I took Reese with me. Black Frank was his own man except when he was my man; in the end he would do what I told him. Not that he was glad to be there. He had no use for Sam Tolen-there wasn’t a black man for miles around who did-he only protested that the Cox kid’s quarrel “ain’t none of my nigger business, never will be.” He refused to commit murder for another man. Of course not, I told him, this was Leslie’s business. All Frank had to do was shoot the horse.
Frank was aching to retort, What about you? What’s in this for you? This was not wise so he burst out angrily, “Why shoot that horse? That’s a good horse. I wish I’d of had that big red horse when we was ridin out of Arkansas.”
If Eddie Reed had shot Belle’s stallion instead of figuring he would inherit him, I thought later, there would have been time to scratch away those boot prints.
At the last minute Leslie showed up with his mama, who hated the Tolen brothers worse than anybody. Frank groaned to me that women were bad luck, he was all set to back out, and I was, too: nobody else was supposed to know a thing about this. But like it or not, Cornelia knew about it, so finally I persuaded Les that this was men’s work, not fit for a lady, and offered his mother my respects along with my earnest wish that she go home. I never asked Will then or later if he had known what his wife and son were up to.
Leslie looked drawn, watching her go. “How come it ain’t you doin the shootin, if you know so much? You think I’m some kind of a dumb kid? Think I don’t know you want this worse’n I do?” But afraid I would walk away, he only muttered this, then let it go, nervously checking the loads in my double-barrel.
I was suffering mixed feelings, I admit. First of all, after those Tuckers, I had put away my gun. Second, I had known Sam Tolen most of my life and we’d had some fun before we had hard feelings. However, it was too late to back out now.
In the corner jamb where the fence rails joined to make a barricade of thorn and vine, we crouched in a kind of cave under the brambles. There we waited near an hour before the squeak of buggy axles came down the road. It was a fine and bright May morning and early sun streamed through the new small leaves. I heard a thrush-like a child’s sweet question, as my Charlie once observed, pausing to listen in our cabin not a hundred yards from where we skulked right now. All around, the spring chorus resounded strangely loud and clear, and I wondered if Sam’s hairy ears ever heard these woodland melodies of his last morning-thick-bodied Sam, slapping his reins on the rump of his red horse as he rattled down the track from Herlong Lane toward Ichetucknee Springs, still belching on his burly breakfast of hominy and hog.
I doubt he heard anything at all. Half stupefied by his long evening of drink, lulled by the pounding rhythms of the big bay’s hooves, the powerful workings of its dung-flecked haunches and its fly-switch tail, poor old Sam would be as deaf to birdsong as he was to the stillness of the white road where three men lay in wait and his dull gaze would not pick out the amorphous shapes obscured by rails and brambles. So I hoped. I hoped his Baptist Lord would show him that much mercy.
Hearing those hoof shots and the clicking of the wheels, Reese raised his barrel to the rotting rail under the vines, deep-creased black finger on the trigger; a moment later, the whole morning quaked at the crash of gunfire. The red horse shied and shrieked and fell, all within the echo of the shot as the buggy climbed the fallen horse and overturned, pitching the driver out onto the road. At the blast, Sam must have grabbed his shotgun because he came up with it as he struggled to his knees, mouth wide in a black hole. His eyes were huge. Unable to believe his end had come, he tried to holler. He still had time because Leslie Cox had frozen on the trigger.
With a shrill yelp, Sam floundered sideways to get behind the thrashing horse as he swung his gun up, but even before he got it to his shoulder, he despaired, flinging it away like something burning. On his knees, he raised his hands.
“Shoot!” Frank ordered Leslie, furious. Frank had been furious before he got there, wanting no part of this damned business, but no matter how often I explained this to Cox later, the black man would never be forgiven for that contemptuous order although it did the trick. “Right then is when Mist’ Sam Tolen knowed he was a goner,” Frank reflected later. “That’s when I looked away. Ain’t decent to watch a man afeared as that. Just plain embarrassin.”
My old adversary and nemesis had sought and found me through the thorns and rails. Too scared to speak, he whimpered like a pup. Those last whimpers burned a hole into my heart, and I cursed Leslie for it, after all my warnings that these things must be done quick or not at all. In that instant he pulled the trigger and Sam’s face ruffled up bright red, bug eyes obliterated. Spun half around and down by a charge of buckshot at close range, he gave only a few quick short kicks as if trying to run while lying there face down. The body sprawled on the clay road, snuffling up blood-spattered dust like a slaughtered hog.
With a victory whoop like some wild Indian, Leslie jumped out on the road and gave the body a second barrel in the back of the head, almost be-heading it. That second barrel made no sense, just made a mess, and Leslie backed away, squinching his nose in disgust. “See how scairt he was? He shit his pants!” But the dead man might never have had time to soil himself if Cox had done his part.
“You sure that isn’t you?” I snarled. Hearing Reese snicker, this fool kid turned on him. Reese saw it coming, knocked the twin barrels up. “Wouldn’t try that, boy, if I was you,” Reese said. “Least not till you reload.”
All three of us were enraged, isn’t that peculiar? Why I was so angry I don’t know, but it was much more than annoyance at Les Cox, who was screeching now, fighting back tears. He looked on the point of passing out and was incensed that we could see that. “You and your fuckin jokes! Got a dead man layin here in his own shit and blood and you’re still jokin? Wasn’t you never taught no common decency?”
I had to grin at that, and Frank did, too, but Cox burst into tears of rage mixed with his fear and relief that it was over. His feelings tumbled around together and got in one another’s way like new blind puppies. But even while he wept, this fool was jamming shells into the chambers. When Reese wrenched the weapon away from him, he yelled, “Fuckin nigger! Gimme that fuckin gun!”
Reese was an outlaw and he knew his business. He emptied Leslie’s gun and Sam’s gun, too, then stripped Sam’s wallet and good boots. When he slung the boots for Leslie to catch, our young killer went pale, as if these humble sweat-stunk relics of the dead man’s days had brought home the revelation that his life had taken a sharp turn and perhaps not for the better. He knocked Sam’s yellow pigskin wallet from Frank’s hand.
“I ain’t no fuckin vulture,” Leslie snarled.
“You doan take his stuff, then nobody gone be huntin for no robbers. They be huntin for his best-knowed enemy. Tha’s you. Mos’ likely they will do that anyways but no sense makin it easy for ’em.” He held the wallet out a second time, raising his voice a little. “Take the money, boy, an’ drop the wallet. We got no business standin round here on this road.”
“Don’t you go givin me no nigger orders!” But he snatched the wallet, picked the money out, then hurled it at the body. Seeing Sam’s wallet bounce onto the road, I had the thought-more like a pang-that if his carcass would just come to and sit up, I could probably make Fat Sammy laugh about the way his career as a rich plantation owner had panned out.
“Show some respect,” I said. “That’s a man laying there.”
“Was a man, you mean!” But Leslie’s jeer was fractured and his eyes looked moist again. Feeling injured that his partners had no respect Whatever for his dangerous deed, committed in the name of family honor, he was fairly quivering with self-pity.
That is how Sam Tolen, quiet, washed, and well-behaved, happened to follow his loved ones into Oak Lawn Cemetery. To keep up appearances, I went, too, accompanied by Kate and Granny Ellen. As befitted the occupant who had administered the money, my mother noted, Aunt Tabitha’s stone loomed over the lesser markers, chaperoning her daughter and her lowlife son-in-law even in death.