Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  David had a recurring dream that first appeared during his time on the Tatum farm. He dreamt it several times while there, and many more times in the years after. The dream always had the same beginning, middle, and end, like a book that never changes no matter how many times it’s read.

  The dream was about tornados.

  When David was a boy, a tornado had come through, barely missing his family’s home and their general store. The twister traveled all the way from Shreveport to Texarkana, skipping along and wreaking havoc wherever it touched the earth. One town in particular, Gilliam, was leveled. Only two houses remained, and many people were injured or killed.

  The spring storm hit around suppertime, which may have accounted for so many folks being caught unaware in their homes. It knocked out the telegraph wires and washed out the railroad tracks. Reports of the disaster spread by word-of-mouth from town to town, and the next morning someone brought the news to the Walker’s store. David’s father and Gramps loaded provisions onto the back of the Mack Junior, then swung by the house to pick up David and his mother.

  The trip was very exciting because David got to ride with Gramps in the back of the truck. The morning was bright and warm—it was May—and he and Gramps sat behind the cab on stacks of boxed goods. The wind roared in their faces as David’s father barreled down the dirt road. Twice along the way, they passed the twister’s path. Neat swaths crossed the road and bent into the woods as if a drunken giant had run a plow through the forest, uprooting the pines and leaving bare earth.

  David’s excitement collapsed when they reached Gilliam. For once, his imagination fell short of reality. He had imagined an orderly catastrophe, in which they repaired the damaged homes and filled them with supplies from the Mack Junior. He imagined a convivial gathering, like Sunday dinner-on-the-grounds.

  Instead, they came around a curve into a battlefield. Debris from inside the homes draped the tattered pine boughs, as if each house had been turned inside out and its contents blown skyward like tufts from a dandelion. A naked man, torn and limp as a rag doll, was caught in a web of branches overhead. Another pine held a dog in similar condition. A dismembered leg hung by a shoe that was still on the foot, wedged in a fork of two branches. David was gaping at the trees when they drove into the clearing where the town had been.

  “My God,” Gramps said.

  The houses were not damaged. They were shredded.

  People had laid the dead in a row in the shade of the pine trees. The people who were hurt—some badly—but still alive were lying or sitting in another shaded area away from the dead. Survivors picked through the rubble, but most of them seemed too dazed to know what they were looking for.

  David and his family worked until dark, doing whatever they could to help. They rode home that night in exhausted silence. They returned to Gilliam the next day, and the day after that. Then the trains started running again, bringing relief from the abundant resources of Shreveport, and David’s family returned to their lives.

  Afterward, Gramps showed David a book he had about the war. “I was gonna wait ‘til you were older to show you this, but I reckon it’s time since you’ve seen so much already.”

  David turned page after page of photographs that told the story of war. Soldiers from each side stood proudly beside their respective flags. Officers in Union blue sat or stood in front of white tents, while others in Confederate gray stood in front of identical tents. There were photographs of battlefields filled with men on horses and men on foot. There were pictures of cannons, the men standing by them ready to light the fuses. There were photographs of the dead too. One showed scores of dead soldiers laid in rows.

  “Just like we saw in Gilliam,” David said.

  “Except these were soldiers, and they knew they might die. The Gilliam folks were sitting down to supper. They didn’t expect anything bad to happen.”

  “It’s not right,” David said.

  “No sir. It is not.”

  In David’s tornado dream, he was back in Louisiana, except the land looked like East Texas. The sky was wide, and everywhere he looked tornados writhed beneath black clouds that hung low over stump-studded fields. The twisters skipped every which way, raising great clouds of dirt.

  The storms converged on the Walker home, drawn to it as if by gravity. David ran, trying to beat the storms to the house and take his family to safety, but his feet tangled with each other, and he fell again and again. There was too much ground to cover, and the tornados raced ahead of him.

  Then, suddenly, David was standing amid the trees in the yard at home. The front door stood open, and he ran through it into the parlor and from there into the kitchen. He ran to his parents’ bedroom, to Gramps’s room, and to his own bedroom. All the furniture and rugs and bric-a-brac were gone. Every room was empty, and every window was wide open.

