“It’s her, ain’t it, Daddy?”
“So he gets up and he gets his old shotgun out of the closet, one of them double barrels, and he sits on the edge of his bed, thinking maybe he’s dreaming, and he’s still lying there under the sheet, and that he didn’t hear nothing for real, and didn’t get up and get his shotgun. But that sounds just keeps a coming. A little louder now, that chain rattling, that dragging sound, and then . . . It stops. He don’t really know where it stops, but he feels like he does. He feels like he knows it’s outside the front door, and then there’s a calling sudden-like, and it’s that same voice with the gurgle in it. It’s his wife’s voice, like the way it would sound if she was full of water and trying to talk. She’s calling his name. Ain’t nothing else she’s saying other than his name, over and over and over.
“He don’t move. He just keeps on sitting there on the edge of the bed, shivering now, and it ain’t cold a bit, but he feels wet as if he was in that river again. The voice calls and calls, and then it stops. It stops for a long time, but he don’t move none, not a bit. And you know what happens next?”
“What?”
“Something starts a knocking at the door. Slow and steady, and then the knocking stops, and there’s a scratching, like a cat, but still he don’t move. And then that stops, and he hears that sound again, the chain and something heavy as it goes dragging around the house and comes to the window by the bed. He has his back to that window, but he’s heard that sound moving around to it, and he knows without looking that someone or some kind of thing is at that window. So slowly he turns and looks. And damn if there ain’t a water-fat face pushed up against the window pane, starring in at him.
He jumps up then, whirls and fires that shotgun, blasting a load through the glass and into that face, but that face don’t do nothing but come apart some, and not much. And he knows it’s just who he expected it was. It’s his wife, and she’s done come for him. She gets hold of the window sill and starts climbing through that window, that broken glass all around it not bothering her none. Hell, he’s done shot her right in the face with one load from that double barrel, and she’s still a coming, and only looking as bad as she looked before, which is bad enough. Though now she’s got little buckshot holes all in her face and head and throat. And she’s so white. So white. And there’s no blood on her, just them holes, black and small as seed ticks. In she comes, the nightgown torn and ragged around her from her rising up from the river and walking through the close brush, and she’s got that chain fastened to her foot, and she bends down and takes hold of that chain, and goes to tugging, pulling that anvil toward her, causing it to drag loud on the ground until it comes scraping up the side of the house and bumps over the open window and falls to the floor with a sound like a big tree falling.
“He can’t run. He ain’t got the legs for it. His knees is knocking together, and he is stuck there like his feet are nailed to the floor. He does open up on her with that other barrel, but he might as well have tried to tickle her ass with a feather, for all the hurt it does her.
Closer she comes, holding the chain in her hands, dragging that anvil across the floor. And still he’s frozen. Step by wet step she comes, that heavy anvil making groove marks in the wood, and about the time he’s come unstuck and is going to run, she moves faster than she ought to be able to, than anyone ought to be able to, and she’s done let go of the chain and has grabbed him by the neck. She winds fingers in his hair and pulls him as she turns, and now she’s dragging him by the hair, through the house, and to the front door, and when she come to it she just kicks it and it flies off its hinges and out into the yard, and still she comes, dragging him by the hair, her foot pulling the chain and what’s hooked up to it.
“Out she goes, slow and steady, dragging him over the ground by the hair to the river. And then she goes into it, floating out to the center of the river where there’s that deep old hole, the chain coming after her, that anvil swinging down below her, but still she keeps atop the water, doing what she couldn’t do in life, swim, or at least float. When she’s right in the center, she tugs him up and looks right at him, plants her water-thick lips on his in a sloppy wet kiss, and then she just lets that anvil pull her down. And away they go, whirling faster and faster, down, down, down in that deep dark hole filled with water, and now with them two lost souls.
“You’d think that’d be the end of it, but it ain’t. She’s still out there in the river, and where she went down, it’s not only deep enough to flow somewhere out of China, the water is spinning around and around on the top of the river, the way it did when she and that man of hers was going down, pulled by that chain and anvil. That water ain’t never stopped spinning there since, and that old suck hole don’t like men at all, or boys. That’s why it took Ronnie. That’s why it tried to take me, and that’s why over the years it’s pulled down many a good boy that’s tried to swim it. It’s even tugged down row boats, tugged them down in that deep, bottomless hole where’s she got her a big old bunch of men and boys, just a spinning around and around in that deep, dark, water hole. Which is why you don’t never want to go out in that river to swim, ’specially not in that fast, deep water over the hole. ’Cause that Water Witch, which is what she’s come to be called, she’s waiting.”
Hap sat silent a moment.
“That’s near here?”
“It is.”
“Is she real?”
“It’s a story.”
“If it was real, could she come back out of that water?”
“I don’t think so. Not anymore. She’s stuck there now. She got the man done what he did to her, and now she’s got that spot that’s hers, and hell to the fellow that tries to swim or fish there. But she can’t come out no more. She’s stuck right there with that husband of hers, Ronnie, and all them others. Now, you need to get in bed.”
Hap slipped under the covers. The covers were warm. His dad tucked them in around him.
