PERHAPS YOU’VE PASSED THIS way before. The valley is sleepy in the summertime, but very beautiful, with lush fields of corn and oats rising against a backdrop of wooded hills that stretch for miles toward the horizon. Sometimes, especially in the late afternoons, a hawk or two will come circling overhead, looking for the evening meal or perhaps only for a place to light.
Tucker Baines passed this way, and sometimes on a summer’s night they still tell his story in the valley.
June is the warmest month, even warmer than July for some reason, maybe because on a July afternoon the heat is often broken by a blowing thunderstorm that comes in low over the hills. June, especially late June, is something else again; hot and humid without a chance of relief, when the big flies buzz around over the fields and roads, and even the hawks are listless in their circling. It was on such a day that Tucker Baines came into the valley.
He was, first of all, a wanderer. Born in the swampy Everglades of Florida to parents who ran a roadside alligator farm with a marked indifference to his upbringing, Tuck had learned early to shift for himself. He’d left them to their reptiles and each other at the age of sixteen, and headed nebulously north toward a world he knew only from comic books and movies which he saw infrequently.
Tucker was also a musician of sorts, always had been since the age of seven when a drunken uncle made him a present of a shiny silver-plated harmonica. It had grown up with him, serving at times as his only link to the more settled joys of boyhood in the dismal swamp-side house.
So he wandered north with his harmonica, working by day in dusty gas stations that sat by the side of the highways like bulbous tumors, waiting to pump new life into the pipeline; life, and sometimes death. He remembered the time a tractor trailer had jackknifed on a curve down the highway, and taken a carload of vacationers with it down a grassy slope.
In many ways he hated the highways, hated especially the odor and clang of the gas stations where he worked. Perhaps that was why he started working nights with his harmonica, playing for his supper at the little greasy truck stops on the road north. When he was eighteen he was playing for drinks, even though he was still under age by most state laws, but he was not really a drinking man. One night he’d had too much and ran his jackknife into a man’s gut outside a roadhouse in North Carolina. He didn’t like to drink or fight or get into trouble, but sometimes it happened. Sometimes he moved out in a hurry, carrying only his harmonica and a few meager articles of clothing.
Gradually the harmonica became the center of his life. The tavern owners liked him, because he was a clean-shaven young man who could play Night Train as easily as Greensleeves, and because he worked cheap and always showed up. The customers liked him, too, liked the sounds which he coaxed from the instrument, hunched over it on a plain wooden stool with the single spotlight riveting their attention. Perhaps he could have made it all the way to Nashville or New York with that sound, but he was too much of a wanderer to be happy in the city. There was always a dirt road to be followed off the main highway, and that was how he happened into the sleepy valley so far from home.
The first person to see Tucker Baines as he wandered down the center of the road with his harmonica and jackknife and paperboard suitcase was Mariam Coty, the postmaster’s daughter. She had lived all of her life in the valley, venturing out only on occasional shopping trips to the big plaza beyond the river. Some spoke of her as a strange, shy girl, but in fact she was only lonely, bored with the sameness of the tassel-haired farm boys who were her only acquaintances. This boy coming down the road now, who surely was no more than nineteen or twenty, was a new face, a new interest.
“Lookin’ for somebody?” she asked, coming out of the mowed field to intercept him. “This is the Cory place.”
“I… no, not really.” He paused to rest his suitcase, and she saw that he was indeed handsome, with a firm, suntanned face and deep blue eyes that sparkled when he spoke. “I’m looking for a place to stay, I guess.” He glanced uncertainly toward the western horizon, as if calculating the remaining hours of daylight.
“A hotel? We don’t have any in the valley.”
“No, maybe just a drinking place, where they got a cot in back.” He pulled something from his pocket. “I play the harmonica, see? People pay me to play.”
She stared, entranced, at the shiny metal instrument with its double line of holes. No one in the valley was very musical except Miss Gordon, the piano teacher, and Mariam knew of only one other person in the whole area who played a harmonica. “I suppose you could play at the River Bend,” she said, speaking softly. “It’s the only night spot in the whole valley, if you could call it that. They’ve got a big new stereo jukebox, and the kids go dancing there on weekends. But I don’t know if they’d let you sleep there.”
“Could you show me where it is?” he asked, picking up the battered suitcase once more. “If it’s not too far.”
She fell into step beside him. “It’s not far.”
