Mississippi Cotton

by Paul H. Yarbrough

  I looked at both of them. “Who is Looty?’

  “He’s a guy we know,” Taylor said.

  “Yeah,” Casey said. “He lives across the cotton field over yonder.” He pointed toward the field. “All by his-self.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Sunday morning seemed to come earlier. Maybe it was because you knew you were going to have to get all dressed up, and you felt tired before you even got out of bed. We had bathed the night before, and after we ate breakfast we were instructed to get a move on. Get dressed so we could get to Sunday School by nine-thirty. I had my sport coat and necktie with a picture of the Lone Ranger and Silver. Even if it did scratch my throat, I liked the way it looked. My Sunday shoes had a nice shine, something I had done before I left home.

  “Now don’t get up there and play in them and scuff them up. You’ve worked hard to get a nice shine on them. Try and keep it for at least one day,” my mother had said. It seemed to me un-shined shoes could keep your feet covered as much as shined ones.

  Taylor and Casey had to make the same sacrifice, getting dressed in Sunday clothes. Cousin Trek had the same attitude my daddy did. Why would you dress like going to church was just anything else? You went to school casually, but you went to Sunday School like you were going to see God, dressed your best. Besides, if you went to see the governor would you go like you were going just anywhere?

  “Let’s go, boys,” Cousin Trek hollered up the stairway. We had already started before he called and almost ran into his voice as we flew down the stairs. We didn’t go in the pickup on Sunday, but instead all climbed into the ‘49 brown Ford sedan. No sitting in the bed of the truck and getting our Wildroot Cream Oil-combed and parted hair blown into an urchin look. No dust coating us from the gravel road. But nothing could stop us from sweating. It was still hot.

  We turned off the highway and as we slowed, approaching downtown, you could hear through the open windows from The New Glory Baptist Church:

  “Oh Victory in Jesus,

  My Savior forever…”

  The colored people, dressed in their Sunday best, were already lifting their voices. Trek blew his horn and waved at one of the late arrivals approaching the front door of the one room church. The man turned and returned the wave.

  “Who was that?” I asked.

  “That was BB. As hard a workin’ man as you’ll ever see, black or white. But he don’t miss church much.”

  Cousin Trek and Cousin Carol went to the First Baptist Church of Cotton City and rarely missed. Farley and I had visited before, and we both knew a lot of Taylor and Casey’s friends. We were a few minutes early, and I got to see some of them. We talked about what we might do the next two weeks before we were told by the director to take our seats, and to please remember that we weren’t outside on the playground.

  Church service began thirty minutes after Sunday School, eleven o’clock. Like most Southern Baptists we started with the Doxology:

  “Praise God from Whom all Blessings Flow,

  Praise Him all ye creatures here below,

  Praise Him above ye heavenly host,

  Praise Father, Son and Holy Ghost.”

  I’ll bet you could have heard us for miles.

  The service would last about an hour, then Cousin Trek would shake a few hands, talk about the sermon and the cotton crop, and Cousin Carol would chat with several friends before we piled in the brown Ford and went back to the farm. Cousin Carol had cooked a big roast, and she would need to get back home to the business of Sunday dinner.

  Cousin Trek moved off to the side with Mr. Hightower and a couple of other men and began to have a conversation, less public, though Casey had gotten within earshot before he was shooed away. He came back over and told Taylor and me what he thought he heard them talking about.

  “I heard one of ‘em say something about Greenville and the body, before they made me leave.”

  “They’re talkin’ about the dead man, I’ll bet you,” Taylor said.

  I wished we were old enough to have gone over and listened, because grownups always had some good stuff to hear that they wouldn’t share. Cousin Carol walked over and put her hand on Taylor’s shoulder. “Go tell your daddy we need to get on home so I can get dinner on the table.”

  We sat down at the table, not having wasted any time on peeling our Sunday clothes; exchanging them for the uniform of the day as my daddy would say—white tee shirts, blue jeans and high-top Keds—at least for me. Casey and Taylor were back into their denim overalls. My Lone Ranger tie was stored for another Sunday.

