Lay Down My Sword and Shield hh-1

by James Lee Burke

  The land was flat here, without trees, and the weeds in the ditches along the road were covered with dust. The camp was surrounded with a barbed-wire fence, and crude hand-lettered signs were nailed to the cedar posts: NO TRESPASSING, BEWARE OF DOG, TRAILERS FOR COLORED, UNAUTHORIZED PEOPLE STAY OUT. The buildings were made of wood and covered on the sides with red tar paper. The windows didn’t have glass or screens, and the wooden shutters were propped open with boards. The corrugated tin roofs reflected brightly in the sun, and I could hear the hum of flies around the community toilets. The yards were bare of grass, and boxes of garbage stood along the dirt lane that ran through the camp. At intervals between every third cabin there was an iron water spigot where the women washed out diapers and cleaned their dishes, but Rie said the handles were often removed by the camp owner because the children left the water running. The showers were located in a gray concrete enclosure without doors or a roof in the center of the camp, and when you passed close to it you could smell the wet reek of the walls and the mold and the sour stench of stagnant water in the bottom of the stalls.

  Men and women with towels over their shoulders and toothbrushes went inside together, barefoot brown children in frayed and wash-faded clothes played in the dirt yards, and emaciated dogs with bent spines and mange on their bodies slunk about in the lane. Four dilapidated school buses with broken windows and license plates from several states on them were parked by a tin trailer with an air-conditioning unit in the window and OFFICE painted above the door. Rie walked up on the porch of a cabin and knocked while I leaned against the automobile and smoked a cigar. Mexican men walking toward the shower building looked at me and the Cadillac, and I dropped my eyes to the ground and concentrated on the end of my cigar. I felt the same way that I had when I drove into the penitentiary to see Art. I had intruded into a place where even a courteous nod from me and the world I represented was a form of patronization.

  Several children stood ten feet from me and stared at my face and the interior of the car. Their black hair was full of nicks and uneven scissor cuts, and their knees and elbows were covered with dirt. A small girl carried a kitten on her shoulder, and one little boy in cutoff overalls had a broken cap pistol in his hand. I smiled at them, but their faces showed no expression in return. I reached inside and turned on the radio, and the insane, blaring voice of a fundamentalist preacher roared out of the dashboard.

  “Do you kids go to school?” I said. Now that’s cool, Holland. Come up with another good one like that.

  They looked at me with their silent black eyes.

  “We’re going to a barbecue this afternoon. Why don’t you ask your folks if you can come along?”

  The little girl set the kitten down in the dust and pushed at him with her bare foot. The others continued to stare at the strange man who had just dropped from the stratosphere right on his head. I switched off the radio, closed the car door, stuck my hands in the back pockets of my khakis, and looked off into any direction where I wouldn’t have to answer those questioning brown faces. Behind me I heard Rie talking with a woman on the front porch of the cabin, and then a man in a dirty T-shirt, with a swollen stomach, as though he had a hernia, stepped out of the tin trailer and walked toward us.

  His blue jeans were bursting just below his navel, his crew-cut head was beaded with sunlight in the center, and his fly was only partly zipped. His shoulders were too small for his head, and the blue jeans sagged in the rear. There was a line of sunburn and dandruff where he wore a hat, and his gray eyes went from me to the Cadillac and back again. I took the cigar out of my mouth and nodded at him.

  “How do, sir,” he said.

  “Pretty fine. How are you today?”

  “It’s a right nice day, all right.” He ran one hand over his fat hip and looked at a spot over my shoulder. “I keep the office here, and I’m supposed to take anybody around the camp that wants to see the workers. Sometimes people can’t find who they’re looking for, and I got all the cabin numbers up in my trailer.”

  “Thank you. We’re just giving some people a lift to the church.”

  He pulled a dead cigar butt from his pocket and put it in his mouth. He lowered his crew-cut head and scraped his foot in the dust and rolled the frayed end of the cigar wetly between his lips.

  “You see, the soda-pop people that own this land don’t like just anybody coming on it. It don’t matter to me, but sometimes them union agitators come down here and try to fire up the Mexicans and nigras and shut down the harvest, and I’m supposed to see that nobody like that gets a free run around here. Now, like that Mexican woman up there on the porch. Her husband run off two weeks ago and she’s got five kids in there. She can’t afford to miss a day’s work because some union man won’t let her get into the field.”

  We talked politely, on and on, while Rie loaded the Cadillac full of children and two huge Negro women. Well, we have a barbecue planned at the church today. I don’t think that would bother the soda-pop people. Why don’t you have a fresh cigar? Like I don’t have nothing against any religion or group of people, but there’s a priest down there that’s preaching commonism or something at the Mexicans, and it’s going to come to a lot of broken heads and people without no paychecks. I can tell you that for a fact, by God. It ain’t any skin off my ass, I got that trailer and a salary whether they work or not, but I don’t like to see them lose their jobs and get kicked out of their cabins because they listen to people that steals their money in union dues while the citrus burns on the tree. Now, that ain’t right. I have a little Jack Daniel’s in a flask. Would you like a ditch and another cigar before we leave?… No, sir, I’m working right now, but tonight when you come back, drop up to the trailer and I’ll buy you a shot with a couple of cold ones behind it… Thank you. I’m looking forward to it… Yes, sir. You come back, hear?

