Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Mac Reily’s shotgun dragged across twigs and branches as he swung it up. The safety stuck and he fumbled to fire one barrel. In the following silence tinny bits of shot rattled down echoing rocks. He saw bushes move slightly, fired the second barrel. Reloaded and fired twice again.

  Jimbo was moving, struggling to his knees, cursing in a hoarse whisper, “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn.” His left hand was reaching behind his back, straining to reach the knife stuck in his shoulder.

  In the pastures below, Charles’s horse startled and backed at the sound of the shots. “Easy,” he said automatically. “Easy now.”

  “Hey, boss,” Harold Frazier shouted.

  “I heard.” Charles stood up, rubbed the horse’s nose.

  Atwell raced out of the fog, came to a jerking halt at Charles’s side. “Boss!”

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “You heard, boss. Shotguns.”

  “You could kill that horse.”

  Atwell slid to the ground. “Man, I don’t like shooting.”

  “Goddamn fool.” Charles hesitated, decided. “Harold,” he yelled. “Come on back.”

  “Yeah, boss.” His horse snorted as he swung into the saddle.

  The three stood together, listening. Hearing small sounds that might have been voices. But mostly silence.

  Charles began walking his horse in circles. He was stiff and tired and suddenly sleepy.

  “We are just fixing to wait here?” Atwell asked. “There ain’t no reason to wait here.”

  Charles said flatly, “You sneak away on me now and you sure as hell be looking for another job tomorrow.”

  Atwell grinned and shrugged and took a bite of his plug tobacco. Charles lit a cigarette. Frazier walked a few feet away and urinated. A bird or two stirred, fluttered, then grew quiet.

  Now they could feel morning coming, the restlessness in the air, the wind from the turning globe.

  Faint distant voices. Then, clearly, three shots. A pause and three more.

  “Boss, you hear that?”

  Charles nodded. Something was wrong.

  “Hold your bridles.” Charles fired a single shot in the air. Eventually a shotgun answered.

  “We wait some more.”

  A couple of crows flapped overhead, talking.

  “You figure they can find us, boss?”

  “Yep,” Charles said.

  Methodically, every fifteen minutes, without getting up, Charles fired a single shot over his head. Frazier and Atwell, hunched over, dozing, didn’t move.

  The mist lightened to the color of a mourning dove.

  “There they are.” Frazier stood up, pointed.

  A steady rattle of loose shale down the slopes. Then four men, carrying a fifth between them. All of them reeking of sweat and alcohol and blood.

  Mac Reily said, “Boss, he was right there, the nigger kid, and he had a knife.”

  Jimbo was breathing in short snorting gasps, the whites of his eyes showed. He hiccoughed and belched bubbles of sour whiskey.

  “How much you give him to drink?” Charles said.

  “He was hurting,” Leroy Green said.

  George Johnson said, “After he couldn’t walk no more, we carried him.”

  “That is some rough country,” Bubba Johnson added. “We kept falling down. Even with the torches we couldn’t see nothing.”

  “We all been drinking,” Mac Reily said and blinked his eyes, slowly.

  Charles said, “Put him down.”

  The knife had gone into the upper shoulder, almost the neck. Blood had soaked through shirt and sweater and heavy wool jacket but now was only an oozing trickle.

  “We got to get him to a doctor.” Charles straightened up. “We can put him on my horse. Atwell’s the smallest and lightest, so he rides with him and holds him on.”

  “Boss,” Atwell said, “I am plain gonna get blood all over me.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Charles said quietly, “I will kill you.”

  Atwell shrugged, then nodded.

  “Frazier, you go along too. I don’t want Jimbo shook up. When you get to the road, you wait. Car’ll be along to pick him up.”

  Frazier’s wide black face smiled briefly. “Sure, boss.”

  “Bubba, you go stick your head in that creek and sober up, then you take that horse there and go on in to the office. You get yourself a car and fetch Jimbo. And send somebody to bring horses to us.”

  Bubba left at a fast trot, tack jingling. Frazier and Jimbo and Atwell moved away into the thinning fog.

