by Odie Lindsey
“Hey!” a woman’s voice had called up to him. “You’re scarin’ me, man!” Her tone was . . . silk? No. It was butter biscuit, or maybe sacred steel gospel. Each syllable was a glisten on summertime skin. He kept his eyes shut to soak in the thick southernness, and he’d been compelled to stretch even farther out that window, toward her call.
“No, really!” she’d yelled out. “You up there!”
Her whistle pierced his reverie. He opened his eyes and looked down at her: pinkie fingers still angled in her mouth, poised to whistle once more. They stared at each other for a few seconds, until she pulled her fingers from her lips and smiled. She was perhaps half his age, a twenty-something in a lemon-yellow jersey skirt, and very pregnant.
“Is that streak o’ lean fatback?” she’d asked, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun.
He smiled at her, nodded yes.
“Smells divine. So anyway, you okay up there?”
Her voice had been a sort of memory, a fertile rush of kinship that bound them across space, transcending the worn bricks and jammed windows of Chicago.
Sonny had stared at the woman for a few more seconds, considering his answer. “I feel stuck, you know?”
“Ha! I do. I do know.” She’d smiled again. “Maybe you just need to take off.”
“Funny,” he said, spreading his arms as wide as wings. “I was just thinking that same thing!” Sonny had stretched even farther out of the window, the frame now hitting his waistline.
“Whoa, man!” she hollered. “I didn’t mean ‘take off’ out of the dang window!”
“No,” he’d called back. “I know that. I’m only coasting.”
“You’d better know it.” She laughed. “I mean it. Go easy up there. I’ve got enough going on without having to worry about you, too.”
He’d nodded at her, and mouthed an okay. The young woman waved goodbye and walked toward the wreckage of a neighboring house.
Sonny’s mother had walked in, and she peered over his shoulder. She recognized the SUV parked at the curb.
“That woman’s from back home,” Sylvia said. “From Pitchlynn, if you can believe it.”
“Did you tell her you’d lived on the farm?”
“Nope. I said I’s from West Tennessee.”
“But why?”
“ ‘Why’ is because I don’t care for Pitchlynn, or Mississippi, Sonny. Besides, her husband’s the one behind all this leaflet nonsense. He’s the fool who’s tryin’ to buy the ‘ugly houses’ out from under everybody. If you ask me, he’s as greedy as a Wallis.”
Sonny had gazed out the window, hovering almost, as he waited to glimpse the woman again.
***
THERE’D BEEN an exceptional lack of direction in the Cessna. An exceptional range of vision. Sonny had been hooked from that very first flight, the free outing he’d won at the Braves ballgame. Despite the rigidity of the mandatory preflight ritual—conference, weather briefing, chock removal, headset tests; the chatter with Control; the checklist and instrument panel verification—ultimately, piloting had shattered his routine, his map. He could move above time, or story.
The solace and navigability of atmosphere was alien, an opiate. He saw the city by the lake like a dream, as if he were some drifting, lofted Jesus. His instructor, a skinny middle-aged Pole, had provided Sonny disposable wraparound shades as offset to the pilot’s own classic gold aviators. Sonny had sensed no boredom in the man, though the pilot admitted to having flown these sky tourism missions throughout the day, every day, for a dozen years.
“Always something new to see,” the pilot had said. “The sky, the light, the students. The city. Hell, even the wind!” He’d glanced down at the Gold Coast. “By the way, this is all you, Edward. I am no longer flying this airplane.”
There was a hiccup of turbulence as Sonny’s hands clenched the yoke. The Polish pilot laughed at the cliché of it all.
And Sonny, Eddie, Ed, or even Hobbs, had heaved with relief as if he had surfaced from mud. On the wings of a dove, he’d asked the pilot if they could in fact turn away from the city, and out over the lake, beyond any marker.
“Roger that,” the Pole replied.
Sonny had steered them out, into the sun-buffed horizon. Within weeks, the idea of his mission home would take hold.
