Stork Bite

by Simonds, L. K.

  Deet invited David into the two-room shack he called home. The room was August hot, thanks to a potbelly stove that blazed with wood scraps. David quickly shed his coat.

  “Sorry about the heat,” Deet said. “Helps with the rheumatism.”

  “I’m cold most all the time, so I don’t mind.”

  A beautifully ornate checkerboard and checkers waited on a barrel in the front room.

  “I’ve never seen such a board,” David said.

  “Made it myself.”

  Their first game went quickly, and during the second, David heard a muffled snore from the shack’s back room. “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “That be Mr. Joseph Baldwin the Third. The yardman.”

  “I thought you were the yardman.”

  Deet laughed. “Ain’t never heard of a colored yardman. No sir, Mr. Joe, he the yardman. He gots the profit ‘n I gots the work.” Deet stood and pushed the door open. “There he be in all his glory.”

  The stench from the shut-up room—body odor, metabolized whiskey, floral perfume—rushed through the doorway. The man snorted as his breath caught on his drunkenness. David got up and peered into the darkness at a rumpled figure sprawled on Deet’s bed. One leg hung over the side, and the sole of his shiny new boot rested flat on the floor.

  “Sometime Mr. Joe get on a mean drunk,” Deet said. “Say he gonna fire ever’ man on the yard. Say we ain’t nothin’ but white trash ‘n niggers that ain’t good for nothin’ ‘cept . . . well . . . I won’t repeat the rest of it.”

  “Mercy.”

  “Sometime Mr. Joe get on a sorrowful drunk. Say he gonna make it up to me for coverin’ for him. Say he gonna make it right cause I doin’ all his work.” Joe Baldwin stopped breathing. After a minute, he reared up, coughing and gasping. Then he rolled onto his side and faced the wall. Deet said. “Mostly, though, Mr. Joe just dead drunk.”

  “Baldwin?” David asked.

  “Yes sir. His fambly own the whole town ‘n there he lay, goin’ to ruin. He a young man, ‘n I reckon he gonna die young from a rotted gut or a bullet some lady husband put in his head.”

  “Does he know?” asked David.

  Deet closed the door.

  “Know what?”

  “Does he know about all the materials you’ve given me?”

  Deet motioned for David to sit down again. “Way I see it,” Deet said as he studied the checkerboard, “them Baldwins owes they riches to the folks that’s livin’ around here. Most folks around here ain’t hardly got a pot to piss in or a wender to throw it out of.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “Them Baldwins ain’t much of a mind to give nothin’ away, so I’s helpin’ a bit in that regard. Not so’s they notice, mind you, but maybe enough for the Good Lord to take notice. Maybe when Mr. Joe show up at the pearly gate, he have a little more good works to his credit than he expected.”

  “I never heard of anybody having an idea like that, Deet.”

  “Well, a feller’s got to think for hisself.”

  Deet supplied a great deal of shiplap and tar paper. “Tar paper keep the inside cool in the summer ‘n warm in the winter,” Deet said as the men loaded the long black rolls into the wagon.

  Big Sherman and David tacked tar paper over the one by sixes of the subfloor, the walls, and the roof. Then they covered the subfloor and the walls, inside and out, with shiplap. Finally, they covered the roof in tinplate and sealed it with pale gray paint. Afterward, Big Sherman and David stood outside, admiring their handiwork.

  “You done good, Jacob,” Big Sherman said. “It be a sight to behold.”

  “We ain’t done yet,” David said.

  Deet’s men loaded onto the wagon a potbelly stove, which the Baldwin Hotel had mistakenly ordered. “Cost too much to ship it back,” Deet said with a wink.

  The final and most difficult part of the building project was framing and casing the windows. David and Big Sherman spent hours shimming the frames according to Deet’s instructions. It was unforgiving work, but when they finished, each window sat in its frame perfectly and opened and closed without a hitch.

  Last of all, Big Sherman and David painted the walls white inside and out and hung a varnished green door with a real glass knob, also courtesy of the Baldwin Hotel. Audie cried when she saw her new cottage, and she kept crying for a long time.