  “What time’re we supposed to meet BB tomorrow?” Taylor asked. The food was still being passed and Cousin Carol was handing me a large bowl of creamed corn. I peered over it at Cousin Trek, waiting for him to answer Taylor.

  “I’m not sure yet. I’ll prob’ly drive over there this afternoon though.” He was carving the roast and his answer came slowly.

  “Can we go?” Casey asked.

  “May we,” Cousin Carol corrected.

  “Yes, ma’am. May we?” Casey said it like he was choking and mockingly put his hands to his throat.

  “You want to leave the table?” Cousin Trek stopped carving and stared straight at Casey. Smart-aleck behavior could be a problem if you didn’t correct it in a hurry.

  There was a long silence—the period when it would be determined if Casey got to stay at the table or sent to his room and wait. Finally, Cousin Trek went back to carving. Cousin Carol offered Casey a tender look. He lifted his eyes at her. A relieved look appeared over his face. He would live another day.

  “Here you go, Jake.” Cousin Trek lifted a large portion of roast beef between a carving knife and a big fork and reached toward me, an indication I should hold out my plate. “Well, maybe we can all drive over there. A Sunday afternoon drive’ll be good for all of us. Whadaya think, Hon?”

  “Oh, that sounds nice,” she said. “Here, Casey, have some peas.”

  The food was passed, and for a brief period there was no sound other than the clink of dishes and glasses and the scraping of bowls with spoons, along with the polite and soft-spoken “thank you” and “please pass…”

  “Cousin Trek,” I said. “You know we found a dead water moccasin yesterday? It’d been shot.”

  “Oh yeah, Daddy—”

  “Okay, Taylor, one at a time,” Cousin Trek said. “Now Jake, where’d you find the snake?”

  I don’t think the dead snake caught his attention as much as the ‘been shot’ part. “Down at the branch. We found it down there after we went back from dinner.”

  “Yeah, been shot twice in the head. I’ll bet it’s Looty,” Taylor said.

  “Taylor. Jus’ a second, I said. I can only hear one at a time.” Cousin Trek wiped his mouth with his napkin and, in clear violation of a cardinal rule that had been pounded into me over the years, leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “Now, Jake, how do y’all know it was shot?” He clasped his hands together under his chin, almost like he was going to pray.

  “Well.” I pointed to Taylor. “Taylor poked it with a stick and we could see blood and holes in his head…and Casey found two bulletshells.” Casey seemed happy I had brought his name up for something important.

  “Y’all found bullets?” Cousin Carol asked at the mention of bullets.

  “No, Dear, they jus’ found the casins. The bullets were in the snake… they think.” First Hon, then the Dear name. Lord, I don’t know how he could do it. He leaned back from the table. He had one of those looks that only grownups got. The ones where they didn’t get excited, at least not where you could tell, but they seemed interested. “Well, people are always shootin’ those things.”

  “It was a .22,” Taylor said. “I’m tellin’ you, it’s prob’ly Looty.”

  Cousin Trek scooped a spoonful of peas from the bowl. “Well, lots of people have .22s. I don’t think there’s more to this, boys, than jus’ someone shootin’ a poisonous snake. What part of the branch were y’all on whe
n y’all found it? And, anyway, you don’t know whether it was Looty or not, so don’t you go repeatin’ that.”

  “It was at our fishin’ spot—the spot where we left our fish before we came home for dinner,” I said.

  Cousin Carol got up from the table and turned the gas burner on low under the corn. The bowl on the table was empty.

  “Well, I guess somebody jus’ came along and saw it and shot it. Y’all be careful when y’all are fishin’ or even jus’ playin’ around that branch—lots of snakes down there. Pass the corn, Carol, please.” He used her regular name. She passed the peas and looked at him. She didn’t smile, she didn’t frown. She jus’ looked and passed.

  Another dinner, and I had been filled. Cousin Carol was a monster of a cook. For dessert we had the rest of the cherry pie, then got up from the table as soon as we were excused and began clearing the table for her. Casey put a little extra into his efforts.

  Most Sunday afternoons were passed doing whatever seemed fun or just doing something other than work. Often a ride through the countryside, or maybe to stop and visit somebody you hadn’t seen in a while. I think Cousin Trek liked to get out and go somewhere without having to do something when he got there. And I know Cousin Carol liked to get out and get away from the house for a while, because I had heard my mother say the same thing.