  I drove back out the barbed-wire gate and headed down the road past the rows of identical cabins with their shimmering tin roofs. The dust rolled away behind me.

  “You ought to do public relations for us, you con man,” Rie said, and smiled at me over the heads of the children sitting between us.

  The Catholic church was made of white stucco and surrounded by oak and chinaberry trees. Pickup trucks and junker cars were parked in the side yard, and Negro, Mexican, and a few white families sat on folding metal chairs with paper plates of barbecued chicken in their laps. Their clothes were sun-faded and starched by hand, and many of the women wore flower-patterned dresses that were sewn from feed sacks. A priest in shirt sleeves was turning chickens on the barbecue grill while the Negro from the union headquarters pulled bottles of beer out of a garbage can filled with cracked ice. I parked the car in the shade of a post oak, and the children raced off across the lawn and started throwing chinaberries at each other. In minutes their washed overalls and checkered shirts were stained with the white, sticky milk from the berries.

  “Come on. I want you to meet this wild priest,” Rie said.

  “I never got along with the clergy.”

  “Wait till you catch this guy. He’s no ordinary priest.”

  “Let’s pass.”

  “Hack, your prejudices are burning through your face.”

  “It’s my Baptist background. You can never tell when the Antichrist from Rome is going to sail his submarine across the Atlantic and dock in DeWitt County.”

  “Good God,” she said.

  “You never went to church in a large tent with a sawdust floor.”

  “With a box of snakes at the front of the aisle.”

  “There you go,” I said.

  “Wow. What an out-of-sight place to come from.” She took my hand and walked with me across the lawn toward the barbecue pit.

  Two Mexican men sat on a table behind the priest and the Negro, playing mariachi guitars with steel picks on their fingers. They looked like brothers with their flat, Indian faces and straw hats slanted over their eyes. The steel picks glinted in the sun as their fingers rolled across th
e strings.

  “What do you say, whiskey brother?” the Negro said. His eyes were red with either a hangover or the beginnings of a new drunk, and his breath was heavy with alcohol and snuff. He popped the cap off a sweating bottle of Lone Star and handed it to me. The foam slipped down the side over my hand.

  “I guess I have a couple of shots in the car if the smoke gets too much for you,” I said. Then it struck me, as I looked at his cannonball head and remembered the humiliation I had seen in his face the other night, that I had never learned his name.

  “I’m cool today, brother,” he said. “Saturday’s for drinking, and Sunday you catch all kinds of sunshine with these church people.”

  The priest looked like a longshoreman. His thick arms were covered with black hair, and he had a broad Irish face with a nose like Babe Ruth’s and a wide neck and powerful shoulders under his white shirt. His black eyes were quick, and when Rie introduced us I had the feeling that he had done many other things before he had become a priest.

  “You handled Art’s appeal, didn’t you?” he said.

  “Yes, I did.” I took a cigar from my pocket and peeled off the wrapper.

  “His family appreciated it a great deal. The rest of us did, too.”

  “I knew him in the service,” I said.

  “He told me. I saw him before he was sent to prison.”

  I chewed off the tip of my cigar and looked away at the line of battered cars and trucks gleaming in the sunlight. Overhead, two blue jays were fighting in the chinaberry tree. Every clergyman has to be so goddamn frank, I thought.

  “Have you been here very long, Father?”

  “Three months, but I’m being transferred to Salt Lake in September.”

  “He’s the church’s favorite Ping-Pong ball,” Rie said, and laughed. “He’s had five parishes in six years. Kicked out of New Orleans, Compton, California, the Pima reservation in Arizona, and now he’s going to turn the Mormons on. I bet those guys will be a real riot.”

  “You’re not improving my image, Rie.”

  “Listen. This was the guy that took black children through those lines of screaming women and thugs when the elementary schools were integrated in New Orleans. He dumped a cop on his ass in the school doorway and said mass in a Negro church the same day in Plaquemines Parish while the Klan burned crosses on the front lawn.”

  “Rie’s given to hyperbole sometimes, Mr. Holland.”

  “No, I’m afraid she’s pretty exact most of the time, Father,” I said.

  “Well, at least it wasn’t that dramatic. A little pushing and shoving and a few truck drivers sitting on the curb with more Irish in them than they deserve.”

  He filled two paper plates with chicken, rice dressing, and garlic bread, and handed them to us. There were small scars around his knuckles, and his wrists and forearms were as thick and hard as cordwood. He smelled of hickory smoke from the fire, and his balding head glistened with perspiration in the broken shade. Rie was right — he wasn’t an ordinary man. I remembered the television newsreels about the priest and ex — paratrooper chaplain who had led terrified Negro children from the buses through the spittle and curses in front of an elementary school in New Orleans in 1961. I also recalled the one short film clip that showed him backing down four large men who had poured beer on the children as they walked up the school steps.

