Although Casey and I heard the creak, Taylor motioned in a downward movement with his hand for us to crawl, and in the moonlight I could see him mouth the words, “Be careful, some of these boards are loose.”
Taylor moved to one side of the window. Casey and I raised ourselves just enough to peak in the other side. There was a floor lamp, the single light in the room. There was no one in the front room, but I could see directly across it. The mantle, the jar.
“Is that the body?” Although I whispered so low that I wasn’t sure they could hear me, Taylor pressed his fingers to his lips.
We could see inside the house. My throat felt dry, and I was scared. I was afraid that any minute somebody inside was going to push his face against the window from the inside and give me a heart attack.
The furniture looked old and broken. A cushion chair was leaning to one side, a leg missing. The sofa had been covered with a sheet, but most of the sheet had fallen off so that over half of the sofa was showing. There was a Philco radio on the table by the lamp. If it was on, it was not turned loud enough for us to hear. I thought that it must’ve been about time for Fibber Magee and Molly. Just as the three of us peeked through the window, our fingers gripping the lower edge, all on our knees, we saw it.
We dropped below the window with exchanged looks of panic. What we had seen was racing across the front room, pounding the wooden floor. We heard the jiggling of the front latch. Someone was at the front door trying to get out to us. We dived off the porch and scrambled underneath it just before the front door opened and the screen door swung out.
We lay in the darkness under the porch with the roly-polies and spiders and roaches and moldy, soft ground that had been hidden from the sun all day. I felt my heart beating, I was terrified. Casey was next to me squeezing my arm like he was on the edge of a cliff, his fingernails cutting into my arm. What if it had seen us crawl under the porch? I was too scared to run away, I would have to die here. I tried to hold my breath, fearing my breathing would move the ground like a small tremor and give away our hiding place.
Above we heard footsteps, first toward one end of the porch, then the other. Whoever was there must not have seen us scramble under the porch. I wondered if it was Looty. Casey was squeezed between Taylor and me and was still holding my arm. Our bodies were touching, and I wasn’t sure whose heart was beating fastest because I could feel all three.
We had to get home before we were late. But all we could do was wait. We were in total darkness, the moonlight making a sharp shadow-line at the edge of the porch. But I couldn’t get the image out of my mind. What we had seen… .
It stopped pacing. We heard the creak of the boards as it leaned on one foot, then the other. We waited for the sound of the door. We waited for it to go back inside, we hoped. Then steps: one, two, three; the spring creak of the screen door and the shutting, then clicking of the front door latch.
Taylor whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”
We crawled the length of the porch to one end, then up and ran for the trees. Under the full moon we made our escape and found our bikes. In the hurry, I had bumped my head on the edge of the porch. It hurt like crazy, and I would have yelled under any other circumstances. My fear strangled my pain and we wasted no time in getting home.
We got up early, no sleeping in, no prodding from Cousin Carol was needed. We had not slept much on the porch, and the excitement had kept us talking most of the night, so we were awake by the time it was time to get up. My head still hurt a little. It had a small knot under my hair. We weren’t sure if we had discovered anything or not. Just because somebody was at Looty’s didn’t mean anything, except that whoever it was scared us. For all we knew it was Looty.
We had had only a brief look through the window and jumped under the porch as soon as we saw him. But why would he dress like that? What we had seen was a black silhouette, but the dark outline revealed a caped figure, the cape draped to the knees and a hood over the head.
We put up the pallets and washed up, then gathered for breakfast about seven o’clock. Cousin Trek had eaten earlier and already left the house. Cousin Carol said he would be back before nine, and then we would leave for Clarksdale. She had laid out the schedule and wanted to talk about who we might see and who she hoped we didn’t see. She had no idea we were paying little attention. She seemed excited for different reasons than we were.
Casey ate heartily, a sign he had come out of his mental shock from last night. Cousin Carol shrieked, “Casey! Stop that!” He was about to scratch the inside of his ear with his cereal spoon. He was definitely back to normal.
