And If I Die

by John Aubrey Anderson

  “What’s she gonna do?” asked Bill.

  Sam smiled wryly. “Work for somebody else, I guess . . . same as I am.”

  “What about the old dry-goods building next door?” Bill pressed. “It’s in good shape, and it’s vacant. She could knock a big hole in that wall and expand into it.”

  “She’d buy it tomorrow if she could, but she’s caught between a rock and a hard place,” Sam explained patiently. “She’ll never come up with the income she needs to expand, because she doesn’t have enough cash coming in to keep this place going.” He studied his big hands and sighed. “She’s been to all the banks here and in Denton; they said they’d like to help, but restaurants are a poor risk. It’s just a matter of time before she shuts it down.”

  “She needs a partner.”

  “That’d work okay, and she shopped around some. There’s nobody willing to help that she can trust.”

  “She can trust you.”

  “Like I said, I just can’t come up with that kind of money.”

  Mose held silent throughout the conversation, waiting. When Bill looked a question at him, the old man smiled and said, “We can.”

  Back in the fifties, Sam Jones and Mose spent time in Parchman prison together. It was a bad experience that generated a good friendship.

  Sam looked from Mose to Bill and back to Mose. “You can loan her enough money for her to get herself out of this spot?”

  The other two men shook their heads, each knowing what the other was thinking.

  “No-no,” said Mose. “Miz Nettie’s a fine white woman, but she don’t need to be knowin’ ’bout our business. We’d loan the money to you.”

  Bill nodded.

  Sam wasn’t prepared for the offer, and the initial thought of borrowing that much money stopped his breathing. Then, because he was human, his mind filled itself with a dozen questions about the money’s origin. Before any doubts could take root, his memory took him back to the years he spent on the Parchman prison farm with Mose . . . any money in Mose’s hands would be as pure as a church collection.

  He said, “We need to pray.”

  The sparse crowd of customers watched as the three black men bowed their heads. Sam and Mose bowed in supplication; Mann bowed out of respect for his friends. The two older men thanked God for His provision and asked for wisdom and guidance; Mann thought about how many more tables Miz Nettie would be serving.

  Forty-eight hours later, Sam sat down with his boss and offered to put up enough money to pay off the note on the existing café building and pay half the cost of incorporating the dry-goods store into their operation. Within ten minutes they agreed to a fifty-fifty partnership. Because folks in town wouldn’t understand about a white widow being in business with a black man, Miz Nettie would maintain “ownership” of the café; Sam would run the kitchen and be her silent partner.

  So far, the café was generating more income every week.

  “You gonna work down there at Pat’s office this summer?” asked Mose.

  “On and off. He and Missy are going to Mississippi for a couple of days as soon as classes let out; he said I can have all the work I want when they get back. And he’s got a new guy—another undergrad student—who’s going to be coming to work in June, so I won’t be swamped.”

  “What you got planned for while Pat an’ Missy is gone?”

  “Well, I’ll help out down at the feed store a little.” The boy sat forward and brushed at the grass on his jeans. He had a tendency to choose his words carefully—this time he was stalling. “And Will’s started back to doing some bull riding. I was thinking I might as well pick up where I left off.”

  The man was shaking his head before the boy finished talking. “Bull ridin’? Have mercy, boy, didn’t that trip to the hospital teach you that bulls is dangerous?”

  The would-be bull rider offered his easy smile. “So they say.”

  “You been talkin’ ’bout fightin’ in that war in Vietnam. You got to be alive to go to a war.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man’s face twisted into a frown and he sat back to let the rocker work its magic on his reaction. Bill and the Pierce boy had been riding on and off since their senior year in high school. Bill took “that trip to the hospital” when he got tangled up during a dismount and ended up getting slung around like a rag doll. The result was some kind of elbow sprain and a badly split lip, both of which were healed in a few weeks. Mose had prayed the bull riding was behind them.

