by Andy Duncan
Daddy Mention rolled his eyes and sobbed and pleaded and exulted.
Dell made no move. “Huh-uh. I ain’t touching that thing.”
Narvel flipped out his pigsticker again and twirled it in his fingers like a little baton. Narvel could be scary even when he wasn’t possessed. Dell sidled forward and yanked free the corners of the sheet. He gathered them up and held the sheet, skull and all, away from his body like it was outhouse dirt.
Daddy Mention stumbling in front, Dell creeping behind, the little procession walked down the corridor. The other prisoners listened as one door, a farther door, an even farther door was unlocked and relocked behind. The clanks got fainter, the echoes more ghostly. When they were half memory, Creflo spoke.
“I got a quarter says he won’t be back.”
There were no takers.
The sight of Daddy Mention disappointed a number of spectators, mostly female, as they had hoped for a younger, more robust specimen of repentant male Negritude.
The warden joined the little party at the single microphone, which he covered with one hand to ask, “What’s in the bag?”
“Hoodoo contraband,” Narvel said.
“Scary shit,” Dell cried, at the same time.
“Tell me later,” the warden said. “Just keep it out of sight till they go.” He removed his hand and spoke. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen . . .”
As the warden droned, Daddy Mention smelled the air: a whiff of rot, growing stronger. He tasted the breeze: out of the swamp, picking up. He listened past the warden, past the rippling crepe, past the weary sighs of the acting governor, past the cranes hollering in the trees, and heard wet footsteps coming closer, squelch, squelch. Then applause drowned them out, and Daddy Mention stood alone.
He figured he was ready. Daddy Mention had nearly worn out the skull rubbing it before Narvel came for him. The wind from the swamp was really whipping now. A popcorn box tumbled to rest, spraying white puffs, at Daddy Mention’s feet. He knew Uncle Monday was coming, but he had to speed him up some, for the gift he had fashioned in his mind wouldn’t last, and Uncle Monday had to be a whole lot closer when he got it, if this was going to work at all. And so Daddy Mention found himself doing that thing he once vowed never to do: calling Uncle Monday on his very day.
Not that the crowd could hear him, of course. As far as they could tell, he was just standing there, leaning into the breeze, his eyelids half-closed and fluttering.
Someone coughed.
“Well, this is fun,” the acting governor told the warden. “Is there no end to the man’s talents? He doesn’t sing, and he has seizures, too.”
“God damn, I’ll make him sing,” muttered Narvel. He stood and strode forward, fists clenched, only to stop dead with a grunt about three feet from Daddy Mention, as if he had bellied into an electric fence. As the crowd murmured, Narvel slowly turned.
“What’s wrong with his eyes?” a woman asked.
Narvel’s jaw slowly sagged, dragging his mouth open. Deep inside, something gurgled. Then a voice not Narvel’s own emerged, as his jaw worked up and down, not in sync with the words:
“Raw head and bloody bones, rise up and shake yourself. He’s halfway here.”
Dell jumped to his feet shrieking, because from within the sheeted bundle beneath his bench had come a sound like a cricket chirping: Rick-de-rick, rick-de-rick, rick-de-rick!
“Raw head and bloody bones, rise up and shake yourself. He’s mostways here.”
Dell’s bundle slid forward several feet, caught no doubt in a sudden gust from the swamp, though it might have kept moving after the gust died. Rick-de-rick, rick-de-rick, rick-de-rick!
Not even the acting governor was joking now. Everyone but Narvel and Daddy Mention sat, frozen. Something yanked up Narvel’s right arm, so that it might have been pointing, had the hand not flopped at the wrist like a scarecrow’s.
“Raw head and bloody bones, rise up and shake yourself, for Monday’s here!”
The wind ripped open the sheet and the skull tumbled out, rolled to a stop at Daddy Mention’s feet. Rick-de-rick, rick-de-rick, rick-de-rick!
Daddy Mention opened his eyes and smiled. As he squinted into the wind he could make out, in the distance, a tiny dark two-legged figure in a hat, striding ever nearer across the swamp, across the surface of the deep water.
