Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  David was to have received his own deer rifle for his eighteenth birthday. A rite of passage. He had pored over the Sears and Roebuck catalogue for months, comparing models, and finally settled on a Winchester 94. As far as David knew, the rifle had been ordered as soon as he made his choice—his parents weren’t prone to procrastinate—giving Gramps the sad chore of picking the gun up at the Shreveport depot after David disappeared.

  On the heels of David’s birthday came Christmas Day. At Christmastime, David’s mother decorated every room with pine boughs and bundles of herbs, filling the house with the fragrance of holiday cheer. Daddy and Gramps strung lanterns from the corners of the house to the trees, and from tree to tree. Every night of the week before Christmas, scores of little oil lamps lighted the entire yard.

  On Christmas eves past, all their neighbors gathered at the Walker home for a potluck supper, which they ate on wooden tables in the brightly lit yard. Their friends brought hams, fried fish and fried chicken, tubs of spicy red crawfish boiled with corn and potatoes, and pots of steaming vegetables that had been put up the summer before. They brought so many pies and puddings, cakes and breads, that the sweets had a table all to themselves.

  David’s mother had a gramophone she set in the window to play Christmas songs, and David always manned the machine. He loved turning the tiny crank—like a toy compared to a motorcar’s. He lowered the sharp needle onto the spinning disc carefully. One wrong move and the recording would be ruined. The instant the needle settled into a groove, music bloomed from the gramophone’s big horn and spilled into the yard, magically released from its dark prison like a princess in a fairy tale. Everyone danced. Stomping, whirling play that left the grown-ups laughing and panting.

  But David’s family would be too sorrowful to decorate this year. Too sad to host a potluck supper and make merry. By now they would have searched for him long enough to find Huck. David imagined Gramps standing over the dog’s rotting corpse, hoping he would not see his grandson’s body hanging from a nearby tree. David’s only consolation was that Gramps would not face the sight he surely feared the most.

  Thinking about his birthday and Christmas churned emotions that tossed David back and forth like waves. Had he done the right thing? No, he had not. But had he at least chosen the best course afterward? Should he have gone straight home, confessed, and let his family help him? Or had he spared them by not doing so? He did not know. Back and forth he went between waves of regret and reasoning and indecision.

  David was beginning to believe he might never know what he should have done or what he should do now, despite the Bible’s claim that the wisdom of the prudent was to understand his way. He was tired of vacillating. Sick of agonizing to no good end. He stopped staring at the notched pole, got up, and walked outside. He looked up, beyond the tops of the bald cypress, into a blue winter sky.

  “I don’t know what to do,” David called in a loud voice.

  Old Gourd tossed his head and clattered his long bill.

  David opened his mouth to scream at the stork. To scream at God. But instead of yelling, he choked on his own spittle. He bent over, coughing and sputtering. When he had finally cleared his throat, he straightened up.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said again, quietly this time.

  He paced back and forth across his campsite, repeating the phrase. The Bible was full of stories about God speaking to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways. One time, God even loosed a donkey’s tongue to rebuke a wayward prophet.

  David stopped in front of Old Gourd. “You got anything to say?”

  The stork tossed his head and flapped his wings mightily. He lifted from his perch, and David watched him glide away among the trees.

  David truly believed God was all around him and even in him. Like air. The Apostle Paul had written, “In him we live and move and have our being.” Words David had loved since he was a young boy.

  He sucked in a long, deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I don’t understand,” he said aloud. “I don’t understand how this happened or why it happened. But you understand everything. You know all about everything and everybody, and you even know the future.” He stopped and waited, listening to his own breath. In and out. In and out.

  “I can’t carry this burden anymore. It’s too much for me. It’s too heavy and so big I can’t see the edges of it. So I’m gonna lay it down. Right here. Right now. Until you show me how to pick it up again.” He waited quietly to see if anything would happen. When it did not, he went back inside his hut.

  He made no more notches on the pole after that.

