“Your Daddy had a spotted pinto pony. I remember it like it was yesterday. He rode it home, and fell off in the yard, he was so hurt. Jacob’s Daddy took a horse whip, and beat that boy like he stole somethin’, sent him running back to the fields, chasin’ him the whole way. And he made Jacob put in a day.
“Your Daddy’s Daddy married again. Or really he took to shackin’ up. The woman was Red’s mother, and Red come to live with them for a time, and they were like brothers, your Daddy and Red.
“But Red’s mother took up with some other fella about nine years later, run off with him, and left Red with the old man and Jacob. Not that she ever cared about Red for one moment. She had a couple other kids too. Girls, I think. They were by Red’s Daddy. I don’t know whatever happened to them. He also had some kids by that colored woman, Miss Maggie. Or so they say.
“Your Daddy grew real close to Red. Kind of a protector. Jacob’s Daddy was gonna beat Red over somethin’, and Jacob, who was sixteen or seventeen at the time, picked up a board and told his Daddy his beatin’ days were over. And the old man backed off.
“So, Jacob saved Red twice. Once from a beatin’, and once from drownin’. Jacob left home that day, and so did Red. Wasn’t long after that Red started seein’ your Mama, then of course your Daddy met her and things changed. They were like brothers, Red and your Daddy, and there ain’t nothin’ worse than kin or near kin fallin’ out.”
“What happened to my Grandpa? Daddy’s Daddy?”
“Somebody killed him.”
“I never heard Daddy say that.”
“What’s he say about his Daddy?”
“Nothin’.”
“Well, then you ain’t heard him say nothin’, and inside that nothin’ is this somethin’. He was murdered.”
“Who done it?”
“No one knows. He was found in his bed, his throat cut from ear to ear. He worked at the sawmill when he wasn’t drunk. He’d already lost three fingers there, and he wasn’t makin’ any real money, just scratchin’ shit with the chickens. So there wasn’t nothin’ there for anyone to rob.”
“Grandma, I thought ladies weren’t supposed to cuss.”
“They aren’t. And it ain’t nice to interrupt a story. Like I was sayin’ about your Grandpa. It’s more likely in my mind someone killed him because he was a rotten sonofabitch. That’s a harsh thing to say, Harry, but them’s the stone-cold sober facts. I figure he rode one of them coloreds out at the mill a little too hard, and the man waited until he went to bed, slipped in, and cut his throat. Wasn’t nothin’ stole no one knew about. Then again, wasn’t nothin’ in the house besides corn liquor and some crackers anyway. Whoever done it, it couldn’t have happened to a dirtier bastard than that old man. He may have been your Grandpa, Harry, but you’re lucky you didn’t never have no truck with him.”
“Daddy says when someone’s killed, people always think it’s a colored. It don’t have to be a colored killed my Grandpa, does it?”
“No. ’Course not. But I hope it was. ’Cause he deserved to die by a colored’s hand, way he treated them. Hell, he just deserved to die.”
“Grandma?”
“Yes.”
“Was Mama’s name tattooed on Red’s arm?”
“That isn’t somethin’ I’d know about, Harry.”
“Grandma, Daddy says you’ve always been good to colored. He says that ain’t like most folks. Why do you feel that way?”
“First off, I don’t know what good to colored is. I try to treat people right, but I’d be a liar I said I treated them just the same. I don’t spend that much time with them, and I ain’t got any real colored friends. I don’t know that much about the lives of the ones I do know. So all I can say is I don’t hate colored. That’s somethin’ worth sayin’, though. Let me ask you a question.”
“Okay.”
“Do you hate colored?”
“No ma’am.”
“Why don’t you?”
“I don’t know … I guess Daddy and Mama.”
“It was the same for me. Someone somewhere figured some truth out and passed it along. I got it. Your Mama got it, and now you got it. And Jacob, well, he once told me how he come by his thinkin’.”
“He told me the story,” I said.
