“Hey, what are y’all doin’. How come y’all are up?” Casey walked in from his room. He rubbed his eyes, yawned, and sat on the bed.
“Shhh. Not so loud.”
“Whdaya mean, not so loud? Y’all woke me up.”
“Whisper. I think Mother is awake. The light is on downstairs. But I think she’s alone. I think Daddy and Big Trek have gone somewhere.”
I got up and cracked the door just enough to see a light streaming up the stairs.
“Close the door,” Taylor said. “We don’t want her to know we’re up.”
“Well, what’s going on? Who came to the house?” I said.
“I couldn’t see but it sounded sorta like Ben Samuels. I swear that’s who it sounded like.”
“What’d he be doin’ here at this time of night?” I asked.
Casey was still rubbing his eyes. He flopped back on the bed.
“I don’t know. But he wasn’t here very long before he left. And I’m pretty sure Daddy and Big Trek went with him.”
“Where did they go?”
Taylor opened the window. “I think they said they were going downtown to see Mr. O’Grady.”
“What are you lookin’ at out there?”
He opened the screen and pushed it out enough to stick his head out. “It’s not raining. And the moon’s out.”
“So what?”
“So, we’re goin’ downtown.”
We were living dangerously, for sure. Sneaking out in the early morning wasn’t something you wanted to get caught doing. You’d get one of those lectures and there was always a chance you could get a switching.
It was well after midnight and the town was quiet, the streets deserted. We parked our bikes in the bushes on the edge of the square. We crept over to the windows on the side of the town marshal’s office. Parked out front were two highway patrol cars, a county sheriff’s car, and the Cotton City police car. Across the street we had noticed Big Trek’s pickup as well as Ben Samuel’s. This was a lot of cars for something like shooting chickens.
We saw figures through the open window and saw someone pass every couple of minutes, like they were pacing.
“Crud!”
“Shhh!” Taylor put his hand over Casey’s mouth. “What’s wrong? You want someone to hear us?”
Casey crouched like Yogi Berra and pointed underneath his legs at his butt. He had sat in a puddle. “It looks like I wet my pants. Now I’ll have to hide ‘em when I get home or I’m dead.”
“Worry about that later,” Taylor said. “We’ll dang sure get killed if we get caught. Now c’mon, let’s go. And keep quiet.”
We sprinted for the corner of the marshal’s office, staying away from the light from the window. We crouched below the ledge, trying to stifle our heavy breathing in order to hear the voices inside, clear, like a radio program.
It sounded like everyone in the room was trying to talk to Ben at the same time, and he was trying to answer them all at the same time. It was as if Ben knew some great secret and everybody in the room wanted to know it.
“Well, Ben, how in the hell do you know who she is?”
“C’mon, Billy Joe. Don’t get so excited. Ben is volunteerin’ to come in here.” There was a sputtering and cracking of voices comin’ over the two-way radio that covered the rest of what was Big Trek’s voice.
“She called me, Mistuh O’Grady. She called me one night and told Julius and me. She said I had better be careful of strangers. Dat dere was one who had wanted it, and dere might be more, and they’d want Looty’s.”
“How would she know that?” the sheriff asked.
“She jus’ said dat. She told me and Julius dat we was lucky.”
Since the rain had stopped, the air was heavy and humid. As we crouched under the window, we were sweating like wild hogs. I started thinking about Cousin Carol at home. What if she went upstairs to check on us? We’d be better off getting arrested.
Everybody started talking over each other. Every now and then we heard a question about Looty—where is he? What did he do? There were so many questions about Looty, and questions about some woman who might have some information. Why were they asking Ben Samuels all these questions? I worried that right now Cousin Carol might be checking our beds.
“Maybe we oughta go home,” I whispered to Taylor.
“Not now. We’re about to find out something.”
Casey tugged at Taylor’s shirt. “I’ve found out enough.”
“Shhh! You’re just scared.”
“Yeah. That, too.”
