Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  At midday, they ate cornbread and peas that had been warmed by the sunshine and lounged in the shade of the wagon until their food settled. They picked through the afternoon to the hum of katydids. When the cotton reached the top of the wagon’s sideboards, David copied down the last weights of the day and tallied them. He was ashamed that his total was hardly more than Luke’s, but at least none of the Tatums knew it.

  “How much is it?” Big Sherman asked.

  “One thousand, eight hundred and thirty-two pounds,” said David.

  “That don’t figure,” said Big Sherman. “Fifteen hunerd make a bale. A wagonload most always make one bale.”

  “It’s more than fifteen hundred this time. Quite a bit more.”

  Big Sherman took off his hat and rubbed his head. He told Sherman to go and fetch Peg, then he said, “Jacob, you’s comin’ with me. And bring that paper.”

  David hesitated.

  “Go on now. Climb up.”

  “Yes sir,” David said. He stuffed the tally sheet in his shirt pocket and climbed onto the seat about the time Sherman returned with Peg.

  “Where you think you’s goin’?” said Sherman.

  “Jacob’s comin’ with me,” Big Sherman said. “I need him. You can go next time.”

  Luke and Zach climbed onto the back of the wagon and wriggled into the soft white lint. “You boys don’ go to wrestlin’ around and knockin’ that cotton out,” warned Big Sherman as he climbed onto the seat beside David and took the reins.

  “How much will you get for this?” David asked.

  “Depend on the year. Last year we got sixty.”

  “That sounds pretty good.”

  Peg picked up speed as they approached a low, washed-out stretch in the dirt road. “Smart mule,” said Big Sherman. “He know he gots to get this load up the other side.” He gave the mule his head. Peg was trotting by the time they reached the gully, and the wagon lurched and rocked dramatically as they rattled through it. David turned quickly to grab for the boys in the back lest they be tossed out. Luke and Zach were still on board, wide-eyed and buried in white lint up to their chins.

  The wagon made it to the other side of the gully upright and in one piece. Big Sherman reined Peg to a stop, jumped down and walked around, inspecting the wheels and axles. “Don’t reckon we’s any worse for the wear,” he said as he climbed back on. He turned to the boys. “Y’all don’t say nothin’ about this to your mama now, hear?”

  “Yes Papa.”

  “You neither,” he told David.

  They rode in silence, and after a while David asked, “How much did you say a bale weighs?” he asked Big Sherman.

  “Five hunerd pound.”

  David turned around and looked at the cotton, which appeared to be pretty clean. The boys were fast asleep on a bed much softer than theirs at home.

  “So, only a third of what we picked is cotton? What’s the rest of it?”

  “Seeds ‘n trash.”

  “That doesn’t seem right.”

  Big Sherman shrugged. “Just the way it is,” he said.

  When they came into the gin yard, Big Sherman guided Peg behind the last wagon in a long line. “Sump’n goin’ on,” he said.

  White men armed with rifles and sidearms swarmed the yard, and many of them wore badges. They moved up and down the row of wagons and congregated at the gin stand. David felt as overwhelmed as a startled doe. He pulled his hat brim low over his eyes, gripped the wagon seat, and fought the urge to jump up and run.

  Zach and Luke scrambled over the sideboards and ran to play with the other children, whose innocence permitted them to run around the yard without so much as a glance from the ragtag deputies. A white man approached the wagon, and David lowered his gaze to the floorboard.

  “Evenin’,” Big Sherman said.

  “Just stay in the wagon,” the man said. “Follow the line right on through.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “After y’all make your sale, head right on outta the yard. Ain’t no hangin’ around nor loiterin’ permitted.”

  “Yes sir.”

  In his peripheral vision, David saw the white man’s gloved hand resting on the wagon. A tarnished badge was pinned to his shirt pocket.

  “Price a cotton’s down,” the man said. “They’s a war pullin’ it down.”

  “How much?” asked Big Sherman.

  “A good bit. Down to seb’m cent a pound.”

  “Lordy.”

  “We aim to keep things peaceable, so don’t make no trouble at the stand, y’all hear?”

