The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

the wheel without jerking the truck into next week. “That’s it, that’s it,” he’d say, his arms around hers on the wheel, the heat coming off his body like a sun-warmed shirt straight off the line, his pecker hard as a tree trunk against her tailbone. “Less go park in them trees,” he’d say, kissing behind her ear, his liquor breath thick as a swamp fog, and she’d say, “Freddie, quit,” and he’d say, “Gotdamn, Elma,” and she’d climb out of his reach and he’d drive her home. Goddamn, she allowed herself to say in her head. Goddamn if she didn’t like the way she felt in Freddie Wilson’s lap.

      Under the moon, knee-deep in Lizard Creek, Genus Jackson stood humming. A slim brown branch hung between his legs. He lathered her soap between his hands. He washed his chest, his neck, under his arms. The cricket frogs called to each other from the bank. Gentle as a teapot, Genus poured a stream of piss into the water. She felt her body flush, the blood rushing between her legs.

      It took all her will not to join him in his song, to join him in the water. But then what? She might spook him. He might call out. They might be heard. If her father found them, he’d take a hoe to both their hind sides. She looked at the pie, dark and dumb on its rock. What was she thinking, bringing a pie to a stranger in the middle of the night? Was he meant to eat it there, standing in the creek with his manhood hanging between them?

      Besides, he would know that she’d followed him. What she needed was for him to come upon her. She lifted the pie, crawled out from under the branches, and tiptoed back up the path.

      All week, at school, in the fields, in her bed, she counted the days to Saturday, when she would go down to the creek and wait for him. She imagined floating on her back in the creek, her hair swimming around her face like copper fish. Or she would sit on a rock on the bank, brushing it over her shoulder like a mermaid. Or she would be standing in the water where he had been, washing herself with her soap (that square of soap, the goose bumps of cornmeal, how they would brush against her skin), and he would come upon her. A vision. In her vision, she said, “Genus Jackson, have you been using my soap?”

      Come Saturday, she listened to the sounds of the house settling down. As soon as she was sure her father was asleep, she slipped outside in her nightdress. It was October, and the clay path was cool under her feet. The light of day still paled the edge of the west field. The mules snuffed and snored in the barn.

      Elma knew the sound of Mamie’s snoring, and of Archie’s shitting. She knew the sound a hog made just before it was slain, and the sound a stallion made when it was upon a jenny, and the sound the jenny made, which often as not was no sound at all. This was the sound she heard as she made her way down the path—the sound of one animal and the silence of another. The sound changed as she walked, a grunt, then a moan, and then nearly a hum. By the time Elma reached the end of the path, and the creek came into view, she did not want to look, but she did. She found her place on the sandhill under the skirt of the oak. It was so dark that at first the two silhouettes looked like round rocks in the creek. Then she made out the shoulders and heads above the water—the same shape, shorn of hair. If it hadn’t been for the sounds, Elma might have found beauty in their symmetry, two busts carved of black stone.

      Above, a cloud drifted past the moon, and then the light caught the ripples of the creek and their open mouths, and both mouths now made a certain sound, a tongueless sound, one unlike any Elma had heard on the farm. The sound would stay in her ears for a long time, and later she would have to reckon that it was what the Lord intended, though at that moment it seemed that the two figures in the creek had invented it themselves.

      The next Saturday, when Freddie Wilson directed Elma to drive his Chevy into the canopy of pines twelve miles west of town, she did. It was the place where the Straight dead-ended into scrubgrass, where no passing eyes could find them. Freddie looked as though he could hardly believe his luck, but he didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He shifted her off his lap and unbuckled his belt. Only if he would marry her, Elma said. Would he really marry her? Of course, he said. Of course what? she said, hand on his chest. He said, Of course I’ll marry you. And then Elma heard the sound again, though Freddie sounded more like a horse in a barn. Two months later, in the truck, when she told him her bleeding hadn’t come, he punched the window with his fist. It scared her so much she waited another month to tell her daddy, but her daddy wasn’t even mad, just nodded solemnly over his plate. He’s got to marry you now, he said. Long as he’ll do you right.

      It wasn’t until she was far along, when the newspapers started using the word “Depression,” that Elma thought back to that fall and saw that the Crash had come then, not long after the night she first saw Genus Jackson disappear down the path to Lizard Creek. It was hard not to draw a line between the two, her following him, and what followed. Pregnant as a potbellied pig, she read the newspapers front to back—it was the one luxury her father allowed in those months—and she could feel the hot, inextinguishable flame of her badness, spreading beyond the horizon like fire on a field. Was it her watching, her wanting, that called the devil down to the creek? It seemed that way, even before the babies came. And after they did, and after Genus disappeared for good, it was hard not to feel that she’d caused the whole world to crash.

       THREE

      

      GENUS JACKSON HAD BEEN DEAD TWO HOURS WHEN A POWERFUL knock came at Sheriff Cleave’s door. He lived in the quarters below the jailhouse in the Third Ward, and he thought the ruckus was his fool guardsman, reporting a problem with a prisoner. Best he could recall the only one up there was Wolfie Brunswick, the raggedy-bearded drunk of a vet who was drying out in the bullpen. Last night Sheriff and the guard had rolled their chairs into the cell to play Georgia Skins with him, Sheriff and the guard drinking Cotton Gin in the office between hands, drinking it in the teacups that had belonged to Sheriff’s grandmother, clinking the cups daintily together, growing more and more boisterous, until they were drunker than the drunk himself and the drunk was beating them soundly, a fact that threw them into greater and greater hilarity, and more and more teacups of gin. They were playing for peanuts, real peanuts, and the dust of them was still caked in Sheriff’s teeth.

      It wasn’t the fool guardsman at the door. It was George Wilson, a coat over his nightclothes, his silver head bare. Rarely had Sheriff seen him out of his pearl white suit. At the curb, his Buick idled. There was no driver waiting.

      Sheriff, still in nightclothes himself, covered his own head with the hat hanging by the door. His first thought was the mill. A quarrel between two drunk lintheads on the graveyard shift. Maybe a quarrel with Wilson himself. There had been unrest in the mill village, you could say, doffers and spinners complaining of too many hours and too little pay, as folks were given to. Folks not showing up for their shifts, or showing up drunk. If they were drunk, they were drunk on Juke Jesup’s Cotton Gin, which Wilson ran himself, if “run” was the word for it, for it didn’t run far beyond the county, and mostly ran his own help into the ground. But he did not suggest this to George Wilson. It was Sheriff’s job to look away, and besides, Sheriff too was drunk on it. Years before, Sheriff’s father and Wilson’s brothers had all followed their fortunes north, and Sheriff and Wilson had stayed behind in the little county seat that no one beyond twenty miles could find on a map, and so their loyalty to each other was a tonic for their shame—that together they might make themselves worthy.

      “It’s Jesup,” George Wilson said, standing at the door. So it wasn’t the mill—it was the gin. And then Sheriff thought of himself, of his own badge. Things had gone sour between Wilson and Jesup. Sour as they’d gone in the mill. Sheriff didn’t know why, but he could smell it. When Wilson said, “He’s gone and killed my man on the farm,” Sheriff had to hold himself up in the doorway. “He’ll say it’s Freddie, but it ain’t Freddie. Well, Freddie was there—I saw him with my own eyes when he come back to the mill—but he’s gone