  We sat in the shade and ate from our paper plates and drank bottles of Lone Star while the guitar players picked and sang their songs about infidelity, their love for peasant girls in hot Mexican villages, and Villa’s raid on a train loaded with federales and machine guns mounted on flatcars. The children had established forts behind two lines of folding chairs, and chinaberries flew back and forth and pinged against the metal, and because it was somebody’s birthday the Negro climbed up an oak tree, grabbing the trunk with his knees, and hung a piñata stuffed with candy from a piece of cloth clothesline. Then he formed all the children into a line, in stair-step fashion, with a foaming beer in his hand, and gave the first child a sawed-off broom handle to swing against the cardboard-and-crepe-paper horse turning dizzily in the dappled light. The children flailed the piñata, and twists of candy showered out over their heads. I borrowed a guitar from one of the musicians and ran my fingers over the strings. The sound hole was inlaid with an Indian design, and there were deep scratches on the face from the steel picks that the owner used.

  “Go ahead and boil them cabbages down,” Rie said.

  I couldn’t be profane in front of the priest.

  “I never play too well sober. Wrong mental atmosphere for hillbilly guitar pickers,” I said.

  “Will you go ahead?” she said. Her eyes took on that wonderful brightness they had when she was extremely happy.

  I tuned the guitar into D and ran a Jimmie Rodgers progression all the way down the neck, then bridged into an old Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston song while the Negro opened more bottles of Lone Star and the children rolled over one another in the grass after the candy.

  Ezekiel saw that wheel a-whirling

  Way up in the middle of the air

  Later, the men on the strike committee pulled two long tables and several benches together in the sun. They sat in the glaring heat, sweat dripping from inside their straw hats over their faces, their browned forearms on the hot wood, as though the sunlight were no different from the shade a few feet away. The warm beer bottles in their hands were bursting with amber light, and their faces were all of one calm and intent expression while Rie spoke to them in Spanish. Her voice was even and flat while she looked quietly back and forth at the two rows of men, and although my Tex-Mex was good enough so that I could understand most of what she said, I realized she was speaking in a frame of reference that had always belonged in the wretched Mexican hovels on the other side of my property line. As I leaned against an oak trunk, watching them through my sunglasses and sipping a beer, I thought about Art’s description of the Anglo roaring down the highway in his Cadillac toward the next Holiday Inn, unaware of anything beyond the billboards that flashed by him like a kaleidoscopic vision. So have another beer on that one, Holland, I thought. And polish your Spanish.

  It was late afternoon and hot when the barbecue ended. A dry wind was blowing from the Gulf, and dust devils spun out of the dirt road and whirled away in the fields. We loaded the children and the two Negro women into the car and drove back to the migrant camp. The tar paper shacks seemed to glow with the heat, and my friend the camp manager was sprinkling the dirt lane in front of his trailer with a garden hose. His clothes were even filthier than they had been that morning, and his face had a red whiskey flush. He turned off the water and walked over to the car. The fat in his pot stomach bulged against his T-shirt, and his odor was so strong that I opened the door partway to keep him a few feet from me.

  “There was a deputy sheriff down here this afternoon, and he says you’re working with them union people.”

  “Must be somebody else.” I watched Rie on the front porch of one of the cabins.

  “He knowed this car, and he described you exactly. Even them cigars.”

  “What else did he have to say?”

  “He says he’s going to lock your ass in jail. And I’ll tell you something else, buddy. You come down here and give me a lot of shit about taking them people to a church barbecue. I don’t like nobody lying to me when they come on the property, and I got a ball bat up there in the trailer to handle anybody that tries to make my job harder than it is.”

  I bit into the soft wetness of my cigar and closed the door carefully. I felt the anger draw tight across my chest, the blood swelling in my temples, and I looked straight ahead at the sunlight beating down on his silver trailer. I coughed on my cigar smoke and picked a piece of tobacco off my lip.

  “Well, sir, we should be gone in a few minutes,” I said.

  “You better get your luck off that porch and haul it down the road a lot faster than that.”

  I opened the door again, hard
, so that it hit him sharply in the knees and stomach, and looked into his face.

  “You’re about two remarks ahead of the game right now, podner,” I said. “Say anything more and you’re going to have problems that you never thought about. Also, if you have any plans about using that baseball bat, you’d better find an apple box to stand on first.”

  His red face was caught between angry insult and fear, and the sweat glistened in his brows over his lead-gray eyes.

  “You’re trespassing, and I’m putting in a call to the sheriff’s office,” he said, and walked away in the dust toward his trailer.

  Rie got back in the car. I closed the windows and turned on the air conditioner as high as it would go, and we rolled out the front gate and headed down the county road toward town. There were buzzards drifting high in the sky on the wind stream, and the sun burned white as a chemical flame. The rocks and alkali dust on the road roared away under the Cadillac.

  “Say, take it easy, Lone Ranger,” Rie said.

  “I’ve been easy all my life. One of these days I’m going to blow all my Kool-Aid and rearrange a guy like that for a long time.”

  She put her hand on my arm. “That’s not your kind of scene, Hack.”

  “I’m up to my eyes with rednecks that come on with baseball bats.”

  “Hey, man, you’re not acting like a good con man at all. What did he say?”

  “Nothing. He’s defending the soda-pop people.”