  The boy waited. He knew what would come next, and he knew it would come quickly.

  “Well, lemme see.” The man patted his leg with the newspaper. “How old’re you gittin’ to be now?”

  The boy smiled. “I’ll be twenty next month.” He would’ve winked at the man, but that wasn’t in the script.

  “An’ man enough to make them kind of choices for yo’self, I reckon.” The old man shook his head, smiled wryly, and admitted, “I have to tell you, boy, for a tall feller, you sho’ do make ridin’ one of them animals look easy. An’ I ain’t got nothin’ better to do than spend some extra time prayin’.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Humph. Better save yo’ ’preciation for when I has to bring yo’ cake to the hospital.”

  Chocolate cake was a midafternoon ritual at the Mann house.

  The boy sat forward in his chair. “You ready for a piece?”

  “Every time,” the man nodded. “An’ there’s coffee on the stove.”

  The boy pushed himself out of the rocker and walked over to the south end of the porch. “Looks like we might get some rain.”

  The man leaned forward and looked across the fence. “My weathermens say it ain’t gonna git here.” He pointed to the north side of the house where the chickens and guineas were roaming the pasture, foraging for insects. “Chickens wouldn’t go that far out if’n it was gonna rain.”

  The boy took the man’s words as gospel and went to cut the cake.

  Minutes later, the young man made one trip to the porch carrying a slender wedge of chocolate cake and a mug of steaming coffee. On his second trip he returned with a quart container of milk, a plate holding a fourth of the cake, and a pair of hard-boiled eggs. He rearranged himself in his rocker and thumbed open the milk carton while he fed the eggs to the dog.

  The man took a sip of his coffee before observing, “You already got that dog spoiled rotten. An’ if you keep eatin’ like that, you gonna git big as Aunt Jemima.”

  The boy pointed his fork at the dog and talked around a mouthful of cake. “He’s the one that’s gonna get fat. I eat the cake to keep my coat shiny.”

  “Humph. How much you weighin’ now?”

  The boy, who was more man than boy, fed a pinch of cake to the dog. “One seventy-five or one eighty with my watch on.” He fooled with the dog for a minute, then tried to sound nonchalant when he asked, “How’ve you been feeling?”

  “I been doin’ just fine. Better’n any time since I had that little go’round with my heart.” The man watched the line of thunderstorms in silence for a minute or two; they were threatening to make liars out of him and his chickens. He put his plate where the dog could get to it, then blew on his coffee and took another sip. “I got a question for you.”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You got any plans for what you gonna do when I die?”

  The young man let his breath make a couple of round trips while he used his fork to push the last bite of cake around on his plate. Normally the kind of person who faced things head-on, he was stalling for the second time that day. “Shoot, Poppa, I guess I haven’t thought that much about it.”

  “You got time for us to talk about it?”

  The youngster glanced at his watch, a handsome piece with a blue and red bezel. “Will said he’d be right behind me.”

  There were some things the two men couldn’t talk about where others might hear. The man said, “We can keep a lookout for his truck.”

  The boy knew wha
t was coming. He took a second look at his watch and said what they were both thinking. “Today’s the fifteenth.”

  “Yep . . . eight years.” The man nodded. The newspaper in his hand agreed with the boy’s watch. The date was April 15, 1968, the anniversary of the killings. “Passes pretty fast, don’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.” They rarely talked about the killings; it would serve no purpose. The boy put his plate on the floor so the dog could clean off the icing, then sat back and draped a leg over one of the chair arms. “Do you get lonesome for Mississippi?”

  “Maybe a little.” He had something he wanted to say, but he didn’t want the boy to ever feel he was being pushed. “But I’ll tell you this, I wouldn’t trade a whole life in Miss’ippi for these few years God let me be yo’ granddaddy.”

  The boy on the porch was young, but he had known for a long time his adopted grandfather’s commitment to him was second only to the old man’s allegiance to his God.

