The World Made Straight Read online

  “There’s things in there that ain’t, I mean aren’t, on the marker or in that book you have,” Travis said, his voice thickening. “When they first got into the Laurel they rounded up the women and whipped them with hickory sticks. Tied some of them to trees in the middle of winter. Those bastards whipped an eighty-five-year-old woman.”

  “I know,” Leonard said, closing the book. He looked not at Travis but at the worn cover. “I’ve read this book. It’s got one big flaw as history, though. It fails to show the other side.”

  “What other side?” Travis asked.

  “How the Sixty-fourth had been shot at for days. How miserable the weather was, how rough the terrain. They figured those women could tell where the snipers were and save them a lot of time and work. Save some of their own lives as well.”

  “It was still wrong,” Travis said. “I wouldn’t have shot a twelve-year-old boy.”

  “Saying that here and now is different than if you’d been there,” Leonard said, handing the book back to Travis. “Some soldiers didn’t want to shoot at first, but Keith told them if they didn’t they’d be killed as well. What if you had a wife and a child? It’s 1863 and they’re about starved to death as it is. The man giving the orders knows where your family lives. It’s no longer about just you. You’ve already seen an eighty-five-year-old woman being beaten, so you know he’d as likely do the same to your wife or daughter.”

  “I still wouldn’t have shot a twelve-year-old boy,” Travis said, his face reddening. “If they’d made me shoot I’d have missed on purpose. Either that or I’d have untied them the night before so they could get away.”

  “The soldiers didn’t know the prisoners were going to be killed,” Leonard said. “Allen had left Lieutenant Keith in charge and Keith told his men the same thing he’d told the prisoners, that they were going to the stockade in Knoxville. Nobody knew Allen had decided otherwise until Keith gave the order to halt and told the prisoners to line up.”

  “Maybe if I’d been at Shelton Laurel I’d have shot Keith,” Travis said. “Maybe if someone had done that one person would have been killed instead of thirteen.”

  “But what if you had to kill more than one?” Leonard asked. He stepped over to the bookshelf, thumbed through a thin paperback to an underlined passage. “Listen to this,” Leonard said. “Force is as pitiless to the man who possesses it, or thinks he does, as it is to its victims; the second it crushes, the first it intoxicates. Those who use it and those who endure it are turned to stone… a soul which has entered the province of force will not escape this except by a miracle.”

  Leonard closed the book.

  “That was written by a woman named Simone Weil in 1940, in Paris. She wasn’t theorizing. She was witnessing.”

  “If you believe that how come you shot that fellow up in Illinois?”

  Leonard laughed.

  “Which version have you heard, the one where I shot the guy in both shoulders or shot off two of his fingers?”

  “Both shoulders,” Travis said.

  “I’ve never shot anybody in my life. That’s a story concocted by someone who heard I was arrested up there. But I haven’t spent a lot of time setting the record straight. It’s not a bad thing for the people I deal with to think I shot somebody. Most of the bastards know they deserve to be shot, but they aren’t especially wanting to hurry it along.”

  “Anybody who’s seen you with that Colt would know you could shoot a man’s fingers off.”

  “All the better,” Leonard said. “Like I said, some of the folks I deal with need to know that if I ever did decide to take aim at their sorry asses I wouldn’t miss.”

  “That why you’re doing the contest Friday?”

  “That’s reason enough, isn’t it?”

  Travis nodded. “You going to practice this morning?”

  “I thought I’d shoot a round or two,” Leonard said.

  “Mind if I shoot some with you?”

  “No. Get your rifle and set us up some targets. I’ll be out there in a minute.”

  Leonard went to the back room and took the Colt .45 and a box of wadcutters from the top drawer. Dena still slept and Leonard doubted even the shooting would rouse her. When she’d come in at 4 A.M. she hadn’t bothered to undress, just dropped the car keys on the bureau and lay down, bringing to his bed the smell of aftershave and cigarettes. Probably used the backseat of his car as her boudoir. Three crumpled ten-dollar bills lay beside the car keys, so at least she’d sold the dime bags of pot. Keeping her end of the bargain, as she put it.

  “You mind if Lori goes with us Thursday night?” Travis asked when Leonard came outside.

