaware of the presence of other people.

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