He liked the girl from that first moment, liked the valley and the tiny village that seemed to form its core. She introduced him to her father, and to a big man named Hark who seemed to be the sheriff. Then she took him to the River Bend, where a few farmhands stood by a rough plank bar, drinking beer with a self-conscious air of guilt. It was early, not yet supper time, and perhaps they felt they should still have been in the fields.
The place itself was almost gloomy in the afternoon sun, and the odor of beer was heavy in the air. In the evening, when the lights came on and darkness settled outside, it would be better. Tuck knew these places. He’d seen so many of them in the past three years.
“The kids dance in here,” the girl told him, leading the way to a bare back room where an unplugged juke box was the only adornment. “Not tonight, though. Just weekends,” she apologized.
She introduced him then to an aproned bartender. His name was Smith, though it might have been anything else. Tuck had forgotten many faces like that in his travels. “Harmonica? Like Big Ben up in the hills, huh?”
“I don’t know Big Ben,” Tuck told him.
“Just as well. Hairy and mean.” He wiped at the bar with a damp cloth. “I’m just managing the place. Don’t know if I could hire you or not.”
“All I’d want is food and a place to sleep. And any tips they throw me.”
“They don’t throw tips at the River Bend,” Smith said with a chuckle. Then, “Let’s hear you play, boy. Won’t do no harm.”
So he played for them, played as he had in a hundred other roadside places; head bent, eyes closed, making the only kind of music he knew how, cupping his hands around the silver harmonica and playing, playing. When he paused between songs he noticed that the farmhands had moved in from the bar to listen, and he was not surprised. People had always listened to him when he played.
He ran through a shortened version of Casey Jones, and then did Blue-Tail Fly. He played some ballads of the Scottish border that a man in Carolina had taught him once, then finished with his favorite Night Train and a jazz version of John Henry. It was a lot of music to get out of a little harmonica.
“Never heard one played that good,” the bartender admitted. “Guess I could take you on for a week anyway, till the boss gets back.”
Tucker Baines nodded. He hadn’t expected any other decision.
When the boss came back, he liked Tuck’s playing too. Most of all he liked the crowds of kids who were coming every night now to the River Bend. They sat and listened and sometimes danced; and often toward the end of the evening they even threw dimes and quarters onto the little stage where Tuck sat and played his wonderful harmonica.
He saw the girl, Mariam, some nights after he finished, and once he sat for a long time with Sheriff Hark, talking about his travels and listening to a history of the valley’s residents. Hark was that sort of a man, big, talkative, interesting.
“You plan to stay around long, son?” he asked Tuck one night.
“Don’t know, Sheriff. I’m a sort of a wanderer, I guess. But it’s peaceful here. Don’t hardly see that there’s any work for you.”
“I try to keep it that way,” Sheriff Hark said. “Sometimes I have to crack a few heads to do it, specially at harvest time.”
Tucker Baines had been playing at the River Bend for two weeks when he finally met Big Ben. He’d heard a lot about the man, mostly from Mariam and the kids who came around. They’d all heard Ben and his harmonica, mostly at church suppers and family picnics. Tuck was better, they assured him, but Big Ben was pretty darned good.
One night when he was leaving the River Bend, figuring to stroll a while before bedtime, Tuck heard someone hail him from a parked car. “Come over here a minute, boy! Got a question for you!”
He walked over, squinting his eyes against glaring headlights, and saw at last a great mountain of a man stuffed behind the wheel of the ten-year-old sedan. “You want something?”
“I hear you play harmonica,” the big man said, speaking through a bushy mustache that almost obscured his mouth.
“I play a little.”
“One of these?” the man asked, holding out his hand. In it rested a silver-plated harmonica.
“Just like that.” Tuck studied the man in the reflected headlights. “You must be that Big Ben they talk about.”
“Ha! How did you figure that one out?” The man shifted uncomfortably, shoving his massive stomach around the steering wheel. “I’d like to hear you play, to play with you sometime. I was listening from here, and it sounded pretty good.”
“Thanks.”
“I got a cabin back in the hills. How about coming up?”
“Not tonight, thanks. I’m pretty bushed.”
“Tomorrow, the next night. I’ll pick you up when you finish.”
Tuck didn’t really want to go with the man, but there seemed no way out. He had a youthful sense of arrogance that told him he could best the mountain of a man in any contest, musical or physical, and perhaps that helped decide him to go. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said.
“I’ll be here.”
The old car pulled away almost at once, and Tuck watched until its taillights had vanished around a distant curve in the old dirt road.