  The sun was a hazy disk, a little wind was rising; it would be a clear day. “Well,” Charles said, “we might as well start walking as stand around.”

  They straggled after him, guns over their sagging shoulders. At the swift-running shallows of Laurel Ford, Charles, Reily, and Johnson crossed dry-shod, hopping from rock to rock. Leroy Green, off balance with a sack tied to his back like a game bag, slipped ankle deep into the cold water.

  “He’s gonna freeze to death before we get home.” Mac Reily laughed as Leroy scrambled up the bank.

  “Don’t worry about him,” Charles said. “He’s too drunk to freeze.”

  Leroy Green said, “Maybe I oughta drown it and save all the carrying.”

  “Drown what?”

  Leroy’s thin ferret face grinned. “I kept one from up there. A real little one. The one Jimbo was holding when he got knifed.”

  “Jesus God Almighty.” Charles sighed wearily. “I have got me one bunch of crazy coons.”

  Mac Reily shrugged. “It’s dead anyway, most like.”

  Johnson nodded. “I ain’t seen it move for a long while.”

  “What?” Charles said. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “One of them,” Leroy said, “from the camp back there. There was two, boss. One with the knife run off when Mac started shooting. I grabbed this one and put it in a sack. They was so hard to catch, I figured I’d just keep one.”

  “One what?”

  “A nigger kid, a real little one. I’ll show you.”

  He unhooked the sack and reached in. Then yelled and stood, shaking his right hand. “Fucking bit me!”

  Mac Reily roared with laughter, hunched over, slapping his knees. Leroy rushed at him, head down, sending him sprawling backward.

  Charles grabbed Leroy, swung him around. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  “Get out the way, white man.”

  Mac Reily lay on the ground, giggling drunk. “His pet play toy done bit him.”

  “Goddamn it, Mac, shut up”—Charles shoved a hand in Leroy’s chest, pushing him back—“before I shoot one of you and it don’t much matter to me which one.”

  A pause. A hiccough. Mac Reily said, “I done finished, boss. I’m on my way home.”

  Leroy rubbed his hand. “Drew blood.”

  “What did?”

  “I told you, boss. I caught this little one.” He picked up the sack and began twirling it around his head. “And I am plain finished with it.”

  Charles Tucker caught his arm. “You trying to kill it? Give it to me.”

  Leroy stopped swinging the sack. “I fetched it all the way down, carrying Jimbo too.”

  “I want it,” Charles Tucker said. “Give it here.”

  Leroy stared at him, silent, weaving a little on his feet, sagging with tiredness, eyes so red they might have been bleeding, sweating sour alcohol into the cold air, the sickness of a mean hangover beginning in his stomach. “I caught it and it’s mine.”

  “I’ll give you five dollars for it,” Charles said.

  Leroy held out his hand for the money.

  LATE that morning—fog burned off, clear sky overhead—Charles drove to Sellers Crossing, to the garage his brother Samuel owned. It was empty, not a car, not a customer.

  “Where’s he at?” Charles shouted to Jaybird, the black boy who pumped gas.

  Jaybird said, “Gone to eat.”

 
; Charles walked through the small office to the back storage room. The closet there was filled with odd bits of things: a shovel with a broken handle, a short length of towing chain, a Ford steering wheel, a few small cans of paint, and a stiffened brush. He dragged them out, clearing the floor, then got the sack from his truck. Carefully, warily, he loosened the fastenings, put it in the closet, and closed the door. There was no key, so he wedged a chair under the handle. Then he sat at Sam’s desk, feet up, and waited.

  “You look like shit.” Sam hung his jacket on the wall rack. “And you got blood all over you.”

  “I been out hunting all night.”

  A pan of peanuts and crackers was parching on top the coal stove. Sam took a handful and looked around. “Where’s the other chair?”

  “Blocking the door,” Charles said.

  Sam chewed slowly, spitting peanut shells to the floor. “You want me to keep asking questions or you fixing to tell me??

  “Maybe you better come see.”

  Charles switched on the overhead light, moved the chair, opened the door.

