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

hated Jesse that day two years ago for saying there would be more babies—as if Jacob could be replaced—although some part of her knew, too, that that was what she’d been waiting for. But Jesse was wrong: there’d been no more babies. He stayed in town more and more, coming home only to load whiskey to fill the orders that he wrote in his pretty script in a little ledger he kept in his breast pocket. She knew now she’d never recover from Jacob’s death. That’s what Jesse had never understood: she didn’t even want to. She’d known, too, for the first time, that her mother had been lucky to die in childbirth, still one with the baby dying within her.
    She led Chester past the house to the barn and unloaded the sugar and peeled the wool blanket from his back and began to curry his coat. He gave a little whinny and she scratched his long black ears. She wondered—when was the last time she and Jesse had lain down together? Would she even want that? As she dumped a scoop of grain into the mule’s bin and watched him sink his nose in, she tried to imagine Jesse kissing her, the tickle of his mustache on her lips. But when she thought of kissing, she thought only of Jacob. Suckling, his hungry mouth working, his eyes squeezed in pleasure, his long eyelashes two dark zippers.
    My husband is a murderer, she thought. It tasted true.
    She wondered when she’d see him next. Jesse kept a room, she knew, at Madame LeLoup’s, paid for with cases of whiskey. Her whiskey. She remembered again the painted door, the whore in the short blue dress who’d opened it and brought Jesse downstairs, how she’d opened the door again after Jesse had gone back up to get his things. The woman was staring at the street when she said, “I done lost three.”
    For a second, Dixie Clay didn’t know what she was talking about.
    “Three babies,” the woman said. “I done lost three. All three.”
    Dixie Clay knew now that the world was full of secret sorrowing women, each with her own doors closed to rooms she wouldn’t be coming back to, walking and talking and cutting lard into flour and slicing fish from their spines and acting as if it were an acceptable thing, this living. But there wasn’t the least thing acceptable about it, Dixie Clay thought as she bent to grab the corners of a sack of sugar and, with a flip, hoist it over her shoulder. Not the least, and she made her way by memory up the path to the darkened house.

Chapter 3
    I f folks thought it strange to see a mud-coated man with a mud-coated baby sleeping on his shoulder riding past the crowded storefronts of Greenville, they gave no sign. Probably they’d seen lots stranger these past months, and they’d see stranger yet if the levee blew. At the lumberyard, men were listening to the radio tell of record levels on the Tennessee River, Chattanooga flooded, sixteen dead. Ingersoll asked a man pricing a boat kit where he could find the police station. The man removed the nail he was holding in his mouth to point.
    Ingersoll hitched his horse at the station and lifted Junior to his shoulder and mounted the steps with dread. On the hour-long ride into Greenville from the crossroads store, he’d realized how strange and suspicious his story sounded. But it turned out that the story—and the bodies—had beaten him to town. A pretty dark-haired receptionist directed him to the officer who took his report: Ingersoll was just a fella who wanted chewing tobacco and had the good luck to arrive at the store after the shooting was over. The officer was only half listening, kept one ear cocked to the loud fellow behind him offering a dramatic story of the shoot-out. There were no tough questions for Ingersoll, just name and place he could be reached. Levee in Hobnob, he answered. I’m an engineer.
    The officer yanked the paper out of the typewriter. “You’re done,” he said, and pushed away from his desk.
    “How do I find out where the baby’s parents were from? Do they