  Caddo Lake settled into winter. The bald cypress shed their needles, leaving only the Spanish moss that hung from their branches like great hoary beards. The ancient gray trees towered around David, as lifeless and grand as columns in a cathedral. Sometimes he stopped paddling and laid the oar across his knees. He sat as quietly as he could and tried to hear something besides the calls of coots and egrets and herons, but he never heard anything other than his own breathing.

  Winter deepened, and the lotus and lilies rotted and disappeared below water that had gone as black as onyx, as shiny smooth as marble. David dipped the paddle, and the pirogue slid along slowly as if through mercury.

  Yet even in the dead of winter, the swamp yielded bountifully. Catfish, perch, and crawfish; rabbits, turkeys, and squirrels; wild sweet potatoes, onions, and garlic were abundant. David harvested persimmons and dried them on a rack he fashioned in the top of his hut. He collected acorns and pecans. He used hickory nuts to flavor the meat and fish he cooked over smoldering embers.

  A family of beavers captured David’s interest. Their dam had formed a pond from which David caught crappie, and he watched the beavers for hours while bank fishing with a cane pole. The mama and daddy grew used to David and stopped slapping their tails to signal their kits to head for the lodge when he came around.

  One morning, David paddled the pirogue to his trotline and retrieved two small catfish. Back at camp, he cleaned them and gave Old Gourd his portion. Then he wrapped the fish around wild onion and garlic and drove whittled spits through the tough skin. He went into the hut and built up the fire.

  David sat cross-legged, listening to the sizzle and smelling the char come on the tough skin. He absently combed through his hair with the fingers of his free hand. It was a habit he had taken to as his hair grew longer than it had ever been before. The sprouts on his chin and cheeks, though sparse, were getting long enough to tug and twist when he wasn’t fiddling with his hair.

  Suddenly, without any warning at all, he had a vision of a future David with a thick, heavy beard and matted, wild hair, sitting at the same fire cooking the same meal, and he knew he had to get himself moving again.

  Chapter Seven

  1914

  David paddled into Texas on Big Cypress Bayou sometime in February, by his estimation. The bayou turned every which way through the cypress brakes until the channel finally settled down and carried him into open country. All the trees had been cleared, their stumps bristling in fields that once had been forest. The pirogue glided along the sluggish water, and David was sheltered from view between canebrakes, grasses, and useless scrub oaks that had escaped the saw.

  Big Cypress Bayou entered Jefferson, Texas, eventually. David had traced the waterway on Gramps’s maps many times, and he remembered seeing smaller towns along it, east of Jefferson, but he did not remember where they were. He wasn’t ready to face town people just yet.

  He put in at a dense canebrake and pulled the boat deep into the thicket. He shouldered his rifle, haversack, and canteen and took off on foot across a field stubbled with flat-topped pine stumps. In the distance he saw two men and a mule, and two young boys playing nearby. They were not white, so David continued toward them and saw that the mule was harnessed to one of the stumps. When he was within earshot, they still had not seen him, so he put down his gear and sat on a stump to watch.

  The older man cluc
ked and coaxed the mule. “Heh! Gee up. Come on, now.” The animal leaned into the collar, but the stump did not budge.

  The younger man yelled angrily, “Pull! Damn ya!” He picked up a rock and threw it hard, with fast ball accuracy, at the mule’s rump. The animal bawled and kicked, threatening to tangle its hind legs in the traces.

  The young man was going for another rock when his father—surely, he was the father—hollered, “Sherman!” He hurried to the son, caught his hand, and spoke to him. David couldn’t hear them, but he could imagine what was said. The son dropped the rock and hung his head.

  David realized the young boys had seen him, as had a hound dog he had not noticed before. The dog tore across the field toward him. David had never seen an animal run so fast. Lightning fast. He stood and braced himself, ready to push the animal off when it lunged. But the hound stopped short. It sat and looked at David with worried eyes.

