Twenty
It was midafternoon. The searching officers had come and gone, on into the bottom, and later Mitch had seen three of them come back out and go up the hill toward the house, where presumably they had left their cars. The other two, he supposed, had gone on up the river and would come out higher up, by the Jimerson place. Looking for a dead man on the bottom of the river, he thought bitterly, like a bunch of hungry turtles.
The river seemed to pause in its attack. For the past half hour the water level on the upper side of the levee had been almost at a standstill, and now it hung, poised, just below the top, like a toy balloon inflated to the bursting point. Was it the crest? Had it reached the peak, or was it merely resting, gathering its force for a new assault? If it’d just drop off a little, even a quarter of an inch, he thought, watching tensely, I’d know I held it. But if it comes up any more it’s gone.
Like Sewell, he thought, the black despair reawakening and moving inside him like something cold but still alive in his stomach. But Sewell’s been dead ever since he killed that deputy and butchered him up like that; he’s just been borrowing time since then. He knew it, and I knew it, and I ought to be used to it by this time.
He turned, looking out across the rain-smeared bottom. Water was backing up into the field on the lower end, but there was no current in it and it was standing quietly in the furrows between the rows of cotton. If the river went back down before too long it would cause little damage.
His eyes swung back, and then suddenly stopped. A man had emerged from the edge of the timber out along the river, beyond the end of the levee, plowing along bareheaded and without a slicker, head down and lurching drunkenly from side to side. That ain’t one of them deputies, lie thought, and then the man fell and struggled weakly in the flood.
Before the man had hit the water he was running. Oh, my God, Mitch thought, lunging across the field. He came to the fence and slid through between the strands of barbed wire, hearing the rip of torn overalls and feeling but not even noticing the wire raking into the flesh of his leg, and then he was splashing through the slowly moving discolored flood toward the weakly floundering man still fifty yards away in the rain. The water came up to his knees, slowing him down. And then Sewell had his head out of the water.
Mitch rushed up to him, panting, and tried to take his arm. Sewell, on his knees with his head down, felt the hands upon him and heard the splashing and tried to pull away. Mitch grabbed the collar of his coat and heaved mightily upward and Sewell came to his feet and stood, facing downriver, not knowing who it was. The gun was in his right-hand coat pocket and he wondered vaguely, with some far-off, detached portion of his mind, whether it would still fire even if he could get it out with the stiff, venom-swollen hand.
Then he turned, and they looked at each other for a long minute, the thin and hard-faced man in drowned overalls and shirt with his butter-colored hair plastered to his skull, and the bigger, heavy-shouldered one in the ruin of his city clothes, and neither of them showed any sign of emotion.
“We can’t stand here in the open,” Mitch said at last. “There’s still some deputies down here looking for you.”
“Not to the house,” Sewell replied, swaying. He seemed to be having trouble keeping Mitch fixed in his gaze.
“No,” Mitch said quietly. “Not to the house.”
“Just in the trees. In the big, black trees. They got bigger since I was here.”
Mitch looked at him piercingly. He’s out of his head, he thought. They got him somewhere. “Where you hit?” he asked, keeping his voice quiet and steady. If I start going to pieces, he thought, I’ll never get him out of here. “Where did they hit you?”
”In this arm,” Sewell said dully. “Didn’t hit the bone.”
The right arm was hanging straight down out of sight beyond him and Mitch did not see it for a moment. He looked at the sickness in his brother’s eyes and the white, ghastly, unhealthy pallor of his face and thought. Being shot through the arm didn’t make him like that. They got him somewhere else he ain’t talking about. But I got to get him out of here. We can’t stand here in the open like a couple of damn fools talking about the crops. I got to get him into the timber. For Christ’s sake, I got to get him moving before somebody sees us or he falls in this water again.
He moved around to the other side of the swaying, precariously upright figure. “Put your arm across my neck,” he said, and started to reach for the wrist to pick it up. Then he saw it, the obscenely swollen balloon-fingered travesty of a hand puffed blackly out of the end of the coat sleeve like an inner tube swelling out of a ruptured tire casing, and he felt his stomach turn over with the sickness of it. Snake, he thought wildly. Half the goddamned police in the state looking for him, and a snake got him. He spent twenty years in this river bottom living with ‘em and then he gets back in it for half a day and one of ‘em gets him. They couldn’t have got him another time, when he could go to a doctor. It had to be today. It had to be now. Of all the dirty . . . But what the hell difference does it make? He couldn’t get out of here no how. I got to stop this. I’m getting as flighty as an old woman. I got to get him into that timber. What’s the matter with me?