  “Yes sir.”

  The man removed his hand from the wagon, and Big Sherman clucked at Peg to close the gap that had opened ahead of them. “Seb’m cent,” said Big Sherman. “How much we git for a bale now, Jacob?”

  “Thirty-five dollars. Just over half of what you got last year.”

  “How we gonna make it?” Big Sherman said.

  David watched under his hat brim as the wagons ahead of them pulled under a breezeway next to the gin. A black man holding the end of a long pipe suspended from the ceiling jumped into each wagon bed and sucked up all the cotton with impressive speed. Normally, an operation like the gin would have captured David’s interest and imagination, but he could not enjoy it because of the armed white men everywhere. And a war! Who was fighting? Where were they fighting? What had happened in the world while he was sequestered on the Tatum farm?

  They moved forward in fits and starts, and soon Peg pulled the wagon under the breezeway, which felt like a box trap to David. A white man with a clipboard stood on the platform, his boots at David’s elbow. David watched the boots move back and forth as the man shifted his weight impatiently, waiting for the cotton to be sucked from the wagon. A newspaper lay haphazardly on a stool behind the man. The front page had fallen onto the platform, and David could read the headline. FRANCE HALTS GERMAN INVASION.

  “Europe,” David whispered.

  “Fifteen hunerd pound,” said the man with a clipboard.

  Big Sherman elbowed David. “Give him the paper.”

  The man knelt, and David fished the paper from his pocket. The man’s face was red from the heat, and he grinned at David through thick white whiskers. “Well, well. What do we have here?” he said, taking the paper. “You done learned to cipher, Big Sherman?”

  “My man here. He ciphered it.”

  “Is that right?” The man looked at David. “You can cipher, boy?”

  “I bought us a scale,” said Big Sherman. “We done weighed ever’ sack, and he ciphered it.”

  The man read the paper. He worked his mouth. Finally, he stood. “Alrighty then. Eighteen hunerd pounds. Now move on through.”

  Big Sherman dragged David to the general store in Baldwin, where he did business. “Mornin’, Mr. Stark,” Big Sherman said to the storekeeper. “I come to pay up.”

  Mr. Stark pulled a metal box from under the counter. “Let’s see . . . Tatum . . . Tatum. Here you are.” He pulled out a paper and handed it to Big Sherman. “Most folks cain’t pay in full, but I’m gonna have to charge extra interest to carry it over to next year.”

  David’s father had not charged his customers interest, even though some of them were never able to pay their bills in full. David’s family were happy to supply their neighbors’ needs and preserve their pride. As he matured, David had realized the Walker General Store was, in fact, a charity funded by his grandfather’s wealth.

  Big Sherman handed the paper to David.

  “Who’s this?” asked Mr. Stark.

  “This here’s my hired man,” said Big Sherman.

  David looked over the bill, to which Mr. Stark had added twelve percent interest. The items listed were things he’d seen Big Sherman bring home from his monthly trips to town. He handed the paper back to Big Sherman. “It looks right. The interest is twelve percent.”

  “Alrighty then,” Big Sherman said. He pulled his hard-earned cash from his pocket—everything from the cotton crop a
nd a good bit of the logging money—and placed it on the counter. David watched Mr. Stark count out enough to cover the bill and push the rest back toward Big Sherman.

  When they left the store, David said, “That interest was almost five bales of cotton. That’s five acres of your forty just paying interest.”

  “The other stores in town charge black folk twenty percent,” said Big Sherman. “Say we’s high risk. Mr. Stark charge black folk ‘n white folk the same.”

  “Then why’d you bring me?”

  “Just makin’ sure.”

  “It’d be good to get out from under that interest, Big Sherman, and pay as you go.”

  They were at the wagon. Big Sherman hoisted himself up, and David climbed onto the seat beside him.

  “Yes sir, it sho’ would,” Big Sherman said. He sat holding the reins loosely but made no move to set Peg going. “How you reckon I can git out from under the interest if’n sump’n happen to stop me ever’ time I’s about to get ahead?”