“I hate I told you that story,” his dad said.
“I liked it.”
“But you’ll have nightmares, and not only is that bad for you, but Mama will know if you do, and that’s bad for both of us.”
“I like stories, Daddy.”
“Good. I can sleep here beside you if you’re scared.”
“I’m okay.”
“Alright, then,” his dad said, and eased out of the room, once again becoming a shadow.
The heater hummed. The wind blew. The rain splattered. The house creaked. Hap envisioned that woman, all swollen up from the water, that chain on her foot, that heavy anvil at the end of the chain, and her spinning around and around just beneath the water, ready to grab a foot and pull you under. He found the story scary, but he found it comforting too. His dad had told him a story like he asked, and the kind of story he asked for, and he loved him for it.
Hap closed his eyes.
Around and around that woman spun. Her hair flowing about like spilled ink, waving in the current, dragging fellows deep down into the wet dark with her, all the way to the bottom of the world.
13.
Squirrel Hunt
“You know, Leonard, now that I think about it. I believe he would have stood up for that black man. I really do. He was a man of his time, but he was an honorable man, and had a true sense of fair play.”
“I don’t doubt that. My uncle never got over me being gay, but honestly, I think he and your dad were a lot alike. Had they known each other in a later time, they might have been friends, like us, thick as thieves.”
“You’re probably right,” I said. “Dad, in spite of his background, had a kind of wisdom about him, and a way of imparting it to you.”
“What kind of way?” Chance said.
“A backwoods kind of way,” I said.
“See,” Brett said. “Backwoods. Like your own father. You can take the boy out of the woods and pick the ticks off of him, but you can’t take the woods out of the boy . .. Or something like that.”
“I was reaching for something there.”
“And didn’t quite get it,” Leonard said.
“You like those vanilla cookies I keep here?” Brett said.
“You are wise, and you have great ways of using old clichés,” Leonard said.
“Like when you said thick as thieves?” Brett said.
“Just like that.”
Chance laughed. It was soft and short and throaty, and that made me smile. “Come on, Dad,” she said. “Give me an example of your dad’s wisdom.”
“Alright. I can tell you an incident that shows that, and his sense of justice.”
I was twelve then, and the country was not like it is now. There were still plenty of tall and ancient hardwoods on either side of the road, mixed with pines and sweet gums and all manner of other trees, and the squirrels were thick in the hardwoods, and the birds when nested in them were so many they looked like colorful blooms.
Daddy drove up a hill in our old black car, and at the top of the hill we coasted down a ways, and then turned left onto a red clay road so narrow the limbs of trees brushed lightly against the windows and whispered over the hood and the roof of the car. It was a cool early winter day and the trees cast shadows across the little road we were on.
After a while, we turned off, and ended up at the end of a sandy rutted road even more narrow than the clay one. There was a car parked there, right next to the woods. A white Chevrolet. Daddy parked next to it, and we got out. Daddy pulled two shotguns from the back seat, a twelve gauge for him, and a four/ten for me.
Both guns were single shot and broken open and unloaded, and Daddy left them that way. He handed me the four/ten, placed his shotgun on the hood of our car, and looked at the Chevy as he pulled on a red vest that had our ammunition in it and some jerky he had brought.
“Hank Jenner’s car,” he said.
I knew Hank Jenner only faintly. He was a burly guy with tobacco-stained teeth and he wore a greasy fedora, the brim of which was turned down to canopy his eyes. He spent a lot of time at the feed store talking to other men who, like him, seemed to have little to do. I would see him when I went to buy comic books next door, and when I came by the open doorway of the feed store, walking along the sidewalk, he always said something or another. I never understood exactly what it was he was getting at, and he said things to my mother too, leaning out of the doorway to do it, but she ignored him. The men in the store laughed.
One time she told me, “Don’t say anything about Mr. Jenner to your Daddy, about anything he said.”
“Why?”
“Because if you do, Mrs. Jenner, who is a very nice lady, will be sleeping alone.”
I didn’t understand that exactly, not then. I did know Mama and Daddy didn’t like Mr. Jenner. Other than his crowd down at the feed store, not many did. No one could figure out what he did for a living, but he always had a bit of money. Most of it went for chewing tobacco, and according to Daddy, lots of alcohol.
I liked Mr. Jenner’s wife. She was my fourth grade teacher. She was sweet and funny and had kids of her own, some younger, some older than me. None were in my classes.
If I saw her out of school, with her husband, she seemed different. Not as tall as in the classroom, never smiling, and she never stopped to talk to anyone. She never wore one of the three or four nice dresses she wore to class, but instead old, gray things. Her kids were dressed poorly as well. At school they had a few good clothes, but away from there they wore old stuff. I understood that. My mother sewed my clothes mostly, and there were hand-me-downs from my cousins that I wore as they outgrew them. When I wasn’t at school, or being made to go to church, I wore older clothes with patched knees and elbows. This was, and still is, a poor part of the country.
Sometimes Mr. Jenner would be waiting on Mrs. Jenner when school was over. He would park at the curb, get out and cross his arms, lean on his car, and wait for her to come out. You could see her grow smaller as she walked toward the car. They never spoke. She just got in.
