Gold Dust

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  “No you ain’t. You never was.” O.C. shook his head, eyes glittering in anger. “He’s having a hard time of it. He don’t deserve this. Help him go on.”

  “You know what happened to us back then.” His voice plaintive, Ned held up a hand, as if to ward off a blow. Images flickered like a Nickelodeon peep show as the humming in his head increased.

  Wasted bodies.

  Weeping relatives.

  Miss Becky praying over her Bible.

  Men, women, and children dying in Ned’s arms.

  Angry, unbelieving residents of a Chisum long ago.

  The Lamar County courtroom, and a young O.C. arguing Ned’s fate as the equally young farmer sat at the defense table, staring at his hands.

  Ned weeping in anguish every time he was called upon to help others pass.

  He shook his head, gritting his dentures. “The Lord’ll take him directly.”

  “I can see it coming on you, just like before. This ain’t the time to argue!”

  Jules convulsed again. He reached for something unseen.

  O.C. gripped Ned’s bicep with a surprisingly strong hand. “Help this man, Ned.”

  “I want to be shed of this.”

  “That’s between you and God, but right now you’re needed.”

  With tears rolling down his sun-browned cheeks and shaking like a leaf in a gale, Ned gave in to the weight of the dread resting on his shoulders. A crowd gathered as the word spread and the onlookers whispered, wondering what they were arguing about.

  Ned watched Jules struggle with Death for a moment more. He reluctantly dropped his hat on the floor and sat on the hard tiles with a grunt, crooking his leg. “Get ahold.”

  Albert paled under his black skin. “I heard ’bout this years ago….”

  Still on one knee, O.C. braced himself. “Not now, Albert. Help me get his head in Ned’s lap.”

  Jules struggled to breathe. Spittle ran down his cheek. His body trembled even harder, like a mule struggling against the plow.

  They tugged the fragile old man around until he half-lay on Ned’s cocked leg. Ned cradled Jules’ gray head. Mouth dry as dust, his voice came out low and hoarse. “You ready? You sure, Jules Benton?”

  For a second, the dull, rheumy eyes opened and fixed somewhere over Ned’s shoulder. “Marse Wats’n. Sweet Jesus, hep me to Glory. They’s a big ol’ rusty chain holin’ me back. I knows you can do it. Lily! Lordy, that angel over your shoulder’s beautiful, but she won’t take my hand. Mama! Tell her to take m’hand.”

  Seen by only Jules and Ned, sparking electricity fractured storm clouds hovering near the ceiling. The high-pitched humming filled Ned’s head and the pressure in his skull built until he felt it would burst like a ripe melon. Ned closed his eyes and pulled Jules close enough to feel his feeble heart.

  It was the long-forgotten but intensely personal act of putting his cheek against Jules’ wrinkled face that completed the mysterious, unwanted circuitry that allowed Ned Parker to help others pass on. Ned’s body went rigid. His body snapped as if hit by a jolt of electricity from the silent clouds against the ceiling.

  Energy and a burst of pain, fear, and longing flowed from Jules and mixed with a warm glow in Ned’s chest. For a moment, aches, pains, and a lifetime of sorrow filled Ned and just as it was about to run over and take him into a deep pit from which he knew he’d never return, Jules’ life experiences fled.

  A ray of light shot down on Jules’ face, but no one in the courthouse saw it, except for the old elevator man. His eyes opened, then narrowed at the intensity of the beam, then closed. He took one last breath and let it out with a slow sigh.

  Shuddering sobs filled Ned’s chest as he did what he hadn’t done in exactly forty years. He used his own Poisoned Gift to help a soul struggling with death to pass on.

  Chapter Nine

  The black oil road leading from school to Neal Box’s store was mostly in the sun, except for a patch of shade here and there. A wide pasture with scattered trees and bushes was on our left, and a fencerow full of hardwoods on the right.

  A trailer full of cattle roared past, not giving an inch to the three of us walking to the store. I didn’t recognize the driver, but I threw a wave anyway, because that’s what was expected.

