Cole Dust Cole

by Micheal Maxwell

  The End

  Cole smiled and turned to the next entry. September 23, 24, 25 and 26 were scribbled out. Each entry had one or two sentences but they were difficult, if not impossible to read. In the margin next to the abandoned entries were the words “Harder than I thought.” Cole turned the page and found in the crisp script of pen and black ink a new entry.

  October 1, 1912

  I am going to start over fresh. Effie told our class that in the future people will be interested in what we have written if it only tells about our life and what we do. I thought it would be boring. I still want to write stories instead. I will try to make my life like a story. I went back and read the beginning of Great Expectations but it was no help. My pa has a new book of Charles Dickens called David Copperfield. I started reading it. It will be my guide.

  Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my story, with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on February 15, 1900 at seven o’clock in the evening. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.

  Cole smiled at the young George’s obvious plagiarizing of Dickens’ text. As he scanned across the page the remodeling of Dickens’ prose gave way little by little to the words and thoughts of the young writer.

  I have three sisters and two brothers. I am told I had two more sisters and a brother but they died before I was born. I am the baby of the family as I am so often reminded, and I am so, by some twenty-four years. All my brothers and sisters are married except for Effie who is the oldest. She has the room next to mine. Sometimes I can hear her crying at night. I would like to see what the matter is but I would not know what to say.

  Albert is my oldest brother and his wife is Maggie. She is fat and has red hair. I love to hear her laugh. They have a sickly boy named Eldon who is much older than me. He can’t play or go outside much.

  I never met my sister Gertie, she went to Oklahoma City to take a secretary course and married a banker from Chicago named Winston. They send a Christmas card every year but that’s about it. I don’t know if they have any children. Nobody talks about them much.

  My brother Will is a farmer. His wife Sarah’s family grows wheat. They live in Kansas. In the summer I go to stay with them for a couple of weeks and get to ride the mowing machines. They have a boy named Roy, he is a man almost as old as Will. He was Sarah’s son when they got married. Her first husband died working in the wheat fields.

  My other sister I don’t like much. Her name is Grace. She is mean and is always bawling me out for the least little thing. She has three girls, Faith, Hope and Charity, she thinks they are perfect. Her husband Pete is scared of her. Pa says he’s henpecked. I peed in the jug of lemonade Mama made for them. They didn’t get sick or nothin’. I hate the girls.

  Today Effie went with me to the library and I got Oliver Twist by Mr. Charles Dickens. I wish I could write like him.

  Cole was delighted at the thought of his grandfather nearly a hundred years ago sharing his love for Charles Dickens. As he flipped through the pages, most of the entries held little interest. Got up, went to school, had an egg sandwich for lunch, did my chores, read in the kitchen, stole ginger cookies from the jar, or worked on my sums. But it was the occasional window into the Sage house that fascinated Cole.

  Tonight we had family band. I of course do not share the talents of my folks or brothers and sisters. I do my best to chord along on the guitar but often play the wrong ones. I would rather sing than play. Papa plays the bass mandolin. Mama plays piano. Albert and Maggie both play mandolins. Eldon just watches. Grace and the girls play fiddles. Pete and I play guitar. My favorite is when we play “Aura Lee”. My mama asked me to sing it tonight. At first I sang very soft, but it got easier as I went along. I like to sing.

  The entry a few pages later revealed yet another talent of the young George Sage.

  For reasons known only to my sister and mother, they entered me in a talent show at the Ladies Auxiliary of the Order of Eagles. I did a recitation of, “The Cowboys’ Christmas Ball.” About half way through I got so thirsty I couldn’t feel my tongue. By the time I got to “Oh, Bill, I sha’n’t forget yer, and I’ll often times recall, That lively gaited sworray.” My whole mouth was like leather. To my great amazement, I won! I got a blue ribbon and a five dollar bill!

