Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  “Folks who don’t understand their world are given to superstition,” Gramps always said.

  David didn’t let himself think about what he was actually doing. Instead, he gave his mind over to the familiarity of sitting in a pirogue among cypress knees, waiting for an alligator to take bait. He’d done it many times before.

  Sudden roiling erupted—gray-black armor and white flesh twisted in a churning whirlpool. Two of them were rolling the body.

  David had seen enough. He turned the pirogue and paddled back to shore. He pulled the boat onto the bank, dragged it to the spot where he’d found it, and turned it over. He gathered the two pieces of the broken oar and carried them into the brush, shoving them under the first log he came to. He went back to the clearing and looked around. Every trace of the man was gone, and the lake was undisturbed except for Huck’s gunshot corpse.

  David knelt beside Huck and pressed his hand against the dog’s flank on a patch of fur that wasn’t stiff with blood. “I’ll come back for you,” he said.

  He stood. Retrieved his shirt and put it on. He picked up his jacket, rifle, and haversack, with its unfamiliar weight. The shadows were long, and David thought about his mother. She’d be wondering if he’d fallen asleep in the warmth of the Indian summer afternoon. He looked at the oxbow lake for a long time before turning and walking away.

  Chapter Two

  David walked to the motorcar and sat with his back against a wheel to wait for nightfall and think about what he’d do next. He had a strong desire to get rid of the car quickly, thus doing away with the last trace of the hateful stranger. He knew just the place, a few miles to the east, where a twenty-foot bluff overhung the Red River’s sucking eddies.

  The bluff was upstream from an inlet where David, his father, and his grandfather had camped during many overnight fishing trips. Gramps called their excursions bivouac. David called them heaven. Every trip, before they put a line in the water, David and Gramps walked north from camp to a bluff that had once overhung a vast raft of fallen trees that spanned the river from bank to bank. David’s grandfather had not only seen the bridge of packed debris, he had walked across it. “All the way to Bossier in dry boots,” he said.

  Gramps was there when the Corps of Engineers dynamited the logjam. “The dynamite smelled like ripe bananas,” he said. David had eaten a banana once. It was as sweet as candy.

  David wanted to hear the deep boom of the exploding dynamite and feel the ground jolt under his feet. He wanted to watch the muddy water geyser skyward, launching whole trees into the air. To smell the sweet dynamite and see the white smoke linger over the water. To watch the river rush through the breach afterward and hear the joyful roar of waters homesick for the sea.

  They always caught plenty of fish on their camping trips, enough for supper and breakfast the next morning. David and his daddy liked the sweet crappie, but Gramps was partial to catfish. They dredged them in cornmeal and fried them with potatoes and onions in a skillet over the campfire. Even Huck lay out with a full belly when supper was over.

  After sunset they sat around the fire, talking and watching the sparks fly up. The previous summer, the campfire talk had rolled around to college. The family had decided David would attend Wiley or Bishop, both in Marshall, Texas. There had been much discussion over the pros and cons of each school. David liked the idea of college—of being on his own for the first time in his life—but not for months on end. He would miss home too much. No fishing or hunting or hikes through his woods with Huck at his side. David had broached the idea of continuing his education at home with flattery, telling his mother that she could teach him as well as any college professor.

  “Just let that thought roll right out the other ear,” his mother had said. “You could use the exposure.”

  Again and again, David found himself turning to speak to Huck. He was used to those glass-blue eyes looking up at him. Huck hung on his every word, as if David’s voice was the only one worth listening to. It felt wrong to leave him, even for a while, as if he’d meant nothing.

  David worked through how long it would take him to hike back from the bluff on the Red River, collect Huck, and carry him home to be buried. Hours. It would take hours. Maybe until daybreak if he waited for nightfall to set out. David imagined himself arriving at the doorstep of his home in the early dawn. Dead Huck in his arms. His mother’s face appearing behind the screen door.