By the following night, Tuck had forgotten all about the odd invitation. He’d spent the afternoon with Mariam, swimming in an old quarry a few miles off, and then he’d come back to the River Bend to have a light supper with Sheriff Hark. He was growing to like the man, to like most everything about the village. He wondered if maybe, just maybe, it was time to settle down.
He played until midnight, giving the kids a solid hour of the newer folk songs and country tunes. He’d picked up a lot of them listening to the jukebox in the afternoons, and he played them well within the harmonica’s limited range.
When he dropped the harmonica into his jacket pocket and stepped outside for some air, he saw the familiar car waiting across the street. All right, he decided, he would go with Big Ben. Certainly no harm could come from it. He went back inside for a quick beer, then went across and climbed into the old car.
“I was thinking you weren’t coming,” the big man said.
“I came, I came. I don’t want to stay out all night, though. I gotta get some sleep.” He’d had three or four beers all told, and he was feeling a bit drowsy.
Big Ben drove the old car over the rough dirt roads as if he knew them like the back of his hand. He probably did, since he’d had a long time to learn them. “I was just a kid during prohibition,” he said, talking as he drove. “I used to make the runs with my older brother over these same roads.”
Finally they reached the house, which was no more than a log cabin set a little ways off the road. Perhaps someone had built it for hunting or even for living, but that had been a long time before Big Ben moved in. It was probably no more disorganized than a bachelor’s quarters in a city might be, but there was a difference. The canned goods, the piled newspapers, the jazz records—they all seemed slightly musty, maybe like Ben himself as he moved through the mess and motioned Tuck to a chair.
“The place isn’t much,” he said, not really apologizing but only explaining. “After my father and brother got killed, my mother sorta went to pieces. I’ve been here alone a long time.”
“They were killed on the highway?”
Big Ben lowered himself carefully onto a chair. “Went through a roadblock with a trunkload of moonshine. Smashed themselves against a tree. I endured.” He smiled and picked up his harmonica. In a moment he was running through St. Louis Woman, then switching in mid-refrain to Gloomy Sunday and the less familiar Unquiet Grave.
“That’s good,” Tuck told him when he paused to hit the harmonica against his palm. “Damn good.”
“I used to play like you, till I put on all this weight. I used to do a lot of things.” He squeezed himself out of the chair and brought out a half-full bottle of cheap rye whiskey. “Here, have a few gulps and then play for me.”
Tuck accepted the bottle and passed his harmonica to Big Ben in turn. “Try mine.”
The big man took it and started to play, then grimaced in pain. “Can’t play it,” he said, handing it back. “Damned mustache gets caught.” He started playing again on his own instrument, then waved to Tuck to join in.
They played and drank like that for more than an hour, first singly and then together, until the room began to blur and spin Tuck’s vision. “I have to get back,” he mumbled at last.
“Hell, you don’t need to ever get back. Them girls’ll wait for you.”
“Gotta—”
“That Mariam’s pretty good, isn’t she? I hear tell you go for her. I’d go for her myself if I was fifty pounds thinner. I’d even—”
“Shut up!” Tuck wobbled to his feet and struck out at the man. He shouldn’t drink, man, how he shouldn’t drink! But then why do people always say things to—
“You lookin’ for a fight, boy? Big Ben could break you in two! Big Ben could fix your mouth so you’d never play a harmonica again.”
Maybe that had been it, the reason for it all. Maybe the man had brought him here out of some twisted jealousy to maim or kill him. Tuck didn’t wait to think, to reason any further. Suddenly the jackknife was in his hand, and it was no stranger there. He sank it up to the hilt in Big Ben’s flabby stomach and watched the surprise spread over the man’s face.
“What? What do you think you’re doing, boy?”
The knife came out and in again, and Big Ben stumbled against the table, upsetting bottle and glasses and harmonicas. “Die!” Tuck breathed. “Can’t you die!”
“I been trying all my life,” Big Ben gasped. “Maybe you come just to help me along.”
Tuck stabbed him three more times before the big man went to his knees and the blood began to bubble at his mouth. Then, desperate with drink and cold with fear, he slashed out at the offered throat and ended it.
For a long time Tucker Baines stood staring at the body, as if wishing it alive again. There had been other times, but nothing like this—he’d never really killed a man before, never taken a human life. The sight of it, the blood and the great bloated body, had sobered him almost at once, and now he wondered what to do.