  As he stood leaning against the window sill a cool breeze gave Cole a shudder. He stuck his finger in the notebook to hold his place and returned to the trunk. He gathered the bundle of notebooks he had untied and then slipped his fingers through a second bundle. Cole nudged the lid of the trunk closed with his foot and took the notebooks downstairs.

  At the kitchen table Cole laid out the bundles. Surprisingly, they were all in chronological date order. He went to the ice chest on the counter and got a soda. With his finger still holding his place he took the notebook and his soda out to the front porch. The rocking chair Cole bought from Burkett & Myers looked to be the perfect place to continue his reading. Cole sat down, leaned back and put his feet up on the railing. He opened the notebook and scanned over several pages when something caught his eye.

  Last night my friend Lloyd came to my house about 11:00. He climbed up the trellis and pecked on my window to wake me up.

  “Get dressed,” Lloyd whispered.

  “Are you crazy? Why?”

  “They’re hangin’ that nigger Tom Caulfield at the livery stable. Come on. We’ll miss it.”

  I dressed as quick as I could and climbed down the trellis as quiet as I could. We took the back streets and come to the livery from the back end. A group of men with lanterns and torches were gathered out front. We climbed through the corral and hid behind the gunnysack bin. I thought for a minute that Mr. Ellis saw us, but if he did, he didn’t pay us any mind.

  “This will be a good place to watch from,” Lloyd whispered.

  “Why are they hangin’ him? He kill somebody?” I asked Lloyd.

  “They caught him in bed with that dee-vorced woman that lives over by the train station.”

  “They are hangin’ him for sleepin’?”

  “No you fool, he was humpin’ her.”

  “He was what?” I had no idea what Lloyd was talkin’ about.

  “Don’t you know nothin’?” Lloyd made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and poked back and forth through the hole with the middle finger of his other hand. “They were doin’ the deed, like dogs in heat, you know.”

  This is new to me. Pa was starting to tell me about babies and how they are made one day, but Effie came in and he stopped.

  The crowd of men was getting bigger. Wagons and horses and even two automobiles were now in the street. There was a loud cheer and there in the middle of the crowd was Tom Caulfield. His eyes were red and there was blood and snot running from his nose. Men reached out and hit and spit on him as they passed him through the crowd. His hands were tied behind his back. His britches were around his feet. Mr. Connors, the deacon at the Baptist Church, took Tom by the neck and guided and pushed him to the livery stable doors.

  “Quiet down now!” Mr. Connors yelled out. “Quiet down. This is going to be done right or not at all!” As he shouted to the crowd it became quieter.

  “Here we go, Georgie,” Lloyd said in a forced whisper.

  “This here nigger was caught in the act of fornication with Nora Carter, a white woman. We need to teach the niggers of this town what their place is, and it ain’t in the beds of our white women.”

  “How come they ain’t hangin’ her?” I asked Lloyd.

  ““Hush” was all he said.

  The crowd cheered and called out to Tom Caulfield. They called him all kinds of names. The men were all screaming mad. A fat man in a bowler hat stepped up to Mr. Connors and handed him a coil of new rope. The old man that owns the livery stable, Bob Philburn, took the rope and fashioned it into a noose.<
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  “Tom Caulfield, prepare to meet your maker. May God look past your deeds to examine your black heart.”

  Behind where we were hiding I heard a noise like crunching gravel. In the flickers of the lamps and torches I saw three black men crouched down behind the corral. I was looking eye to eye with a man with a thick scar that ran down his cheek and across his mouth, parting his thick bottom lip into two pieces. He raised his finger and drew it across his throat like he was cutting it with a knife, then he held his finger to his lips telling me to hush. I turned back around and didn’t look back again.

  All of a sudden the loft doors of the livery barn opened and old Bob appeared with the noose. He shinnied out on the beam where the hay pulley is and looped the rope through it and dropped the rope down to Mr. Connors. The crowd cheered again. Mr. Connors put the noose around Tom Caulfield’s neck.

  “Please don’t do this thing!” Caulfield screamed. He was crying and twisting and trying to get his hands free.