  David still carried the twenty-dollar note in his pocket, thanks to Deet and Mr. Joseph Baldwin the Third, and he said a little prayer that Mr. Joe would indeed find mercy at the pearly gates.

  After David discovered Methuselah’s blindness, he paid more attention to the mule to see how he was getting by. Methuselah stayed close to Big Peg. They ate together. They drank together. They slept lying beside each other in the old barn, with Methuselah’s head laid across Peg’s rump.

  Then one day, David found the old mule alone and confused behind the barn. On another day, he found him wandering in a field, far from the house. When David led him to the water trough, Methuselah dunked his gray muzzle and sucked water as if he hadn’t had a drop in days. It broke David’s heart to watch him, and he knew it fell to him to do the merciful thing.

  David turned his face away while Big Sherman said goodbye to Methuselah in the privacy of the barn. The farmer wrapped his thick arms around the old mule’s neck and hung there for a long time with his face pressed to Methuselah’s hide. He spoke softly into the long ear, saying, “Me ‘n you done it, didn’t we, old feller? They weren’t nobody but me ‘n you ‘n Audie. You’s plumb wore out now ‘n sufferin’, I reckon. It be best this way. I know it don’t seem like it, but you’ll see. You gonna be a young feller again ‘n they ain’t gonna be no aches ‘n pains. Ain’t gonna be no blindness neither, nor any work at all. Just play. You be eatin’ the softest, greenest grass you ever did see ‘n when you’s tired, you just lay down ‘n have a nap. Ain’t nobody gonna object. You’ll see.” Big Sherman laid his wet cheek against Methuselah’s. “I ain’t never gonna forgit what you done,” he said, and then he slipped out of the barn.

  Audie cried too, as did Zach and Luke when their turns came to say goodbye. Even Sherman—tough guy that he was—held the old mule’s face in both of his hands and kissed him between the eyes. “Good mule,” he said and bent his forehead to Methuselah’s.

  David took Methuselah to the woods on a summer evening when the air over the cotton fields had settled from its scorched frenzy. Because of the heat, they walked deep into the forest where the smell of the rotting carcass would not reach the house. Whip followed along, rooting under every log and bramble. David stopped at a maple tree and pulled from his pocket a bit of cloth he had filled with crusty sugar from Audie’s store. He held it out and Methuselah licked until the sodden cloth had no more sweetness.

  Tears ran down David’s face when he hugged Methuselah around the neck as Big Sherman had done. He told the mule how much his family loved him and that Big Sherman was telling the truth about heaven, where all the days were sunny and warm, and all the pastures were thick with green grass and flowers. This brought the Twenty-Third Psalm to David’s mind, and he quoted it to the animal. He told the mule that all his troubles and hardships were over. Methuselah’s long ears turned this way and that at the sound of David’s voice, and once he tossed his head the way he used to do.

  Because the .22 was such a light gun, David shot Methuselah in his milky eye at close range. The mule dropped as readily as a deer, dead before he hit the ground. Whip ran to the carcass and sniffed all over it, as he had never been able to do when Methuselah was alive. The dog turned and looked at David with worried eyes, as if to ask, “Am I next?”

  David sat down cross-legged and laid the rifle aside. He called the dog to him and hugged him tightly. Then David Walker opened his mouth and let loose a loud, suffering wail that had nothing to do with Methuselah.

  Chapter Seventeen

  By the time David’s third winter on the Tatum farm rolled around, he looked like every other
colored cotton farmer in Harrison County. Gone were the threadbare clothes, shiny from wearing and washing, that he’d worn when he paddled out of the Caddo swamp. In their place were other clothes the same dull, faded brown as East Texas loam. The gangly teenager who fled Arkansas was long gone, and in his place stood a man, weathered and worn in his twentieth year.

  In December, for the first time since he had been on the farm, David accompanied the Tatum family to the annual communal hog killing. Hog killing coincided with the first freeze, which came late that year—it was nearly Christmas—and took place at the farm of neighbors who raised hogs rather than cotton.

  Every spring, Big Sherman bought a suckling piglet from Old Man Barnes and notched its left ear with his mark. Barnes raised the piglet to an adult hog that weighed about the same as a bale of cotton. The animal never left the patch of ground where it was born and where it would die, the same as everyone else in the county.