Daddy Mention sometimes wondered why he always took free and bedeviled over locked up and safe, but he couldn’t change how he was, any more than Uncle Monday could choose his walking days. There are higher powers in this old world, his Aunt Ruth used to say, and that old woman didn’t know the half of it. One day Daddy Mention was going to find those higher powers, and open up a can of whupass. But right now Uncle Monday was laying hold of him. Narvel dropped like an empty sack as Uncle Monday, still a hundred yards distant, pried open Daddy Mention’s mouth and began, though him, to sing. It was a song that got amongst the audience like a moccasin in a swimming hole. It carried without need of amplification, without need of eardrums. It was Uncle Monday’s song.
Uncle Monday’s on his way, better strike a deal
You know he ain’t never one to miss a meal
Uncle Monday
Uncle Monday
Uncle Monday Uncle Monday Uncle Monday
Uncle Monday’s been dead for many a year
But he keeps hanging round cause he likes it here
Uncle Monday . . .
Uncle Monday likes to crawl up onto the land
Go two-legged dancing like a natural man
Uncle Monday . . .
Uncle Monday goes a-strolling on the second day
He’ll let you keep your money, steal your soul away
Uncle Monday . . .
Uncle Monday has so many teeth sharp as a file
Can take you seven days just to watch him smile
Uncle Monday . . .
Uncle Monday walks Okeechobee like it was dry
While bobbin up behind him are the fish that have died
Uncle Monday . . .
His breath blows hot but his blood runs cool
And his nuts swing low like a Georgia bull
Uncle Monday . . .
When Uncle Monday wants a woman he just gives her a shout
She goes skipping into the swamp and never comes out
Uncle Monday . . .
Uncle Monday knows the swamp ain’t all that it seems
And you know that wasn’t just a panther’s scream
Uncle Monday . . .
Uncle Monday made a raw head and bloody bones
Rise up and be a-walkin just to hear it moan
Uncle Monday . . .
Uncle Monday, there’s a poor man got no legs
Yes, I swum up beneath him, cut him down a peg
Uncle Monday . . .
Uncle Monday took a trip down to hell and back
Toting seven governors in a croker sack
Uncle Monday . . .
Uncle Monday says have you a drink and a smoke
You’ll soon enough be swinging from a cypress oak
Uncle Monday
Uncle Monday
Uncle Monday Uncle Monday Uncle Monday
His walking form now was a dozen yards away and closing, and Daddy Mention could feel him pouring in, opening the skull-door wider, ever wider, in his eagerness to get in. Rick-de-rick, rick-de-rick, rick-de-rick! But here’s a true thing: a Monday skull is a two-way skull. And while Uncle Monday was sending Daddy Mention his song, Daddy Mention was sending him something in return, something powerful, something he had spent several days whittling with his mind: A little squatty man carved from black oak, with Uncle Monday’s true name cut into its stomach; this wrapped with black cloth and tied with black thread around a bundle of blackberry vines.
&n
bsp; While Uncle Monday dealt with that, he lost his grip on Daddy Mention, the way a man who steps into a hive has concerns more immediate than honey. In the moment Uncle Monday was distracted, a moment in which Daddy Mention aged more than any human lifespan, Daddy Mention snatched up the microphone stand, swung its weighted base over his head like a hammer, and bashed the Monday skull into graveyard dust.
Then lots of things happened at once.
Daddy Mention, as near as Uncle Monday could tell, ceased to exist—for a few minutes, anyway.
The bad energies Uncle Monday had funneled through the skull sped out in all directions from the impact, like pond water fleeing a chunked-in brick. Snowballs pelted roofs in Key West. A sudden, pervasive hogpen smell emptied the white high school in Tampa. In Orlando, the screens of televisions showing a roller derby telecast flickered and, for just a few seconds, held the grainy silent image of a black man howling. In Tallahassee, the governor in his deathbed sat bolt upright with black orbs for eyes and rasped to the yes-man, “I have come back from where you are going,” and fell back dead.
The full brunt of the flood, however, was borne by all those people in the prison yard, who briefly and horribly became aware of Uncle Monday’s true nature.