  Every time he got to that part—his mother’s face, the worry and love and relief in her eyes—his thoughts turned away sharply. He could not rein them back to find out what happened next.

  When evening set in, the sky became gray with clouds and lightning flashed in the northwest. David counted, “One potato, two potato, three potato, four—” Thunder rumbled. He’d be wet soon. He got up and wrestled the Runabout’s convertible top over the worn seat, then sat with his knees sticking up on either side of the steering wheel. Overhead, light shown through many gashes in the fabric and long threads hung down and caught on his hair.

  David slid off the seat and went around to the cargo box, thinking it might hold a tarpaulin. He lifted the lid on squeaking hinges. Inside was a plaid wool jacket, bunched as if it had been tossed in hastily. An afterthought. Had the man’s wife brought it out of the house—screen door banging—as he was about to drive away? Had she called out to him? “Here, honey, take your coat. It’s October, after all.”

  David pushed aside the jacket and the image of the man’s wife. A dozen boxes of .22 caliber cartridges nestled in folds of white cloth. He gathered the ammunition and stacked it on the wool jacket.

  When the cartridges were out of the way, a vacant-eyed white hood stared up at him, lying atop a white cloak with Klan regalia on its breast. David stepped back. He took a deep breath and then another. He stepped forward again and touched the cloth, timidly, as if it were enchanted. It was shiny, brilliant white, and very tightly woven.

  The storm grumbled again.

  David hastily pushed the hood and cloak aside, which seemed like an impossible thing to be able to do. Yet there they lay, bunched to the side of the cargo box, wrinkled and harmless. David looked up and scanned the forest around him. He imagined a horde of Klansmen in tall white hoods, watching from behind every tree, waiting to fall on him and avenge their brother. But no one was there.

  A leather pouch tied with a thin strap and a pair of brown leather gloves, the knuckles stained dark, had fallen from the folds of the robe and lay atop a weathered tarpaulin. David took the leather pouch and the tarp and closed the cargo box. After he’d arranged the tarp over the tattered roof, he settled in the seat and untied the pouch, reached inside and brought out an envelope and a sheaf of crisp banknotes, fastened with a paper sleeve. The notes were hundred-dollar certificates, issued by the United States Treasury.

  David’s experience with paper money was limited. The customers in his father’s general store unpocketed coins and an occasional threadbare dollar bill, if they paid with cash at all. The white man’s banknotes were as crisp and clean as the pages of a new book, and the thought crossed David’s mind that they might be counterfeit. He counted them, growing ever more alarmed as the numbers ticked higher, “. . . ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred.”

  Ten thousand dollars!

  The bundled stack was less than an inch thick. Surely, the money was not real.

  The last of the daylight was fading fast. David picked up the envelope. Someone had written on the front in decorative script, such as he’d seen on important documents in history books, Non Silba Sed Anthar.

  The envelope was sealed with crimson wax imprinted with the letters KKK inside a circle. David stuck his thumbnail under the wax, opened the envelope, and pulled out a letter dated mere days before. It was addressed to the “Grand Dragon, Realm of Louisiana.” He read the letter slowly, taking in every word. It was an exhortation to the “Good Citizens of Louisiana” to uphold the “Tenets of the Christian Religion and White Supremacy, Just Laws
and Liberty, and Pure Americanism.”

  On and on the letter went with high talk, affirming that “every true, red-blooded, native-born, white Gentile, Protestant American Citizen” was with them. “Please accept the offering this letter transmits as a blood-bond between the Good Citizens of Louisiana and their brothers in the Realms of Arkansas and Tennessee. The bearer of this covenant risked life and limb to place it safely in your hands.” The letter was signed “Grand Wizard of the Invisible Realm.”

  It did not contain a single person’s name.

  The storm’s first gust sheared the tarpaulin off the roof of the Runabout. David dropped the letter and leapt from the seat to run after it, as if his life depended on catching that thin scrap of protection before it flew away.