  “Fine by me,” Leonard said. He aimed the Colt at one of the cans Travis had set on the row of stumps and fired. A can lifted into the air and landed beside the stump upright as if placed there, a hole in its center. Leonard shifted the Colt to his left and hit another can. He shot four more times, the cans leaping and spinning into the grass.

  “Your turn,” Leonard said.

  Travis raised the rifle, slowed his breath, then laid his index finger on the trigger. The bullet hit low, a solid thump as it burrowed into the stump. He shot and missed again.

  “You’re jerking the trigger,” Leonard said. “Slow and gentle. It has to be a surprise when the gun goes off.”

  “It could be the iron sights are off plumb,” the boy said defensively. “If I had that Colt I could hit them easy.”

  “I doubt it’s the iron sights,” Leonard said. “Let me try.”

  Leonard raised the .22 and shot the can off the stump. He handed the rifle to Travis.

  “Try it again. Look at the target and squeeze the trigger slow. Don’t think about anything else. Just those two things.”

  Travis raised the rifle, let his finger rest on the trigger half a minute before the shot. A can leaped like something alive before falling onto the grass.

  “That’s better,” Leonard said.

  After Travis left for work, Leonard sat down in the recliner, a cotton cloth and bottles of Hoppe’s bore cleaner and oil in his hand. He took the pistol apart and cleaned and lubricated it thoroughly. As he worked Leonard remembered how during his first week at Chapel Hill he’d gone into Wilson Library and asked the research librarian about a Civil War massacre in Shelton Laurel, North Carolina. Thirty minutes passed before the librarian handed Leonard a roll of microfilm labeled The New York Times, July 1863. He’d threaded the microfilm onto the reels and moved through time until he came to the July 24 headline BARBAROUS OUTRAGES PERPETRATED UPON UNION MEN BY THE REBELS. Leonard remembered how he’d slowly scrolled down the page, learning not just boys but grandfathers had been killed. Learning the killing had not been done just with guns.

  The gun cleaned and lubricated, Leonard pushed in the re-coil spring and the plug and barrel bushing. The empty magazine locked into place with a satisfying click.

  January 11, 1863, Bald Mountain, Tennessee—North Carolina

  line

  Boyce Alexander. Shot by sniper in upper left arm. Minié ball so

  bone shattered. Amputation. Whiskey. Chloroform—ten

  drops. Used capital saw. Arteries tied off with horsehair.

  Cauterized with flat blade of Lieutenant Keith’s Bowie knife.

  Mortification possible. Two drams of laudanum for pain when

  awakened.

  Emmit Johnson. Frostbite, left foot.

  Billy Revis. Frostbite, both feet.

  Thomas Rigsbee. Frostbite, left foot.

  Bryce Ross. Frostbite, right big toe.

  Immersed limbs in cold water before intense movement of

  affected skin. Tincture of iodine applied. Removed black

  tissue from Revis’s left foot. Refused chloroform but imbibed

  draught of whiskey. Even in peacetime Billy never averse to

  spirits.

  Dewy Morton. Still dangerous with fever. Fifth day. Continue to

  drink tea made of boneset and feve
rweed.

  Claude Frizzell. Dyspepsia. Calamus tea. Epsom salts and

  mayapple purge to remove morbific matter.

  Isaac Ponder. Bloody flux. Tea made with dogwood bark (no

  blackberry root obtainable). Mustard plaster on stomach. Only

  real cure better victuals.

  Recommended Ponder, Revis, Alexander relieved of duty.

  Note: Address Allen of need for more iodine, chloroform,

  laudanum.

  P.M.

  Jeremiah Cantrell. Gutted with knife or bayonet. Found at sentry

  post. Two drams of laudanum to dim his final suffering.

  When brought back to camp the poor man’s intestines dragged

  the dirt like an umbilical cord. A more dismaying sight no

  man could ever find words for.

  NINE

  “Looks like most of the county decided to come,” Dena complained as they followed a long line of cars and trucks into the fairground’s dirt parking lot. “I thought it wouldn’t get crowded till the weekend.”

  Leonard glanced over at Dena. Her irises had narrowed to pinpricks, like the quickness of her words evidence she’d found the black beauties he’d hidden last week behind the ledgers. Probably sniffed them out, he thought, the same way a drunk sniffs out whiskey in a dry town.