  Sam said, “At first I thought it was a groundhog.”

  “Looks kind of like it.”

  “It’s all brown and black and the sack looks like fur and it’s got those same shiny black eyes.”

  “It’s a nigger kid, a real little one.”

  The child stared at them from the jumbled heap of sacking and ragged wool that circled it like ripples in a pool.

  “It stinks like an animal, for sure.”

  “I bought it,” Charles Tucker said. “So I guess it belongs to me. Only I don’t know what to do with it.”

  “You think it’s hungry?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so.”

  “We feed it then.” Sam took the cat’s bowl from the corner of the room, crumbled in two crackers from the pan on the stove, and added the last of the milk from a bottle on the windowsill. “Gone sour, but that don’t matter none.” He put it inside the closet. Charles closed the door and wedged the chair against it.

  “Now what?” Sam said.

  “I got to leave it here for a while.” Charles scrubbed at the itching stubble of his beard. “I got to clean up and go to work. There’s a big shipment of hams to go on the five o’clock train and I got to check the invoices. After that I go tell Mr. Wilson everything that happened.”

  Mr. Wilson, coughing lightly, delicately, stood by his study window. Behind him was the dark vastness of Aikens Grove Plantation, around him a kind of halo—silver hair, gray ascot, gray tweeds.

  Charles Tucker sat in the straight-backed leather chair and waited.

  “It is over then.” Mr. Wilson’s voice was husky and soft. “You do not think he will return?”

  “He won t.”

  “Was he hit?”

  “Maybe.”

  But that’s not why he won’t be back. He won’t be back because we’ve won. We’ve taken the little one away from him. That’s why he’s gone.

  “A boy, you said?”

  “One of the men saw him close up. Yes, sir.”

  Mr. Wilson folded his handkerchief and repeated, “A boy.”

  “Yes, sir,” Charles said. “There was just two of them. A boy and the young one we caught.”

  Mr. Wilson sat at his leather-topped desk, hands folded prayerfully, fingers touching closed eyes, as if his head had grown too heavy for his neck. “Homeless?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mr. Wilson tapped his praying hands on his forehead. “The Lord seems to have given us this least of his flock, so I suppose we must take care of it. Boy or girl?”

  “I don’t know,” Charles said. “It bites and I haven’t had time to look.”

  Mr. Wilson coughed out his laugh. “Whatever it is, we must see that it goes on its way in life. Perhaps we could pay one of the local Negro families to raise it.”

  Charles shook his head. “None of them will take it. They say it’s a devil child.”

  “Well, then, is there a county orphanage for Negroes?”

  “No, sir.”

  Mr. Wilson stood up again, impatient. “I shall make a few telephone calls in the morning. There will be a place for it somewhere. Now, take it to a doctor immediately, it’s bound to be infected. There must be a Negro doctor somewhere in the county. What do the Negroes do when they get sick?”

  They mostly die, like all poor people, Charles answered silently. Aloud he said, “Yes, sir.”

  He left, walking carefully over polished floors, past furniture that gleamed red-brown with wax, past gold-framed portraits, and gold-framed mirrors, along halls where chandeliers tinkled slightly at his passing—where everything was hushed and muted.

  Charles thought: I know how this looked to the nigger kid. A place with columns and steps and dozens of windows all shining fresh polished. When he finally sneaked a look inside and saw what I am seeing now, he hated it with a fury he never felt before in his life.

  The houseman opened the door for him, and Charles stepped into the evening dark.

  And went on thinking.

  If times were different, or if things were different, I might just be out there with him. I might even be him.

  That thought so frightened him that he broke into a sweat, drops drying in the cold, so that he shivered all over.

  By eight that evening he was back in Sellers Crossing. All up and down the slopes of town the houses showed their lighted windows, and the streets were empty. Sam waited in the office doorway. “Come on in, baby brother.”

  The stove was out, the tin pie plate of peanuts empty.

  “You smell something, baby brother?” Sam asked.

  “Seems I do.”

  “Smells to me like your little pet shit all over the place.”

  “I’ll clean up.”