  “That ain’t cool.” Pepper threw her middle finger into the air. “That asshole ain’t got no manners.”

  “I don’t believe what you just did was very nice, neither.” I kicked at a rock and watched it skip across the oil road. The air was thick enough to chew and my tee-shirt was already sticking to my back. I was looking forward to a cold drink from Neal’s musty smelling cooler.

  “Shut up, Zippy.”

  I hated when she called me that. She picked it up at the traveling carnival a while back and liked the sound of it. It was my fault she kept on wartin’ me with that stupid nickname. I played the devil the first time when I told her not to call me that anymore. Now she knew it aggravated me and wouldn’t turn it loose.

  Pepper had changed some in the past few months, but the old Pepper imp was still in there, kicking to get loose again. I sure hoped she wouldn’t call me that name at school. If Harlan heard it, he’d have two nicknames to hold over me.

  I saw Miss Mable Truitt coming back from the post office. She was a little odd and always tickled me to death. Miss Becky said the midwife who helped deliver her in a house in the bottoms hurt her on the day she was born. She was one of the few people in Center Springs that I wasn’t kin to, and that made her special to me and Pepper both.

  She was in a blue-and-white housedress, the kind most Center Springs women wore only at home. I thought they were the ugliest dresses on the planet, and not even Twiggy could make one look right. She had her hair curled nice, though it was glued into place by so much Aqua Net hair spray that we could smell it before she reached us.

  Pepper brightened. “Howdy, Miss Mable.”

  The old woman stopped and grinned. The skin on her legs below the hem of her dress looked like scarred leather. “Hi, hon. How’re you today? You’re supposed to call me Sissy this week.”

  “We’re fine.” Pepper rubbed the old gal’s spotted arm. “Whatcha got in your bucket?”

  Instead of a purse, Miss Mable always carried a different container everywhere she went. Most of the women in Center Springs toted big purses, but Miss Mable didn’t. This time she had the skinny bail of a nursing bucket full of mail in the crook of her arm.

  You never knew what she had in ’em, neither. I heard Grandpa say she’d carried around everything from puppies and kittens, to rocks, to a baby doll. At Sunday school one time, Miss Becky made Miss Mable give her something she real quick wrapped in a scarf before anyone could see it, and though I’d asked her a hundred times what it was, she’d turn red and refuse to answer.

  Miss Mable glanced down at her galvanized bucket as if she was surprised to see it. I ’magine there was a nursing bucket in every barn in the county, but you usually didn’t see ’em carried down the road in the crook of somebody’s arm. The size of a regular milk pail, the bucket had a six-inch pink nipple that looked like a cow’s teat sticking straight out to the side. Folks used them to feed baby calves.

  She reached out and squeezed the nipple like she was milking a cow. “Why, ain’t got no calf to nurse. I believe it’s mail.”

  She kept squeezing and stroking the nipple while she talked and Pepper pressed her lips together to keep from laughing. Her ears turned red for the first time I could remember. “Is it your mail?”

  “Why, I reckon.” Her crooked old fingers fluttered around the envelopes. “See, here’s some right here. And this is my lead rope.” She pulled out the tail of a worn out rope.

  I had trouble taking my eyes off of Pepper’s red ears. “You have a baby calf at home?”

  “Why, no. I ain’t got no barn or corral neither. Why you t
hink that?”

  “I can’t think of an answer, Miss Mable.”

  Mark peeked into the bucket and his eyes widened. He stepped back. “Something’s moving in there.”

  I knew Miss Mable well enough to back up too. I was surprised to see Pepper get closer. “You got something else? Maybe a baby chick or two?”

  “Why no, hon.” Miss Mable reached into the bottom of the bucket and drew out a sluggish two-foot chicken snake that wrapped itself around her wrist.

  Me and Mark were set to run, after my dealin’ with a rattlesnake a few months earlier, but Pepper only laughed. “Miss Mable, how come you to be carrying around a snake?”

  “Why Pepper, I forgot I put it in this mornin’ when I went to gather th’ eggs.” She bent down and gently put the snake in the grass beside the highway. “It was in one of the nests and I couldn’t leave it in there to eat m’eggs. Well, I got to get goin’.” She took off without another word.