  David had never seen such a dog in the flesh, only in books about old English breeds, sight hounds whose names he could not recall. The dog was not large, weighing maybe forty or fifty pounds. His slick coat was brindled where it was not white. He was long in the legs, thin in the flank, and deep in the chest, and his delicate head was disproportionately small. The dog’s neck arched in a noble line, and he was as out of place among these farmers as an aristocrat among peasants. His long ears flopped upright when he tilted his head back, and his eyes were bright and intelligent.

  David sat down again and dug in his haversack for a piece of dried rabbit, which he offered with outstretched hand. “Friends?”

  The hound slinked forward and stretched his neck until he could snatch the meat. Then he took off.

  They were all looking at David now. He stood, shouldered his gear, and raised a hand. “Can y’all use an extra hand?” he called.

  The father removed his worn and faded hat and rubbed his shaved head. He looked fierce and very strong, with the muscular build of a prizefighter. But he smiled at David.

  “Reckon so. Can you handle a shovel?”

  “Sure,” David said, looking into the hole they had dug around the stump. “Looks like y’all are gonna have to dig to China to free those roots.” He smiled and looked up into their blank faces.

  “Wha’chu say?” growled the young man. The violent one.

  “What?”

  “Wha’chu mean? Dig to China?”

  David realized they had never heard of China and any attempt to explain would only mock their ignorance. He shrugged and forced a laugh, “I dunno what it means. I just heard it all my life.”

  The father settled his hat to his head. “Well, it’s a right funny sayin’.” He handed David a shovel. “I’ll unhitch the mule. You start diggin’ on the other side, and Sherm, you git the axe after them roots some more.”

  David and the father dug, and Sherman hacked with the axe. The stump jerked every time the blade broke through a root.

  “What will you do with the stump after you get it out?” David asked.

  “We gots to let it dry out good. Then burn it.”

  The whack, whack, thump of the axe stopped, and Sherman climbed out of the hole.

  “Papa, can he spell me?”

  “You mind?” asked the father.

  “No. Happy to.”

  David accepted the axe, and Sherman met his eye impassively. David looked into the hole at the perfectly cut roots. Sherman had not wasted a swing; every single cut had landed in the chink of the one before it.

  David planted his feet, heaved back the long handle, and swung the heavy head in an arc. The blade landed on a root but bounced off without making a cut. He looked up in time to see Sherman glance at his father, who had stopped digging and was leaning on his shovel, watching. David widened his stance and took another swing. This one landed in the dirt, near the root.

  Sherman pointed, slapped his knee, and guffawed. The younger boys came over to see what was funny.

  “Dang, son,” said the father. “Ain’t you never swung a axe?”

  “No sir.”

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  “He cain’t even hit the root, Papa!” hollered Sherman. Loudly. The boys giggled.

  “That’s enough,” said the father.

  “Gimme it,” Sherman said, “or we be here the whole damn day.”

  “Go on now, son,” the father said to David. “It’s all right. They’s plenty a diggin’ to do.”

  David handed Sherman the axe, looking him in the eye. How about we see how you handle that rifle? David thought. I bet you couldn’t hit the side of a barn. Of course, the last thing David wanted to do was hand a gun to this guy. Fury simmered in Sherman’s eyes, fiery as magma.

  They worked all afternoon, and the younger boys played. At one point, David straightened his back, wiped his sweating head, and looked across the field. There were hundreds more stumps like this one. Finally, the poor mule dragged the rootless mass out of the hole. The gray-muzzled animal dropped its head at the end of the ordeal. They untied the ropes around the stump, and David gathered his things.

  “Come on up to the house for supper,” the father said. “You earned it.”

  “Thank you. If you have plenty.”

  The father clapped David on the shoulder and stuck out his hand. “Sherman Tatum. Folks call me Big Sherman.” David shook the man’s hand and glanced at the son.

  “I ain’t Little Sherman,” he said.

  “The two young’uns there is Zachary and Luke,” said Big Sherman.

  They looked at David expectantly.

  “I’m Tom,” David said. If they had asked for a last name, he would’ve said Sawyer.