Taylor ate and once or twice glanced at me but said nothing. Course there wasn’t much we could say in front of Cousin Carol.
Cousin Carol had dressed for the trip. She puttered around the house waiting for Cousin Trek while Casey and Taylor and I hung around the couch, whispering when we could about last night. Course we had talked about it last night on the porch about a hundred times so that we were about to get bored with our own talk.
It seemed like a real big event last night. In the daytime, and having talked about it over and over, we began to think maybe what we saw was just Looty after all, and we had just got scared in the dark.
“Everybody ready?” Cousin Trek said. It was jus’ before nine. He had walked in and announced that the truck was gassed up and anytime we were ready, he was. What that meant, was that he was ready and we should be. “By the way, when I stopped by the feed store they were talking about how Looty had been taken in for questioning early yesterday afternoon. Word down there was he was held all night.”
Cousin Carol said, “Yes, well let’s not talk about it in front of the boys.”
Too late. We had heard. If Looty wasn’t at his house, who was? Who had walked out on the porch? Who would dress like… like a…vampire?
CHAPTER 10
We piled in the truck. Jostling down the gravel road to the highway, we began talking again about last night at Looty’s house. Each of us said he wasn’t scared as much as the others. And now his being taken in for questioning renewed our interest. I really didn’t think Looty would kill anybody, but I didn’t know him. They were probably questioning him just because he had been in jail before. And maybe because he was kind of simple, I guess. People who were a little slow got picked on more than others.
Soon, the long trip to Clarksdale took our full attention. No cotton to hoe. No work. Nothing to do but ride and let the wind blow in our faces.
“Wish I had a gun,” Taylor hollered. “I’d like to shoot some of them crows up there.”
Crows perched on the telephone wires along the highway. The long rows of crossed poles with wires strung from pole to pole made inviting places for birds in search of rodents or insects in the fields, or even crops. Mississippi cotton was still king, but there was a lot of corn and other food crops. Birds were eaters, especially crows.
“Aw, yeah,” Casey said, “like you could hit something outta the back of this truck goin’ ‘bout a hundred miles an hour.”
“Aw shutup, nitwit. I can shoot anything I can see. And, anyhow we ain’t goin’ no hundred miles an hour.”
I held my hand up and over the side of the truck. The wind rushed hard against it as I forced it into the airstream. “I’d say that’s about fifty miles an hour.”
Taylor and Casey did the same thing. Through some magical calculation known only to us, we were able to determine the speed of the truck by the rush of wind against our hands.
“About fifty-two,” Taylor said.
“A hundred,” Casey said.
A rapid tap, tap, tap, on the window of the cab from Cousin Carol.
“Don’t put your hands out like that! You want some car to knock them off?” She yelled loud enough to hear through the glass. She probably broke Cousin Trek’s eardrums. Sometimes it wasn’t easy to have fun.
“I hope we get to eat dinner at Pete and Buger’s café,” Casey said. The subject of shooting bir
ds had passed.
“Yeah, me, too,” Taylor said. “Better’n any café around here. Better hamburgers anyway.”
“Yeah, I think we ate there back when Farley and I were here about five years ago or something. I was only five or six. I remember they got a pinball machine.”
“Yeah, but Daddy’ll have a heart attack if we ask him if we can play it.”
“Yeah, same with mine,” I said.
“Our daddy’ll say, ‘put your own money in it if you want, but not mine,’” Casey said. He tried talking in a low voice like a man. We all laughed. Pinball machine warnings were legendary.
“Big Trek likes to eat there. And he’ll tell Daddy we oughta eat there because we don’t know when we’ll be back,” Taylor said. “Mostly Big Trek’ll jus’ wanna eat there, but that’s what he’ll say.”
I tried to lie back against the side of the truck and just rest and enjoy the ride. It was kind of hard to keep yelling over the rush of wind and road noise. I had heard Daddy and Uncle Trek and other men talk often about the land we were driving through.