  David felt tension in Big Sherman. He felt frustration. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “I ain’t never done nothin’ just cause ever’body else done it. Folks think the way things has always been is the way they gots to be, but I don’t believe that.”

  “Things like farmers having to use credit?”

  “Yes sir.” Big Sherman clucked for Peg to get moving. “Things such as that.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  1915

  David thought about his mother, his father, and his grandfather every day, and his guilt over helping the Tatums while his own family suffered grief was overwhelming. Every morning, he beseeched God to whisper to them that their only son was alive and well. He prayed that his family would hear the Spirit’s witness and believe—even though they could not see—as they believed in heaven.

  The months on Lake Caddo and the Tatum farm had not brought David any closer to knowing how to go home. In fact, his regret and shame had only compounded with each month that passed, during which he could have—should have—found a way to let his family know he was alive and did not.

  David found a friend in Pastor Mo Rawlins, who sent word by Audie one Sunday for David to meet him at the church house that evening. Pastor Rawlins brought David a copy of the Marshall Messenger, and they talked about the war, which had dug into the French countryside like a tick on a dog.

  After that, David walked to the church house every Sunday evening, and Mo met him there with the newspaper. To his credit, the pastor never mentioned David’s absenteeism on Sunday mornings. If he recognized David Walker from the handbill he had tacked to the church door months before, he kept it to himself.

  David always sat on the first pew, and Mo sat on the altar. They were warmed by a potbelly stove in the corner, into which Mo fed pieces of kindling that caught fire quickly in the embers from the morning service. Mo and his flock were foot washers, and washtubs hung on pegs above the tall windows along each side of the sanctuary. David tried to imagine Big Sherman washing Audie’s feet, and Audie washing her husband’s. David would’ve been embarrassed for anyone to see his bare feet, much less wash them.

  Mo wanted to start a school, but it had been impossible to round up the local children. He had loaned David the textbooks he’d acquired to that end. “You’re doing a good job teaching Zachary and Luke,” he said.

  “I can’t teach Zach fast enough,” David said. “Luke, well, he tolerates his lessons, more or less.” Luke had managed, finally, to master the Eclectic First Reader. He could count by ones, fives, and tens as high as his impatience allowed. And he could add and subtract. David thought these skills were enough to run the farm, which Luke swore he would never leave.

  “I want Zach to go to college,” David said. “In Marshall.”

  “That would be a first.” Mo nodded toward the paper. “Messenger’s got a story this week about Americans going to France on their own, to fight the Germans.” He pulled the paper apart and found the article. “Says they’re signing up with a French outfit called the Foreign Legion. Real interesting part here about a colored fella—a boxer from Georgia—who’s been in the fighting since it started.”

  David had imagined finding a way to Europe to fight in the war. Becoming a soldier like Gramps, maybe even a sharpshooter. He took the paper and read the paragraph Mo pointed to. “He was already over there,” David said and put the paper down.

  “Yes sir.”

  Neither spoke for several moments. A stick of overheated wood cracked in the potbelly stove. “My grandfather fought in the Freedom War,” David said. He wanted to tell Mo everything.

  “That so? What regiment?”

  “Louisiana 7th infantry. He was a sharpshooter.”

  “From what Big Sherman says, you’re a pretty good shot yourself.”

  “Yes sir. Thanks to my grandfather.”

  “So, you’re from Louisiana?” Mo said. “Where abouts?”

  “Port Barre,” David lied.

  “Don’t know it,” said Mo.

  “No sir, not many people do.”

  David lingered in the church house after Mo went home to his family. He read the paper. He thumbed through the hymnals and sang a few songs. He walked around the sanctuary, examining the washtubs. Trying to imagine the foot washing part of the service. When he got sleepy, he blew out the lanterns and walked outside, shutting the big oak door behind him. The churchyard was bright with fallen snow, and the air was thick with silently falling flakes.

  David stood his threadbare collar up around his neck and walked toward the live oaks where he always waited for Audie and the boys when Big Sherman was away. He stopped under their evergreen boughs, the bare ground black beneath his boots. He removed his hat and shook it, then brushed off the snow that had settled on his shoulders.