  “Hang ‘em! Hang the nigger!” The crowd began to yell all at the same time over and over.

  Mr. Connors took a step back and the rope grew tight. “I’m gonna need a hand here,” Connors said to some men near him.

  The men stepped forward and like the tug ‘o’ war at the Fourth of July picnic began to pull the rope. Tom Caulfield’s feet left the ground. His feet kicked and his britches fell off and hit the ground. Higher and higher they pulled him. His tongue was sticking out of his mouth. It was a strange purple color. His legs kicked wildly. His eyes were nearly about to pop from his head. All of a sudden he began to piss. The spray went everywhere. Men in the crowd screamed and cursed and moved back. Then it happened. The strangest thing I ever saw. Watery shit blew all down his legs and his kicking flung it out over the crowd. His mess hit the barn door and ran down the whitewashed boards. Mr. Connors was hit in the face with it and began to puke right there in the street.

  Lloyd started to laugh and then threw his hand up over his face.

  “We got to get out of here. I want to go home,” I said.

  Lloyd shook his head no. But I got up and ran all the way home. Right past the black men at the corral. I didn’t look back and I didn’t stop running until I was back up the trellis. I got my clothes off and got my nightshirt back on and pulled the covers up over my head. I sure hope Jesus will forgive me for seeing what I saw tonight.

  Cole laid the notebook in his lap and rubbed his hands through his hair. Twelve years old, he thought. He tried to imagine a twelve-year-old boy lying in bed in the dark of the night with the visions of what he had just seen swirling around in his head. In that one night, in that one event, his innocence died with Tom Caulfield.

  SEVEN

  At eight o’clock Monday morning Cole pulled up in front of the offices of Western Farmers Electric Co-Op. He dropped by the ATM in front of the First National Bank on his way, and withdrew four hundred dollars for the deposits. Ten minutes later, he had an order for power to be turned on that afternoon and his four hundred dollars still in his pocket.

  “If you don’t pay we turn the juice off,” a smiling young woman in her twenties told him. “You can’t take any with ya so we gotcha comin’ and goin’.”

  With a bag of chocolate donuts and two pint cartons of milk from Sandy’s Sweet Shoppe in the seat next to him Cole headed for home. By the time he arrived the electricity was turned on and in his driveway sat a truck from Swanson Gas Company.

  “Morning,” said a man in a blue uniform with Burt stitched on his shirt. “Dry as a bone. Just about full now though.” He approached Cole with his hand out. “Burt Swanson.”

  “Cole Sage.”

  “I’ll check the stove and furnace when I finish up here. Make sure they don’t leak. Been off quite a while. Don’t want to welcome you to town by blowin’ you up,” Burt said jovially. Thirty minutes later he put in a new valve on the furnace and fired up all four burners on the stove, lit the oven and declared everything in working order.

  Cole walked from room to room flicking the light switches on and off. Three bulbs in the house worked, eight needed replaced. It came as no great surprise the bulbs in the three lamps he purchased from Burkett & Myers were dead. He returned to the kitchen and opened the door of his new almond colored refrigerator’s freezer section. Cold as ice. The food compartment was cold and the walls were dry. He emptied the contents of the ice chest into the refrigerator and put the chest on the back porch to dry.

  As he passed the table he glanced down at the pile of notebooks. Before the sun went down the night before he worked his way through 1912 and 1913. Cole ran his fingers across the notebook labeled March 1914. He knew he had better things to do but the pull was so strong to read more he could not resist. He picked up the notebook and scanned the first page.

  March 31, 1914

  The weather has been bad. We have heard reports of several tornadoes to the east of us. I have only seen one in my life. I am ready to see another. I’m not afraid of a storm like some kids at school. We need a little excitement around here.

  It was apparent from George’s entries that his life slipped into a dull sameness. The entries were getting shorter and he would miss days in a row. He even began to take short cuts on the format. It became harder and harder to tell the date since he began the entries with only the day of the week. In April though, a new tone crept into the entries, and that tone was directly connected to the appearance on the pages of Marie Louise Nelson.

