I heard her talking me down about dang fool tomboys who tear around on dangerous machines like reckless savages, but I knew it was because she loved me. Standing tall on my pedals where the road dipped down, I bumped along and turned, fingertips just grazing the handlebars, blowing them kisses and pushing my red hair out of my face as Laura fell back against the wagon seat, fanning herself.
Laura Nelson worked their farm alone since L. W.’s father, Roster, ran off before the baby was born three months ago. Laura shoed the mule, boiled the laundry, plowed the small field, and built the new coop when the chickens got to be too many, but she still thought young ladies—leastways, young white ladies, she said—shouldn’t go tearing down dirt roads on bicycles. It seemed to me she was hogging all the fun for the girls down in Dark Town. When she came to town to clean for my mama, she thumbed through the latest issue of The Ladies’ Home Journal, amazed by the pictures of lingerie hats you could make if the laundry didn’t have to get boiled, or the vegetable silk hosiery fine ladies got to wear when they weren’t shoeing the mule, or the Lotil hand cream you could buy for skin smooth as a baby’s backside, which came in handy after a day behind the plow.
Mama sent away for a jar of Lotil and gave it to Laura for her last birthday. Laura cried and rubbed a bit of the white cream no bigger than the size of a tiny pebble into her rough and beautiful black hands. She liked it so much that when the baby came she named her Lotil because she liked this word for a cream that was soft and sweet smelling and came from far away. Maybe Lotil the baby would get to go someplace far away from Okemah. Maybe it would bring her white luck.
I got to the farm first, just ahead of Gorgeous, who was suddenly acting lively. The Nelson farm wasn’t much of a farm, pretty much dirt and scrub and a patch of field that Laura and L. W. planted just for their own keep, but it had been homesteaded by Laura’s granddad, a freed slave, so the land held her. She kept the shacks in good repair and the harvest canned, pickled, and root-cellared. She kept an eye on L. W., who she called her “slow and dutiful boy,” because he was fifteen which, as she put it, the Good Lord knows is the age of devilment. As far as I could tell, both the Good Lord and the devil were matters of no great concern for Laura, who was too busy to pay much attention to either, although she liked using them in her conversation.
There was a dappled horse whinnying softly in what Laura called the barnyard, that space between the chicken coop and the cabin, the reins flung loosely over the branches of a buckbrush. I set down my bike and crossed my arms, waiting to see who was creeping around the Nelson place while Laura and L. W. were off in town. As their wagon caught up to me, I heard baby Lotil fussing, and turned to see Laura’s eyes looking sharply around her property. She stepped down out of the wagon, holding a hand out, palm down, to L. W. and me, which was as good as telling us to stay put.
Just then a man appeared around the far side of the plain little cabin. He caught sight of us and headed our way. It was the deputy sheriff, name of George Loney, and I admit I felt relieved. Not just because he was one of the handsome fellas in Okemah—pretty much all that took was regular features and ears that lay flat against his head—but because he always brought little gifts like flowers he picked himself or—from what I could tell, hiding behind our curtains—what looked like frosted cupcakes to Ella Joy whenever he snuck into the house next door to ours, which was pretty reliably when her husband Tom Darnley was off on a sheriff’s call far out in Okfuskee County somewhere.
Mama and I would just give each other looks, thinking George Loney might just as well go pitch a tent in a grizzly’s den for all his life was worth if Tom Darnley got wind of the gossip. But the deputy genuinely seemed to like poor Ella Joy, which was more than we could say about her husband, who crowed around town how much he loved his fine sweet girlie wife the beauteous Ella Joy. Even I know there’s something wrong when you can’t tell the difference between love and hate, and I’m just twelve.
George Loney came over to us, swiped off his uniform hat, and gave us a small smile. Miz Nelson, he said.
Laura’s lips barely moved when she said, Deputy, because I knew for a fact she didn’t want any white man on her property for any reason whatsoever because, as she once told me and Mama, their fun ain’t fun and their serious is deadly.
Ma’am, we got a report of stolen goods here at your place.
Laura said with some spirit, Who told you that?
I don’t rightly know, but the sheriff told me to check it out.
Exactly what are these stolen goods, Deputy?
Saddles, saddlebags, said the deputy, rifles, canteens.