  It was always good to have a reason to start out, and a visit to BB’s would be Cousin Trek’s reason. Taylor and Casey and I were going to be helping BB and Mr. Hightower tomorrow, and we could stop by and make sure of the time we were to meet. Besides he wanted me to meet BB, I guess, since I had never met him.

  We drove out and turned onto the highway toward a section of Big Trek’s land about two miles away. BB and his daddy lived about a mile past it on a hundred and twenty acres they farmed. That was in addition to sharecropping part of Big Trek’s. Taylor told me that BB’s momma died when he was a young man, and BB and his daddy also hired out to Mr. Hightower, sometimes on his rented property.

  Ben Samuels, BB’s daddy, had gotten his land from Elizabeth Nash. She had gotten it from Ben Samuels’ parents. It was a twist to a strange story, or maybe I was just too young to keep it straight. Cousin Trek was telling us about the Samuels’ land as we drove. It was mostly for my benefit, I think, since everyone else probably knew about it.

  He told us that Ben’s place was once owned by Jackson McComb’s family. McComb was a Confederate officer whose war ended at Vicksburg when he was seriously wounded in 1863. Unfortunately, some of the Yankees moved northward to the Delta, and McComb’s entire family was killed along with two of three Negro servants, all murdered by Grant’s Yankee marauders. The only survivor was a boy, four years old.

  After the war the carpetbaggers came, swarming like maggots on a wounded carcass. Taxes were pushed up by the occupiers, and many landowners lost their land. McComb somehow kept his. Reconstruction worked a hardship, but he saw his way through it with the help of the young boy who worked from childhood to save the Mississippi farm. Mr. McComb died in 1899. In his will he left the entire one hundred and twenty acres to the young boy, now grown and married with an eleven-year old son, Ben Samuels. But McComb’s will had stipulated that should the former servant have children, the property would go to someone who would hold it for them until they were grown, in the event the parents died. Ben was the only child and McComb had chosen Elizabeth Nash—Looty Nash’s grandmother.

  There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun bore down like a torch. The wind blowing against us in the bed of the truck offered some relief, but tomorrow in the field, hoeing, there would be no wind. No relief. It would just be Mississippi Hot.

  We turned off the highway and onto another gravel road, winding, a curve, then straight, a curve: the road bordered another stream. It was easier to allow the roads to wind than to build a lot of bridges.

  Cousin Trek slowed at the first house we came to. The mailbox had a rural route number hand painted on it and the name, B. Samuels. Cousin Trek pulled into the driveway, a grassless path scoured by the constant movement of vehicles. I could see a big John Deere tractor on the side of the house. It had a tool box balanced on one of the huge tires, as if someone had just been working on it. When we stopped, the dust cloud flowed over the truck and gradually settled like a brown mist. Cousin Carol waved her hand in front of her face and coughed.

  An old colored man stood on the porch, a curved-stem pipe squeezed between his lips. He took it out and waved with it in his hand. “Hello there, Mr. Trek. How y’all doin’?” Chickens pecked and scratched around in the yard, their heads bobbing as if in competition for the last morsel of food.

  “Hot as usual, Ben. How’re you doin’?” Cousin Trek had gotten out, a signal that we could, too, and we piled over the side of the truck. Casey picked up a rock and threw it at a blackbird perched on a fencepost. It stretched its wide wings and lifted itself, flying low and slow across the cornfields.

  “I need to hire dis young fella to watch my corn. Dem birds’s after it all day long.” Ben pointed at a stick cross, adorned with a hat and ragged shirt drooping on it. “Dat scarecrow don’t scare nobody—at least no birds.” He laughed. We laughed with him, looking at the pitiful looking scarecrow.

  “Well, Casey’s a good chunker. I can tell you that,” Cousin Trek said. Casey smiled. I think he liked being called a good anything.

  “Hello, Ben,” Cousin Carol spoke her first words.

  “Hello, Mrs. Mayfield. Looks like you gittin’ an afternoon off.”

