Delta Blues

by Carolyn Haines

  He was pronounced dead at 12:31 a.m. The black curtains were closed, and the witnesses hustled from the room. Outside, Butch and Leon leaned on a corner of the redbrick building and smoked a cigarette.

  Inside the death room, a vent above the chamber was opened, and the gas escaped into the sticky air over Parchman. Fifteen minutes later, guards with gloves unshackled Raymond and wrestled his body out of the chamber. His clothing was cut off, to be burned. His corpse was hosed off with cold water, then dried with kitchen towels, reclothed in prison whites, and laid inside a cheap pine coffin.

  Leon and Butch sat with their mother and waited for the warden. Inez was still sedated, but she clearly understood what had taken place in the last few minutes. Her head was buried in her hands and she cried softly, mumbling occasionally. A guard entered and asked for the keys to Mr. McBride’s van. An hour dragged by.

  The warden, fresh from his press announcement, finally entered the room. He offered some sappy condolences, managed to look sad and sympathetic, then asked Leon to sign some forms. He explained that Raymond left almost $1000 in his prison account, and a check would be sent within a week. He said the van was loaded with the coffin and four boxes of Raymond’s belongings—his guitar, clothing, books, correspondence, legal materials, and manuscripts. They were free to go.

  The coffin was moved to one side so Inez could be rolled through the back of the van, and when she touched it she broke down again. Leon and Butch rearranged the boxes, secured the wheelchair, then moved the coffin again. When everything was in its place, they followed a car full of guards back to the front of the prison, through the entrance, and when they turned onto Highway 3 they drove past the last of the protestors. The television crews were gone. Leon and Butch lit cigarettes, but Inez was too emotional to smoke. No one spoke for miles as they hurried through the cotton and soybean fields. Near the town of Marks, Leon spotted an all-night convenience store. He bought a soda for Butch and tall coffees for his mother and himself.

  When the Delta yielded to the hill country, they felt better.

  “What did he say last?” Inez asked, her tongue thick.

  “He apologized,” Butch said. “Asked Charlene for forgiveness.”

  “So she watched it?”

  “Oh yes. You didn’t think she’d miss it.”

  “I should’ve seen it.”

  “No, Momma,” Leon said. “You can be thankful for the rest of your days that you didn’t witness the execution. Your last memory of Raymond was a long hug and a nice farewell. Please don’t think you missed anything.”

  “It was horrible,” Butch said.

  “I should’ve seen it.”

  In the town of Batesville they passed a fast-food place that advertised chicken biscuits and twenty-four-hour service. Leon turned around. “I could use the ladies’,” Inez said. There were no other customers inside at 3:15 in the morning. Butch rolled his mother to a table near the front, and they ate in silence. The van with Raymond’s coffin was less than thirty feet away.

  Inez managed a few bites, then lost her appetite. Butch and Leon ate like refugees.

  They entered Ford County just after 5 a.m., still very dark, the roads empty. They drove to Pleasant Ridge in the north end of the county, to a small Pentecostal church where they parked in the gravel lot, and waited. At the first hint of sunlight, they heard an engine start somewhere in the distance.

  “Wait here,” Leon said to Butch, then left the van and disappeared. Behind the church there was a cemetery, and at the far end of it a backhoe had just begun digging the grave. The backhoe was owned by a cousin’s boss. At 6:30, several men from the church arrived and went to the grave site. Leon drove the van down a dirt trail and stopped near the backhoe, which had finished its digging and was now just waiting. The men pulled the coffin from the van. Butch and Leon gently placed their mother’s wheelchair on the ground, and pushed her as they followed the coffin.

  They lowered it with ropes, and when it settled onto the four-by-four studs at the bottom, they withdrew the ropes. The preacher read a short verse of Scripture, then said a prayer. Leon and Butch shoveled some dirt onto the coffin, then thanked the men for their assistance.

  As they drove away, the backhoe was refilling the grave.

  The house was empty—no concerned neighbors waiting, no relatives there to mourn. They unloaded Inez and rolled her into the house and into her bedroom. She was soon fast asleep. The four boxes were placed in a storage shed, where their contents would weather and fade along with the memories of Raymond.