“Did he tell you that we all, no matter what we think, slide a little backward now and then? Did he tell you somethin’ comes up missin’, and there’s a white man and a colored man standin’ nearby, most of us are gonna think it’s the colored that did it? That he’s the one shiftless? Ain’t none of us that damn good, Harry. We all got a lot of learnin’ to do.”
“But a colored man could have stole it, couldn’t he?”
“He sure could have. But it ain’t the thing to expect of him just because he is colored. You get what I’m sayin’, Harry?”
“Yes ma’am.”
We fished for a time, then Tom woke, shook off the blanket of leaves, and we moved to another place.
I was sort of worried Grandma would try to take us off to where Mose was. I could tell she was curious about what was going on there, but she fooled me. We stayed pretty close to the house, even though we changed spots two or three times, and by nightfall we had caught a dozen fish or so and Grandma had shot the head off another moccasin.
We got back to the house about supper time. I cleaned the fish, which were mostly hand-sized perch, and Grandma fried them up with hush puppies. She also made a pie with fig preserves, Mama not believing it could be done and taste right.
We ate the fish, all the while being told to watch for bones by Grandma and Mama, then we sucked down the pie, which turned out delicious. Afterward, we went out on the sleeping porch to sit or swing or lie on the floor until we had digested enough to move again.
14
Next day the fun was over and we were back to regular. We did chores, and after lunch Grandma brought out one of her cardboard suitcases. Inside were six books. The Bible, Ivanhoe, Huckleberry Finn, Last of the Mohicans, The Red Badge of Courage, and Call of the Wild. She had me read aloud to her from Ivanhoe.
She kept saying how she just loved bein’ read to.
When I finished a chapter, it was Tom’s turn. Tom had a lot of trouble with the words, and I wanted to just go on and read it because the story was so good, but Grandma insisted Tom do it. Tom got about halfway through the chapter and gave up.
Grandma said, “That was real good, Tom. You just need more time for the big words.”
She gave the book back to me, and I caught on to what was happening. We were being schooled. I didn’t say anything. I just read. I liked reading. I liked the book. Grandma made the whole thing fun. By the afternoon, she asked if Mama, Tom, and me would like to drive into town and visit Daddy at the barbershop.
Mama declined the trip, having wash she wanted to hang, and though Grandma volunteered us to help her, Mama insisted we drive on into town and visit without her.
We drove along at a fast clip with the windows down. The wind picked up the scent of the woods and the earth and filled the car with them.
Grandma said, “I just love the smell of dirt. I like it best when it starts to smell right before a rain. There’s somethin’ about an oncomin’ rain gives the earth a real fine smell. That’s another thing about North Texas. Dirt, wet or dry, didn’t smell right.”
We weren’t long at the barbershop before Grandma got bored. She was willing to argue with the customers on nearly anything that came up. Religion. Politics. Farming. The Depression. She even got on Cecil’s nerves, and he generally liked to talk about most anything. She thought he cut hair a little too close, and even suggested a superior form of wrist movement for stropping his razor.
When she finally tuckered out arguing, she took to reading one of the pulp magazines, and pretty soon she was criticizing the writing. I could tell Daddy, Cecil, and the customers were glad when she made up her mind to go over to the general store and take us with her.
I was nervous about going over to G
roon’s store, but when we got there, he greeted us like family. He didn’t bring up our recent encounter with him except to talk about Mama’s chocolate cake.
“She bakes a good’n,” Grandma said, pursing her lips, “but she always put a little too much sugar in it, and not enough egg to make the icing.”
“Oh,” Mr. Groon said.
“I’ll fix some sometime and bring you a slice,” Grandma said.
“That would be right nice of you, ma’am,” Mr. Groon said. “Since my wife died, I don’t do much cooking that matters. Just a little to get by, and it ain’t worth much.”
Grandma bought a few small items. Staples for Mama: flour, coffee, cornmeal, and finally a couple of peppermint sticks for me and Tom. We went out to the car and placed our boxed items inside, except for the peppermints, which me and Tom took to sucking right away.
