The Tilted World by Tom Franklin, Beth Ann Fennelly Read Free Book Online

after a moment she continued. “Reckon I better ride home and see to ’em, and to the still.”
    She turned and began the business of unhitching the mule, then reached down for her satchel before she remembered she’d come to town with nothing in her hands but her stiffening son.
    At her back, Jesse said, “I’ll follow on directly in a day or two, once business here is tied up.”
    She nodded and fit her shoe into the stirrup and swung up.
    Jesse spoke again. “Dixie Clay, hey, you go on, take the Model T. I know you know how. I know you’ve always wanted to. I’ll—I’ll take the mule this time.”
    She merely yanked Chester’s head toward the road and gigged his flanks.
    Jesse called out to her back. “Dixie Clay. Dix. There will be more babies.”
    She gigged the mule harder and was gone.
    It was April when Jacob died and it was April now, but a stranger looking through her eyes wouldn’t guess she traveled the same road, mud choked, deeply rutted, washed out altogether in spots. A sort of phantom road sprang up alongside the first, cutting through the forest where a giant elm, struck by lightning, had toppled, or where a buggy had mired in the mud and the furious owner up and left it after a vicious kick or two. Today, if she didn’t get stuck and have to haul the mule out herself, the seven miles down Seven Hills would take over two hours, and it’d be dark when she arrived. This ride two years ago would have taken an hour. Not that she’d been in a hurry to find her house empty of everything but signs of how much life it’d once contained.
    As she rode with her shoulders hunched against the rain she thought that if she’d lived in a different kind of place, she might have been spared the worst of that homecoming. If she’d had a sister, or a friend like Patsy McMorrow back in Pine Grove, or a neighbor like Bernadette Capes. Neighbors, not these squinty, rifled men (here she passed Skipper Hays’s house, a bootlegger who drank too much of his product to have enough to sell), men as skittish and inarticulate as the game they trapped. A sister, friend, or neighbor would have come to strip the baby bunting and remove the cotton dresses she’d made, each with a J in blue embroidery floss. Instead, after that mule ride home, she’d stood in the doorway and stared. On the floor had been the soft cloth that she’d used to wipe Jacob’s sick—when he’d still take enough of her milk to get sick on, before he turned away from her leaking breast. Before he began panting, and she saw first the White Strawberry Tongue she’d heard of, pale with raised red bumps, which progressed exactly as she’d heard it would to the beefy Red Strawberry Tongue.
    She must have dropped the cloth as she’d fled with him. Balled on the floor, it was studded with flies. She kicked and the flies lifted, swirled, resettled. The air was rank—milk she’d left on the counter. She’d known that as soon as she got the still running, she’d have to put things to rights, get down upon her bones and scrub. She was twenty then and knew that all that lay before her was work and more work until she died. So far, she hadn’t been wrong.
    Now Dixie Clay swerved the mule off Seven Hills to skirt a tree that had fallen even since her ride into town. It was an elm, with a squirrel’s nest that had been ripped like a paper sack as the branches bounced against the ground. But maybe, she told herself, the squirrels had felt themselves falling and leaped to safety. The key was to know when you were falling.
    Around the tree she was in sight of the last hill, beyond which was the turnoff to their house, a drive you came upon quickly, as Jesse had intended. Of course Chester knew to turn. Pines crowded the drive, low limbs forcing Dixie Clay to duck, and once she didn’t dip her head enough and a shaggy forearm knocked what felt like a gallon of cold water down her back. But there was the house, a black bulk against the navy sky.
    She’d