The soil across the land was rich because floods from the river had washed over it many times from long ago, and from not too long ago. Just a few years before I was born there was one of the greatest floods of all time anywhere, right here where we were driving. It was called the Great Flood of 1927. It was like all the water in all the United States had come from other rivers and streams and flushed into the Mississippi. Nobody had ever seen a flood like it, except maybe Noah.
The Mississippi Delta had the richest soil in the world. Over and over during hundreds of years the Mississippi River had dumped sediments and nutrients into this area in northwest Mississippi. Some of my most memorable stories were of the Great Flood. The river stories were so much closer to us, and we knew they were true, and we knew the people. We were part of these stories. They were part of us.
One family of six got into a small boat about twelve feet long. They put as much of their stuff into the boat as they could and tried to paddle away while the water was only knee deep. But one of the temporary levees broke, and a huge rush of water hit the overloaded boat and all were washed away. Only a small three-year-old boy’s body was recovered—his tiny body found tangled in the roots of a large, washed-away magnolia tree.
The flood was the greatest disaster in the history of the United States. It had rained and rained during the spring of the year all over the Mississippi River basin, which covered almost half of the United States, and finally all tributaries had been filled and the levees couldn’t hold anymore. So the water spread everywhere.
I had heard grown men talk about it with a respect for the river as a wild force of nature. Some of them appeared to believe that if they didn’t speak reverently of the river, it could act on its own and return at will. “If you didn’t have any other reason to believe it, the Mississippi River would be reason enough to believe there was a God of creation,” my uncle in Meridian had once said.
Clarksdale had 16,235 residents, so the sign said. It was probably as big as Cleveland and Yazoo City put together. Once my daddy brought Farley and me up here. Every now and then Daddy would talk about getting a farm and getting back to the land and being a farmer, because, like a lot of people in Jackson, he was reared on one. So when we were visiting Cousin Trek and Cousin Carol one time he brought us up here to look at some hogs and stuff for sale at an auction. The hogs pretty much just waddled around making oink and snort noises. Daddy asked some questions, but he didn’t buy any since we didn’t have a farm; and I don’t think my mother would have allowed them at home. She had said that Farley and I already ate enough for one household budget. Daddy’s farm idea would come and go. After I’d hoed cotton for two days, I’m glad it went. I hoped it stayed gone, especially if our crops were going to be cotton.
Cousin Trek had slowed down to about thirty, I figured. Big Trek was at the Clarksdale Hotel, Taylor said, and that’s where we’d go first. Then probably go by a couple seed and feed stores, a hardware store, maybe the John Deere dealer. Those could be pretty interesting, especially if there were some old men telling stories and stuff. Sometimes they would spin tales that were probably half made up, but they were almost always fun to hear. Old men had a special way of telling stories that my mother called “delightful” unless they got crude.
At some point we’d probably have to wait while Cousin Carol went to some dress shop, or something equally useless. There was nothing as wasteful as hanging around waiting at a dress shop. Hat shops were none too exciting either, although they could be good for laughs. If you laughed too much, they’d ask if you wanted to leave. But you couldn’t say yes even though you wanted to, because then you would get punished for talking back. So you were trapped there, wasting time.
We turned the corner onto Main Street and saw the hotel. The streets were crowded and there was a lot of traffic. Clarksdale had a lot more stores and picture shows and cafés. In the small towns the crowds and traffic usually didn’t come until Saturday. But in Clarksdale even Wednesday was busy. There was a policeman directing traffic at an intersection. I thought about Mr. Siler driving here. He’d probably hit the policeman, or just yell at him. Of course it would probably take fifty years for Mr. Siler to drive this far from Cotton City.