“Ain’t there anything else to do around here?” Grandma asked.
“No ma’am. Not really. ’Cept go see Miss Maggie. You was sayin’ you knew her.”
“I know who she is, but I don’t believe we’ve ever exchanged words … Well, hell, let’s go see her. She might be up better for conversation than these men folks. They can’t stand to be disagreed with. There ain’t a thing they don’t know. They ain’t even half the cussers they think they are neither.”
Since I hadn’t heard anyone cuss around Grandma, I wasn’t certain how she had drawn those conclusions, but thought it was a pretty good bet she could cuss with the best of them. As for them not knowing as much as they thought, well, they hadn’t had all that much time to express themselves. Grandma was always talking.
We left her sacks in the car; unlike now, you could do that. It was rare then, even in hard times, that anyone would steal from you, unless it was a banker. There were, of course, the Pretty Boy Floyds of the world, but it wasn’t like now where everything has to be under lock and key. A thief was usually from somewhere else other than where you were.
We came up on Miss Maggie hanging out her wash. She had on her big black hat. She heard us coming, looked over her shoulder.
“Howdy there, Missuh Harry. And who that you got with you?”
“This is my Grandma,” I said.
“My name’s June. I hear yours is Maggie.”
“Yes’m, that’s right.”
“Don’t ma’am me,” Grandma said. “Makes me feel a hundred years old.”
Miss Maggie cackled. “I am a hundert years old.”
“Naw you ain’t.”
“Yes’m. I am too. I might be a hundert and two, but I done lost me some track on it.”
“You don’t look a day over seventy,” Grandma said. “I see you’re hangin’ out your drawers.”
“Yes’m. They got to have air’n. My drawers might even need a little extra air’n.”
“Least your drawers ain’t wide enough to stretch and jump on.”
Miss Maggie cackled. “You somethin’, Miss June.”
There was a basket full of wash and clothespins setting on the ground. Grandma plucked out some clothes, grabbed up a handful of clothespins. She put one of the pins in her mouth, and somehow holding three more in one hand, she pinned the piece up, grabbed another and pinned that.
When she had used the pin in her mouth, Grandma said, “I been up the barbershop my son owns, talkin’ to the men there, and I can tell you straight out, ain’t a one of ’em knows a damn thing.”
Maggie grinned. “Ain’t that the truth, Miss June.”
Grandma grabbed more wash and started hanging. “They think they know everything there is to know, but they don’t know which end of themselves the crap comes out of.”
Miss Maggie laughed. “You is one cutup, Miss June. Yes, you is.”
A short time later we were sitting in Miss Maggie’s house, at the table, eating buttermilk pie, and Grandma and Miss Maggie were arguing over a chocolate and buttermilk pie recipe. I had never heard of such a combination, but then again, I’d never had fig preserve pie until the night before either, and it had been like a slice of heaven.
It was hot in there because of the wood stove. The front door was open, and I could see out the screen. There were no flies this day, but in the distance I could see a black and yellow butterfly playing above the hog pen. I was seeing it and not seeing it. I was thinking about Ivanhoe.
Pretty soon Grandma and Miss Maggie were up cooking together, arguing all the while, banging pans, pouring this and that, Miss Maggie showing Grandma where the cooking stuff she needed was, and telling her what’s what on how to use it.
Grandma told her how she had been cooking for over sixty years, and Miss Maggie said how she started cooking regular when she was four, and hadn’t never stopped, and how she was a hundred years old or more.
Grandma sideswiped that by telling how she’d cooked for twenty men at a time, and Miss Maggie upped that one by telling how she used to cook for a logging company, cooking for well over three hundred men, three times a day, breakfast, dinner, and supper.
Before too long, both of them, covered in flour and sugar, were poking pies in the oven, building up the wood, stoking the fire, and letting the pies bake.
They went outside and brushed flour off, came back in, sat at the table, and went right back to it.
“You done put your buttermilk in too heavy,” Miss Maggie said.