  “You talk funny,” said Luke, the younger of the two, a tiny boy whom David judged to be six or seven.

  “He talks like a white man,” said Sherman.

  After a pause, David said, “Well, you can see I ain’t white.”

  Big Sherman laughed. “I reckon you’s dark enough. Come on, boys. Mama’s waitin’ on us.”

  The house and small barn were unpainted and badly weathered. The family appeared to be barely scratching out a living from the hard-packed earth, practically with their bare hands. David thought about how ungrudgingly Caddo Lake had supplied him, even in winter, and he wished he could load the Tatums into the pirogue and take them to his camp, where life was easy. “Rest yourselves,” he would say. “Let’s live among the cypress and the myrtle and leave the thorns and thistles behind.”

  A petite woman in a faded dress, her head wrapped in a red bandanna, appeared in the doorway when they reached the yard.

  “Gots company for supper, Audie,” called Big Sherman.

  “Pleased to meet you,” David said.

  Audie looked at David and then at the rifle. She said nothing.

  “This here’s Tom,” said Big Sherman. “He helped us dig out a stump. Took all afternoon.”

  “Much obliged,” Audie said.

  “Well, alrighty then,” said Big Sherman. “I’s gonna tend to this old fella.” He turned and led the mule toward the barn. The two young boys pushed past their mother into the cabin.

  “Sherman, y’all wait out here for your papa,” Audie said.

  “Yes’m,” said Sherman.

  Audie went inside and closed the door. David and Sherman stood in the yard. Not speaking. Not looking at each other. Dusk was coming on, and without the distraction of activity, David felt the chill. He imagined Sherman was even colder, in his threadbare jacket, though neither of them would have admitted it. The hound came trotting from the field, and the chickens scratching in the yard scattered. The dog wriggled under the low porch.

  Big Sherman came from the barn. “Reckon we better lay off them stumps,” he told his son. “Cain’t affords to wear the old boy out before we git the crop in the ground.”

  “We need us a new mule,” said Sherman.

  Big Sherman put his hand on his son’s shoulder and said, “Let’s git on inside. Mama’s waitin’.”

  Chapter
Eight

  David followed Big Sherman into the cabin and stood awkwardly inside the doorway, letting his eyes adjust to the dim light. His Caddo hut had been dark too, when the fire was low, but its close, thatched walls made it as cozy as an animal’s den. By comparison, this one-room cabin was only dreary. Old newsprint had been pasted to the boards like wallpaper. Even so, David saw the evening light coming through in many places. There was one glassless window with its shutter closed against winter.

  A large blanket hung from the rafters, forming a partition beyond which David glimpsed an iron bed. A rolled pallet lay under the blanket’s lower edge. To David’s left were a fireplace and a wooden rocking chair, and to his right a table and a sideboard. The sideboard was very old and finely made, with scrollwork and claw feet. Its wood was black and shiny in the low light.

  “Sit yourselves down,” Audie said.

  A round of yellow cornbread cooled on a plate in the center of the table. The rest of supper was in a pot hanging on an iron arm in the fireplace. Audie used a bunched-up rag to lift the lid, then she spooned red beans into enamel bowls while the menfolk patiently waited and watched.

  David fought the urge to help, as he would have helped his mother, but he could see it was not their way. He would’ve offended them by offering to carry bowls back and forth, as if Audie were too slow. So he sat and waited with the rest of them. After Audie had filled her own bowl, she took a battered pan from beside the hearth, ladled beans into it, and set it on the mantle to cool.

  “For the dog,” said Big Sherman when he saw David watching Audie. “I reckon we’s just happy Whip don’t eat first.”

  “Hush now,” said Audie. “Mr. Tom, would you ask a blessin’?”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  They all bowed their heads, and the two little boys carefully folded their hands between their chins and their bowls of beans. David recited his family’s mealtime prayer, “Lord, thank you for this food. Bless it and the hands that prepared it, in Jesus’s name. Amen.”