In the past he had always run from trouble, but this was something different, something dangerous. To run away would be an admission of guilt. He began running over it in his mind. No one had seen him with Big Ben, no one knew he’d come here. He remembered touching nothing except the bottle and glass and harmonica, and perhaps the edge of the table. Now he quickly wiped these off, and wiped off the knife as well, dropping it into his pocket.
Still, he could not take chances. He found some fuel oil for the stove and emptied it onto a stack of newspapers in one corner. The place would burn like tinder, body and all. Let them think what they wanted, after that.
He tossed a match from the doorway and watched the papers catch and flare. Then, at the last possible instant, he remembered the harmonica. It was still there on the floor by the overturned table. He ran back toward the crackling flames and scooped it up, then retreated as the ceiling timbers caught the first glow of the fire.
He was halfway down the hill, traveling through the darkened fields, when it started to rain. No matter—behind him the flames had already broken through the log roof of the cabin. There would be very little left for Sheriff Hark to examine.
She saw him the very next morning, early, strolling up the hill to join the crowd. He looked almost as if he hadn’t slept, and she wondered if he’d been up late practicing on his harmonica.
“Hi, Mariam,” he said, stopping at her side in the trampled grass. “What’s the excitement?”
“It’s Ben’s place—Big Ben’s—it burned down during the night. They say he’s dead inside.”
He glanced past her head at the little knot of spectators, at the steaming remains of the cabin. The heavy rain had doused the fire before the destruction was total, but only blackened timbers were visible from where they stood. “That’s too bad,” Tuck told her. “I never did get to meet him.”
“He was the only one I ever knew could play like you.”
“Yeah.” He moved a little away from her and seemed to be thinking. She wondered about what.
That night Tucker got to the River Bend early, and found Sheriff Hark already there waiting for him. He plugged in the jukebox to listen to a couple of folk tunes he was learning, then sat down at the sheriff’s table.
“Too bad about Big Ben,” he said, speaking first.
“Darned shame,” Sheriff Hark agreed. “You ever meet him?”
“Never,” Tuck told him, shaking his head in confirmation of the statement. “Heard tell he was pretty good on the harmonica, though.”
“That he was.” Sheriff Hark sighed. “There was a little basement storage room under the cabin, and when the floor burned away Ben’s body dropped through. The harmonica was there too, with him till the end. Looked just like the one you play.”
“Was he pretty badly burned?”
“Not too much. Like I say, he fell through the floor before the fire did too much damage. And then it started to rain.” Sheriff Hark was staring down at his hands. “Funny thing—looks like somebody killed him.”
“Killed?”
“Yeah. Five or six stab wounds in the stomach, and his throat cut. Fire couldn’t have done all that.”
The kids were beginning to drift in. It was almost time for Tuck to start playing. “Who’d want to kill him?” he asked, slipping the harmonica from his pocket.
The sheriff shrugged his rounded shoulders. “A wanderer, probably. Someone passing by. Ben never had any money.”
“You’ll have to excuse me. I gotta start playing.”
The sheriff nodded. Then, almost casually, “Say, Tuck, could I see your harmonica for a minute?”
“Sure.” He passed it across the table.
“You ever have a mustache?” Sheriff Hark asked, turning the shiny instrument over and over in his hands.
“No. Why?”
The harmonica caught at a stray beam of light and reflected it toward the ceiling. Sheriff Hark looked uncomfortable. “Hell, I’m not one of those storybook detectives. I’d be lost with a fingerprint or a footprint. But I know my people, here in the valley.” He took another harmonica from his pocket and laid it on the table next to Tuck’s. “You say you never met Big Ben?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Well…” He shifted uncomfortably. “This harmonica was the one I found by his body. I think it’s yours.”
“You’re wrong,” Tuck said, suddenly breaking into a sweat. “This here’s mine.”
“Look close at it, boy. You’ll see a thin line of solder near the top, above the row of holes. It’s a trick fellows with bushy mustaches use to keep from gettin’ them caught between the body of the instrument and the silvery top piece.” He paused, looking unhappy. “This was Ben’s harmonica, boy. He couldn’t play one without that soldered top piece. You musta picked up the wrong one after you killed him.”
“It’s time,” Tuck said, wetting his lips. “I have to play.” His hand hesitated over the twin instruments, and finally rested on Big Ben’s harmonica.
“Play,” the sheriff told him. “I’ll be waiting.”
Tucker Baines nodded, walked over to his stool, and began to play very softly an old mountain melody. Somewhere outside a hawk drifted slowly across the evening sky, and the breeze was soft in the valley that night.