Little Sister Death Read Online Free

“ said the good Saint Francis .
    —William Faulkner, Mayday

A Plantation in the Tennessee Country, c. 1785
    The wagon and team came jouncing and creaking around the foot of the hill and up the dry creek bed, but the portly man in the black broad-brimmed hat and the dark suit didn’t know that. He sat huddled in the corner of the wagonbed, blindfolded, arms clutching the sideboards in a vain effort to absorb the shock of the hard bouncing over the rocks, the wagon tilting up and then ascending the bank and him sliding against the tailgate and the black Mastiff growling at him deep in its throat and shifting position slightly on the jarring wagonbed, its chin laid between its paws, watching him.
    He had stopped wondering where he was. He knew from the crying of the whippoorwills that night had fallen. He knew that the ground was frozen, for he could hear the iron rims of the wagon wheels turning against earth frozen in icy whorls. He knew that he’d been in the woods; a branch had rapped him hard and cut his face, a trickle of blood had frozen, crusted like a scarlet slash from a solitary fingernail.
    The heavyset man, whose misfortune it was to be a doctor of medicine, was blindfolded with a winding of muslin that covered his face from the tip of his nose to the felt of his broad-brimmed hat; the hat itself jammed on his head misshapen, the brim uncurled and splayed out as if someone had laid a hand to each side of the hat and jerked down hard. Which was, in fact, what had actually happened. The white man with the muttonchop whiskers had leant toward him for a moment, stooping to attain eye level, then performing what the doctor saw as the final insult to his dignity (he had not known there was more still to come): grasping the hat and yanking it down until it seemed stopped only by the obstruction his ears formed, the whiskered man’s face showing all this time only a sardonic amusement.
    They were three in the wagon, not counting the Mastiff: the portly doctor, a rawboned man with muttonchop whiskers and a flatbrimmed countryman’s hat, and a gangling black who seemed to be dozing on the seat, slack lines paying out from his hands to the team of horses left to their own discretion, or perhaps following some nigh-invisible trail to a place they knew.
    The doctor, whose name was Mayfield, had stepped out of his office in Mossburg, Tennessee, at ten o’clock the morning before, and the black, who had been folded against the wall by the door, had arisen with an inherent gracelessness, like a carpenter’s rule unfolding itself. The Negro had on a dusty shapeless cap he did not doff, and when his eyes met the doctor’s, there was no deference in them. He said, Old Marster say he need to talk to you.
    Turning, the doctor saw for the first time the man in the flatbrimmed hat, his upper lip was shaven clean but he wore a neatly trimmed white beard and muttonchop sideburns on his florid face, and his silver hair curled out from beneath the brushed hat and obscured the collar of the broadcloth coat. The look of a gentleman or at least a country squire. The doctor nodded to him and started a smile but something in the man’s face precluded it. He saw immediately why a doctor was needed. There was something wrong with the man’s mouth. It seemed swollen from the inside, so grotesquely that the face seemed deformed. The purple tip of a swollen tongue protruded between his lips and the cheeks looked peculiarly distended like nothing so much, Mayfield thought, as if you had sharpened the ends of a stick four or five inches and jammed it into the man’s mouth and forced him to clamp it between his teeth.
    The man said something preemptory to him but Mayfield had not an inkling of what he had been told to do. Then the black took his elbow roughly and turned him toward a wagon hitched and waiting at the curb.
    Old Marster say you come on, he said.
    Mayfield knocked his hand away. Keep your hands to yourself, he said, but the Negro