“Y’all be quiet. They’re gonna hear us if y’all don’t shut up,” Taylor said.
Then we heard another unmistakable voice. “Daddy, tell ‘em what you know—what she told us. Tell ‘em now. If you don’t I will.” It was BB. He and Ben Samuels were both in there. More sputtering and cracking obscured most of what he said.
Taylor raised his head to peek in the window, hoping for a glance at who was in the room. He dropped back down like a fallen rock. “Ben and some other men are standin’ around in their raincoats. I couldn’t see Looty though. I saw Daddy and Big Trek, too.”
“Whodaya s’pose they’re talking about? Who is she?” Casey asked. “What’s Ben s’posed to be tellin’ ‘em?”
The next thing we heard was clear. Mr. O’Grady said they had better go—to get out to Looty’s. That was a signal it was time for us to go, too. We didn’t want to get caught out here listening at the window. We took off for the bushes in the square. From there we saw six or seven men come out of the office and move toward the squad cars. Although it had stopped raining they were wearing their yellow raincoats, all but one who wore a poncho. Silhouetted against the light from the office, BB in his old army poncho was a dark figure in the dim light. He looked like a vampire.
It was almost two when we got back to the house. No one was waiting up for us. And we had beaten Trek and Big Trek back. Casey stuffed his pants under the bed. If they hadn’t dried by morning he wanted them hid good. They would have until after noontime to dry since we would be wearing our Sunday clothes tomorrow morning.
We all were still wide awake, but two things we knew were true. One was that there was a she involved in something; and two, the silhouette of BB in his poncho had convinced us who was at Looty’s that night.
“Y’all think my pants will be dry by morning?”
“Will you stop worrying about your pants? They’re gonna be dry. Momma ain’t gonna check under the bed before we get back from church. Anyway, I told you not to sit down out there. I told you it was wet.”
“You didn’t say nothin’ ‘bout not sittin’ down. You jus’ said don’t get your shoes muddy or we might get caught if we tracked it in the house. An’ anyway you oughta be as worried as me. If we get caught I’m spillin’ my guts. I ain’t gettin’ a whippin’ by myself.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll be branded a dirty little squealer if you do. You’ll be shunned in Cotton City. You’ll be an outcast.”
We sat up for another hour and talked in low whispers. Was BB involved in whatever Looty was involved in? Was Looty involved in anything? Was BB? As much as anything, I had begun to wonder about the ‘she’ who was mentioned. I probably wouldn’t have thought about the straw-haired lady except I had seen her at Greenville with Looty. And she was a she.
I didn’t bring the topic up to Casey and Taylor, but after we lay down I thought about her some. Was she involved somehow or just an accident that she showed up?
We decided we would go over to BB’s after church tomorrow. Maybe we could ask him some questions without letting him know we were listening at the jail.
After Taylor and Casey fell asleep, I lay awake thinking about the straw-haired woman. I sat up and looked out the window. I thought about how simple she had acted. Simple of mental capacity, my daddy would say. She reminded me of Looty and his ways and habits. I remembered how she was on the bus, and the way she talked about things. She said things that were funny; but now t
hat I thought about her, it seemed like maybe she wasn’t trying to be funny. I wondered if other people on the bus were laughing at her without her knowing it, because she was different.
The skies had cleared and the full moon lighted the cotton field; a dimmer light than the sun but with a kind of a glow that seemed to rest the cotton. It was cool from the rain. As I stared across the field there was music in my head. The words of Dixie were coming from the field, like what they called background music in a picture show.
“I wish I was in the land o’ cotton…
Old times there are not forgotten,”
Old times there… It wasn’t a song only for some people any more than cotton was just for some people. Then my thoughts of her got mixed in with Looty and mixed in with a lot of people, like a long parade of them.
It sort of came to me—the cotton didn’t get in that field by itself. People planted it. And other people tended it and took it off the stalks. And others bought it, and ginned it, and sold it, and got oil from it, and traded it, and sold and resold it for clothes and blankets and quilts and stuff.
