By the looks of the place, Arthur Smalley had at one time tried to have a go at farming. Off to his left, Luther could see a barn in need of painting and a field with a skinny horse and a pair of knobby-looking cows wandering in it. But nothing had been tilled or reaped out there in some time and the weeds stood tall in midautumn.
Jessie went to ring the bell again and the door opened and they looked through the screen at a man about Luther’s size but near twice his age. He wore suspenders over an undershirt yellowed by old sweat, the mask over his face yellowed with it, too, and his eyes were red from exhaustion or grief or the flu.
“Who you-all?” he said, and the words came out airless, as if whatever they answered wouldn’t make no difference to him.
“You Arthur Smalley, sir?” Luther said.
The man slid his thumbs under his suspenders. “What you think?”
“I had to guess?” Luther said. “I’d say yeah.”
“Then you’d guess right, boy.” He leaned into the screen. “What ya’ll want?”
“The Deacon sent us,” Jessie said.
“Did he now?”
In the house behind him someone moaned, and Luther got a whiff of the other side of that door. Sharp and sour at the same time, as if someone had left the eggs, the milk, and the meat out of the icebox since July.
Arthur Smalley saw that smell hit Luther in the eyes and he opened the screen door wide. “Ya’ll want to come in? Maybe set a spell?”
“Nah, sir,” Jessie said. “What say you just bring us the Deacon’s money?”
“The money, uh?” He patted his pockets. “Yeah, I got some, drew it fresh this morning from the money well. It’s still a little damp, but—”
“We ain’t joking here, sir,” Jessie said and adjusted his hat back off his forehead.
Arthur Smalley leaned over the threshold and they both leaned back. “I look like I been working of late?”
“No, you don’t.”
“No, I don’t,” Arthur Smalley said. “Know what I been doing?”
He whispered the words and Luther took another half-step back from the whisper because something about the sound of it was obscene.
“I buried my youngest in the yard night before last,” Arthur Smalley whispered, his neck extended. “Under an elm tree. She liked that tree, so …” He shrugged. “She was thirteen. My other daughter, she in bed with it. And my wife? She ain’t been awake in two days. Her head as hot as a kettle just come to boil. She gone die,” he said and nodded. “Tonight most likely. Else tomorrow. You sure you don’t want to come in?”
Luther and Jessie shook their heads.
“I got sheets covered in sweat and shit need washing. Sure could use a hand.”
“The money, Mr. Smalley.” Luther wanted off this porch and away from this sickness and he hated Arthur Smalley for not washing that undershirt.
“I don’t—”
“The money,” Jessie said, and the.45 was in his hand, dangling beside his leg. “No more bullshit, old-timer. Get the fucking money.”
Another moan from inside, this one low and long and huffing, and Arthur Smalley stared at them so long Luther started to think he’d fallen into some sort of trance.
“Ya’ll got no decency at all?” he said and looked first at Jessie and then at Luther.
And Luther told the truth. “None.”
Arthur Smalley’s eyes widened. “My wife and child are—”
“The Deacon don’t care about your domestic responsibilities,” Jessie said.
“But you-all? What you care about?”
Luther didn’t look at Jessie and he knew Jessie wasn’t looking at him. Luther pulled the.38 from his belt and pointed it at Arthur Smalley’s forehead.
“Care about the money,” he said.
Arthur Smalley looked into that barrel and then he looked in Luther’s eyes. “Boy, how does your mama walk the street knowing she birthed such a creature?”
“The money,” Jessie said.
“Or what?” Arthur said, which is exactly what Luther had been afraid he’d say. “You gone shoot me? Shit, I’m fine with that. You want to shoot my family? Do me the favor. Please. You ain’t gone do—”
“I’ll make you dig her up,” Jessie said.
“You what?”
“You heard me.”
Arthur Smalley sagged into the doorjamb. “You didn’t just say that.”
“I damn well did, old man,” Jessie said. “I will make you dig your daughter out her grave. Else I’ll tie your ass up, make you watch me do it. Then I’ll fill it back in, while she lying beside it, so you’ll have to bury her twice.”
We’re going to hell, Luther thought. Head of the line.
“What you think about that, old man?” Jessie put his.45 behind his back again.
Arthur Smalley’s eyes filled with tears and Luther prayed they wouldn’t fall. Please don’t fall. Please.
Arthur said, “I ain’t got no money,” and Luther knew the fight was gone from him.
“What you got then?” Jessie said.
Jessie followed in his Model T as Luther drove Arthur Smalley’s Hudson out from behind the barn and crossed in front of the house as the man stood on his porch and watched. Luther shifted into second gear and put some juice into it as he passed the small fence at the edge of the dirt yard, and he told himself he didn’t see the freshly turned dirt under the elm. He didn’t see the shovel that stuck upright from the dark brown mound. Or the cross made from thin planks of pine and painted a pale white.
By the time they’d finished with the men on the list, they had several pieces of jewelry, fourteen hundred dollars in cash, and a mahogany hope chest strapped to the back of what had once been Arthur Smalley’s car.
They’d seen a child gone blue as twilight and a woman no older than Lila who lay on a cot on a front porch with her bones and her teeth and her eyes lunging toward heaven. Saw a dead man sitting against a barn, blacker than black could ever get, as if he’d been struck by lightning through his skull, his flesh all bumpy with welts.
Judgment Day, Luther knew. It was coming for all of them. And he and Jessie were going to go up and stand before the Lord and have to account for what they’d done this day. And there was no possible accounting for that. Not in ten lives.
“Let’s give it back,” he said after the third house.
“What?”
“Give it back and run.”
“And spend the rest of our short fucking lives looking over our shoulders for Dandy or Smoke or some other broke-down nigger with a gun and nothing left to lose? Where you think we’d hide, Country? Two colored bucks on the run?”
Luther knew he was right, but he also knew it was eating Jessie up as awful as it was eating him.
“We worry about that later. We—”
Jessie laughed, and it was the ugliest laugh Luther’d ever heard from him. “We do this or we dead, Country.” He gave him an open-armed, wide-shouldered shrug. “And you know that. Less you want to kill that whale, sign you and your wife’s death warrant in the process.”
Luther got in the car.
The last one, Owen Tice, paid them in cash, said he wouldn’t be around to spend it no way anyhow. Soon as his Bess passed, he was going to get his shotgun and ride that river with her. He’d had him a raw throat since noon and it was starting to burn and without Bess there wasn’t no fucking point to it anyway. He wished them well. He said, sure he understood. He did. Man had to make a living. Wasn’t no shame in that.