Paradise Sky

“Have you been at that kind of work?” I asked.

“I have, but it was in the war, so we considered it all right to steal a horse.”

“I’m in kind of a war, so I reckon I was seeing it the same way.”

“Were you, now?”

I was propped on my elbows, trying to get a read on the fellow, wondering if I could leap up and dart through the corral slats and make a run for it. But something about the way he held that pistol like it was one of his fingers led me to staying still.

“Tell you what,” he said, after what seemed time enough for daylight to be on the rise. “Why don’t you tell me why you was stealing my horse.”

“You want to hear all that?” I said.

“Asked, didn’t I?”

I considered some lies but decided I wasn’t up to it. I told it like it happened, making sure to mention the first horse I had stolen I had let go and that it was probably already back at the livery doing whatever it was horses liked to do there in the middle of the night.

“That is quite a story,” he said when I finished.

“It’s the truth.”

“Is it, now?”

“True as I can tell it,” I said, which after I said it pained me a little, because it sounded like I had told a lie and dressed it up as the truth.

“You swear it’s true?”

“I swear by it.”

“Did you get along with your mama?” he asked.

“Right well. Got along good with my pa, too. And I like grits and ain’t got no hatred for turnip greens if they’re seasoned right.”

“That pa of yours got burned up?” he said. “That’s the one you liked?”

“He’s the only one I had.”

“I had two daddies,” he said. “One that made me, and the one that raised me. I didn’t get along all that well with either one of them. Well, I don’t know how I’d have gotten along with the one that made me, on account of I never got the chance to find out. Him ru

“I can see that,” I said.

“You get those ears from your ma or your pa?”

“My pa,” I said.

“That’s a relief. If it was your ma, she was going to spend a lot of time wearing a head scarf. A man can deal with ears like that. All right. Get up.”

He gun-pointed me up to the house, took me around to the back of it, and had me take off my horse-shit-covered shirt and pants and toss away my shoes. He marched me inside the house naked. I was starting to fear the plans this fellow had might be worse than Ruggert’s.

Turned out he had some of his old clothes for me. I put them on like he asked. I had to cuff up the bottoms of the pants slightly; the shirt hung loose on me. I was a young man, but six-two tall, so you can figure the size of my captor. I reckoned him having two inches on me in height and about ten inches across. His shoulders was wide enough he had to turn a little sideways when we come through the door, and his chest looked like a barrel had been stuffed under his shirt. He had a bit of a paunch, but you couldn’t really call him a fat man.

The house itself was good-sized. You could have put our old house into it three, maybe four times, and had a room for Jesse and at least a half dozen chickens and a visiting mule. There was other rooms off the one I was standing in. There was some rugs on the wall, which seemed like an odd place for rugs. There was a bit of a smoky smell in the room, and that was because the stove was leaking wood smoke, the damper not working just right. There was also in the air the smell of something good cooking. It made my stomach knot up like a hangman’s rope.

I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I noticed he put the pistol into its holster and hung his hat on a peg by the door. I took a good look at him now. My guess was when he was young he might have been handsome, but that face he was wearing now looked as if it had been whipped raw, left out in the rain, and sun-dried.

“You ate lately?” he asked.

“No, sir,” I said.

“Let’s fix that first. Got nothing but cornbread, but I got some good molasses to dip it in.”

I studied on him to figure if he was serious. He seemed to be. I said, “That would be just fine, if you can spare the grub.”

“It’s you and me or the ants get it.”

Now, he had lied to me a bit. There was certainly some cornbread and molasses, but it was fresh baked, and he had a big pot of pinto beans to go with it, seasoned with onion, bacon, salt, and a right smart bit of hot garden peppers.

He had me sit down and served me like he was working for me. It made me nervous. I hadn’t never had no white person do anything like that for me. He heaped beans on my plate, brought out a big jar of molasses with a ladle in it, then he brought me a cup and poured some coffee.

He fixed his own plate then, sat down at the other end, and eyeballed me. I said, “Thank you, sir, for not shooting me and for feeding me.”

“Well, I can still shoot you after you eat.”

That stopped a spoonful of beans midway to my mouth.

“Nah,” he said, showing me he had a nice set of teeth. “I’m just joshing with you. So you got old Sam Ruggert after you?” He of course knew about this, as I had laid it all out to him honestly while lying in horse shit in the corral.

“Yes, sir,” I said, and by this time I was a little bold, knifing up some butter and putting it on my cornbread, heaping spoonfuls of sugar into my coffee, touching it off with milk from a pitcher. “You know him, sir?”

“Me and him went to the war together. I used to be a preacher in the church we attended.”

“Preacher?” I said.

“Before the war. It was an easy living. They paid you for it, and you could empty the collection plates every Sunday. It’s a delightful racket. It don’t seem right to me now that I’ve quit being religious. I have come to think that if your job is to spread the message and get paid for it, then you don’t believe it. And I got tired of having to figure out how to explain the Bible saying one thing in one place and another in another place. Mostly you just preached around it—picked out the things that sounded good and ignored the rest. Finally I decided I’d be a Christian without all that Christ nonsense.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I just try and do right because it’s right, and I don’t need no other reason. Goodness for goodness’ sake. Which is not to say that if you mess with me I won’t shoot your goddamn balls off.”

It wasn’t a smart question to ask, but I was itching to ask nonetheless. “Before the war, did you have slaves?”

“Four, and they were hard workers. Then one day, while I was still a preacher, I came across the stories about slaves in Egypt again, and about how they were freed by Moses and ran off, and he parted the waters, and all ma

“Fine, sir.”

“Good. You see, I had me one older slave that was always telling me how close we was, how he was glad I fed and housed him and such, and when the War between the States come, I sold them other three and kept him. I left him to take care of the property while I was away fighting, thinking we’d have those Yankees whipped in six months. Well, we didn’t. When I finally come limping back here, the whole place was run-down, and Chase, which is what I called the old colored man, had run off and made his way up north, taking some of my goods with him. I thought right then he didn’t love me nearly so much as he said, and I thought, too: why should he? My wife, who was alive for another year before the pox got her, said she couldn’t believe he’d do that after all we’d done for him. He even took a big shit in the middle of the floor. Right there.”

He pointed out the scene of the crime, which wasn’t too far from the table.