8
A handful of days after the wire story ran, Derby couldn’t help but go track down his sister. As Colleen sat home with the twins, at once delighted and tense with exhaustion, believing that her husband had had to make an unscheduled run to town, to oversee a materials delivery to the Wallis House, Derb was instead cruising his truck over the rust-colored asphalt of Main Street, Marks, Mississippi.
Two-story, mostly brick buildings drifted by like a dirge. The few windows left unboarded showcased FOR RENT and FOR SALE signs and fingertip graffiti in dust. The exteriors were pocked like moonscapes, and no scrap of wood—door to banister to window frame—was more than a hash of paint peel and split. The sidewalk plates buckled. Here and there an establishment remained open, a Dollar Store knockoff, or a filling station-cum-grocery that advertised both the usual (“2 Liter, $1.49”), and the extra usual (“Pork Fat, .99/pound”).
Though he’d managed to hide the newspaper from Colleen, he felt shot through with anxiety, and compelled to . . . to talk to Winnie? To listen? To scream at her for hounding his wife on the phone? To threaten her for dragging him back into things?
No. He wanted to warn her. To remind her that living an hour away from Pitchlynn was not going to harbor her, or Ladybug, should Hare still be able to mobilize his people. After all, Derby had tracked her down with a couple of calls.
Mostly, he thought, he was there to say goodbye. He was done with her.
Cruising cracked avenues, his hands clammy on the wheel vinyl, Derby thought about the other boy, about Hare’s other family, the “better bitch and child” that were mentioned in the story. He wondered if these others were free of themselves, and of the last name they’d been saddled with.
The string of slight houses on Winnie’s street were contrivances of warped wood and rust lesion, of blue plastic tarps bleeding over woodpile and scrap pile, and any pile left to rot. This, in fact, was the poorest slice of the poorest state in the nation. The most illiterate state. The fattest, the highest in teen pregnancy, and the lowest in life expectancy. The most laughed-at and despised and written-off state.
It was the dyingest fucking place in America. Nobody cared to save it.
And there he was. And then there was Ladybug, at play behind a saggy chain-link fence. He pulled over, cut the engine, and watched her frolic about with an empty laundry detergent bottle. She threw the orange jug high into the air, then ran under it and caught it—or pouted when she didn’t. She then held the makeshift toy on her hip as if it were her baby. The girl cradled the jug in her arm, an act he found tender, if not cute.
But in a shot, Ladybug’s eyes grew frantic with fear. She began to sprint around the yard, her open hand thrust out as if to protect the jug-baby from invisible, ongoing assault. She dodged musk thistle and flashing remnant, running away, desperate to fight for the safety of her child.
He put his head down on the steering wheel and he gasped, and wanted to cry. Not for his niece, but for his overarching greed. Fact was, Derby could never introduce this broken element to his own children. Ladybug was lost. Even her imagination had turned against her. No telling how her influence might take root in the twins.
A car horn blared from behind him, followed by the drawled-out holler of the driver. Derby waved the vehicle around, then looked back to his niece. Ladybug now stared at him, her hands grasping the backyard chain link. She struggled to place him, dropping the jug-baby to the ground. He sped away, back toward Pitchlynn.
Half an hour later, Derby mashed the brakes and swerved onto the shoulder. A smile hit his face, and he laughed while slapping the steering wheel. His niece hadn’t been using the laundry jug as a doll, protecting it from some
unseen terror. Rather, her palm had been held out to stiff-arm defensemen, as would any world-class tailback. That girl had been playing football.
There was so much hope to be reaped from the future, if he could only remember to seek it out. To see it. He threw the truck into gear and headed on home, having decided to contact Winnie when the retrial was over, and Hare was gone for good.
GABRIEL
AUGUST 6, 1964
1
Gabriel strode the calf-high grasses of the glade, his bare shoulders sheened with sweat. Wheatlike brome whisked the pant legs of his overalls. He swung a large club casually, as if he were a batter on deck. Reaching the center of the clearing, he paused and looked around. Stretched. Smiled.
The small meadow, and the wilds that hemmed it into isolation, were his. The parcel had belonged to his father, and his grandfather, and within its unmapped innards he felt a kinship to land and family, and he felt impenetrable.