Laura Nelson set her hands on her hips. Does it look to you like I’m putting together some kind of army out here?
No, Ma’am, it does not.
Go have your look around, Deputy. And if you find my flat iron that went missing a month ago, you just let me know.
After George Loney disappeared inside her cabin and L. W. guided Gorgeous slowly back to the shed they called the barn, Laura stood very still in her yard. I could tell we were both watching a little bird hopping from branch to branch in the locust tree at the side of the road, backlit by the sun. Hard to tell what it was, exactly, until it started to sing, and then I knew it for a warbler, with that sweet falling song that sounds like two birds singing. It’s beautiful, Laura, I cried, because I was twelve years old and my heart was lifted by things like small birds and Lotil’s curly eyelashes and the Winslow’s roller skates I knew Laura was saving her pay from my mama to buy L. W. for his next birthday.
I passed Lotil to her, and Laura looked sorrowfully at her baby girl. Ain’t enough beautiful anywhere in this world, she said with a shiver.
We left it, Laura and me, that I’d come help myself to eggs on Tuesday after school. Which was why I was inside the chicken coop that afternoon. I had ridden my bike over the rough yard to the far side of the coop, where I let it drop into the switch grass, and I figured Laura and L. W. were hacking at kudzu around the field at the far side of the cabin. Kudzu was what Laura called strangle vine because it grew thick and wild and cut off the light and air from everything else that wanted to grow, if you didn’t stay after it with a hatchet and no mercy. With a quick look at the eastern sky, where the clouds were darkening up, I let myself into the chicken coop, which was empty except for white speckled eggs.
I never minded the smells of the coop, or the feathers that floated up when all I did was get close and breathe on them. I had brought a basket from home, lined with clean rags to keep the eggs safe on the ride back, as safe as I could, but I always lost a couple. I had just pulled two fine eggs out of the straw when I heard hooves outside in Laura’s yard, peeked out between the slats of the coop, and saw Deputy Loney. He slid easily off his dappled gray and flung the reins back over the same buckbrush he had used a few days ago. I watched him stand kind of uncertainly there in the yard for a few moments, heaving a sigh, like maybe he didn’t want to be back, but that’s why they called it work. The sun was low over the road to Dark Town, three miles off, and the deputy wiped his brow, pulled back his shoulders, and started off in no hurry to find Laura.
Suddenly, I heard a sound off to the side of the coop, something coming through the thin woods. A horse snorted. I had to crane my neck to see through different slats, to see what was happening off to the side there. Something that didn’t want any attention was coming closer. Then I saw him. It was the sheriff, no denying, leaving his fine chestnut horse back in the trees. As he moved silently closer to the yard, I kept losing him from slat to slat, and it was hard to see what his face could tell me. When I saw him step just into the yard and saw a rifle in his right hand, I started to gasp and clamped my hand over my mouth. Tom Darnley braced his legs, raised his rifle, and called out: George.
From my hiding place, where I didn’t draw so much as a breath, I watched the deputy turn around, and the very last thing he did in this life was to manage an unsuspecting half smile for Ella Joy’s husband who s
hot him dead—two crack shots, his body jerking back before it fell—there in Laura Nelson’s yard. Then the sheriff whipped the rifle underhanded in the direction of the body. I only just saw the blood spreading on the deputy’s shirt front before I lost sight of anything, anything at all, for maybe a minute, as good as blind, my eggless hands shaking out in front of me. When I could see again, I heard cries, heard Laura and L. W. running closer from out back, the sheriff nowhere in sight. The horse in the woods—gone.
When Laura saw the deputy, she stopped dead in her tracks, her arm holding back L. W., who ran into her. Then her head reared back, and she scanned the skies, stricken, for the truth that was too long in coming, and her shoulders dropped hard and she shrieked. I was trembling all over, my fingertips on my face like they were checking to see whether life was possible inside this chicken coop if death and betrayal was that close to me just outside. And I saw in that moment that Laura was right. Ain’t enough beautiful anywhere.
I stumbled, wailing, out of the coop with my basket, which was when Laura and L. W. found me, and we grabbed each other and all life was infernally slippery then like the greased pig contest at the county fair every summer. I clutched at her arms. It was the sheriff, the sheriff, I’ll tell them all, I’ll tell everybody what I saw, I cried, and it was Laura who first heard the combined sounds of horses and Model Ts coming at a pretty good clip, not too far off.