It was Sewell who snapped him out of it. “What’s the matter, kid? You getting sick?” he asked, and Mitch stiffened as if he had been sluiced with a pitcher of ice water. He looked at his brother’s face and saw the cold, ferocious grin and the sardonic eyes watching him.
He’s all right again, he thought. His mind was wandering, but it’s all right now. He’s the one with the poison in him and I’m acting like a kid or an old woman.
“Come on,” he said, deadly calm now. He moved around to Sewell’s left to keep from jarring the swollen arm, put his arm around Sewell’s waist, and started walking. We don’t dare go across the field, he thought. We got to go in above the levee, through that water, where we can stay in the trees.
They pushed through it in the gray and dismal crying of the rain. In places the water was up to their waists, and Sewell walked falteringly, several times almost falling before Mitch could steady him. Once the sickness came upon him and he bent over, retching, and tried to vomit. He had been sick so many times and for so long there was nothing to the vomiting except the dry and terrible retching.
After what seemed like an hour to Mitch they came to the end of the water and started up the incline going out of the bottom. He guided Sewell away from the trail to where, some hundred yards away, there lay the crown of a big oak he and Cass had felled for stovewood early in the spring. Sewell fell to his knees and lay down back among the branches, out of sight of anyone going along the trail. Mitch sank down beside him and helped him to straighten out. Then he thought of the raincoat.
“Wait a minute,” he said hurriedly. He ran down into the field and came back with the coat, Spreading it across a pair of limbs, he made a sort of tent of it to break the rain. Then he sat down, with his head under the edge of the coat, his face dark and still as if chopped out of walnut.
He looked at the arm. “Moccasin?’’ he asked quietly.
Sewell lay with his head on a small limb, his face deathly white except for the brown splotches of the big freckles, and his body rigidly still save for the hurried and shallow breathing. He shook his head slightly.
“Rattler,” he said.
Oh, God, Mitch thought. It couldn’t have been worse, but now it is. God knows how many hours ago, and a rattler on top of that, instead of a moccasin.
“Where?” he asked, still with that same quietness, as if he held onto his emotions with the same tenacious and indomitable grimness with which he was trying to hold back the thought of his brother’s dying. “When?”
Sewell tried to raise the arm. “Twice,” he said faintly. “Once on the wrist and once on the hand. Little after daylight this morning.”
“Did you get any of the poison out?”
Again there was that faint shake of the head. “I didn’t have a knife to cut it with.”
Mitch sat quietly, avoiding his eyes. “You’ll be all right,” he said, knowing he was lying. There wasn’t one chance in a hundred, even for a specimen like Sewell.
The old sardonic gleam came momentarily into Sewell’s eyes. “Don’t give us that, kid,” he said with the pain showing under his voice. “We ain’t got time for any crap.”
Mitch started to break then, just once. “Look,” he said urgently, his voice very thin and harsh, “a doctor could still fix it. I’ll go up and get a wagon and send one of them goddamned deputies after a doctor.”
Sewell looked at him quietly. “Cut it out, kid.”
“For Christ’s sake, Sewell!”
“Knock it off. In the first place, it’s too late. In the second, if he could fix me up I’d go to the chair. I like it better here.”
Mitch looked down at the mud. He nodded his head slowly.
“You want to stay down here, then?” he asked. “That’s right.”
“All right,” Mitch said quietly.
They were both silent for several minutes, listening to the monotonous tattoo of the rain on the spread raincoat. Then Mitch said, “What about, if—?”
“Not if. When.”
“All right,” Mitch said. He always had to be tougher than anybody else, he thought. I guess being tough was the only religion he ever had. And I reckon it’s as good as any, if it lasts. Got help you, though, if it ever quits on you. “All right, then. When.”
Sewell looked at him. “You still got a shovel on this shirt-tail farm? Or has he sold that too?”