  “I got this.” Sam pointed to an amber-colored bottle of Clorox.

  “Mr. Wilson says he’ll find a place for the kid. He says he’ll pay for a doctor.”

  Sam whistled. “You suppose he’d done that if it was some white cracker’s whelp?”

  “No.” Charles took a swallow of whiskey from the bottle Sam offered him. The smell grew worse.

  “Okay now,” Sam said. “I know where the nigger doctor lives. I figure we take the kid there.”

  “He’ll put it in the hospital, don’t you think?”

  “He’ll sure as hell have to do something with it, baby brother. I ain’t keeping it, and you ain’t either.”

  Charles nodded. “Why’d I take it, you tell me that.”

  “ ’Cause you are one sweet somebody?”

  “Why didn’t I just leave it?”

  “Come on, bro.” Sam lifted a wire dog cage to the table and handed Charles a piece of horse blanket. “Wrap the kid in that and put it in the cage.”

  They opened the closet, carefully.

  The food was gone, the cat’s bowl turned over and pushed against the far wall. A yellow scum of diarrhea covered the floor. Charles pushed his sleeve far up, above his elbow, before he reached for the bundle of brown and gray with the small black raisin eyes. It didn’t move, didn’t even blink. He picked it up by the back of the neck, like a kitten. Bits of things fell from it, knucklebones, a dried frog’s leg, bone beads, a bright blue-jay feather. He put the child on the blanket, gathered the edges together, and lifted the entire bundle into the dog cage.

  “Now,” Sam said, “you clean up and then we go find us a doctor.”

  Gerttown, Niggertown most people called it, was a grid of unpaved streets on the steep slopes of the east side of town—small houses with fenced yards broom-swept to flat bare earth, small churches whose doors were flanked by young pine trees growing in old car tires. The window shades of all the houses were drawn tight, shut against the dark.

  They found the house at a corner, under a streetlight. It was newly painted pale pink; there were a dozen geranium pots on the porch, pushed far back against the house for shelter against the cold. The fence had a sign: DR. WINSTON H
ILL.

  Sam pounded on the front door, the sounds echoing like gunshots in the quiet neighborhood. “Hey, Doc!”

  He opened the door, a short heavy man, light-skinned and balding, only a crinkly fringe of hair like a wreath around his ears. He wore a red sweater, its pocket ripped, and a white shirt. He’d taken off the detachable collar, leaving the button in place in the band. He’d been eating dinner; the smell of frying fat and onions swirled around him. He nodded to someone, a quick short bob of the head, and stepped out, closing the door.

  “You the doctor?”

  “I am the only Negro doctor in the county, yes. But I do not treat white people.”

  “It ain’t white,” Sam said, “and it ain’t even ours. You just listen to what my brother’s got to say.”

  When Charles finished, the doctor said, “I have no facilities to care for such a child.”

  Nearby, a rooster crowed half a call and was silent. Farther away a dog howled long thin strips of sound.

  “I hate to hear a dog like that,” Sam said, “makes my skin creep.”

  Charles said, “I told you we’d pay. You just have to clean it up and keep it until we find a permanent place.”

  “Today in the Negro wing of the hospital”—the doctor moved a step backward until he was leaning against his front door—“I treated four stab wounds, one of them the man who was with you last night, and two ice-pick wounds, both fatal. I delivered a dead child to a woman who had been in labor over twenty-four hours before her family called me. I amputated the lower arm of a careless sawmill worker. I set the broken leg of a drunken school janitor who fell from the second-story window he was repairing. I saw two new cases of tuberculosis, which I can do nothing for. I saw half a dozen children with scarlet fever, all from the same house; they will probably die. Three cases of gangrene in diabetics; they will certainly lose those limbs. I did a tracheotomy on a child with diphtheria. I signed the death certificate of another child who died of complications of the infantile paralysis she contracted last summer. I showed an old man how to wear a truss. The living went home to their families, excepting a very few. Those I had to admit to the hospital, which is so crowded even the halls are filled. There is no available bed, there is not even available floor space. I will treat this child here, now, like any other patient. But it must return home after.”