The chickens were squawking and flapping all over the yard, but nowhere near the red-stained body lying still in the dirt that never changed, whatever happened. L. W. held up my bike, his deep sad eyes on me, when his mama said, there’s time to tell them all later, later, baby, and now you get on home, through the woods, and don’t let them see you. You’re faster than any cyclone I ever knew, so just go fast now, you’re my own Josie cyclone, you hear?
She stroked my hair when I should have been stroking hers, but I believed her when she said later, and I fell on L. W., who taught me cat’s cradle and huckle buckle beanstalk and blind man’s buff, which wasn’t too much fun with just two so we usually ended up laughing and falling out in the dirt, which always seemed more the point than groping around with a blindfold. Only then as he shoved my bike at me, which he pointed into the woods, he looked older than practically anyone I knew. And there were two streams of tears on his cheeks, which show up better on a black face than a white. Then I disappeared into the woods, my basket slung over my handlebars, just as the horses and cars pulled up at Laura’s and men swarmed the yard.
I heard someone shout, There’s George, oh shit, he’s shot dead.
And Tom Darnley’s voice over everybody’s, I knew there’d be trouble with these niggers, glad I asked y’all along—
Coulda been the both of you layin’ there dead, Tom.
Only wish poor George had waited for me.
Now, Tom, this ain’t the time to go thinkin’ about—
That there’s the weapon.Grab them niggers!
And over all of them, I heard Laura’s fierce cries, My baby girl! Let me get my baby girl! And as I got deeper into the woods I knew there was no good place for Lotil Nelson, not crying by her little self alone in the empty cabin, and not keeping company with her mama and brother, wherever in creation they were headed.
Mama gave me soup while I told her what I saw, her slim fingers drumming the table. I could tell from her eyes that she was paying very close attention, and I kept sputtering the soup, what with the crying I couldn’t help. That night I slept in her bed, and we lay in each other’s arms in our matching white dimity nightgowns she had paid Laura to make us by hand. Mama felt a little bony to me, like she needed more happiness or potatoes in her life, not these troublesome Okemah fifth graders who only talked tough about protecting what was theirs, like that was anything at all out here in a dust bowl that no improvement can change, but I didn’t want to cry about that too. I had enough just then with L. W. and Laura.
Through the gap in her curtains, before I drifted off, blubbering something about baby Lotil, I saw Mama’s green eyes wide open and staring in the moonlight slanting through. Her hairpins were sticking up here and there out of her hair she had worked loose, hardly noticing, while I told her everything. She had barely said a word all evening, just shushing me and clucking at me while she thought.
The next day she put on her best teaching shirtwaist dress in pale yellow and went down the main street of Okemah, collecting the gossip. When she came back, she told me the Nelsons were in the jailhouse at the end of town, that the sheriff was laying around the tale that when Deputy Loney returned to check out the matter of stolen goods again, one of the Nelsons—thought was, L. W.—shot him dead, and that the circuit magistrate was making his rounds and was due in Okemah sometime week after next, which was what everyone was righteously waiting for, including the Nelsons. There was some talk about niggers getting too above themselves in these parts and some talk about poor handsome George Loney who was such a good family man, now leaving a wife and three young ones, shot down in cold blood in the line of duty, which is every true citizen’s unholy nightmare.
Mama actually got in to see Laura and L. W., stepping around Sheriff Tom Darnley, who made sure to block her way just enough with his barrel chest that she was forced to touch him as she went. She had seen this behavior in mean dogs, she told me, and knew what it was. Laura and L. W. were in separate cells, what with just cracked slop jars and rough cots, L. W. silent and sorrowful, clutching the ragged jail pillow, and Laura quietly nursing baby Lotil, whose little hand tried to land peaceably on Laura’s cheek. No, said Laura, we don’t need anything, Audra, just the magistrate. The magistrate will see it for what it is, she went on, nodding kind of serenely in complete confidence. And then we’ll be needing our Josie.