  The wind roared through the house like a freight train. David darted frantically from room to room, calling his family at the top of his lungs, but the howling wind drowned out the sound of his voice. He stopped running and stood in the middle of the parlor. The wind ceased, and the house fell silent. Then the rain came. Drumming, deafening rain.

  David always woke up when the rain began, and he lay very still until he could no longer feel his heart beating.

  Chapter Ten

  One day Audie told David, “Them boys is askin’ me if you’s deef.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you ain’t respondin’ when they call you Tom.”

  Big Sherman solved the problem by giving him a new name that, to David’s dismay, stuck to him like glue. This came about after a Sunday sermon about Jacob, who worked on his Uncle Laban’s farm to win the hand of his daughter Rachel. Laban employed scheme after scheme to keep Jacob working for him longer than he’d agreed to. Laban did this because he believed Jacob was blessed, and as long as Jacob stayed with him, Laban was blessed too.

  “You’s my Jacob,” Big Sherman said. “You’s bringing us blessin’s.”

  David did not want to stay on the farm for a long time. He wanted to be among people with whom he had common interests, people who listened to him and understood his ideas, as Gramps had. The Tatums were too wrapped up in their God-awful farm for such foolishness. David thought about leaving constantly, but where would he go?

  One afternoon, Big Sherman took David out with him to walk the length and breadth of the farm. “My daddy bought this farm,” Big Sherman said as they hiked across the fallow acres. “When he died, it was split betwixt me and my brother, Ben. Ben passed two year ago, and I bought his portion.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Dunno. He got sick and couldn’t git well. His wife didn’t have no way to keep the farm goin’, so she found work in Marshall and moved her chil’ren there.”

  Big Sherman stopped and removed his hat. They had come to an unplowed corner of the farm where the grass, still lifeless from winter, was undisturbed.

  “This here’s Ben,” he said, pointing to a low mound of rocks David had not seen amid the tall grass. Crumbles of dried flowers were caught between the stones. “And this ‘un over here’s Daddy.” Big Sherman pointed to another, similar mound.

  David followed as Big Sherman led him past one unmarked grave after another, pausing beside each flower-sprinkled mound to call the name of the person buried there and their relation to him. None of them were Audie’s people, except the children. Six graves belonged to little ones he and Audie had lost.

  “This ‘un here’s Millie. Little Millie didn’t live to see the mornin’. And this ‘un over here’s name Ben after my brother. Little Ben was about yay high,” Big Sherman waved his hand a few feet above the ground, “when a fever come through. Like to killed us all.”

  “I’m sorry you lost them,” David said.

  Big Sherman, ever the father, put his hand on David’s shoulder. “Reckon we gonna have ourselves a big fambly reunion on the other side,” he said.

  David remembered wh
en he was a boy and he realized that all their neighbors had at least half a dozen children, armies of them who stormed his father’s general store, always hoping for a bit of candy.

  “Where are my brothers and sisters?” David had demanded of his mother.

  “It’s a miracle we have you, honey,” she said, as if his parents had managed to order David from Sears and Roebuck, just in time, before they ran out of children.

  “This here creek marks the property line,” Big Sherman was saying. “My daddy used to bring me and Ben fishin’ down here. Used to be more water back then—dunno where it all went.”

  Big Sherman and David stood side by side a while, looking into the meager stream. Then they settled their hats back on their heads and continued their hike, eventually coming to the field where David first happened on Big Sherman and his sons.

  “Last year, this land come up for sale. Forty acre. Cheap land cause it ain’t been cleared. But it’s good soil.” Big Sherman turned to David. “Say, where you come from that day?”

  “Lake Caddo. Do you know it?”

  “Heard of it. Ain’t been there.”

  “We’ll go sometime. We’ll go fishing.”

  Big Sherman smiled. “That sounds right fine.”