He set the club down, unfastened the braces of his heavy denim overalls, and stepped into nakedness. The swelter demanded liberation. Gabriel took opportunities.
Across the field, crouched behind a thick brake of blackberry, they watched him.
“Mama,” the boy whispered.
“Hush,” she said, clenching her child’s shoulders, holding him down behind the wall of vines. They had hiked onto Gabe’s land to sneak a couple of apron pockets’ worth of berries. To snatch a few ripe handfuls for a skillet cobbler for the boy. (She knew that Gabe would have given her the berries had she asked, but the token mischief of the trespass had made the idea fun for Sonny.)
Their presence was now a weapon. “We have to live with that, him,” she whispered. “So hush up, and look away.”
“But Gabe might see us. He might—”
“Might nothin’,” she said. “Shh.”
“But—”
“He cain’t see us, if he knows right,” she interrupted. “He just cain’t. And we cain’t tell nobody we’ve seen him, neither. I mean this, Sonny. Nobody can know.”
The woman and child did not face each other. Rather, their gazes were trained on the familiar man whose appearance now favored myth. The boy clasped an Indian Head pocketknife in his left hand, his thumb rubbing the groove in the wood casing. He watched Gabriel swing the club while striding through the meadow. He watched Gabe’s stomach, his thighs, his sex.
The cudgel Gabe carried was mesmerizing. Fashioned from a small uprooted sapling whose trunk had been stripped of branches, its gnarled roots were now the killing end of the so-named “tap stick.” Clipped to finger-length and sharpened, the roots twisted from the club head like some arboreal morning star. The grip end of the weapon was wrapped in a strip of worn leather.
A dog bark arrested Gabriel’s footsteps. His muscles flared as he scanned the meadow. The bark came again, again, from near where the mother and son were hidden.
“That’s June,” the boy whispered. “June’s gonter tell Gabe we’s in here!”
His mother pinched the base of his neck, silencing him. She had known Gabe for six years, since her husband had taken work on Wallis Farm, moving them out of the Delta and back into the hills they’d come from. Gabe was kind and smart. Dutiful. Respectful. A respectful Negro whose interactions thrust just up to (and often beyond) his position, but whose presence seemed welcome nonetheless. She had now and again bartered surplus veg with him, or dry goods; on more days than not they shared a few words in passing. She would always ask about his daughter.
Only now, his violence. Gabe focused on the dog, whose barks alerted him to the nearby presence of prey. He trekked toward the blackberry thicket, his steps whisper-light and fast.
Seeing him approach, the boy trembled. This was not the Gabe whose smile had brought comfort, or who had promised to one day teach the boy of the secrets told to mules. No. This was a man alive, muscular and hurtling toward them, bladelike, his bare legs shredding the tall grass, the creases of determination like wounds on his brow.
The speckled feist lunged into the thicket, snapping the air on the far side of the vine-wall.
Jesus lord, the woman thought, clenching the boy’s arms, before pulling him close. She knew only Gabe could call the dog off.
“Say somethin’, Mama,” the boy whispered. “Please.” The blackberry spines nicked his skin as he struggled. His syllables grew soggy with fear, as if he were three years old instead of five. Still, he gripped the wood-paneled knife.
“I cain’t, Sonny,” she answered. “You don’t know what they’ll do to him. Gabe cannot know we’s in here.”
Just a skillet cobbler for the boy, with a spoonful or three for herself. It would be heaping, sugared, then brown-sugared and buttered, made care of a quick, clandestine jaunt for ripe berries. It had been a nothing idea.
It was now a trial. Was terrorism. For if the boy should tell his father of how he had witnessed Gabe’s body? Or no, more specifically, if Hare were to learn that she’d been present at the seeing? Retribution would catalyze at the velocity of lightning. No White woman was allowed to see a Black man like this.
Between the serrated leaves they saw the bloody scratches on the dog’s snout, and the stab of its tallow-colored fangs.