  Chapter Three

  David sat in the motorcar wrapped in the tarpaulin while cold rain drove in great blowing sheets. In his lap, under the tarp, were his rifle and haversack, and the dead courier’s package. He had not drunk a drop of water since leaving home that morning, and his tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. He drank from his canteen and refilled it with rainwater by creasing the tarp. Drank again. Refilled it again.

  David thought about the rain pounding Huck’s body into the mud. He had an urge to go and get him and bring him under the tarpaulin, just until the rain stopped. Then he could wrap Huck’s body in the canvas and carry him home in it.

  No, he couldn’t. The tarp would be too hard to explain.

  Once again, David imagined himself at home, but this time he was seated at the kitchen table with his family. Huck was lying out in the yard. David could see him through the screen door, just lying there with his stiff fur, waiting to be wrapped in the old raccoon pelt and buried near the people he had loved.

  “We’ll get to Huck soon enough,” David’s family said, all in unison. They were all around the table—Mama, Daddy, Gramps—and they were all looking at him. “Tell us everything that happened,” they said. “Start at the beginning.”

  And David said . . . what? What might he say? That he accidentally shot Huck while aiming at a mallard? Gramps wouldn’t believe that for a minute. David could say the gun discharged on its own. He’d say he fell asleep at the lake, sad and exhausted, and had to wait for first light to make his way back. That’s why it took him so long.

  What if he told them the truth? That a Klansman attacked him. Wait. It was Huck the man attacked, not David. He would tell them it was an accident. He killed a man—a very bad man—accidentally. Then he fed him to some alligators. On purpose. Maybe he wouldn’t mention the Runabout, that he drove it to the Red River and pushed it into the muddy current.

  “I’m proud of you, Big Man,” Gramps might say. “Chip off the old block.”

  No, Gramps would not say that.

  David imagined spreading the Klan’s letter and the banknotes—ten thousand dollars!—on the table for his family to see. As evidence of the man’s wickedness. The thought of the blood money and the terrible, awful letter on his mother’s kitchen table chilled David to his marrow.

  In his mind’s eye, the horde of tall-hooded white savages he had imagined in the woods rushed the front porch and broke through the screen door, with their bloody-knuckled gloves, their ropes and guns and knives. They filled the kitchen and grabbed his family. Dragged them outside to the yard—

  David inhaled sharply.

  There were so many trees in the yard. So many live oaks and pines with thick, high branches.

  What had he done?

  How had this happened?

  David’s mother had quoted Jeremiah 29:11 so many times that David always said the words with her, partly to make her stop and partly to keep her going.

  “‘I know the thoughts that I think toward you,’ says the Lord, ‘thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end.’”

  Maybe killing the man was David’s expected end—his destiny. What if he was God’s instrument to stop the Klan’s devilment? Gramps had killed many such men in the Freedom War. He had leveled the sights of his Sharps rifle—at their heads? their chests?—and squeezed the trigger. On purpose. Wasn’t David’s violent encounter a war too, after all? David wasn’t sure if he might be right or was so terribly wrong that he no longer knew the difference.

  Surely the Lord knew this day was coming all along. Surely God had anticipated it, while David headed blithely toward it, hapless and hopeful. Every single day of David’s naive, sheltered life was another step closer to this evil, inevitable moment.

  Was it inevitable?

  David had been raised to believe he always had a choice. His family didn’t cotton to notions of predestination, at least not when it came to a person’s behavior. His mother quoted Proverbs to make her point. Not as often as she quoted Jeremiah, but often enough. “A man’s own foolish choices make his life hard,” she said, “but he blames God.”

  David wrapped his arms around himself. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it began, and cold wind gusted from the north, tugging at the tarpaulin. He imagined his mother at home. Oh, how he wanted to be with her! To hug her and feel the safety of her embrace. He imagined their warm kitchen and his mother sitting at the table, a steaming cup of tea in front of her.