Each reacted after his own fashion. There was moaning and sobbing and puking and tongue-speaking and St. Vitus dancing. Some just sat and moaned, and some ran, knocking their heads into the stone wall or tangling themselves in the fence where they might have been shot had the guards not been jibbering mad at the moment, too.
None of those doused by Uncle Monday that afternoon could remember it afterward, and you could say they all recovered within the hour, none the worse for wear. But the seeds had been planted. And so they found themselves, in the next month or so, for perfectly good everyday reasons (they thought), switching churches or getting saved or writing letters to the editor denouncing Jim Crow or preaching atheism in the town square or taking grocery-store bagboys as lovers or beginning to drink heavily or taking the pledge or buying two-tone Buicks or joining the Klan or the Masons or the Anti-Defamation League or giving all their possessions to colored orphanages or declaring for the fifth congressional seat or burning their hats or crying for two days, all because it’s always Monday somewhere.
In the immediate aftermath, as everyone rubbed their heads and picked themselves up off the ground and tried to remember what had happened, it was Dell who first asked:
“Where’s Daddy Mention?”
That seemed another uncanny mystery beyond human ken, until they found a cafeteria bench standing on end against the west wall, and discovered the acting governor’s limousine was acting gone.
Daddy Mention’s latest escape made neither the papers nor the radio, but every inmate in eight states knew about it by Tuesday at 3, when it was the talk of the yard at Tennessee State.
“Picked up Uncle Monday by his tail and slung him right over the wall!” said Marcell, the bass.
“God damn! I’d like to have seen that,” said John D., the second tenor.
“Then he dusted the governor with some essence of bend-over and made him hand over the keys to his limousine,” said William, the baritone.
“Lord amighty!” said Ed, the third tenor. “Tell it, now.”
During all this, Johnny Bragg, lead tenor of the Prisonaires, whom armed guards had escorted to the Sun studio in Memphis to record “Just Walking in the Rain” and then escorted back again, stood in the corner of the yard, facing the wall, practicing a song titled “That Chick’s Too Young To Fry.” It was a song with meaning for Johnny Bragg, who at 16 had caught his girlfriend half full of another man, her eyes focusing on Johnny Bragg only long enough to wink. The police got there in time to arrest Johnny Bragg, somehow, on a rape charge, and as they had a file drawer of unsolved cases at the stationhouse, Johnny Bragg was now serving six 99-year sentences, which was entirely two many threes for comfort. But Johnny Bragg knew he had not been delivered from blindness at age 7 just to stare at the walls of a 6-by-8 cell, so he practiced, food bucket over his head for reverb, while his sorry excuse for a vocal group woofed the hour away. Johnny Bragg wondered whether Bill Kenny ever had this trouble with the Ink Spots. He doubted it. He yanked off the bucket, found the outside air just as hot and close as in, and said:
“Daddy Mention this, Daddy Mention that, Daddy Mention shit. How many times Daddy Mention ever got your asses over the wall? Huh? Marcell? Even you can count up to nothing. Are we going to practice today or not?”
The others made no move. “We was just talking,” Ed mumbled.
“Some of us,” said William, his shoulders back, thumbs seeking purchase on absent suspenders, “think a whole lot of Daddy Mention.”
“I done time with him,” Marcell said. “South Carolina, summer of ’52. He whistled down an eagle and flew off over the Congaree. He did! I knew a man who talked to a guard who was in the yard with his back turned and heard it happen.”
“Wait, now,” William said. “It was Parchman he busted out of that summer. Raised so many sparks gnawing his bars he started a fire that he walked right through and out the door, Shadrach, Meshach, Abednego.”
Now all the others chimed in with their own, competing accounts, and Johnny Bragg shook his head.
“My people, my people,” he said. “My race, but not my taste. What does it matter how many prisons Daddy Mention got out of at once? Here we sit when Daddy Mention goes in, and here we sit when Daddy Mention goes out. You are four sad gum-beaters.”
Johnny Bragg cast down his bucket and tried to walk away, but the effect was spoiled by a guard who made him pick it up. Those damn things cost money, and he didn’t want to eat out of his other bucket, did he?