When Sonny’s whispers again rose to words, she clamped her hand over his mouth. The child writhed in an effort to break free of her grasp, his body crushed against her ribs and the blackberries in her apron. His eyesight grew blurry as he fought. Strangely, a piece of him, something beyond even consciousness, thought only of the pocketknife, a dull, Indian Head brand that his father had given him. He determined never to drop it, even as his muscles went limp, and his vision drained to white.
The woman whispered a prayer for silence, constricting her boy ever tighter into the shelter of her body. She quoted scripture as she stared the dog down, her syllables frantic, until suddenly the feist bolted off, flushing a large brown-gray swamp rabbit from the brake. She watched as Gabe tracked the rabbit across the clearing, then hurled the club at trajectory, thirty yards or so on a rope, striking it dead. The precision of the kill was astounding.
The woman’s trance was snapped by the boy’s gasping return to consciousness. Terrified, she smoothed and praised him, shushed his cries, and rocked. “Breathe,” she whispered. “Baby? Sonny?”
His small fingers flinched around the Indian Head knife.
Across the field, Gabe ordered the dog, “Bring ’at rabbit here, June!” The feist obeyed him, trotting back with the limp rabbit held soft in her jaw. Gabe was pleased with this. Beyond attack and devotion, June was keenly empathetic: she shadowed him, needed him. Fled him if necessary.
Gabe accepted the hare from the dog, patting it once. “Now go fetch ’at tap stick,” he ordered. “Get!” Her tongue flared to one side as she tore through the grass. The dog retrieved the club, cutting a double line in the glade.
With the rabbit dangling from his fist by its ears, Gabe scanned the meadow like a raptor. He stared at the thicket long enough to let on that he’d been aware of the others. Let on, that is, if they could admit it to themselves, confirming their communion with his body, and the assault they could initiate upon it.
Didn’t matter. Wasn’t nobody going to tell Gabe how to hunt his own land.
2
It was August 1964. The mules were all but ghosts, the Delta an army of machines. The earth’s atmosphere was a rally site of space flight and microwave, radio and NTSC broadcast. Yet in the northern hills, at least on this particular, singular operation, draft animals still took up the burden of work, lock to dock, first to last light. Given the available technology, the existence of such a throwback space was a perverse bow to nostalgia. A living monument. A snare of lost time.
Fact was, Wallis Farm only brought in heavy machinery every year or so, to stave off an ongoing war with a beaver colony, whose dams and lodges flooded hundreds of working acres. Flatbed rigs would haul in dozers and dumps, dredging the large creek and obliterating blockages. For a hyphen of
time, hydraulics would dominate the pastoral, before making their motorized retreat.
Miss Wallis, or “Miss Beverly,” as all were taught to call her, was a funding body of anyone or anything involved with preservation. Fused to her compulsive, obsessive saving of any site deemed appropriately historic, depot to manse to Missionary Baptist church, was a concurrent desire to preserve the natural world. This meant that alongside the aesthetic and production-based sequestration of her farmland, the virtual and relentless encapsulation of the plantation as she had known it during her 1930s childhood, best she could recall, anyway, Miss Beverly did not condone the killing of animals—any wild animals, by any means. She understood of course that hogs had always and would always be slaughtered, gutted, shaved, and boiled (especially at Christmas). But this indulgence, alongside the processing of a necessary few head of cattle, was the extent of the killing on her family land. Period.
She and Mr. Wallis often screamed at each other about this policy, this schism with the past. Never in public, though on a breezy day you could hear their clashes drift out of the open windows of the big Wallis farmhouse and all the way down to Gabe’s cabin. Mr. Wallis was correct in his assertion that, due to Miss Beverly’s mismanagement, the farm had become a coveted animal preserve, one that couldn’t be thinned by losing a few head of game. Yet she still forbade her husband the hunt, whether whitetail or bear, turkey or rabbit. Some of the densest and last remaining quail populations in Mississippi even flocked the underbrush. No matter. The farm came from her family money, so it was her home. And though Mr. Wallis now eclipsed his wife’s sociopolitical lineage, and while she took a backseat to him publicly—even letting him rename the farm after himself, Wallis, versus her family surname, George—Miss Beverly would only let him hunt it if she saw the deer turn skinny and sick, a plague threatening the population.