  “The men have come to see Leonard show everyone else up,” Travis said from the backseat.

  Dena scoffed as Leonard pulled into an empty space.

  “More likely to watch some hootchie-cootchie dancer shake her ass.”

  Leonard opened the trunk and took out the .45 and a box of wadcutters.

  “They let you tote guns around the fairgrounds?” Travis asked.

  “No,” Leonard said. “Sheriff Crockett isn’t the most diligent upholder of the law, but he won’t allow that. I have to check it in at the main gate. A worker takes the pistols and ammunition to the arena.”

  They moved through the tight maze of vehicles toward the entrance. The fairgrounds looked like a desert mirage of some bright but far-off city. The pulsating lights of the ’sky rides radiated deep into the dark. As they got closer, a kaleidoscope of sounds became more individualized—bells and shrieks, the clatter of a roller coaster. From the livestock barns, calls of haw haw echoed as cattlemen finished the team penning for the night.

  “I’m buying the tickets,” Leonard said at the entrance as he handed over his pistol and ammunition, took out his billfold.

  “Look at the big spender,” Dena said as he paid. “Twelve whole dollars.”

  As he pocketed his billfold Leonard wondered if the man at the ticket booth assumed he and Dena were husband and wife, Travis and Lori their children. Maybe thought the four of them just another farm family come to spend harvest money on what passed for exotic in these hardscrabble mountains. Mirage. It seemed he could hear the word’s soft syllables whispered beneath the fairground’s louder sounds.

  “We’ll need to decide where to meet later,” Leonard said as he handed out tickets.

  “What time’s the pistol shoot?” Travis asked.

  “It’s the last event, so not until nine-thirty.”

  “Let’s just meet there,” Travis said, and took Lori’s hand.

  Leonard watched them walk up the midway, knowing they would linger before every game and ride and tent because they were too young to know how tawdry and fleeting the midway’s exotica were, how in a week you would come back here and find only sawdust and trash.

  “I’ll go with you if you’ll win me a teddy bear,” Dena said, placing her elbow in the crook of Leonard’s arm.

  “The games are all rigged,” Leonard replied.

  “You can at least try,” Dena said, leaning into him. “I’m worth a few quarters, ain’t I?”

  They walked toward the midway, passing shadowy sideshows, their imploring barkers in front of lurid paintings promising giant reptiles, freaks, and scantily clad women. Leonard felt the sift and give of sawdust under his feet, the crisp fresh smell of powdered wood mingling with candy apples and french fries. They were soon on the midway, passing a cart selling corn dogs, another where a woman swirled feathers of cotton candy onto paper cones as if performing a magic feat. They passed a dunking booth, then bumper cars whose metal rods sparked like lit fuses. Dena stopped where horses on a merry-go-round paused mid-gallop while a carny dismounted children.

  “Give me fifty cents,” she said. Leonard fished two quarters from his pocket and watched Dena join the line of waiting children. She paid and mounted a horse whose eye had been chipped away, its teeth bared like a grimace. The last children were hoisted up and the platform began turning, the horses slowly rising and falling as a discordant lullabye crackled from the speakers. Dena sat erect, hands on the knobs sprouting from her horse’s ears, eyes straight ahead as though looking for some obstacle she might have to leap.

  Leonard turned and watched the red and white ride called the Octopus fling riders into the sky. Beneath its flailing arms, in the nexus of thick black cables, grease-caked gears, and pulleys, crouched a man in a grimy tee-shirt and jeans. He was old, brow and biceps wrinkled, long hair falling to his shoulders in a gray tangle. But he moved with the dexterity of a spider monkey as he hunched and scurried between the supports and electrical systems to keep the machine going, its wide arms appearing to hurtle forward but in reality returning again and again to where they had always been. Like God at the center of his universe, Leonard thought, watching the scabbed, grizzled hands at the controls.

  Never a sparrow falls from the sky but God knows it.

