The Marble Orchard - Alex Taylor

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Derna’s eyes fluttered and a slow groan of ecstasy rolled up from her belly. Her knees buckled and she braced herself against the stove, her head bent so that her black curls dangled in the drafty air, and she gripped the edge of the iron stove with such force her knuckles whitened.

      All of the men turned toward her. Even Loat, his mouth now gaped in slack surprise, craned his neck.

      “Dollbaby,” he said. “Is the heat in here getting to you?”

      Derna raised her head. Her eyes had a drowsy cast to them and her open mouth burned a bright ring of color in the center of her powdered face.

      “Yes,” she said, almost gasping. “I think maybe I’d better go lay down.” She stumbled out of the room and clomped down the hall to the room where Loat kept her bedded. For a time, the men stared after her, a bit dazed by what they’d seen. But whatever it had been, true bliss or performed rapture, it had diffused the simmering violence in the room so that Boyce Hazelip raked his chips from the table into his black-banded hat.

      “I’ll cash these leavings with you at a later date, Loat,” he said.

      Loat gave no reply as Hazelip exited the house. The other men around the table listened to the cough and grind of his ancient Ford pickup, the engine giving grate and snarl as it descended the grade from Loat’s house to the main trace that led back to town. When the noise had diminished, Loat ordered that the game be finished. His gaze was calm and serene as he dealt the final hand.

      A week later, Boyce Hazelip’s wife found him in his burley patch with his throat slit. Loat was brought in for questioning, but the sway of his influence extended into lofty pockets, and the police soon turned their inquiries elsewhere, and when the trail went cold, the matter was mostly forgotten.

      For Clem, this seemed but a footnote to the larger story. What he’d seen that night was a woman throttled by the scene of two men paired against each other, the smell of their building blood hot in the close dingy room. It was the first time he looked upon Derna as something more than just another woman. Her back arced against the iron stove, the sweat dribbling from the crease of her hairline—it all gave her the appearance of a woman being inhabited by forces larger than herself, and the gruff moan as it slid from her throat made it clear the forces were welcome, that her body longed to house them.

      “Go on, Clem,” she said, bringing him back from memory. “Fetch the Hoover so I can run it over the carpet here. You’ve dropped cornbread or something all through the house.” Her hand darted at invisible crumbs.

      Clem retrieved the vacuum, plugged it into an outlet, then sat it before her. She laid the shotgun beside her on the couch and turned on the machine, its brash roar rattling the windows as she wheeled it over the carpet, soft plumes of dust rising about her. Her look was empty and calm, as if this were an action as somber and driven of anger as church.

      Clem watched her for a spell, then went to fetch his baking soda.

      In the morning sometimes, a white vintage Cadillac would coast into town and lurch to a stop in the gravel parking lot of Steff General Merchandise, the car rocking on its chassis as the motor sputtered and died. In the backseat rode a band of six Doberman hounds posed in various attitudes. At the wheel was Presto Geary and beside him sat Loat Duncan, his face shaded under the straw hat that marked him to folks from a distance. The men on the porch of the store would nod or hello him, but Loat rarely spoke, passing on into the cool dark of the mercantile, bent upon his own mysterious business.

      The dogs waited in the car. These were not jolly hounds, but had the look of beasts borne up from some uncharted desert, their lean tapered forms resembling those of jackals, though they were much larger and coated in the black and tan pattern of their breed. When Loat and Presto emerged from the store bearing their brown-bagged groceries, the men on the porch were glad to see them go as the dogs made them nervous because they were clearly bred for hunting and the hunting they were bred for was the hunting of men.

      Once the Cadillac drove away in a fog of bone-colored dust, the men on the porch would resume their talk, the appearance of Loat directing the conversation toward grim memory.

      “He was around twenty or so I guess when it happened with him and Daryl.”

      “He was young I remember.”

      “Young, but mean already.”

      “Who else was with them the night it happened?”

      “Clem Sheetmire. You know that.”

      “Oh. I recollect now.”

      “The three of them run out to the Peabody mines. Course the mines had been shut down for a year at that time and that was the summer when if a man had any copper laying around he better sit on it if he didn’t want it stole. Folks would leave for church and come home to find the wiring tore right out the walls of their house that copper was going at such a price.”

      The sun had shifted to fall slantwise beneath the porch eaves, and the men moved in tandem to the cooler shade of the concrete steps.

      “It was Daryl climbed that transformer pole out at the mines. All three of them thought the power had been shut off and I guess anybody would have thought the same, seeing as the mines had pulled out a year before.”

      “The power hadn’t been shut off though, had it?”

      “No sir. Daryl climbed that pole with a set of bolt cutters and when he laid into the line it exploded. Blew his arms clean off at the elbow.”

      A collective nodding of heads.

      “Electricity cauterized him, didn’t it? That’s why he didn’t bleed to death?”

      “That’s right. Only, I bet there’s been times he wished to hell he had of bled to death. It can’t be no easy life without your arms.”

      “No, I suppose not. But he up and sued Peabody and raked in a hell of a settlement, didn’t he? And he was the one stealing from them.”

      Heads shaking in mute disbelief.

      “Another thing I heard told, and it may not be right, but that it was Loat made Clem and Daryl throw dice to see who’d climb that pole. Daryl threw low was how come it was him to climb up there instead of Clem.”

      “Is that what happened?”

      “What I heard. Heard Clem always carried a set of dice in his pocket he loved to gamble so much and that he rolled them with Daryl that night to see who’d go up. I also heard those dice were loaded.”

      “Well, I guess that explains why Daryl never had much use for Clem after that, don’t it?”

      One of the men took a thin carpenter nail from his shirt pocket and began to pick his teeth with it. When he was done, he leaned over and spat off the porch into the dust.

      “Ask me, Daryl’s been laying for Clem ever since.”

      “Well, he’s taking his time, ain’t he? That all happened twenty years ago or better.”

      “Don’t matter. He’ll take care of Clem when the time comes. You wait and see.”

      The men mumbled begrudged dismay at this, the breath swarming out of them in long gusts as they palmed the sweat from their faces. They spoke of other things for a little while, and then, after a time, became very quiet.

      WEDNESDAY

      The dark descended over the game trails Clem had told him to follow, and the hard scarring of stars and moonlight slowly erased the last hints of daylight so that the shadows fell in grainy showers like soot crumbling from a chimney flue, and the night thickened gradually until there was no sound but that of his boots as they swept through the dry tinder of leaves and fallen hickory limbs.

      Beam

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