  The Barnes family supplied this service for a fee to their neighbors who, like the Tatums, were not set up for raising hogs. Even those who raised their own hogs brought them to be slaughtered during the annual event. David had stayed away, as he had stayed away from church and other social gatherings. But he felt it was safe at last to give in to the family’s urgings and go with them.

  It was a cold trip, riding in the back of the wagon with Luke, Zach, Sherman, and Whip, while Audie huddled close to Big Sherman on the wagon seat. They rode under a blanket of gray clouds that seemed close enough to reach up and touch. The Tatums were upbeat, singing and laughing, but David felt cold and gloomy. He was stuck in limbo, like the dull day that didn’t even have enough gumption to cast a shadow, much less push it across the earth.

  “Looky there!” Luke exclaimed. “They’s startin’ without us!”

  He had been hanging over the side of the wagon, and now he turned to his brothers, his eyes sparkling with excitement. The wagon bed dipped, and Peg’s hooves splashed in water. David raised himself and looked over the side at the stream they were crossing. The water ran bright red. The entire stream in both directions was as blood-soaked as Egypt’s rivers, staining the rocks and dirt along each side.

  David sat down and pulled his hat brim over his eyes. He tried to push away an image of other blood, black and thick, that curled and pooled in warm water. He had jerked his guilty arm away before it reached him and clung to his skin like the green bladderwort.

  The smell of the slaughter reached them first. An aroma of rendering fat as appetizing as morning bacon frying in a pan, and Luke rubbed his belly. Dark smoke poured from a long, whitewashed smokehouse and collected in a layer beneath the clouds. The wagon rolled into the yard, and David saw men and women congregating amid long rows of tables.

  Folks were in high spirits, talking and laughing. The boys, Sherman, and Whip hopped out of the wagon and disappeared before Big Sherman reined Peg to a stop. Even Audie climbed out on her own rather than waiting for her husband to help her down. David climbed out and went around to the front to help Big Sherman unhitch the mule. He took his time unbuckling the traces and looking over the hog-killing operation, which was much larger than he had imagined.

  “C’mon ‘n meet Ol’ Man Barnes,” said Big Sherman.

  David followed Big Sherman to a fat man—a very fat man—seated on a ladder-back chair against the smokehouse. The legs of the chair bowed under the load, but Mr. Barnes appeared unconcerned, relaxing in a fragrant cloud of tobacco smoke that billowed from a bent pipe.

  “Howdy do, Mr. Barnes,” Big Sherman called as they approached.

  “Mornin’, Mr. Tatum. That ain’t Sherman, are it?” Mr. Barnes squinted at David. His round cheeks pushed his eyes into friendly crescents.

  “No sir. This here’s Jacob, my hired man.”

  The introduction rubbed David the wrong way, even more than it had at the general store in Baldwin, and at the cotton gin before that. It seemed to please Big Sherman to no end for folks to think he had a hired man.

  “Pleased to meet you, Jacob,” said Mr. Barnes.

  David shook the fat man’s soft hand. Mr. Barnes’s lady hands were fastened to thin wrists at the ends of his roly-poly arms. David caught himself staring rudely at the delicate fingers curled around the bowl of the bent pipe.

  Luke ran across David’s field of vision, chasing three shrieking little girls. One of them slowed long enough to yell, “Meanie!” over her shoulder. Luke stopped and raised his arm. His hand clutched entrails that hung down to his elbow. He laughed like a lunatic, and David feared he was about to throw the offal at the girls.

  “Luke!” he hollered. The boy stopped and looked at him, then tucked his arm and took off running again. He made a beeline to his brother and shoved the innards in his face, but Zachary only pushed his little brother away.

  Zach sat on a stool facing a wall from which hung a row of hog’s heads. He was one child in a line of children—boys and girls—sitting on stools in front of the decapitated heads, using paring knives to carefully scrape the hair from the disembodied faces. The hogs’ eyes were closed, and their expressions were placid, like pudgy, wrinkled white men permitting barbers to shave their stiff, unwanted whiskers.