  Wednesday

  A new girl came to the school today. She is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen. Even her name is pretty, Marie Louise Nelson. Lloyd said he heard that she is thirteen and in the form just below us. Her family moved into the Woodbridge house and from my room if I stick my head out the window far enough I can see the tip of one of the gables on her house.

  Friday

  Today I spoke with Marie Louise Nelson. During arithmetic I saw her looking for chalk. She must have forgotten to bring extra. When Effie was putting a problem on the board I took a piece of chalk to Marie Louise.

  “Please take one of mine,” I said

  “Oh, thank you so much,” she replied shyly.

  Her cheeks turned a deep shade of red. It was like the blush on a rose. I think I shall never see anything as lovely as Marie Louise Nelson.

  Cole smiled at the expression of first love. The thought of his own first infatuation came rolling back. He could still feel the thrill at the memory of Susie Larson in Mrs. Pontachelli’s fourth grade class. He recalled the little fair skinned girl with hair so blonde it was nearly white. Cole kissed her on the top of the Jungle Gym then scurried down and ran to play dodge ball with the boys. By first year of high school Susie was no longer fair skinned. The ravishes of teenage acne pitted and scarred away her childhood beauty. Cole recalled passing her in the hall once and smiling at her, she did not return his smile. He hoped Marie Louise fared better.

  Sunday

  Reverend Talley was in fine form today. He talked about the Probable Son. This fellow took his Pa’s money and went off to the big city. He wasted it all on parties and harlots (I think that’s Bible talk for whores) then when the money ran out he came back. His Pa killed his best heifer and his brother got mad. The reverend says that’s like God. He will always take us back. He’s a fine storyteller.

  On the way out I saw Marie Louise. The sun through the front doors was shining through her hair and in her white frock she looked like an angel straight out of heaven. I almost stopped breathing when her ma and my ma stopped to talk. I couldn’t even hear what they were saying; I could only stare at Marie Louise. She just looked down at her shoes mostly. Mrs. Nelson shook my hand and said it was nice to meet me. It was the best thing ma ever did. All the way home I could still see Marie Louise in my mind’s eye. I can see her still.

  There were three blank pages before the next entry. The top and bottoms of the pages were marked by a thick black border. The handwriting began with a strange hand that
looked as if it were written while the table shook. By the end of the first paragraph or so it smoothed out and George’s recognizable hand returned.

  Tuesday April 27, 1914

  It is a black day in Orvin. I will do my best to write the story of what happened here as best I can. On Friday last, a tornado hit our town. I was in the backyard beating the rugs for ma when the sky began to darken. Ma called out for me to hurry because it looked like it might rain. It had been windy for a couple of days but it hadn’t rained. As I was finishing up with the rugs the wind stopped. Cutter, the Clemens’s dog next door started to howl. As I looked around I saw the sky had turned a very strange greenish tint. The sky to the east was as black as night.

  Mama called me into the house. She was very worried because Effie had gone shopping downtown after school. I ran outside and opened all the shutters on all the windows. Mama went upstairs and pulled open all the windows. Pa had called from the bank and said to get in the storm cellar. He said a twister touched down east of town and it appeared to be heading our way. He would stay at the bank with the tellers and clerks. Pa said not to worry that he was sure Effie would head for the bank.

  Mama got her Bible and a picture album. She told me to grab a loaf a bread and the cheese off the table. We went into the cellar at three thirty; the wind started to blow real hard. It had started to rain.

  Inside the cellar we could hear the wind roaring about. Several times we heard things hitting the house. Once it sounded like a something the size of a cow hit the front of the house. We heard glass breaking and Mama started to cry. The floor above us shook and moaned. I was sure our house had blown away. The wind didn’t stop. It seemed it was getting louder. Once I thought I heard someone outside screaming.