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Автор Tom Franklin

SMONK

WIDOW TOWN

BEING THE SCABROUS ADVENTURES

OF E. O. Smonk

OF THE Whore Evavangeline

IN CLARKE COUNTY, ALABAMA,

EARLY IN THE LAST CENTURY… Tom Franklin

For Barry Hannah

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! How is she become as a widow! She weepeth sore in the night.

—LAMENTATIONS 1:1–2

“Magnifique!” ejaculated the Countess de Coude, beneath her breath.

—EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS,

The Return of Tarzan

1 THE TRIAL

IT WAS THE EVE OF THE EVE OF HIS DEATH BY MURDER AND THERE was harmonica music on the air when E. O. Smonk rode the disputed mule over the railroad tracks and up the hill to the hotel where his trial would be. It was October the first of that year. It had been dry and dusty for six weeks and five days. The crops were dead. It was Saturday. Ten after three o’clock in the afternoon according to the shadows of the bottles on the bottle tree.

Amid the row of long nickering horsefaces at the rail Smonk slid off the mule into the sand and spat away his cigar stub and stood glaring among the animal shoulders at his full height of five and a quarter foot. He told a filthy blond boy holding a balloon to watch the mule, which had an English saddle on its back and an embroidered blanket from Bruges Belgium underneath. In a sheath stitched to the saddle stood the polished butt of the Winchester rifle with which, not half an hour earlier, Smonk had dispatched four of an Irishman’s goats in their pen because the only thing he abhorred more than an Irish was an Irish goat. By way of brand the mule had a fresh . 22 bullet hole through its left ear, same as Smonk’s cows and pigs and hound dog did, even his cat.

That mule gits away, he told the boy, I’ll brand ye balloon.

He struck a match with his thumbnail and lit another cigar.

He noted there were no men on the porches, downstair or up, and slid the rifle from its sock and snicked the safety off. He backhanded dust from a mare’s flank to get her the hell out of his way (they say he wouldn’t walk behind a horse) and clumped up the steps into the balcony’s shade and limped across the hotel porch, the planks groaning under his boots. The boy watched him: his immense dwarf shape, shoulders of a grizzly bear, that bushel basket of a head low and cocked, as if he was trying to determine the sex of something. His hands were wide as shovels and his fingers so long he could palm a man’s skull but his lower half was smaller, thin horseshoe legs and little feet in their brand-new calf opera boots the color of chocolate, loose denim britches tucked in the tops. He wore a clean pressed white shirt and ruffled collar, suspenders, a black string tie with a pair of dice on the end and a tan duck coat. He was uncovered as usual—hats made his head sweat—and he wore the blue-lensed eyeglasses prescribed for sufferers of syphilis, which accounted him in its numbers. On a lanyard around his neck hung a whiskey gourd stoppered with a syrup cork.

He coughed.

Along with the Winchester he carried an ivory-handled walking cane with a sword concealed in the shaft and a derringer in the handle. He had four or five revolvers in various places within his clothing and cartridges clicking in his coat pockets and a knife in his boot. There were several bullet scars in his right shoulder and one in each forearm and another in his left foot. There were a dozen buckshot pocks peppered over the hairy knoll of his back and the trail of a knife scored across his belly. His left eye was gone a few years now, replaced by a white glass ball two sizes small. He had a goiter under his beard. He had gout, he had the clap, blood-sugar, neuralgia and ague. Malaria. The silk handkerchief balled in his pants pocket was blooded from the advanced consumption the doctor had just informed him he had.