  Leonard remembered how the Fairlane had faltered that last half mile before crossing over the Eastern Continental Divide, the mountains ensuring his return to Bloody Madison, to a run-down trailer where he sheltered a boy whose last name was Shelton. Then the glasses literally rising up out of the past. And now the yellowhammer feather. He had come in last week, and there it was on the coffee table. When Leonard mentioned that during the Civil War Alabama soldiers called themselves yellowhammers and wore such feathers in their hats, Travis had said all he knew was they made good trout flies.

  The merry-go-round’s music began to wind down and Leonard turned to see the bolder children already sliding off their mounts. Dena stayed on her horse until the next group of riders stepped onto the platform.

  “I always wanted to ride one,” she said as they walked on up the midway.

  “Disappointed?” Leonard asked.

  “No,” Dena said. “It’s a real good feeling. Kind of like floating just above the earth but never quite touching.”

  They walked on to the far end of the midway and entered a makeshift arcade. Dena spent two dollars maneuvering toy cranes that rooted sand for prizes, cursing when a watch slipped repeatedly from the dull steel teeth. Leonard threw rings and won a fake-silver bracelet. The booth operator engraved Dena’s name on the bracelet’s plate.

  “Keep you from forgetting who you are,” the carny said, a comment that struck Leonard as sinister. The man laughed harshly, exposing yellow teeth crooked and gapped. The teeth reminded Leonard of gravestones in a derelict cemetery.

  “All the magazines say giving her jewelry means a man’s got serious intentions about a woman,” Dena said. She clasped the bracelet on her wrist, the bright metal clicking as it locked. “So I reckon long as I’m wearing this we’re honest to God sweethearts.” She held out her arm so he could see the bracelet better. “This means you’ll have to take care of me,” she said, “for better or for worse.”

  Out on the shadowy grass beyond the midway, a guitarist, bass player and drummer crowded a wooden stage so small and rickety it swayed each time the musicians moved. From where Leonard stood, the three men appeared to be performing on a waterborne raft. They were older men, probably in their sixties, and played the staples, “Your Cheating Heart,” “Long Black Veil,” “Wolverton Mountain.” Leonard checked a passerby’s watch.

  “Let’s go over and listen,” Leonard sai
d. “We still have half an hour.”

  “Not me,” Dena said. “If I want to listen to that hillbilly yowling I can turn on the radio.”

  “Meet me at the arena then.”

  “You got a couple dollars I can borrow?”

  Leonard gave her two ones. She clinched the bills in her hand and walked back into the arcade.

  Leonard sat down near the front of the stage. A good-sized audience filled the aluminum bleachers but no one Travis and Lori’s age. That didn’t surprise him. When Leonard was growing up, his family’s radio was on dawn till bedtime, always tuned to a country station. But he rarely listened. Country music had seemed too depressing, most lyrics a litany of yearning and regret. He’d preferred the energy of Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry, later the bliss and magnificence of classical music. But country music had a rough-hewn honesty Leonard had come to appreciate. He remembered something a Nashville songwriter had once said, that a great country song was nothing but three chords and the truth.

  As the musicians played the last verse of “Long Black Veil,” the bass player turned to the guitarist and nodded at the far bleacher. Leonard leaned to get a better look and saw the person being gestured toward was Carlton Toomey.

  As a child, Leonard had heard the stories about Toomey and seen him often enough on the streets of Marshall. He remembered a big man who wore short-sleeve tee-shirts even in winter, displaying meaty upper arms that appeared ready to split the cloth, his thick black hair swept back in a pompadour. That hair was gray now, the face more furrowed. One morning last March Leonard had sold out quicker than anticipated and driven over to the Toomeys’ farmhouse. Carlton sat at the kitchen table with a sharp-dressed dealer from Atlanta. Leonard joined them at the table, waited for the two men to finish their transaction.

  It had been like watching an actor give a flawless performance. Toomey’s accent was thick, his grammar mangled. He’d slouched in the chair, head tilted back and slack-jawed. The one thing Carlton could not conceal was the quickness in his eyes, studying the dealer as if an opponent in a poker game who might reveal his hand with some small gesture. The Atlantan had been abrasive, downright insulting, but Carlton had ignored the slights, calmly restated what he’d pay, and gotten the price he wanted. As Leonard watched that morning, he came to believe much of what he’d heard about Toomey was hyperbole, like Leonard’s own criminal acts in Illinois.