There Won't Be War

Carpy had no idea what the monstrosity confronting him might be, nor how it might have arrived. “It’s like a big arrow was shot through the roof. Impossible stuff,” he called it. “Mr. Doc, nobody in this house can be responsible. Fact, I don’ know anybody who could. My word on that.”

Of course Doc ought to have guessed that no servant had hauled the thing in here. His mind tried to put together an explanation: Too large to have been dragged and lacking a corresponding hole in the ceiling for Car-py’s “arrow,” the odd cylinder must have been assembled in place, brought in through the back door. The cause for this blasphemy remained an enigma, but the method at least he could resolve to his own satisfaction. He ordered that the thing be removed. “Break it into little bitty bits if you have to.”

Carpy pushed hard against a polished fingerplate, which raised one of the connected pads a little ways. Deep below them, the earth seemed to belch out a flat, sonorous note. Carpy backed up against the wall. He and Doc traded worried looks. “Gonna take all the hands,” he said, “everybody from the fields just to nudge this thing.”

“Then, we gonna deal with it later,” replied Doc. “Not messing about the workday over this little damn problem.”

“Yes, sir, that seems best.” Carpy withdrew past him, back up the steps. He peered down into the sarcophagal blackness of the instrument. Was that the top of a pale head way down inside there? The thing was some kind of sign, like chicken blood or a hanged man. This was a blight upon the family.

Halfway up the stairs, Doc found himself confronted by his wife. Sally had a way of looking at him that reduced his stature. That he was standing on a lower step of the stairs didn’t help, either. He tried to take control of the situation quickly. “Damndest thing I ever seed,” he said as he leaned back over the rail. Sally gave the thing a quick look. “Clarinet,” she said sagely, “but you’d have to stand on the roof to play it.”

“What the hell kind of clarinet is that?”

Sally replied, “A big clarinet.” She moved to let him up.

Muttering, Doc stepped around her and headed for his room at full tilt. There, Lizzie had already removed the chamberpot and finished making the bed. The child did look after him well. He thought again of Carpy’s mother, but dismissed the memory as both provocative and immaterial. Sally trod solemnly along the hall. He sensed her lingering in the doorway, and he turned around. He walked over and started to close the door. “I have to git dressed if you don’t mind.”

“You’ve dripped on yourself,” she indicated, staring at his crotch.

Doc shut the door. He listened to her move off. “Sally,” he said softly, “you are workin’ my last nerve.”

Once he had finished dressing, Doc went down to breakfast. He had barely scooped up his first forkful when a cry from outside stopped him. His name upon the air brought Doc running out to the porch. Sausage in his mouth and a checkered napkin bibbing his neck, he towered over Ed Rose, who stood in a panic on the ground. Ed blurted, “You gotta come quick, Doc. You gotta see this thing.”

Doc told him to calm down. He threw off the napkin and followed his foreman into the fields. The steamy Mississippi morning pumped the sweat out of him as he waded through waist-high cotton plants. Branded workers had stopped their business to watch as the man himself strode past them. Ahead, a cluster of them surrounded “the thing.”

It had crushed rows of plants but no one had been hurt. It was a thin gold tube, far longer than the thing inside the house, and it had spread a blue stain in a band over some of the cotton. The tube stretched out twenty yards before curving back—a piece from something much larger and more grotesque. In the flattened cotton the shape of the whole instrument could be discerned, as if it had slept there overnight and then moved on at daybreak, leaving the sloughed hand slide behind. Doc walked in its rut while trying to formulate an identity for the thing. He had trouble.

“Hell,” he said, “looks like ... looks like ...”

One of the fieldhands spoke up. “Like God’s trombone.”

Doc whirled around angrily but as quickly realized that was exactly what it looked like. “That’s right. A big trombone.” And the thing in the house—it, too, was some sort of instrument. What had passed across his land during the night? “This don’t make no kind of sense.” While he wore a consternated smile, he marked the worker who had spoken—a young man. A smart, clever, and unbranded young man. Wouldn’t do to have a smart satchel-mouthed nigger roaming in their midst. Liable to foment all sorts of trouble. He would have to sublease Spangler’s Mill again. Soon. As for the mystery trombone, it was so great a mystery that he saw no point in trying to wrestle it to earth. “Drag this curlicue outten here now, and you all get back to work,” he told them. “And don’t be worrying yourselves over what it portends. It don’t portend shit.”