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“Oh?” Dick asked, as if he were Clarence. “How come?”
She made an ambiguous motion with her shoulders and smiled at her shoes. “I could listen to you sing and carry on until sunrise. You have a real pleasant disposition; and you’re interesting to look at; and, I don’t know, you sort of make me warm all over.”
“I’m what they call a worldling.”
“Well, I knew there had to be a name for it.”
“You and the Hite family don’t get along, if I’m to trust Wood and his version of the situation.”
She let her hands and sewing sink in the navy blue lap of her dress. Orange candlelight raised and lowered on her face and she tucked her bottom lip with her teeth. “We hate each other like poison, if you want to know the truth. Most of the Hites wouldn’t spit on me if I was on fire.”
Dick never missed even the most concealed insinuation. He said with a wink of his skewed right eye, “They say when a woman catches fire you’re supposed to roll her around on the ground and cover her with your body.” And Sarah laughed so loudly she clamped her mouth, and then called him a naughty tease and said he tickled her to such an extent her cheeks were burning up. And then Wood was at the screen door in a nightshirt, his hair as sprigged as a houseplant. “Isn’t it just about bedtime?” he asked, and Dick kissed Sarah’s dainty nubbins as he exited for the second-floor bedroom.
Dick took off his boots and clothes and tucked himself under the bedsheet. He wacked the pillow, he rustled and stirred, he announced that he’d drunk too much coffee. He saw Wood in the bunk across from him as he arose in his longjohns and woolen socks. Wood’s eyes glared at him. “I need to visit the privy something terrible,” Dick said.
What he did was sneak down the first-floor hallway and touch the master bedroom door two inches inward to see Major George Hite alone in the room, puttering a snore. Dick d
id not allow the screen door to clap as he went outside. He walked around the rocking chair and across a cold lawn to a two-hole outhouse in back. The board walls showed interior candlelight at each severance and crack. Dick paused and looked around at the night, then slid into the outhouse and shut the door carefully behind him.
The candle was tilted in a tin cup that was nailed below a small side window and Sarah sat next to it, prim as a child, her dress hiked up and collected like laundry, her pale thighs squeezed and puckered a little with fat, her ankles thin above her shoes. He could see her blush and her downcast eyes were a maiden’s, but she seemed less shocked than amused. She said, “This is embarrassing.”
“You can go ahead and do your duty; I don’t mind.”
“Well now, I’ve sort of got stagefright with a strange man in the commode with me.”
“You look awful pretty.”
“Do I?”
“I’ve never seen such well-shaped limbs.”
She glanced fleetingly at the bent pronouncement at his crotch and then at his chill blue eyes. “Is Wood awake?”
“Just me.”
She contemplated her knees for a moment and then blew out the candle. She rose with her navy blue dress still bunched at her waist and shyly moved toward Dick. She said, “I bet you thought I was a lady.”
DICK LIDDIL stole into the house at eleven o’clock, crawled up the stairs so that the footboards wouldn’t creak, and saw that Wood’s bunk was empty. He reclined on the mattress for a minute or two, contemplating causes and effects, then sat up and removed his revolver from its scabbard and slid it under the woolen blanket like something pleasurable. And he awoke at sunrise to the calm voice of Wood Hite in middle sentence: “—moonlight and held a conversation with myself over what I should and shouldn’t do. Should I blow the sidewinder to kingdom come? Should I chop his perty face into hash? Maybe I could cut his oysters off like a steer.”
He sat on the bunk across from Dick, his eyes pouched and green with sleeplessness, his nose colossal beneath the strip of daylight allowed by a window shade. Dick’s pistol had somehow been fished from its place and was squashed under Wood’s thigh. Wood continued, “But I took into account our months together on the wrong side of the law and what I come up with is you and me should duel; and may the best man win.”
“You’re making this more grievous than you oughta, Wood.”
Wood smacked him with a pillow. “The honor of the entire Hite family is at stake!”
So the two accordingly stood back to back on the cold, dew-white lawn, revolvers raised like ear contraptions, Dick in his longjohns and boots. Wood created gentlemen’s rules for the duel as Dick kidded and negotiated and finally counseled Hite about the jeopardy to his very being that was forthcoming. Nevertheless, Wood counted out numbers in a stately, funereal measure and the two marked each word with a stride, greening the grass with their boot tracks. But Dick was a man who left nothing to chance; not only did he angle toward a broad ash tree as he walked, but he turned at nine instead of ten and fired at Wood’s left ear.
Wood ducked in reaction to the gunshot and the sizzle of a miss that veered wide of his skull, then he crouched and spun around to see the green lawn in streaks that slewed toward the ash and a flicker of yellow hair next to the gray bark. He clutched at his trigger and the revolver jumped so violently it sprained his wrist and a chunk of ash tree exploded. Dick bent out and shot at Wood a second time—his arm kicked up, there was a noise akin to a window that has crashed down in its sash, blue gunsmoke ballooned and then dwindled, and another noise like the snare of a saw cut the air near Wood’s neck.
The gunpowder noise surprised Wood’s relatives and servants from sleep and they rushed down the hallway to the screen door, closing robes around their nightshirts and nightgowns, as Dick discharged his last round and crackled branches in a woodrow next to the road. He snapped the hammer into three detonated cartridges, saw the Hites behind the screen door, and ran to them in the clomping, clumsy way of a cowhand unused to his legs as Wood shot at his back twice, neglecting to lead Dick each time.
Dick struck the last riser on the stairs with his toe and walloped into a slide across the porch. Major Hite flattened his nose to the screen as he hollered, “Here now! Stop this! Wood? Wood! I won’t have any gunplay on my property! I’ve told you a thousand times.”
Dick slithered toward the old man’s bare feet and Wood shot another time. It shattered a chair strut and nailed a dark hole in the windowsill. Major Hite stamped down on a throw rug and yelled, “Wood! You listen to me! No more!”
Wood looked down the revolver muzzle and clicked the chamber around. “That was my last bullet anyways.” He eyed the revolver at a bird feeder. “Something must be wrong with the sight on this thing.”
George Hite, Jr., was bent next to his father. He said, “You’ll notice I wasn’t in on it, Daddy. Don’t even own a shooting iron.”
