Child of God(21)

Old woman told me today, said: It's a judgment ... Wages of sin and all that. I told her everbody in Sevier County would have to be rotten to the core to warrant this. She may think they are, I don't know. How you, young feller? Fine, said the deputy. Here's a man can tell ye about the White Caps, said the sheriff. People don't want to hear about that, said the old man. Cotton here said it sounded like a good idea to him, the sheriff said. Keep people in line. The old man studied the rowing deputy. Don't believe it, son, he said. They was a bunch of lowlife thieves and cowards and murderers. The only thing they ever done was to whip women and rob old people of their savins. Pensioners and widows. And murder people in their beds at night. What about the Bluebills? They was organized to set against the White Caps but they was just as cowardly. They'd hear the White Caps was ridin out someplace, like Pigeon Forge, they'd get out there and take up the boards in the bridge and lay in the bushes where they could hear em to fall through. They hunted one another all over the county for two year and never met but one time and that was by accident and in a narrow place where neither bunch couldn't run. No, those were sorry people all the way around, ever man jack a three hundred and sixty degree son of a bitch, which my daddy said meant they was a son of a bitch any way you looked at em. What finally happened? What finally happened was that one man with a little guts stood up to em and that was Tom Davis. He was a wheel horse wasn't he, Mr Wade. He was that. He was just a deputy under Sheriff MiIlard Maples when he busted up the White Caps. He made three or four trips to Nashville, paid for it out of his own pocket. Got the legislature to pass a bill attaching the Circuit Court to the Criminal Court over in Knoxville so that they'd have a new judge in Sevierville and then he started after the White Caps. They tried ever way in the world to kill him. Even sicked a big nigger on him one night comin back from Knoxville. In them days you could go by steamboat and this nigger come off another boat in the middle of the river and pulled a gun to shoot him. Tom Davis took the gun away from him and just brought him on in to jail. By that time White Caps was leavin the county in droves. He didn't care where they went. He . brought em back from Kentucky, from North Carolina, from Texas. He'd go off all by hisself and be gone weeks and come in with em on a string like a bunch of horses. He was the damnedest man I ever heard of. Was a educated man. Had been a school teacher. There had not been a Democrat elected in Sevier County since the Civil War, but when Tom Davis run for sheriff they elected him. You don't remember the flood of 1885 do ye? said the deputy. Well, bein as that was the year I was born my memory of it is somewhat dim. What year was it they hung them two, Mr Wade. That was in 99. That was Pleas Wynn and Catlett Tipton that had murdered the Whaleys. Got em up out of bed and blowed their heads off in front of their little daughter. They'd been in jail two years appealin and what not. There was a Bob Wade implicated in it too that I'm proud to report is no kin of mine. I think he went to the penitentiary. Tipton and Wynn, they hung them on the courthouse lawn right yonder. It was right about the first of the year. I remember there was still holly boughs up and Christmas candles. Had a big scaffold set up had one door for the both of em to drop through. People had started in to town the ,I evenin before. Slept in their wagons, a lot of em. Rolled out blankets on the courthouse lawn. Wherever. You couldn't get a meal in town, folks lined up

three deep. Women sellin sandwiches in the street. Tom Davis was sheriff by then. He brung em from the jail, had two preachers with em and had their wives on their arms and all. Just like they was goin to church. All of em got up there on the scaffold and they sung and everbody fell in singin with em. Men all holdin their hats. I was thirteen year old but I remember it like it was yesterday. Whole town and half of Sevier County singin I Need Thee Every Hour. Then the preacher said a prayer and the wives kissed their husbands goodbye and stepped down off the scaffold and turned around to watch and the preacher come down and it got real quiet. And 'then that trap kicked open from under em and down they dropped and hung there a jerkin and a kickin for I don't know, ten, fifteen minutes. Don't ever think hangin is quick and merciful. It ain't. But that was the end of White Cappin in Sevier County. People don't like to talk about it to this day. You think people was meaner then than they are now? the deputy said. The old man was looking out at the flooded town. No, he said. I don't. I think people are the same from the day God first made one. As they ascended the courthouse stairs he was telling them how an old hermit used to live out on House Mountain, a ragged gnome with knee length hair who dressed in leaves and how people were used to going by his hole in the rocks and throwing in stones on a dare and calling to him to come out. IN THE SPRING BALLARD watched two hawks couple and drop, their wings upswept, soundless out of the sun to break and flare above the trees and ring up again with thin calls. He eyed them on, watching to see if one were hurt. He did not know how hawks mated but he knew that all things fought. He left the old wagon road where it went through the gap and took a path that he himself kept, going across the face of the mountain to review the country that he'd once inhabited. He sat with his back to a rock and soaked the warmth from it, the wind still cold that shivered the sparse high mountain bracken, the brittle gray ferns. He watched an empty wagon come up the valley below him, distant clatter of it, the mule pausing in the ford and the clatter of the immobile wagon rolling on regardless as if the sound authored the substance, until it had all reached his ears. He watched the mule drink and then the man on the wagon seat lifted one arm and they commenced again, now soundless, out of the creek and up the road and then again came the far muted wooden rumbling. He watched the diminutive progress of all things in .the valley, the gray fields coming up black and corded under the plow, the slow green occlusion that the trees were spreading. Squatting there he let his head drop between his knees and he began to cry. LYING AWAKE IN THE DARK of the cave he thought he heard a whistling as he used to when he was a boy in his bed in the dark and he'd hear his father on the road coming home whistling, a lonely piper, but the only sound was the stream where it ran down through the cavern to empty it may be in unknown seas at the center of the earth. He dreamt that night that he rode through woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread.