Fall Line. Joe Samuel Starnes

handshake and got a healthy backslap in return.

      “Thank you, Guvnah. We appreciate all you do for us.”

      “I do the best I can.”

      The state senator walked back to the front of the restaurant and sat in a booth with two lawyers who had been waiting for him. The sheriff sat down and attacked his food, but the ham and biscuit in his mouth didn’t quell his angry whisper.

      “Goddamn, Elmer, what’s wrong with you, son? I can’t do everything for you. You got to make an effort.”

      Elmer scowled and leaned toward his uncle.

      “Why you call him ‘Guvnah?’ Ole Talmadge beat him like a stray dog.”

      “Son, you know everybody ’round here calls him Guvnah.”

      “Might as well call me sheriff.” Elmer smiled a little at his own joke and would have scratched himself and spit had he not been sitting down and eating. “And I wonder who he stole from to buy that car?”

      His uncle shook his head from side to side and let out another long sigh. He looked straight at Elmer, but Elmer spoke before Lloyd could, his eyes intense, his hand gripping his fork in the way he would hold a hammer.

      “Goddammit Lloyd, that sumbitch took our land. Your parents’ land, my mama’s land. I don’t see why I got to act like he didn’t. He flat out stole it.”

      “That was a long time ago, Elmer. He did me and Billy and your mama a favor.”

      “A favor, shit. He favored a lot of dirt farmers right up the ass, didn’t he? Then acted like he was our best friend. Most of the poor sumbitches believed him. I believed him for a long time, too.”

      “Elmer, it’s not that way. It cost him something. He saved a lot of farmers ’round here from going to jail.”

      “Mama always said that giving up our land is what killed granddaddy and grandmama.”

      “They was old, Elmer, had lived hard lives. At least they died in the homeplace, not some old nigger shack. Aubrey’s a good Christian. He did us a favor by not kicking us all out in the road.”

      “And doing us all favors made his ass rich. Helped him to take over the bank, helped him to get elected.”

      “He was already in the state house by then.”

      “That don’t matter nohow. Goddammit, Lloyd, it’s about our land. He took it, and now look what he’s done with it. I’m supposed to be happy about that?”

      Lloyd shifted in his seat and leaned forward over the table.

      “Elmer, son, it was the big’un. I know that your mama and Billy could’ve done worse, they could’ve lost everything. They never had to work in the factory. Your daddy could have gone to jail.”

      “My daddy might as well have ended up in the jailhouse.”

      “I ain’t saying Billy wasn’t sorry, Elmer. He was sorry—is sorry—and your mama would probably have been better off if she’d never seen him . . . but the Guvnah don’t have nothing to do with his being sorry.”

      “I don’t see what loyalty you got to the old sumbitch, Lloyd.”

      “The Guvnah has supported me all along. I was a young man, only thirty, when I got elected.”

      “Lloyd, everybody knows he ran you against old Rasmussen ’cause Rasmussen didn’t let him get away with drinking liquor and gambling and screwing half the women in this county. Like you do, Lloyd.”

      “Elmer, don’t you go there with me. Not today. I know you are in a bad place, but there ain’t no cause to be mean. Brother Frank says every time somebody’s being ugly, it’s because they are hurting inside . . . and I know you are hurtin’. But I ain’t gonna ’low it. I ain’t. You hear me?”

      “Don’t quote no uppity preacher to me. You know what you oughta do, Lloyd? Go out and see your family’s land one last time and say goodbye to Finley Shoals. You and your girls are the only Finleys left. You oughta take them out there and see what they lost. See the little crossroads that was once theirs, before it all goes down to the bottom of the lake. Maybe if you thought of it that way, you’d want to shoot that old sumbitch like I do, instead of giving him a goddamn gold medal.”

      “Elmer, keep your voice down, boy. You just talking again.”

      “I want to give the sumbitch some medals, all right, some metal from my gun, right in his ass.”

      “Elmer, hush now. You can’t go around saying you are going to shoot somebody. I’ve heard you say it before. I know you just talking, you angry, but you ain’t going to do anything of the sort . . . Go on home, cool off for a while. Think about things. He’ll help you out if you just let him. He pulled some strings to help me keep you on as long as he could, until it got to where he couldn’t do anything else.”

      “Shit. I don’t believe ’at for a minute. He’ll help me only if he can help himself.”

      “Well, it’s the only help you gonna get, boy. The only help you gonna get. You better take it. Your mama would tell you the same thing if she was here. You family, son, I love you. I’m telling you that you better see things different. He’s your best ticket to something new, a job, your future.”

      Elmer said nothing, avoiding eye contact with Lloyd.

      “Son, I wish I knew what to say to you. You going to go out there this evening to this thing, ain’t you? Wear your suit and a tie. You’ll be there?”

      Elmer cut another piece of gravy-soaked biscuit with his fork and put it in his mouth.

      “Well, son, won’t you? This is the best chance you gonna have.”

      Elmer chewed and swallowed. He looked up at his uncle’s red face, then back down at his plate.

      “C’mon, now, son. You look good in that blue dress suit of yours. Just for a little while, this afternoon.”

      Elmer set the fork tines down on the edge of his plate, listening to his uncle’s labored breathing.

      “I ain’t going to promise you nothin’,” he said, “but I’ll think about it.”

      Downtown Lymanville on Thursday morning was slow, more than half the parking spaces empty. Silver aluminum stars with glittery tassels hung from the creosote-covered light posts above the street-side trees, bare gingkoes and crape myrtles dormant in the late fall as winter waited to begin. Elmer lit a cigarette and walked down Lyman Avenue and then turned right on Main Street toward the women’s college, passing storefronts: the five and dime, the bank, the pool hall still dark, Woolworth’s, the movie house, the Piggly Wiggly across from the courthouse. He finished the butt and tossed it on the ground.

      He sulked along the street for a ways and then turned and went back up Main Street for a block and then left onto Lyman Avenue and crossed it and went up the high steps and into the Feed-and-Seed. He shut the screen door behind him and the smell of fertilizer and phosphorus rose up on him something powerful and phosphorous, the odorous promise of high corn and fat red tomatoes and world-record turnips. The store had dim lights and the smell in the air was like a relic of the last century; the old hardwood floors were clean but long worn and had not seen a coat of varnish in Elmer’s lifetime. Exposed brick on the inside walls showed sloppy masonry from a bygone era. Four men, two gray and two bald, all in glasses and overalls, sat around a checkerboard on a wooden barrel near the front. They looked up at him and nodded. Mr. Worthington, the bald store owner who was the oldest and the only fat one, spoke.

      “Mornin’, Elmer.”

      “Mornin’.”

      “Something I can help you with today?”

      “Naw sir. Just looking.”

      “Okay. Make yourself at home.”

      Elmer