That night he woke to find Daddy Mention standing beside his bed, looking down and smiling. He was a lot older than Johnny Bragg had expected. Johnny Bragg asked, you come to spring me? and Daddy Mention said, hell, no, and Johnny Bragg asked, why you here, then? and Daddy Mention asked, why are you? And then Johnny Bragg—who would never escape, who would serve another three years and be let out and be sent back to serve six more and then be released into a world where even the Ink Spots were forgotten—woke up a second time and woke up mad, that he had fretted his sleep on such useless dreams as that.
Late in the day of Daddy Mention’s concert for the governor, old Wilmer, sunburnt and swollen like a boudin sausage, stumped down from the Trailways at the turpentine thicket on the highway, not real close to the prison but as close as the Trailways ran.
Old Wilmer mopped his neck with a scrap of tablecloth as he trudged the shady back road toward the coroner’s entrance. Bluebottle flies zummed past. A faraway woodpecker fired off messages, send help send help send help. Old Wilmer set down his case, unhooked his suspenders, and made water in the road, just to watch his stream cut channels in the clay. Old Wilmer was in no hurry, because he knew that in his absence, the prison surely had gone teetotally to hell, and his mind projected Technicolor slides of chaos and ruin.
He stopped on the plank bridge for a cigarette. As he slung his match into the scum, he thought someone was watching beneath the surface of the water, and the sweat beaded cold on the back of his buzz-cut neck. But then it was just a big old gator, still as a cypress log and playing dead. Full of deer, probably, or coon dog. Every time the hounds were let loose in the swamp, one or two didn’t come back, and the warden would cry like a woman. They lost a lot more dogs than men. At that moment, old Wilmer heard the hounds baying, as if he had summoned them.
Old Wilmer smoked and stared at the gator, and the gator’s one eye stared back. When he was done, old Wilmer felt strangely respectful, did not throw the butt into the water but wedged it into the crack of his shoe between leather and sole, to save for the trusty who collected tobacco and was two-thirds of his way to a Winston by now.
Wilmer found turning his back on the gator surprisingly diff
icult. He looked back once. Standing stiff-legged on the bridge, arms hanging at his sides, was an old Negro in high-water britches, face shaded by a preacher’s hat in the gathering dusk. Wilmer nodded once, the wary acknowledgment one Southern man gives another, and after a pause the figure nodded back—less a nod, really, than a jerk, involuntary, like a flinch from an unseen blow. With the nod was a brief pyrite sparkle in the shadow where the right eye might have been.
Old Wilmer turned and walked on, his fatalism stoked at every step by the baying of hounds and, now, the splashing and cursing of men. The first to stagger into view was that idiot Narvel, now rightly subordinate to the ass end of a hound, Narvel so muck-crusted and bedraggled and snarling that he clearly was on his third or even fourth fruitless sweep through the swamp—and then old Wilmer knew who, of all of them, had got out.
He set down his suitcase till he was done laughing. Then he picked it up and swung it as he walked, and whistled a nasty song his mama’s nurse taught him over a Mason jar of coondick. Maybe he could get Cell A for a proper office, once it was cleansed. Surely no prisoner would be moved in there. Who knew what Daddy Mention left behind?
Guards ran in and out the back gate like roaches from a matchbox. Old Wilmer handed his suitcase to one, really just held it out so that the rushing other’s pistol arm thrust through the handle and snatched it away as a train snatches mail. Old Wilmer wouldn’t need it again for a long, long time. All he needed was here, inside a pair of boots in his locker. Narvel and the other guards might put their faith in locks and walls, muscles and guns, and the color of their skin, but Old Wilmer kept his eyes open, and believed in whatever worked. If he laid down an X of Draw Back Powder, corner to corner of the cell, and burned a black-over-red candle at the crossroads, that would be a start. Old Wilmer reached into his pants pocket, touched the little nine-knotted bundle of devil’s shoestrings, and strode whistling into the prison.
Much that is said about Daddy Mention is not true, and much of the rest is lies. Many of these lies were told by Daddy Mention himself to begin with, and he is always pleased, at a general store or a hog-killing or a shrimp boil, when one he invented is told back to him. They were whoppers to begin with, but my how they grew!