The moonlit field made me think of Mississippi people, because this was my home and these were people like me. No matter if you lived in the city or on a farm, or ran a store or a filling station, or played football like Johnny Vaught’s Mississippi boys or were a soldier like BB who wanted to go to war for his people; or were just a lady on a bus, or a simple man who might be mixed up in the head. My thoughts seemed so strange that I thought I was dreaming. But when you dream you don’t think you’re dreaming, you just think things are strange.
It was like all those folks were here on the same land I was hoeing cotton on, because they were all Southern people—Mississippi people and land people. Southerners were people of the land. They didn’t all have farms here like Big Trek, but they had roots here.
I thought about the blind students my grandmother had taught at the Mississippi School for the Blind. They couldn’t play football, or hoe cotton or go to war either, but were part of the land because they had roots. And there was an old colored man who had no legs and scooted around the streets in Jackson on a little wooden board with metal wheels, selling peanuts and newspapers. I never knew his name, but he had roots here. All of the people were different, but their roots had made them the same. I recalled my daddy’s phrase, ‘Mississippi sinew.’ He told me sinew was like a muscular strength that each man has or doesn’t have, and groups of people have as a group. Southerners, agrarians, farmers had it. And Mississippi’s was as tough and strong as anybody’s, he said.
That’s what I thought about Looty and the straw-haired woman—they were as different from Big Trek and Trek and Mr. Hightower, and even BB and Ben—as different as the light of the moon was from the power of the sun. And they were the same. They had roots here. Tough roots. I hoped they had done no wrong—and BB neither.
I fell asleep; and I awakened, as usual, early.
CHAPTER 18
All slicked down and pretty handsome, according to Cousin Carol, we climbed into the brown Ford. The grownups weren’t as talkative as they usually were on Sunday morning. We weren’t either. For one thing we were sleepy, and two, the only thing we wanted to talk about was what went on at the jail last night. We were soon to learn what went on.
We passed the New Glory Baptist Church, its gravel parking lot filled with puddles of muddy water. The colored people were carefully side-stepping the puddles in their Sunday shoes. We didn’t see Ben or BB, but maybe they were already inside. I kept looking back to see if I could see them, until we were too far for me to see anything. About the time I had turned around, Cousin Carol turned and smacked Casey on top of the head.
“Stop that!” He was pickin’ his nose. “Don’t do that in public.”
“This isn’t public,” he protested. “This is just regular people.”
“Don’t talk back.”
I noticed Cousin Trek’s eyes in the rearview mirror, probably lined right at Casey. Casey must have noticed too, because he didn’t say anything else. He just pushed his hair back in place where he had gotten whacked then he wiped the Wildroot Cream Oil off his hand with his necktie. We pulled into the church parking lot.
Young boys weren’t to know about things that were strictly for adults, like murder and crime investigations. But if you got enough boys together, there was always some information just by putting rumors and talk together, some by overhearing your parents when they didn’t know you were listening.
Marshal O’Grady’s son Eddie was in the Sunday School class, and he was the head knower. Whatever your daddy’s job was, you knew more about that subject than everybody else your age.
“My daddy said they were gettin’ close to solving the murder of that guy they found in the river.”
Eddie was an okay guy, but he got a little snotty when he started telling you things about the police and all. Nobody could dispute him out loud because no one really knew what his daddy might have told him. But we were pretty sure he made a lot up.
“Oh, yeah,” Casey challenged, “how come you weren’t at the jail last night?”
“I coulda been if I’d wanted to.”
“Yeah, sure,” Casey said. Everybody in the class laughed.
“Well, maybe I could have if it weren’t so late. And y’all better watch out sneaking around the jail like that. If my daddy catches y’all, he’ll throw y’all in jail. I mean it. He will.”
“No he wouldn’t,” Taylor challenged him this time. “He’d just call our parents, and we’d get a whippin’, not jail.”
“I’d rather be in jail,” another boy said. Everybody laughed again.