  Pepper waited for a minute before she busted out laughing. Mark gave her one of those looks they’d been trading back and forth. “Did you see the way she was handling that…?”

  His eyes sparkled and I thought he was gonna say something funny, but he just gave her a nudge and we headed for Uncle Neal’s store. I couldn’t figure out what they were talking about, but it sure had ’em both laughing.

  We each had a quarter to spend, and I was trying to decide what kind of coke I wanted. A coke could be anything in the cooler including oranges, strawberries, Chocolate Soldiers, Dr Peppers or even a Grapette. I was kinda in the mood for an RC, though, and was thinking about putting some salted peanuts in it.

  Our cotton shirts were wet by the time we circled around to the front of the white frame building that was the Center Springs Courthouse back in the 1800s.

  The usual members of the Spit and Whittle Club were on the porch, talking and watching cars and trucks pass on the highway, but there was a difference I picked up right off. Every man there was straight and attentive, even the ones on the two-by-six rails, facing a young woman who was perched like a magazine model at the far end.

  We slowed on the wooden steps to get a look at what was going on. Pepper reached out and snapped a knuckle sharp against the bottom of my chin. She leaned close. “Close your mouth, Zippy. Flies’ll get in.”

  It was open for good reason. I’d never seen anything like that gal in a white mini-skirt held tight on her hips by a chain belt around her waist. Her sleeveless blue blouse was unbuttoned lower than I’d ever seen on a woman. And she wasn’t wearing a brassiere. Every time she moved, and she did that about ever’ ten seconds, there was a chance that something would get loose.

  From the looks on the men’s faces, I figured they were praying for that to happen.

  Ty Cobb Wilson rested an elbow on his knee and leaned forward. “It’s hotter’n a two-dollar pistol today.”

  Even though they weren’t twins, his brother Jimmy Foxx did the exact same thing at the same time. You didn’t see either one of the Wilson boys without the other. Those middle-aged men more than favored each other, with hooked noses, long, scraggly hair, and their ever-present hip waders folded down at the knee and looking like bell-bottoms.

  The woman threw her head back and laughed, reaching out a bare foot and nudging Ty Cobb’s leg with her bare toes. Her sandals were on the dusty boards. “You boys are so funny!” She batted her eyes, and I heard Pepper growl behind me.

  It was all I could do to take my eyes off the woman, but when I did, I saw Pepper push Mark through the door. His head was down, but I knew good and well that he was sneaking his own look through the long hair hanging down in his eyes.

  Pepper threw another glance toward the lady. “Something else’s cheap around here, and it ain’t no pistol.”

  “Watch your mouth, missy.” Uncle Neal glanced up with a pencil in his hand. His shirt-sleeves were rolled to the elbows and the red-and-white plaid material was soaked under his arms.

  She threw her hands up. “Who’s that hussy out there?”

  “Keep your voice down or I’ll have to call your Daddy.” He leaned on his bare-board counter crowded with everything from tubes of BBs to cigarette lighters, to coils of string. He pointed with his pencil stub that was barely visible in his thick fingers. “That there’s Scottie Graham, or at least that’s the name she gave me when she bought her an Orange Crush.”

  “I don’t know no Grahams.”

  Uncle Neal sighed. “You ain’t as old as my shoes, so I don’t reckon you know everybody.”

  “Well, how come you to ask her name in the first place then? You don’t care who spends their money in here.”

  “Pepper!” His voice was low and sharp, a tone I’d never heard from Uncle Neal.

  “Well, those men out there need to get their eyeballs back in their heads and them tongues off the floor.”

  “She ain’t hurtin’ nobody. They’re just out there talking.”

  Pepper stalked over to the coke cooler, the big bells on her jeans slapping with her anger. Mark raised his eyebrows Groucho-style and tagged along behind. I held back beside the rusty screen door to listen.

  “Say he found a fifty-dollar bill?” Scottie’s voice was light and full of life. There was something else in there, too, that made me feel funny in my stomach. “Mason what-his-name?”