  The grunting of the hogs, which had been a murmur under the voices of the crowd, erupted into panicked squeals, drawing David’s attention toward the pen where the animals were held. A group of teenaged boys—Sherman among them—had separated one poor sow from the passel awaiting slaughter. The half-dozen young men pulled—by a rope and her tail—the frightened, screaming pig toward the creek bank. They laughed and tossed themselves about as if it were a game, while she desperately sought a way out of their hands.

  Another young man waited by the creek with a sledgehammer, its iron head resting on the packed earth. He took a position at the sow’s head and struck her more or less between the eyes. She shuddered and went down on her front knees. The teenager landed a couple more blows in quick succession, and she rolled to her side, jerking, her legs kicking weakly. He dropped the sledgehammer and sat on her while the others drove hooks into her hind legs.

  The blunt noise of the sledgehammer on the hog’s skull made David’s stomach ball into a fist. Had he heard such a thunk when the oar struck the white man’s skull? Did the man shudder as that poor hog had—already killed but not quite dead—before he fell against the pirogue? Was David remembering sights and sounds long forgotten, or was his imagination filling in the details?

  Barnes said, “Jacob, I reckon a big feller like you could knock a hog clean out with one blow. You oughta pick up a hammer cause that ‘un over there sho ‘nuff makin’ a mess of it.”

  The teenagers heave-hoed a rope attached to the hooks until the sow was hoisted from the ground and suspended upside down from a scaffold. The animal shook unnaturally while they cut her throat, and then she hung there trembling, occasionally convulsing, until she bled out.

  The sow was carried away along narrow tracks that stretched across the yard, and the pigs still alive squealed again as the young men stormed the pen to catch another victim.

  David saw now that the scaffolds rolled on these tracks, carrying the hogs through the butchery. The sow was moved over a steaming trough, where she was dunked and scalded. When her pale body came out of the boiling water, two men scraped the hair from her hide like moss. Her tender white skin showed through in stripes that grew wider and wider.

  After that, other men hacked off her head and split her open from tail to throat. Her entrails spilled into a tub, and the fist in David’s stomach clenched and threatened to cast out his breakfast.

  “Jacob?” said Big Sherman. “You okay?”

  “I can’t do this.” David turned and walked away, back toward the way they had come.

  He heard Barnes’s voice behind him, saying “Is your man squeamish?” But he did not care. He kept moving, head down, until he was across the bloody stream and could no longer hear the noisy death.

  After the hog killing, David would not
touch the ham Audie served at Christmas dinner. Its spongy pink flesh seemed unclean. No one commented on his abstinence, not even Sherman.

  David knew his time to leave had come and if he waited until the turning plow came out, he would be on the farm another year. He told Mo Rawlins as much during their first Sunday evening visit of the new year. Mo said he had a friend in Marshall, a pastor, who might be willing to take David in for a while, at least until he could figure out his next move.

  David invited Zachary to go hunting early one morning, just the two of them. This was a first because David had resisted the boys’ pleas to go with him to the woods. Hunting was one of the precious times when David could be alone and feel like himself again. Zach accepted the invitation soberly, as if he understood the weight of it. “I’ll be quiet,” he promised.

  “I know you will.”

  David showed Zachary how to clean the squirrels he shot, and they gave the offal to Whip, who carried it off to eat, as he always did.

  “Would you like to try your hand at shooting?” David asked.

  “At a squirrel?”

  “Maybe we’ll have some target practice first.”

  David taught Zach to shoot the same way Gramps had taught him when he was a boy. He showed Zach how to load and unload rounds, and when they got back to the cabin, David showed him how to clean the gun with coal oil. “My daddy gave me that gun when I was about your age,” David said. “I’ve been carrying it ever since.”

  “I like this gun.”

  “Well, I’m glad to hear that.” David put his hand on Zach’s shoulder. “Because I need you to look after it for me.”

  “I don’t want you to go away.”

  “I know. It’s hard.”

  The boy began to cry. “Why can’t you stay? Why do you have to go? Don’t you like us anymore?”

  “Of course I like you. I love you—all of you.”