Free The Tilted World by Tom Franklin, Beth Ann Fennelly

have dumped the bodies on their land? Two days prior she’d spotted a trio of wheeling buzzards and hurried to their shadows gyroscoping the ground but found only an Appaloosa horse wedged between shoals in the Gawiwatchee. A few days dead. Probably slipped off the levee where it was being worked in Greenville. She hoped it had broken its neck in the fall, that it hadn’t merely hurt itself, hadn’t tried to clamor and hoof helplessly up the sliding walls of mud before being swept away.
    Dixie Clay poured the last of her coffee down the sink and tucked a stale biscuit in the pocket of the trousers. Then she slung the rawhide strap of her Winchester across her back and exited by the kitchen door, avoiding the still as she headed toward the Gawiwatchee. The walk was shorter than it used to be, because the moiling and nonsensical stream had leaped its banks and kept spreading, spreading, now maybe sixty feet across. It was blood-red due to swirled clay, full of downed trees, snags that river folk gave names to, planters and sleepers and sawyers and the trees, called preachers, that submerge and then spring back up. Two pecan trees, yoked, pierced the water—where Dixie Clay used to hang laundry after washing it in the stream. She hadn’t used that line in years, not since Jesse had bought her the Thor Electric Washer, first one Hobnob had seen. Now she dried her laundry near the house, but she hated to see the line hyphenated above the water, something rudely interrupted.
    In addition to searching for the revenuers, Dixie Clay liked to check the stream because, though the traps were drowned, storms sometimes brought surprises. Two weeks ago, that mandolin. Before that, a Flying Arrow Jr. Wagon, the wood warped but all four red enamel wheels working. Dixie Clay cleaned it and used it to transport jars from still to storage shack. Before that, she found a frilly white waterbird in her last remaining badger trap. The bird looked sewn of snowflakes, or what she had seen of snowflakes in National Geographic . Dixie Clay would have freed it, let it fly back to—what place was exotic enough—Timbuktu, Constantinople? But it had snapped its neck on the spring-loaded door. So all she could do was fold its wings and lift it out and carry it home, where she identified it in her field guide: a great snowy egret. Like Dixie Clay, it didn’t belong in these parts.
    As she walked the muddy banks, high-stepping to pull her boots free and scanning the water for the sinuous ribboning that decried a snake, she remembered leaving her wedding. Held in the backyard of her father’s house, with all of Pine Grove picnicking on tea sandwiches. She and Jesse had sat for the photographer, and then Jesse had loaded her trousseau in the bed of his wagon—the same light and speedy wagon that had bounced away singing in its traces three years earlier when she’d sold him her bundle of skins.
    Without a mother to advise her, Dixie Clay had duplicated the trousseau recommended in Ladies’ Home Journal : six pairs of sheets, two dozen pillowcases, three dozen tablecloths, three dozen napkins, all finished with neat hemstitching. For dress—she had this memorized—“personal linens embroidered with the bride’s maiden initials, one smart dress of serge, one afternoon frock of georgette crepe, one dark suit with several gay colored blouses.” She’d packed some books—Meredith, Swinburne, and Hardy—her mother’s Bible with the family tree inscribed on the flyleaf, the medal she’d won for the county’s best Spencerian penmanship, the clover pin from the 4-H club. She’d packed her bell-end, hickory-handled hammer. It was small, child-size, really, but with a good head-to-handle ratio, perfect balance, practically swung itself. She wouldn’t have traded it for Thor’s. So practiced was she that she didn’t even have to look as she balanced a pecan on its flat end and swung, crack. Pick out the good sweet meat, the nestled halves like tree