We saw Big Trek standing in front of the hotel talking to a couple of guys who were wearing straw hats and denim overalls. Big Trek was poking the air with his finger. My guess, he was informing them of some weather that he was speculating about—probably rain. Big Trek was like a walking, talking Farmer’s Almanac. He just seemed to know when it was going to rain, or be dry, or when tornadoes were about to drop from the sky. No one knew how he did it. He mostly was right about his predictions and people listened. Casey had said they should send his name into Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Big Trek waved at us as we parked in front of the hotel. All of us climbed out and went to greet him. Hugs and more hugs. You’d think he had been in Alaska or someplace digging for gold for about ten years. Big Trek told me how much I had grown, which couldn’t have been much since last Christmas. But he said it anyway.
“Well, now, I trust the farm ain’t burnt down,” he said. He always joked with Cousin Trek, and Casey and Taylor, that they’d let the place burn down or get destroyed. They laughed and Cousin Trek said something like, “Not when we left, but you can never tell.”
Big Trek laughed and rubbed the top of Casey’s head. “Well, I’ve still got some errands to do. Maybe by the time I’m finished, we can get some dinner at Pete and Buger’s before we head back.”
“Where you goin’ now, Daddy?” Cousin Trek asked.
“First, I gotta go to the hardware store. I gotta get some nails and paint. Then I wanna go to the tractor dealer.”
“Okay, we can jus’ leave the car parked here for now. Come back in an hour and stick another nickel in the meter,” Cousin Trek said.
“Well y’all can go the hardware store, but I’m not spending part of my day off listening to those hair-brained, seedy stories y’all be telling,” Cousin Carol said. She didn’t consider them delightful today, I guess. “I’m going up the street to a shop I’ve wanted to visit for the longest time.”
Cousin Trek said, “Well, that’s fine, Honey. You go ahead.” The ‘honey’ word meant he hoped she didn’t ask him to go. I supposed those names did come in handy once in a while, if they got you out of something horrible like going to a dress shop. There was a brief silence. Casey and Taylor and I shuffled our feet, as if we hadn’t heard her.
“Well, doesn’t someone want to come with me?” she asked.
Now, she had to know we would rather have an eye gouged out with a hot poker and a wasp stuck up our nose than go to some woman’s shop. “How about my baby? Casey, you wanna go with your mother?”
“Well…maybe…I guess…”
She reached over and pulled his head toward her and kissed him right on the forehead, right there in broad daylight. Then she
laughed and said, “Y’all go on, I’ll meet y’all back at the car about a quarter ‘til twelve. Okay?”
The hardware store was filled with everything you could imagine that had something to do with work. Nails, plenty of evil cans of paint, tools of all kinds, rope, chains, insecticides, even fishing tackle and hunting supplies, with rifles and shotguns lined up in racks behind the counter. It had a cement floor and smelled like a hardware store—rough, greasy, a hemp smell and the always great fertilizer aroma. A small group of men at the counter were talking, most likely about the baseball standings and the price of cotton.
Casey and Taylor and I stood in front of the counter looking at the rifles and shotguns, talking about which one we would buy if we had the money. “You could kill a bear with that one,” Casey said.
“Aww, there ain’t any bears around here,” I said.
“Yeah, there are,” Taylor said. “Back a long time ago there were lots of bears up here.”
“Aw, c’mon.”
“Really, Big Trek says about two hundred years ago there were lots and lots of bears in the Delta. Panthers, too. Before farmers started growing cotton and stuff like that. It used to be like a jungle almost, around here.”
“Really. Panthers, too?” I asked.
“Yeah, and there are still some—panthers and bears, I’m pretty sure.”
Big Trek and Cousin Trek walked toward us, each with a can of paint. “See anything you boys want?” Big Trek winked at Cousin Trek when he asked.
“Casey wants a bear gun, Big Trek.” We laughed.
“Well, sounds good to me. Picked one out yet?”
“Yes, sir. That one on the end,” Casey said.
“That’s a .22, Casey,” Cousin Trek said. “You can’t kill a bear with that, unless maybe you beat him over the head with it.” He put his free arm around Casey’s shoulder and squeezed him.
“Why not? You can kill people with one.”
“Well, people are different than bears—and what makes you say that anyway? Whada you know ‘bout killin’ people?”
Mississippi Cotton Page 10