On this hunting day I was excited, and the sight of Mr. Jenner’s car meant little to me. A lot of people hunted those woods. I suppose the property belonged to somebody, but back then there was an understood rule that you could hunt on other people’s property as long as you didn’t shoot everything in sight, cut fences, or build unattended fires. I liked to shoot squirrels, and had gone hunting several times, and we had eaten what I killed like Daddy said we had to do. If we didn’t kill anything, I knew we’d be having corn meal mush for dinner.
We went into the woods along an animal path, doing what was called “still” hunting. We didn’t have a hunting dog, we just walked and looked up and watched for a squirrel’s tail to blow in the wind, and then we shot it. We had a strict number of squirrels we killed, and then two more for a poor colored family. That was what African-Americans were called then. Colored
They lived not far from us. The man of the house had a bad foot injury and could only do light work, so they always needed food and money. His wife did cleaning and the children worked part-time jobs and went to the colored school beyond Marvel Creek at a place called Sand Ridge. A lot of coloreds lived there.
I existed in a state of confusion because Daddy cussed “the niggers and the burr-heads and the jigs,” but was always giving them extra squirrels he shot, or extra fish he caught. When we didn’t catch many fish or killed only a few squirrels, he would give them all away, and corn meal mush would be in the offing.
Yet, at home, way he talked about colored people in general was pretty tough and made me kind of sick to my stomach, even though I wasn’t exactly sure why.
Mama saw the good in people, no matter their color.
She and Daddy talked very different about the colored folks, though they both seemed kind and generous with everyone, and Daddy, oddly, considering how he talked, seemed even more that way with the colored. The best I ever came to understanding him, was when he once said he knew what it was like to be hungry.
Out in the woods, carrying our shotguns, me and Daddy walked along for a while. It was fall and the oaks had shed their leaves. The pines were eternally green unless dying. The air smelled of trees and dirt and nearby water from the Sabine River.
After a bit, I saw a squirrel and Daddy let me shoot him. It was a good shot, and the squirrel fell. I grabbed it by the tail and tied it off to my belt with a piece of twine, and we carried on.
It was about midday when we stopped to eat something. I had killed two squirrels and Daddy had killed two. Daddy pulled out the jerky inside his vest, unwrapped the wax paper it was in, and gave me a piece.
“Eat slow, we might be a while before supper,” Daddy said.
I chewed slowly, pretending I was Davy Crockett on a hunt for bears.
Daddy said, “You like shooting those squirrels, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, them squirrels are food. Okay to be glad about food, but you start shooting to watch something fall, start thinking killing is good, you need to sit down on a log like this and have a little talk with yourself. Killing ain’t no good thing, son, unless it’s to eat or protect yourself. And you ought never to delight in it.”
That’s how Daddy was. He said things kind of off to the side sometimes, and then you’d think on it and understand it. But I certainly had been delighting in killing those squirrels. Guns and killing made you feel powerful.
When we finished eating, hunting continued, and we killed one more a piece. We were about to start back to the car, when Daddy saw something bright red on the ground between some sycamore trees, and there was something black on the red and it moved and shimmered in the strips of sunlight that fell between the boughs of the trees. We went over to it.
Daddy took me by the shoulders and told me to go stand by a big elm he pointed at, and I did. I could see what was lying on the ground, though, and I had seen it cl
ose up. A man with most of his head missing. I had shot a squirrel earlier and most of its head was gone, but I hadn’t felt the same way then. Flies had risen up in a cloud when we came upon the body, and now the cloud was descending again. The body was soon covered in them, and when they moved it was in mass, as if they were all part of one kind of creature. You could see bits of his red shirt between the mass of flies, and then for some reason or another, they would rise up in a blast and then come down again. The air smelled sour.
Something, a wild dog or coyote or red wolf, perhaps, had pulled off one of the body’s cowboy boots which lay nearby, and had gnawed at a socked foot. It didn’t even look like a foot anymore, and most of the sock was missing and part of it had been pulled out in a long strand. A greasy fedora lay nearby, on its crown, and by the body was a rifle.
“Jenner,” Dad said.
You couldn’t tell that by the face, but we knew it was him, way he was dressed, shape of his body, his car being parked at the edge of the woods.
Daddy leaned over the body and gave it a closer look. He glanced at Jenner’s 30/30 on the ground beside him. He stood up and walked around Jenner and bent down and looked at the leafy ground. He ran his finger into something in the dirt. I couldn’t help myself. I moved away from the elm just enough to see it was a footprint, and there were others. They were small footprints and they led off toward the river, which at that point you could hear it gurgling along not far from us.
Even at that age, it came to me those prints were out of place. Jenner was a big man with big feet. Those prints were much smaller and had been made the day before. I knew that, because they were dried now, and they had been impacted in the earth when it was wet. It had rained yesterday.
Daddy came over and pulled a big pack of chewing tobacco out of his pocket and stuck a wad in his cheek. He didn’t say anything, just cradled his shotgun in his arms.
“We gonna tell the sheriff?” I said.
Hap and Leonard: Blood and Lemonade Page 15