  They walked the length of Big Sherman’s second forty acres. The whole of it was riddled with stumps.

  “I been in hot water with Audie ever since I spent the money we was saving toward a mule on this land. Poor old Methuselah—” Big Sherman laughed. “Dang you, Jacob, you done got me calling that mule by name.”

  “You can call me David out here.”

  “Best keep the habit. Anyways, that poor old mule give his best ever’ day, but I knew they weren’t no way he was gonna get a crop in the ground. He’s plumb wore out.”

  “Methuselah seems to be doing better. I think he’s put on a little weight.”

  “I reckon the rest done him good, but he ain’t up to spring plantin’. I didn’t know what I was gonna do. It was a terrible worry. Only God knows how many a night I laid awake worryin’, with no answer in sight. Then here you come outta nowhere, with more’n I coulda hoped for.”

  “Best to figure it came from the Lord,” David said. “I’m just the messenger.”

  “I told Audie you might be a angel.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “Well . . . ,” Big Sherman looked down. “She don’t much think so.”

  After their walk across the farm, Big Sherman introduced David to cotton farming. The first day David spent behind the heavy turning plow, he gripped its wooden handles so hard and for so long that they rubbed the skin off his palms and fingers. By late afternoon, water-filled blisters had formed and broken. The skin peeled away, leaving spots of painful red flesh. That night, Big Sherman showed David how to coat the burning sores with axle grease, which they also applied to Peg where the collar and harness had rubbed his hide raw.

  The next morning, David asked, “What about gloves?”

  “Don’t need ‘em,” Big Sherman said. He held out his palms and showed David the thick, brown calluses that padded them.

  David sighed and curled his hands around the wooden handles, wincing at the pain.

  Sherman and the boys followed behind the plow, breaking up the clods of dirt with rakes. The boys collected arrowheads and an occasional coin and deposited their prizes in their deep pants pockets.

  During the first week of plowing, David was too tired and irritable to pay any mind to the treasures the boys had found. But he perked up the second week and told them stories about the Caddo Indians and about the hut he and Gramps had built. Zach and Luke were giggly and wild after listening to David’s stories. They threw themselves against him to provoke wrestling. They preferred to roughhouse with David rather than Sherman because David let them win, as Gramps had done when he was small.

  It took David and Big Peg three weeks to break up forty acres of fallow East Texas loam. By then, they both had thick calluses the color of axle grease.

  “Me ‘n Papa coulda done it in two weeks,” Sherman said.

  “That would’ve been fine with me,” growled David.

  It rained for three days after they turned the fields, which Big Sherman took as a sign the coming season would be prosperous. When the sun returned, out came another plow.

  “This here’s the furrin’ plow,” said Big Sherman.

  “More plowing?” David asked.

  “We’s just getting started.”

  Big Sherman and Peg made an arrow-straight furrow with the plow to demonstrate.

  “It’s a furrowing plow,” David said.

  “Furrin’ plow,” Big Sherman corrected.

  David said nothing more.

  Big Sherman plowed two more long furrows parallel to the first one before turning the reins over to David. While David plowed, Big Sherman walked in front of Peg. He clucked and sang and occasionally raised his hands in what David inferred was overwhelming gratitude for all his blessings. Peg followed his new master, his long ears twisting, pulling the lightweight plow effortlessly and so quickly that David had to jockey the handles constantly to keep the blade from bucking out of the ground. It was mind-numbing work, but if he let his thoughts wander, the plow jumped off course.

  David’s parents had given him a bicycle on his thirteenth birthday, and he rode it everywhere for months, with Huck trotting behind. One afternoon, David tried to cross the creek near their home on rough gravel that had been put down for the wagons that forded there, to keep them from miring in mud. David was pedaling fast, and the bicycle’s front wheel bounced crazily when it hit the rocks. He held on tight and fought the handlebars to keep from losing control. Plowing furrows was like riding that bicycle across gravel from sunup to sundown, six days a week. At the end of each day’s work, David’s arms trembled from the strain.