  But he was not imagining anymore. He was remembering. They all sat around the kitchen table for a family meeting when David was eight years old, nine at the most. He and Gramps had returned from Shreveport, where they’d gone to pick up supplies at the train depot for the Walker General Store. It was David’s first trip to Shreveport, his first brush with the world outside the sanctuary his family had built in the deep piney woods of Caddo Parish.

  They had passed a sign on the way to the train depot. It was hanging in the dusty window of a ramshackle store on the highway, just north of town. A large white board—too large for the size of the window—suspended by ropes. Painted on it in angry black brushstrokes were two words: Whites Only!

  “Why is that sign there?” David demanded as they drove past.

  Gramps shook his head. Said nothing.

  “Somebody needs to tell him to take it down. We ought to go back and tell him that’s not right.”

  “You listen to me, Big Man. When we get to the train depot, there’ll be white folks there. You don’t speak to them. You don’t even look at them, you understand?”

  “Why not?”

  “These white folks aren’t like the white folks you know. They’re looking for an excuse to make trouble. Big trouble. Don’t you give it to them, hear? I mean it. You look straight at the ground. Do you understand me, boy?”

  “Yes sir,” David said, chastened. He sulled up then and wouldn’t get out of the truck at the depot. He sat and stared at his boots while his grandfather and the porters loaded crates of canned goods, flour, sugar.

  When they returned home, Gramps told David’s parents the trip had not gone well, and David’s father called a family meeting. His mother made herself a cup of tea, and they all sat around the kitchen table

  “We’ve been too protective,” his father said. “These are dangerous times, son, the worst we’ve ever seen. I fear we haven’t been wise to hide them from you.”

  “What about the Freedom War?” David said. “You said we won.”

  “We did,” Gramps said, “but you wouldn’t know it. It’s worse now than it was before the war. At least, for the freedmen. And it’s far, far worse than during Reconstruction. We were making progress, real progress, but they snatched it all away. Seemed like almost overnight.”

  “Who snatched it away?” David asked.

  “We can’t vote anymore,” Gramps said, as if he hadn’t heard. “God help us if we look at the wrong white the wrong way. My God! We are all subjugated now!” Gramps raised his fist, then unclenched it and put his palm on the table.

  David’s throat closed at his grandfather’s frustration, at the powerless words coming out of his mouth, when he’d seemed all-powerful before.

  David’s mother said, “Thi
s conversation can’t be all about the whites.”

  “They are the problem,” said Gramps.

  “Not all whites see us as inferior. Many of them sympathize with our situation, but they can’t change it any more than we can. Besides, the real problem goes deeper than race. Even if you could drive down to Shreveport and vote in the next election?”

  “That would be nice,” interrupted Gramps.

  “Yes, it would. But I wouldn’t be able to vote, now would I?”

  “Well, that’s a different discussion.”

  “I think it’s the same discussion.”

  David’s mother turned her attention from her father to her son. She pushed her cup and saucer across the table toward him. The silver tea ball and its thin chain rattled against the china.

  “Take the tea out of the water, David,” she said. “And put it back in the infuser.”

  David looked at her, confused. Finally, he said, “I can’t.”

  “That’s right. You can’t. No more than you can drive all the evil out of the world. There’s only one person who’ll do that, and even he can’t do it until the trumpet sounds. In the meantime, you have a choice to make. You can fight against it every day of your life, if that’s what you choose to do. But I suspect in doing so you’ll only add to the evil, not take it away.”

  David looked down into the milky tea. He wanted to sling the cup and saucer across the room and hear the bone china shatter against the plaster of the wall. Watch the tea streak down it like muddy water.

  “Or you can choose peace. We chose peace, David. We chose to overcome evil by doing good, to the extent we can. That’s what we do with your daddy’s store. With my lessons. With your grandfather helping the neighbors.”

  “Gramps fought,” David said.