  “Two Crow, Mason Two Crow, and that’s what he told me.” That was Jimmy Foxx’s voice. “Said it was old and might-near rotten.”

  I didn’t like not seeing, so I went to the clear glass case by the door, pretending I was interested in the bags of Gold Nugget chewing gum on display under the open window.

  She took a tiny sip from the orange drink and straightened up. The material of her shirt stretched tight. “Where was it?”

  “Up on that far bend in the river north of Colbert Lake.”

  “Where’s that?”

  Emory Daniels snorted, interrupting. I never liked him much. He was the kind of man to leave his tools out in the yard to rust. “I don’t see why they call it a lake. Hell, it ain’t much more’n a mudhole.”

  “Well I didn’t name it.”

  Scottie frowned, but the smooth skin between her eyes didn’t wrinkle, like a baby’s frown. You could tell she was irritated that Daniels had butted in. “What was he doing up there?”

  “Went fishing.” Jimmy Foxx Wilson scratched at the hair hanging over his collar. “Said he had some throwlines in the river and saw it when he was climbing up the bank. It could have washed out of the bank, or down the river.”

  “Hey!” Pepper’s voice was loud and I jumped.

  “What?”

  “You want to get your eyes off that gal’s titties and talk to me?’

  Uncle Neal grunted. “Beatrice Parker. I’m about to get your goat.”

  Pepper sighed long and loud at the public use of her real name, but we knew whenever an adult resorted to a kid’s full title, they were about out of patience. “You want a coke or something?” she asked me.

  I picked up a wire flyswatter with the tag still on it and turned it in my hand, keeping up with my charade, even though all three of them knew what I was doing. Uncle Neal met my eyes and winked. Heat rose in my face. “Yeah, get me a Dr Pepper.”

  The bottles rattled as she guided them through the slots. The men outside laughed and it irritated me that I hadn’t heard what was said. Uncle Neal chuckled real soft, tallying up the monthly bills. He carried half the community on credit, but might-near everyone paid up at the end of the month.

  Skinny little Ike Reader always wanted to be the first with any information and talked fast, but he was twitching even more than usual, like he was hooked up to electricity. “Listen listen. It might be from that robbery back in the fifties.”

  “Which one was that?” Scottie didn’t know nothing.

  The jerky little farmer cleared
his throat. “It was somewhere around fifty-five or fifty-six, after two men robbed the Hugo Trust and Loan.”

  Pepper and Mark went up to the counter to pay up. Uncle Neal tallied the total and we trooped back outside at the same time the conversation stalled. Pepper’s expression shot daggers across the porch and I almost laughed out loud.

  Scottie noticed her and her eyes went dark, and cold. “Hi, hon.”

  There was a long pause before Pepper took a long swallow of her Dr Pepper. “Hidy.”

  “I bet you kids have heard about this buried money these boys are talking about.”

  Pepper didn’t like that kid part one little bit. “You talking about the gold that’s buried out at Palmer Lake?”

  A look passed across Scottie’s face that I didn’t like. Now I knew for sure and for certain that she was there for something else besides a cold drink. “I hadn’t heard that one. The boys here are talking about bank robbers. You say there’s gold?”

  “Sure. Ever’body around here’s heard that story. Where you from?”

  “Dallas. Bill Preston hasn’t said a word about it.”

  “You kin to him?”

  Preston was a Dallas businessman who was busy buying up as much of Center Springs as he could. He was one of those city people who enjoyed the country, but then tried to change it into something else. “No, he’s just a really good friend. I came up with him a few days ago to see the new house he was building. I heard a story about some found money and came up here to see if it was true.”

  “I bet.” Pepper’s eyes lit up, and I didn’t like that one little bit. “Hey, you want to know a secret?”

  “Sure.”

  The men leaned in and the corner of Pepper’s mouth twitched. “Come around to the side of the store for a minute.” She took off down the steps, twitching her bottom in a way I’d never seen before. Barefoot, Scottie slid off the porch like a water moccasin right behind her and, believe me, that woman went down the steps like warm oil.