  It was decided that Butch would stay home that day to care for Inez, and to ward off the reporters. There had been many calls in the past week, and someone was bound to show up with a camera. He worked at a sawmill and his boss would understand.

  Leon drove to Clanton and stopped on the edge of town to fill up with gas. At 8 a.m. sharp he pulled into the lot at McBride Upholstery and returned the van. An employee explained that Mr. McBride wasn’t in yet, was probably still at the coffee shop, and usually got to work around 9. Leon handed over the keys, thanked the employee, and left.

  He drove to the lamp factory east of town, and punched the clock at 8:30, as always.

  19 What His Hands Had Been Waiting For

  Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly

  July, 1927

  They left the dead looters in the house and were striding toward their horses, Ham Johnson reloading his .30-30, when they heard what sounded like a cat.

  “Ain’t no cat,” said Ingersoll.

  “Naw.” Ham clicked a cartridge into the port of his rifle. He clicked in another.

  They followed the squawling past the house’s slanted silhouette—the owners smart enough to leave the doors and windows open, which had let the flood waters swirl through. Behind the house, a shade tree, now like something dipped in batter halfway up. Snagged in the top branches, a coop filled with dead chickens.

  Anyway, Ingersoll was right about it not being a cat. It was a baby.

  The men stared. A bushel basket on a low branch held the red-faced thing. In the mud, beneath the basket, a shred of blanket it’d kicked away.

  “Mother of God,” Ingersoll said.

  “Wasn’t nothing of God about this one’s mother,” Ham said. He raised his right arm, aiming his shotgun at the door of the house, and closed one eye. “She was the one. Got-damn it. When she heard us coming she must’ve up and left this one here and hid herself in the house.”

  Ingersoll considered the baby. It wore a gnarl of diaper and was impossible to name boy or girl. It was bald. Red from crying and he realized they’d been yelling above its noise.

  “You better off,” Ham told it. “Take a chance with the current elements. Maybe a gang of coyote’ll take you in. Isn’t that what happened to you, Ingersoll? Band of coyotes found you in the tundra and raised you as their own?”

  Ham shoved the silver tray they’d taken from the looters into his saddlebag. A white man just over six feet tall with a red face and bright red hair he kept cut short, Ham wore mutton chops (also red) he called burnsides, and a belly nutria derby that he was slightly vain about and endeavored to keep clean. Ingersoll’s hat was bigger and more practical, a black Stetson Dakota.

  “Ain’t no coyotes this far south,” he said.

  “Is too,” Ham said. He kicked his leg to flap his boot sole down—the leather wet so long it’d rotted—and fitted his boot into his stirrup and swung onto his saddle.

  “It’s wild dogs a plenty, Ham. But it ain’t no coyotes.”

  Ingersoll was looking beyond the house, studying the inland sea of dried and drying mud where cotton plants had once been, the horizon unrelenting brown, flat and cracking like so much poorly thrown pottery. Twice he had seen arms of the dead reaching out of it.

  The levees had ruptured back in April, and even here, twenty-five miles southeast of the Mounds Landing crevasse, the waves had surged six feet. Thunderous breakers of coffee-colored froth had flattened near every
tree and building, then just wiped them all away, like something out of Revelation. Ingersoll recalled the buried road to Yazoo City, a bloated mare and in front of its muzzle a bloated Bible as if the horse were verifying the events of the end time when they befell him.

  “Tell Junior goodbye,” Ham said.

  “What you mean?”

  “I mean it’s somebody’ll come along sooner or later and get this damn baby’s what I mean. We got to skedaddle.” He looked over his shoulder at the basket, now swaying in the breeze. “What’s that lullaby? ‘When the bow breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come baby, cradle and all.’“

  “Ham—”

  “C’mon,” Ham said. “Let’s get to New Orleans, spend some of this looter loot. I got me a mind for a foreign girl. Russian if we can find one. Get a steak and lay some pipe. Then buy me a new pair of boots.”

  “I can’t leave no baby, Ham.”

  “Well we ain’t bringing it, Ing.”

  The foul wind from the east moaned through the leaning mule barn.

  “Adios, Junior,” Ham said, and gigged his sorrel with his heels. “Vaya con dios.”