“You poured in too little,” Grandma said. “Pie’ll be dry.”
“You got too much buttermilk, you can’t taste the chocolate right.”
“Use too little, you might as well have done gone on and baked a chocolate pie.”
“Hard as chocolate is to come by, you got to play with it some, add a little ginger to give it a right taste.”
“Ginger don’t help chocolate none at all,” Grandma said.
“We’ll just sit here and wait on them done pies,” Miss Maggie said.
While we waited, Miss Maggie said, “That boy there done told you about seein’ that Goat Man?”
Grandma looked at me and raised an eyebrow. “Goat Man?”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “Me and Tom seen it.”
“Now, I know you probably didn’t want nothing said, but I wanted your Grandma to know there’s been things goin’ on in them bottoms. She’d want to watch for you.”
“I heard there was some murders,” Grandma said.
“Uh huh,” Miss Maggie said. “But they wasn’t just no common murders. And I ain’t talkin’ out of school here, child,” she said, looking at me, “it’s all over colored town here, and over in Pearl Creek, which ain’t nothin’ but coloreds. This here is one of them funny murderers. A Travelin’ Man, maybe.”
“Travelin’ Man?” Grandma asked.
Miss Maggie told her the story she had told me, but a truncated version.
“Ah, tush, ain’t no such business,” Grandma said.
“Well, that boy there, he done see the Goat Man hisself. And that Goat Man is probably a Travelin’ Man.”
Grandma looked at me.
“Just like I said, Grandma. Me and Tom seen it. It had horns.”
“You must have seen somethin’ else and thought it was a Goat Man.”
I shook my head. “No ma’am.”
Grandma pursed her lips. “Well, you say you seen a Goat Man, then that’s what you think you seen. I haven’t got any doubt on that. But that don’t mean that’s what it was.”
“Whatever you believe, you best keep them young’ns out of them woods,” Miss Maggie said. “Well, I do believe them pies is ready.”
Tom and me was set up as judge, and they were both delicious, neither better than the other, just different. We declared it a tie. Both Grandma and Miss Maggie were happy with that. We ate half of each pie. Then Grandma said we had to go. Miss Maggie put all the pie in one metal pan and wrapped it with brown paper.
“This way, you got to bring my pan back,” Miss Maggie said, “and I could sure tolerate the company. I like my mule, but ole mule doesn’t say much.”
> “Kind of like some men I’ve known,” Grandma said.
Miss Maggie chuckled over that. We got our pie, said our goodbyes, and went out of there.
On the way home Grandma drove a little more slowly than usual, which was good news for a couple of slow stray dogs and a startled squirrel.
Grandma quizzed me about the murders. I told her what I knew. Like Miss Maggie said, wasn’t any of it a secret, and she’d done told Grandma pretty much what I knew. I even told her about the body I found, and before I could help myself, I was telling her about being on the roof of that icehouse, looking down, seeing that poor dead woman.
“Well, now,” Grandma said. “This ain’t nobody gettin’ off a train at random, ’less they’re somebody lives close, catches that train to get into the area where they can do what they want to do. How many random hoboes you think gonna come through and do the same thing?”
“I don’t know Daddy thinks that,” I said. “Whites are pretty sure a colored is doin’ it.”
“Wait a minute. That’s what’s goin’ on with Mose, ain’t it? Somebody thinks he did them murders. That’s why your Daddy’s so hush-hush about him … Ain’t that it, boy?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You just said yes,” Grandma said. “You don’t tell a lie worth a damn.”
I thought about what she had said about Red’s tattoo and Mama. Neither did she.
Late that afternoon, when Daddy got home, Grandma was laying for him. She kind of directed him onto the back screen porch with Mama, and I sidled over to the door to listen. After a moment, Tom saw me and asked what I was doin’. I hushed her and waved her over. We both put our ear to the door.
We couldn’t catch all that was being said, but I could hear my name coming up, and Grandma explaining I wouldn’t tell her nothing, but she said she “deduced it from circumstances.”
The Bottoms Page 17