  Of the three on the porch, only the dog was using his real name.

  The old man was born Moses Lincoln Washington. His great-grandfather, old “Preacher” Washington, named him after two men who stood strongly on the side of oppressed people. The godly old ex-slave’s choice for his great-grandson’s name was, like so many major aspects of Moses Lincoln Washington’s life, a thing of providence.

  In 1960, on a wet night in Mississippi Delta backcountry, a gang of white men attacked a black woman and her son—and Mose Washington stepped in. In the middle of the twentieth century, for a black man to oppose the actions of a group of white men was dangerous—for him to face them down from behind a shotgun was courting death. A mysterious white man emerged from the darkness and allied himself with Mose in time for them to rescue the young boy. They were too late to save the child’s mother.

  That same night, in the predawn hours, Mose, Bill, and the mysterious white man stood over the body of Bill’s mother while Mose prayed. Mose and the woman’s son vanished after the short funeral. Their white ally was gone as well, leaving no more trace than a figure carved in steam.

  Law enforcement officers were on the scene before noon the next day. They found the bodies of the black lady and three white men, and because one of the dead men was the son of a powerful congressman, the FBI entered the picture.

  Bill Prince, the boy who fled Mississippi with Mose, lost his dad in March, 1960—less than a month before the white men killed his mother. Major William L. Prince, one of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, fought and won aerial battles in the skies over Africa, Europe, and Korea, but he couldn’t beat cancer. When he was on his deathbed, the Air Force fighter pilot gave his ten-year-old son and namesake four things—a handsome Rolex watch, a .45 caliber Colt automatic, a gentle dictate to be a man, and, most importantly, a commission to care for his mother.

  When young Bill Prince disappeared, he left his mother, the Colt pistol, and his father’s name in Mississippi. From his former life, the orphaned boy salvaged the watch, his dad’s admonition to be a man, and a vow to himself that he would be a fighter pilot, just like his dad.

  In 1962, two years after the killings, Mose Mann and his “grandson,” William P. Mann, settled themselves in the middle of a wooded tract of land in the sparsely populated country outside Pilot Hill. Their home’s location offered privacy; their nearest neighbors were the Roberts family, a mile to the north.

  “Poppa?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You think they’ll ever catch us?”

  “Can’t say for sure. Pat an’ Missy say nobody ever comes lookin’ for us in Miss’ippi. That Wagner boy from the FBI says don’t nobody ever mention us. An’ that Bainbridge fellow from Washington is dead.”

  “Has anybody said anything about that last son of theirs . . . or that Mrs. Bainbridge? They say she’s becoming a big woman in Washington.” Bill wouldn’t classify himself as a worrier, but it was his nature to stay abreast of his situation. The anniversary of the killings usually prompted a short discussion on the state of their circumstances.

  “We under the protection of the good Lord, boy. We done all we can do; the rest is up to Him.” The old man reminded his grandson more than once during the past eight years that they each had at least one guardian angel. “Evil folks—demons even—might come up an’ stand on this here porch, but they can’t never find us long as God don’t want ’em to. If He let’s them find us, they still got to git past Him an’ His angels.”

  Mose Mann’s assertions found their origins in his faith—and his faith was well-founded.

  Three hundred years earlier, a man who thought himself clever offered as a point of speculation the number of angels that could dance on the point of a very fine needle. Had that intellectual wastrel been offered a glimpse of those who stood at the shoulders of the old black man and his grandson, he would’ve been disposed to spend the remainder of his earthbound days introducing more worthwhile questions. Clothed in brilliance and bearing swords in God’s righteous cause, two angelic beings stood guard over the men on the porch.

  The angels were seasoned veterans of an ongoing multimillennial war spanning the universe. God’s ultimate defeat of the forces of evil was ordained in eternity past, but the ferocity of the battle would continue unabated until the day His Son returned to reign on earth. For now—for the two capable warriors—their given roles had to do with the protection of the two humans. That the younger man had no felt need for angelic protection did not diminish his guardian’s vigilance.