  Ingersoll stared down at the kicking baby like maybe he’d had a baby himself long ago. And a wife.

  But he hadn’t. He was twenty-seven years old. He had no living family anywhere. He’d never even touched a baby.

  “Ah, hell,” he said and looked at the pewter sky, which gave a chuckle of thunder.

  WILD DOGS FOLLOWING. Or coyotes if you asked Ham. Ingersoll rode a quarter-mile behind his partner and figured the big man wouldn’t hear the thing fussing in his arms. It smelled like piss and flung its fists out and kicked. As he rode it was the beating and kicking that impressed Ingersoll. Little dickens had some fight.

  In an hour the baby had lulled to a hiccupping sleep and Ingersoll let the horse follow the deeply-etched tracks Ham’s sorrel was carving. Ingersoll had learned to trust Ham’s lead after Ham had spotted and dispatched two of the saboteurs back in Marked Tree, Arkansas. Their next orders, sent via telegram by Coolidge’s men, had brought them to the Old Moore plantation near Greenville, Mississippi, where they were told to monitor local Negroes, some growing seditious, planning to head North, put the lapping Mississippi far behind them. But the landowners—and the officials the landowners elected—couldn’t allow the Negros to leave. Who would pick the cotton then?

  But the cotton hadn’t mattered. They were perhaps a dozen miles from Mounds Landing, searching for runaway Negroes, when that levee had burst. As if from the sky they heard it, heard the terrible roar, like a twister first but then an earthquake, it seemed, coming from beneath the horses. “Go,” Ham had yelled. They spurred their mounts to a gallop and within minutes, the floodtide was upon them, washing trees and bodies past, brown water splashing over the horses’ hooves first, then quickly over their withers to the riders’ legs and then the horses were careening and swimming and the men fighting to stay on, the land gone behind them, there passing in the current a church steeple, there a wagon still hitched to a pair of kicking mules, there a school house desk.

  Now Ingersoll’s horse gave a lurch. He grasped the baby, which startled it awake, its arms flying outward, and set it to crying. The horse’s back legs had sunk, stuck again. Ingersoll would have to dismount and wrench its hooves free. But what to do with the baby?

  “Ham?”

  He heard a horseshoe clip a rock behind him and lowered his head and shook it.

  “I told you about that damn baby,” Ham Johnson shouted at his back. “Look where your instincts are.”

  “It’s my decision,” Ingersoll called over his shoulder. “I’ll ditch it first people we find.”

  Ham skidded to a stop beside Ingersoll’s horse, wiggling its rump and straining its neck and rolling its eyes in panic. Ingersoll slid off clutching the squalling baby. It was horribly red in the face and its tears left tracks in its coat of dust.

  “I think it’s hungry,” Ingersoll said.

  Ham leaned and spat. “So am I.” He spurred his horse, which threw beads of mud on Ingersoll’s neck as it trotted away.

  Ingersoll looked before him, behind. His own feet were heavy with mud and he saw nothing to do but set his upended Stetson in the mud and place the wailing baby ass-first in its crown. When he saw it wouldn’t topple out he stood behind the horse, talking to it, and grounded his feet and squatted and with both hands around the horse’s fetlock yanked it free, the mud yielding with an anguished and greedy slurp.

  IT WAS A LONG AFTERNOON that they traveled south across the birdless crackled brown mudscape without ever arriving at its edge. At four it rained and woke the baby but they kept riding. They passed through the rain and through a spell of cool, the air dotted with mosquitoes, before it got hot again. Twice Ingersoll’s horse jumped the bloated bodies of goats, his mount so weary and jaded it hardly broke stride. They crossed a patch where strange arcs and teeth of stone pressed through the mud that Ham said must have been a cemetery. As they rode, Ingersoll switched the baby from sore arm crook to sore arm crook, grateful that his horse had fidelity, hardly needed guiding at all.

  As they pushed south, Ingersoll held his drinking pouch—he’d mixed sugar and water—for the baby to suck on. He’d also peered in its swaddle and seen its tiny knob, cleaned its backside with a rag dipped in puddle water and rigged his kerchief to make a new diaper.