  “Well, jus’ a little bit,” she said. Cousin Carol was wearing a broad-brimmed straw hat, but she put her hand under the brim at her forehead to block the glare, anyway. “Watch where you step, Casey.” She pointed at a spot on the ground.

  Casey lifted his foot and looked at it. “I am,” he said. He scraped the bottom of his shoe against the side of the other.

  The original McComb house had been burned to the ground by the Yankees, as well as all outlying houses on the place. The small wooden house Ben Samuels lived in was built many years later as a temporary living place. Gray weathered boards lined its structure from front to back. It was what I had heard my daddy say was a shotgun house. That meant if you walked inside, you could walk all the way to the back without turning a corner. The living room was up front, then down the hall, doors opening into bedrooms, then to the kitchen and out the back door.

  There was a porch on the front with an overhanging roof. An old sofa and a straw-back chair sat where you could watch the sun set. The yard was not cluttered with various articles of junk that many of the houses in the county had. Many country folks often had an assortment of old worn-out and unusable items scattered around their yards: tires; old cars; bits of furniture, appliances, etc. But the Samuels place had nothing unusable. Just a John Deere tractor and some rolled chicken wire.

  “Maybe I ought to hire Looty to come shoot ‘em,” Ben said.

  “Looty, huh? What’s he up to,” Cousin Trek said.

  “I tells you, I don’t really know. He was by here the other day. Said he’d shoot any bird in the corn for ten cents a bird.”

  Ben and Cousin Trek both laughed. I wasn’t sure what part was funny so I didn’t laugh. Cousin Carol didn’t laugh either. I wondered how much more she knew about Looty than I knew. And I wondered what they meant about shooting birds. All I knew was what Taylor and Casey had told me yesterday at the branch.

  Just then a big, muscular colored man walked out on the porch. He had a peach in his hand with what looked like about two good bites gone. He was taller than Cousin Trek who was exactly six feet tall himself. The man was as black a man as I had ever seen, except for those in the Tarzan picture shows. The ones Tarzan always called the Jaconi Tribe. I knew without anyone telling me that this was Big Black Julius, BB.

  “How ya doin’?” Cousin Trek called.

  “Doin’ fine, Mr. Trek. You’re lookin’ fit. Good to see y’all.” He nodded at Cousin Carol. “Mrs. Mayfield, how are you d
oing?”

  “Fine, BB, jus’ fine. Thank you. Good to see you looking so well.” An obvious reference to his war wound. “Been working on the tractor?” She pointed to the side of the house.

  “Yes, ma’am. At least I’m fixin’ to. It’s been missin’ some. Jus’ changed my clothes from church.” He stepped down off the porch. “These boys are lookin’ fit, too. They’ll be off to Ole Miss before you know it.”

  Cousin Trek gave him one of those looks that was supposed to be friendly in a nasty way. Ben smiled then laughed. BB laughed, too.

  “Well, if they do, they’re gonna pay their own way. They’re bound for the cow college if I pay for it. They gonna be farmers, not no sissy doctor or lawyer.”

  “We’ll see,” Cousin Carol said.

  Taylor and Casey and I jus’ listened. We weren’t sure what was funny and what wasn’t. Anyway, Cousin Trek changed the subject.

  “How’s the leg, BB?”

  Cousin Trek said he never was sure why BB didn’t go off to Florida A&M on that scholarship, but by October BB was in Korea. Later, he was in a famous Battle up near China, called the Chosin Reservoir. Cousin Trek said the men called it the Frozen-Chosin. He said there were almost as many casualties from the cold as from the fighting.

  BB got shrapnel in his legs and frostbite in his toes. He was discharged due to his wounds, but he got a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star for helping some other men. Little pieces of shrapnel were still in his leg. The doctors said his leg would be stiff for a while, and that he was lucky he hadn’t lost any toes.

  “Leg’s fine, Mr. Trek. Getting’ better every day. I’ll be up to snuff all the way pretty soon. But now who’s this new fella you got here?” BB looked straight at me and smiled. It was a big pleasant smile. His huge white teeth contrasted against his pure black face. I knew right away why Taylor and Casey called him their friend.

  Cousin Trek put his hand on top of my head. “Jake Conner. He’s our cousin. And the hardest workin’ city boy you ever saw.”