  The snow on the rough fields was as pretty as freshly blossomed cotton. But looking at the fields made David feel lonely. Sitting in the church telling Mo about Gramps had made him lonely too. It had made him sick with desire to go home. He was a grown man, but he had no one and no place to call his own. For a brief moment, before he left the sheltering oaks and struck out for the Tatum cabin, David wondered if he was living under a cruel, slow-moving curse.

  Christmas came, and the Tatum family sang carols at church with their friends while David hid among the live oaks, listening and singing along in a low voice. At Christmas dinner, the Tatums and David feasted on fresh pork from the annual hog killing. Afterward, Audie surprised them with a bread pudding laced with honey David had collected from a hive he found in the woods the summer before.

  The family lingered around the table, drinking coffee with lots of milk and sugar, and David read aloud the second chapter of Luke’s gospel. “Next year, you’ll be the one to read it,” he told Zachary.

  “Yes sir. I’ll be ready.”

  Zachary still read aloud haltingly, but his silent reading was fluent.

  Mo had acquired a large dictionary for the church, and it lay atop an old pulpit that stood in one corner of the sanctuary. Zach copied new words and definitions from the dictionary every week and brought them home. The dictionary was slowly and steadily being transcribed onto scraps of paper that Zach kept in a drawer of the sideboard.

  Zach read every word of the newspapers David brought home from his Sunday night visits with Mo, and he asked David many questions about the things he did not understand. David listened with fascination as literacy leached into Zachary’s everyday speech.

  David had studied the Tatum’s one-room cabin ever since he moved in. He wanted to build a room onto the back of it—a bedroom for Audie. By the time a new year rolled around, David was ready to approach Big Sherman with the idea.

  Big Sherman took off his hat and rubbed his shaved head. “Need to clear lots more of them stumps this winter.” He put his hat on again, settling it on his crown with one big hand. “But I reckon me ‘n the boys can handle ‘em. They ain’t no money to spare for lumber.”

  “I h
ave a little money left.”

  “Why you wanna do this, Jacob?”

  David shrugged. “Beats pulling stumps.”

  Big Sherman laughed. “Reckon it do, son. Reckon it do.”

  Big Sherman’s eldest son was not as supportive of the project. Sherman caught David behind the barn the next day and pinned him to the rough, weathered wood with a forearm against his throat. “Wha’chu think you’s up to now?” he growled.

  David pulled on Sherman’s arm with both hands, but Sherman leaned into him with all the force of his stout, muscular frame. David mustered everything he had, put both hands against Sherman’s chest, and shoved him away. He was as surprised as Sherman that he was able to push him off. He rubbed his throat. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “You don’t belong here. Ain’t your farm. Ain’t your house. Ain’t your fambly.”

  “You think I don’t know that?”

  “You needs to go. Go on now, git the hell outta here.”

  “I ain’t leaving. Not yet.”

  “Yeah. You’s goin’.”

  David took a step away from the barn wall, and Sherman took a step forward too.

  “I will go, but not yet,” David said. “I’ll go in my own damn time.”

  Sherman took another step forward, and they were chest to chest.

  “I’m not gonna fight you,” David said.

  “You’s gonna get a whippin’ if’n you stay.”

  “I won’t fight you, even though I want to. My fists are itching to hit your stubborn puss. But I won’t take a chance on killing you.”

  “You is ignernt as a stump. You couldn’t kill me if’n you tried.”

  “Killing folks is no trouble at all, Sherman. You of all people ought to know that.”

  The ferocity drained from Sherman’s face.

  “I’m sorry,” David said quickly and walked away.

  David had dreaded the day when Big Sherman would grow tired of feeding Methuselah, whose only contribution was carrying an occasional doe back from the woods. David did not want to put a bullet in the old mule’s head, but he understood the hay and corn he ate represented money that was needed for a lot of other things. One day when he couldn’t stand it any longer, he asked Big Sherman flat out how long he intended to keep feeding Methuselah.