  They dismounted at the top of a small hill with a swift swollen creek below, a butter churn bobbing against speckled rocks. Ham hobbled the horses, keeping them close and saddled. Ingersoll took off his Stetson and frowned at the rotten smudges on his fingers but lowered the baby in it anyway, extending its arms along the brim. Ham had arranged a few twigs and branches and soon had a fire sputtering, its pops and sparks and orbiting moths a fascination for the baby, who pointed a crooked finger.

  They chewed beef jerky and drank water from their canteens and rolled out their bedrolls. Ham unstoppered his pouch of mescal and pushed out his feet like he did when he was fixing to elaborate. His boots, caked in mud, were twice their regular size. Ingersoll reached into his saddlebag and lifted out his taterbug mandolin, a bowl-backed beauty of maple and mahogany, now warped a few degrees because of the rain. They’d found it washed ashore in a hussar trunk that Ham opened by shooting off the lock. Ingersoll, by tuning it a step and a half below standard, could play all the blues keys on it.

  He laid down a few licks and the baby turned its attention to watch Ingersoll with its bright blue eyes. Ingersoll began to pick out a little ballad he’d made up.

  “Tell this youngun your real name, Ham.”

  His partner swigged from his pouch. “Nobody knows it, living ner dead.”

  Ingersoll always enjoyed the next question for the contradictory answers it provoked. “And tell him how you come to be called Ham.”

  Ham took another pull. “You know how babies have that good smell, that sweet smell to their heads? Well, when I was a baby, my head gave off the perfume of ham.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Ingersoll played two bar fills and saw that the baby’s eyelids were heavy, its head bobbing towards sleep.

  “Yeah. Smelled like ham, like real good roast ham. People around me always getting hungry. It was my breath, something from inside. Over the years”—he took another swig, and Ingersoll laid down a blues lick—”over the years, I learned to stand downwind of folks. Naturally, as I grew I lost that sweet ham smell some, but it’s still there if you get close, whore-close. In fact, had there been this flood back then, I’d likely have been the first one cannibalized. ‘Ham Johnson’ they’d say, shaking their heads. ‘Damn but he made a fine breakfast.’“ Ham leaned to pass the mescal. “Nobody would of ever thought he’d a been a genuine war hero and confiscated by the military government itself to pursue saboteurs of levees—”

  “Dynamite-wielding saboteurs,” Ingersoll added, taking a drink.

  “Dynamite-wielding saboteurs of such a low stripe,” Ham said, “that they’r
e willing to set their charges wherever the highest bidder says.” He started talking about how one group of saboteurs, posing as government engineers, had taken money from a village on the east side of the river and then blown the west side, flooding a village over there in order to keep theirs dry.

  Ingersoll handed the tequila back and laid down a turnaround in E, just showing off now. He’d gotten his first guitar at ten, and holding it felt like somebody had attached a missing piece to his body. By fourteen he was making a living, a little gambling on the side, playing blues up in Clarksdale. But in 1916, he left for the Great War, put down his guitar for a U.S. Government-issue Mossberg 50-caliber rifle. He’d taken to it the same way, either-handed and cool-headed and pitch-perfect and fingers as nimble as air.

  Finally Ham belched and tapped his chest and aimed the neck of his pouch at the baby in the Stetson.

  “Sleeping like a gotdamn baby,” he said.

  Ingersoll went to his saddlebag, put his taterbug back and removed his spare dungaree shirt. He tucked it around the baby, whose breathing seemed shallow. “We need to get some milk fore long. Tomorrow.”

  Ham sighed. He pulled his legs in and stood. “You want first watch?”

  Ingersoll slipped his thumb into the baby’s hand and felt his fingers close around it. He waggled his thumb and admired the baby’s fierce grip. “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’ll turn in.”

  “All right.”

  Soon he was asleep and Ingersoll sat holding the hatful of baby in his lap. When the fire cracked out an ember that lay fizzing in the mud, the baby opened its eyes. It began to fuss and so he lifted it out and held it against his shoulder and started rocking, singing the one about the Corps men sandbagging the levee: “I work on the levee, mama, both night and day. I works so hard to keep the water away, he sang. It’s a mean old levee, cause me to weep and moan. Gotta leave my baby, and my happy home.”