  After Easter, Big Sherman put the cottonseed in the ground, which was hardly any effort at all compared with preparing the fields for it. When the planting was finished, Big Sherman cleaned the turning plow, the furrowing plow, and the planter with coal oil and put them away in the barn. David was thrilled. That night, over a supper of beans and cornbread, he said, “It sure feels good to have the cotton laid by. I’m going hunting in the morning to celebrate.”

  The Tatums stopped eating and looked at one another.

  David looked around the table. “What? Big Sherman, you’ve been talking about having that cotton laid by for weeks. ‘When the cotton’s laid by, we can pick up work at the sawmill.’ ‘We can clear more stumps when the cotton’s laid by.’ ‘Ain’t no breaks ‘til the cotton’s laid by.’”

  Big Sherman coughed and choked on his cornbread. Then all the Tatums got tickled, and the longer they howled, the funnier the joke became to them. Even David’s little buddy Zach covered his mouth with his hands, over which his eyes sparkled and crinkled.

  “Okay, okay,” David said. “The joke’s on me. Tell me, what’s so funny?”

  Audie wiped her eyes. “Oh Lordy, you gonna see. You gonna see real soon.”

  Early one morning, David and Big Sherman walked side by side down the rows, where lines of new leaves had pushed through the soil in crowded clumps.

  “That planter put too many seeds in the ground,” David said. “The plants are too thick. They’ll choke one another out.”

  Big Sherman stopped walking and looked at him. “Dang, Jacob. Where you come from? Ain’t you never heard a choppin’ cotton?”

  David had heard of it. When he had grumbled about chores, Gramps’s typical answer was, “Beats chopping cotton.” David had seen people with hoes working cotton fields plenty of times, but he had not had an appreciation for what they were doing out there or the length of time they were at it. He lifted his eyes and looked over acre after acre of young plants racing one another for a future. He looked at the rising sun—already hot on his face—its arc climbing higher and longer by the day. “Cotton is a labor-intensive crop,” he said, quoting one of his mo
ther’s textbooks.

  Big Sherman laughed and shook his head. “Lordy, Jacob, the things you come out with.”

  Not only did the cotton plants race one another, they raced the Tatums too. Six days a week, the entire family and David, armed with hoes, went out to the fields at daybreak to thin the young plants and chop the weeds and grass that sprang up overnight. Everyone had to bend into the hoe, but David had the disadvantage of being unusually tall. His lower back burned as if a hot brand had been put to it.

  “We gots to git you a longer hoe,” Audie said as she worked the row next to David.

  “Before next year, for sure,” called Big Sherman from the row beyond Audie.

  “Not gonna be a next year,” David muttered, and he kept right on hacking away.

  The Tatums and David spent days upon days, from dawn until dark, chopping every unwanted thing from the fields. In the beginning, they left groupings of three or four young cotton plants. Later these were thinned to single plants spaced a couple of feet apart. Within a month of the first sprouts breaking ground, there marched across the Tatum farm an army of evenly spaced, green-leafed survivors.

  “That’s a fine stand,” Big Sherman said. They all stood at the edge of the field admiring their handiwork and passing around water ladled from a bucket.

  And still they were not finished.

  Big Sherman took from the barn the last farm implement Peg would pull, the cultivator. Despite the rising midday temperatures, David found walking behind the cultivator was pleasant compared with the backbreaking hoe. The whirling mechanism uprooted weeds and widened the furrows, banking loosened dirt against the growing cotton. Peg and David completed their circuit in a few days, only to repeat it within a week or two, depending on rainfall. This they did, while the cotton plants grew taller and sturdier.

  “That’s enough,” Big Sherman called one morning. He followed behind David and Peg as they started down a furrow. “You’s gittin’ into the roots.”

  David looked behind him and saw frayed white capillaries poking out the sides of the mounded earth. He and Peg backed out of the field, and David removed his hat and wiped his sweating head. It was early, but already the morning was hot and sultry. David estimated it was sometime in July, or maybe early August. “What now?” he asked.