Let the law sort it out, was what Mama told anybody on the street over the next two days, when she overheard whispers about high time we go clear out Dark Town once and for all and who’s to say our pure womenfolk are safe from these vicious creatures ain’t fit to be in polite society. Mama asked one group of whisperers exactly what polite society they were referring to, but then they sniffed at her, spat something about maybe she’s not fit to teach their precious young, and moved off.
By that evening the whispers ended and Deputy George Loney was being mourned loudly in every place from the Okemah Baptist Church to Dugan’s Bar. Loney was now the finest, the holiest, the tallest, the crackest shot, the tenderest father, the steadiest drinker, the best angler, whistler, and spitter west of the damn Mississippi. And by that evening Laura and L. W. were lawless, dangerous devils responsible for lightning strikes, failed crops, and every personal disappointment suffered by a white person west of the damn Mississippi.
After dark we mistook the deep and sudden quiet everywhere for folks coming to their senses and turning toward home in shame at their idle talk. But then we heard trouble down at the far end of Okemah, near the jail, near the lumberyard where usually the worst that got planned were shivarees and ice cream socials. Mama stepped out of our house and looked far up the street. Except for a dim light in Ella Joy’s, all the neighbors’ houses were dark. A stray dog slunk past in the other direction, bouncing lightly on silent feet, its scrawny head pointed out of a town where maybe he could no longer trust the scraps. Suddenly, Mama told me to go grab my basket, and I hurried up the street behind her, trying to keep up.
Outside the jailhouse the electric globe lights were bright and the double doors were standing wide open. From there we watched distant lanterns swinging through the moonlit night, jostling along the road in their wagons, headed west out of Okemah, toward the Canadian River. Except for the thin, far-off voices singing “Onward Christian Soldiers,” you might have mistook the lantern lights for eyes of nighttime animals out hunting, doing their business in the dark. And maybe they were.
I followed Mama up the steps into the jailhouse, which was empty except for the old, bald jailer, name of Broome, who had ropes looped loosely around his wrists and ankle
s, sitting there in a chair tipped back against the wall. He was reading the latest issue of Feed News. Mama looked quickly around at the empty jail, eyed the doorway to the cells, and took a deep breath as Broome looked up at her. Then she said an extraordinary thing. I’m here for my baby, she declared.
What baby you talking about, Miz Templett?
The one Laura Nelson’s been minding for me. Where is she?
Broome sat up in his chair and leered at her. That black baby ain’t yours.
Mama shouted, Are you telling me I don’t know my own child? Now where is she?
It plumb belongs where the sheriff and the others took the other two, only I expect they’ll be back for it. And he gave her a dark look. Only next time they won’t bother to go so far out of town.
Mama disregarded the jailer and strode down the corridor to the cells. There, in the cell that had held Laura, baby Lotil was fast asleep, swaddled in blankets and tucked as far underneath the rough cot as Laura could get her. We scooped her up, blankets and all, set her in my basket, and headed out. Hey, called Broome, you two are stealing the property of the Okfuskee County Sheriff’s Department, same as a chair or a slop jar, which is punishable—
Go to hell, snapped Mama. We rushed around the corner to the livery stable, roused the stable boy, who was one of Mama’s fifth graders, and paid him to hitch a good fast horse to a buckboard. When he was done, still complaining about long division being the devil’s work—Mama told him he really has to look past long division to find the devil’s work—we climbed up, my heart pounding as I huddled over the basket, and he handed up a lantern he didn’t even charge us for, then let go of the bridle. We set out in the dark, alone on the road they had traveled, Laura and L. W., Mama driving the horse as fast as she knew how.
As bats swooped silently around us, jerking after a meal, I set Lotil’s basket between my feet and held up the lantern, not daring to ask Mama where we were going. I thought the sheriff was moving the Nelsons to another jail in another town, away from all the godforsaken talk about setting fire to Dark Town, somewhere they would be safe until the magistrate came and I could tell what I saw of the murder—somewhere none of us would have to be afraid of Tom Darnley ever again when they slap him in chains for the cold-blooded murder of his deputy. I wouldn’t even let myself wonder why I even thought it made sense for the killer to be protecting the very people he set up to take the blame for his deed. I wouldn’t even let myself wonder why the very people of Okemah who were calling the Nelsons bloodthirsty unchristian monkeys would be riding along with the sheriff and his new deputies while they transferred them.
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine 11/01/12 Page 3