  “Mmm.” The younger man had never been able to bring himself to care about God or His angels—if they were real, they’d stood by while a pair of deranged killers beat his mother to death. He watched lightning strike the ground in front of the widening squall line and changed the subject. “Are you sure about the chickens? Those storms are getting closer.”

  “And bigger.” Mose let the conversation take the turn. “Guess we got the kind of hens what ain’t scared of gettin’ struck by lightnin’.”

  The two watched the storms in silence until Bill said, “What’re the chances of us getting a tornado?”

  “Can’t say. They can come up sudden.”

  Bill thought he knew the answer to his next question, but he asked it to keep the conversation away from the things of God. “You ever see a tornado?”

  “Mm-hmm . . . seen two.”

  “You never told me that.” Bill sat up. He thought he’d heard everything that ever happened to the man. “When?”

  “The first one was back when I was just a tad. I was livin’ down in south Miss’ippi with my momma.”

  “I thought you were born and raised at Pap’s house.”

  “Well, I mostly was, ’cept for that short spell with my momma.”

  “Did they come close?”

  Mose smiled. “The first one couldn’t’ve come no closer. I’d of been ’bout eight years old, I reckon—an’ I can close my eyes right now an’ see the inside of that funnel.”

  “The inside? You got sucked up in a tornado?” Bill was surprised, but only mildly. The story of the old man’s life played out as a closely linked series of dangerous adventures and severe hardships. On top of that, he’d stood on the edge of, or played a part in, several shootings.

  When Mose told the old stories to the boy, he did so in a matter-of-fact manner. In the instances where most men would paint themselves as heroes, Mose would give his God the credit for the outcome. From anyone else on earth, accounts like the man related might be suspect, but Bill knew people who corroborated what Mose said—people who were there.

  The sound of Will’s truck engine interrupted them, and Bill stood up. “Gotta go.” He stopped at the top of the steps and asked, “Will you tell me about the tornadoes when I get home?”

  “Mm-hmm.” Mose glanced at the pickup coming down the driveway. “But don’t be sayin’ nothin’ ’bout it to nobody. This is ’bout them other days, an’ it’ll best stay between you an’ me.”

  “Yes, sir.” Bill and Mose onl
y talked about them other days with a few select people—people who were committed to helping hide and protect Bill and Mose Mann from the ones who wanted them dead.

  Will Pierce stopped the truck and stepped out. He waved at Mose and knelt to greet the dog. “Howdy, Dawg. How you been doin’, boy?”

  When the dog was thoroughly rubbed and petted, the boys waved again and climbed in the truck.

  As the truck was backing out of the driveway, Will asked, “Well, what’d he say?”

  “About what?”

  Will had been Mann’s best friend for six years, and he knew when he was being baited. He also knew how to snap his black buddy back to the subject at hand. “About the earliest mention of Christ in the Old Testament.”

  Mose knew more about the Bible than lots of preachers, and Will liked learning from the old man. Mann, on the other hand, could be counted on to keep his distance from theological discussions.

  Mann said, “He said what I knew he’d say.” He dropped his voice an octave and mimicked a past generation’s dialect. “You man enough to make that decision fo’ yo’self.”

  Will shook his head. “Boy, I hope you know that man is one in a million.”

  Mann looked at the coming storms without seeing them and told Will more than he’d ever told anyone else. “You don’t know the half of it, buddy boy.”

  When Mose stood to watch the truck leave, a gust of wind blew dust across the porch and ruffled the pages of his Bible—a precursor of the coming storm. The chickens out in the pasture continued their bug hunt, oblivious to the impending opportunity to get struck by lightning or blown into Oklahoma. Mose looked at the chickens and frowned. “Ain’t no different from most human folks—they more interested in eatin’ than they is in gittin’ to where it’s safe.”