Humphrey Turnipseed was also in the class. Since he had been held back in third grade, I wondered why he was still in this Sunday School class. Casey always came to the same class as Taylor because he was with his older brother. But it seemed like to me Humphrey should have been set back in Sunday School class, too. I guess they didn’t want to fail a guy in Sunday School. Farley told me once that if you failed Sunday School, you probably went to hell.
Anyway, Humphrey’s theory was that the dead man had committed suicide. One shot to the head. One shot to the heart. Taylor said that was the kind of thinking that would get him held back in the fifth grade.
Another boy, Benny, who was probably the smartest boy in fifth grade and always wore a bowtie to Sunday School—a clear sissy choice—said that Looty was not all there and had gone off the deep end and killed somebody. He said Looty had started by shooting chickens, and that’s the way murderers did. They started with little things like chickens or yard dogs and worked their way up to people.
When he said that I thought about Casey squashing roaches for bait. I wondered if he was slowly developing into a small-town psychopath.
Benny also said he had made a study of Raymond Chandler characters on the radio programs, and that it was pretty easy to see their development from small killings to important ones. I didn’t want to think about Looty being guilty. I didn’t want him to be guilty because mostly, I felt sorry for him.
I didn’t want to think about BB being guilty either. But what was he doing in Looty’s that night if that was him in his poncho? I was hoping it was just somebody we didn’t know. And I kept feeling sorry for the straw-haired lady, though I wasn’t sure why.
Just then Eddie said something that got everyone’s attention. “Well, I can tell you this. I heard my daddy tell my mother that they went to Looty’s last night, and he wasn’t there. And they couldn’t find his rifle either.”
I glanced at Casey and Taylor. I suspected they were thinking the same thing I was.
“Well, boys, how are y’all this morning?” The teacher walked in and we mummed-up on the crime talk. “Did y’all get plenty of rain at your houses last night?”
Various positive answers followed, and he sat down. He was a nice old man, about eighty I imagine. He wore a red tie and blue suit and had liver spots. He opened his Bible to the
first couple of pages and announced, “We’ll have a word of prayer and then read about Cain and Abel.”
In church we sang loud and long, as usual. When we sang Blessed Assurance, I thought it would have been nice if my mother were there this weekend because that was her favorite. Farley and I were more partial to Onward Christian Soldiers since it had more action. My daddy preferred Christmas carols.
When the pastor got to going, Taylor and Casey and I squirmed and tried to look like we were paying attention to him. But our attention was on Mr. O’Grady who was two rows in front of us. I thought Casey was going to pass him a note and ask him what he found at Looty’s last night. You never could tell about Casey.
I wondered where Looty was now. He hadn’t gone back home, or at least the police hadn’t found him there last night. That is, if Eddie O’Grady knew what he was talking about. And when I thought about Looty, I kept reminding myself of BB and what did he have to do with all this. Why would he have been in the house that night?
I didn’t hear much of what the pastor said. I just stared at the back of Mr. O’Grady’s head. I thought he might jump up any minute and run out on some emergency. Maybe all of a sudden he might get one of those great ideas like Phillip Marlowe did, and in a flash he would realize who the murderer was. Course it didn’t happen and finally after about an hour the service was over. We all flocked to the doors.
When grownups crowd together, it’s hard to get them un-crowded. Church was no different. After the service is over, most people funnel themselves out the front door so they can congratulate the pastor and shake his hand. Once outside, everyone stands around and shakes hands and some of the ladies hug and then re-hug, and the men tell either weather stories, especially those affecting the cotton crop, or baseball stories. Sometimes they talk about the upcoming football season and what the Rebels or the Bulldogs might do. And which one would win the season ending battle for the Golden Egg.
Today the crowd had dispersed into clumps of people. No one wanted to step in the puddles or mud, so they stood on the sidewalk and in the dry spots of the parking area. Occasionally someone’s mother would scream at her son. “Get out of that water! You’ll ruin your shoes!”
Mississippi Cotton Page 17
