Redwood and Wildfire

by Andrea Hairston

  “I know.” She snapped at Redwood. “Who you telling?” Her lips trembled.

  “He hit you?”

  “Not yet.” She was hiding something.

  “You got a new beau?”

  Josie cut her eyes at Redwood. “It just ain’t working out how I thought.”

  “That happens.” Redwood set the tools on the porch, huffing coughs.

  “You sick, gal? Too busy passing out cures. You ought to take your own medicine.”

  “I do.”

  “Medicine don’t cure everything.”

  Redwood wheezed. Aidan should have gone to Miz Subie for a good-luck spell. she would’ve done it right. Redwood couldn’t get nothing hard to work out. “I’m sorry.”

  All the bluster and fight drained out of Josie. “If a man come after me with his fists, I’d have a mind to get a gun.” She sighed thinking on this. “That ain’t no way to live.” She drove off with her son shrieking again and left Redwood standing on the porch.

  A bush by the door hung with colored glass bottles tinkled in the wind.

  It was a week since Josie left Aidan for one of her old flames, or was it two weeks? Down to his last jug and he was having a hard time keeping track of time and space. Aidan come into town and couldn’t find nothing where it used to be. Turn his back a minute and Peach Grove done grown into a bustling metropolis. Besides the telegraph and post office there were now two general stores, a hotel, a doctor and a dentist office, a new schoolhouse with a library upside it, a bigger Baptist church, and too many fancy townhouses — where did all these rich folk come from they need two feed stores and a dress shop? The new sheriff got hisself spanking new digs too, right ’cross from the bank. No question who he was working for.

  “All we need is the railroad and a good cat house to put us on the map. Josie Cooper the one to see for that.” Miles Crawford, a burly white man with reddish-brown hair, was making fun, loud so Aidan and every other body in the post office could hear. Miles was sharecropping for Jerome Williams on good soil he once owned. His wife worked herself to death last summer, and Miles took her dying hard to his heart. Josie run to Miles when she left Aidan. That lasted three days. Josie run from him and his three kids too. She went to South Carolina chasing somebody. So much for Aidan doing right by her. He didn’t miss Josie much, but little Bobby —

  “How she get even a bastard son of a whore to marry her?” Miles roared his nasty laugh. With so many joining in, egging Miles on, the business Aidan had come to the post office for flew out his head. He turned to leave, weaving and wobbling, his fists throbbing. Miles blocked his way. Aidan walked ’round him.

  “Leave him be,” somebody muttered.

  Miles shoved Aidan, twice. “Cheaper to pay by the hour. Hear what I say?”

  Laughter died when Aidan slugged Miles in the chin, and he fell clear out the door into the street. Though he’d had a few, Miles was not as drunk as Aidan. He stood up swinging and landed punches on Aidan’s side and shoulder. Aidan fell back. The pain cleared his muffled head just a bit.

  Miles kicked dirt in his face. “Irish fool, can’t never hold your liquor.” He took a moment to gloat for his audience. A few in the crowd were chuckling ’til Aidan slugged Miles four or five times in the head and gut and then kicked his legs out from under him. Miles doubled up, yelping and spitting blood. Aidan slammed a bottle of Miz Subie’s cure-all at a post. It shattered and spit glass back at him, cutting his hand.

  “You the bastard son of a whore, not me,” Aidan yelled. Miles crawled ’round to see who might come to his aid. Men shook their heads at Crazy Coop brandishing a broken bottle. Aidan howled and thrust jagged glass in their faces. “A lot of folks who be ready to laugh with you, ain’t willing to spill blood for you.”

  Miles tried to feint one direction and get away the other, but limping on a bruised ankle, he had no speed. Aidan stopped him cold. “Damn you,” Miles said.

  “Damn you to hell too.” Even if Aidan didn’t love her or miss her, “Josie’s my wife.” He grabbed Miles’s arm, yanking ’til it come half out the socket. Miles screamed. Aidan twirled him so they were face to face. For all his bulk, Miles wasn’t strong. Just the sort of blowhard fool Josie could convince to take her in. Aidan held jagged green glass to his eye. Miles sputtered and banged at Aidan with a useless arm.

  “What you got to say now?” Aidan said.

  Miles was crying. “Josie just don’t want you no more, you crazy drunk! You goin’ kill me for that, take my eye?” He whined like Aidan started this fight.

  “I guess she don’t want you neither,” Aidan said.

  Redwood sauntered out the old general store with a bag of flour over one shoulder and a basket of notions in the other hand. “What’s going on?” she said.

  Seeing her, Aidan felt dizzy. The liquor sloshing ’round his belly and rising up to his head was fixing to spew out his eyes and ears. He didn’t need to go to jail over Josie. He dropped the shard of glass, backed away from his whimpering victim, and swallowed a string of cuss words. Redwood crossed the muddy street heading right for him.

  “That’s Garnett’s gal!” someone whispered.

  Miles pulled hisself together, nodded thanks at her, and stumbled away. Nobody helped him — the crowd went on ’bout their business like nothing had happened.

  Just before Redwood reached Aidan, Jerome Williams stepped out the bank, smiling at her long legs and ample hips. Jerome was curly gray handsome, a silver fox at twenty-seven, finely dressed, and one of the richest men in the county. He and his mama, Miz Caroline Williams, stole land right out from under poor folk — white, colored, and Indian: the Crawford’s fields and the Jessup place, Graham Wright’s pastures, Cherokee Will’s orchard, and Raymond and Garnett Phipps’ farm. The Williams clan had their eye on Aidan’s land too. Redwood strode by Jerome without so much as a glance. He stepped directly in front of her and they almost collided.

  “Oh. How do, Mr. Williams.” Redwood smiled at Jerome. She could smile at a rattlesnake and mean it.

  “How do yourself.” Jerome admired her. Who wouldn’t?

  Aidan went from demon drunk to near-sober in an instant.

  Jerome was notorious with the ladies, breaking hearts and leaving a trail of bastards all ’cross the county. Aidan didn’t want him nowhere near Redwood, for her own sake and her brother’s too. George would come after the man with a shotgun and end up hanging from a tree. Jerome ate her up with his eyes. Redwood danced past him without noticing.

  “How do, Mr. Cooper,” she said.

  Aidan rubbed bloody palms against filthy clothes. His hair hung over his eyes in sweaty clumps. Blood trickled down his cheek. Redwood stepped close to him. Jerome took note of her light touch on Aidan’s forearm. Aidan smelled the last several weeks clinging to him like rot. He wanted to bolt, but he wasn’t leaving her alone with Jerome.

  “You promised to come by and visit us,” Redwood said, not worrying over the stench, dirt, or the bloody streaks his hands left on his pants; not worrying if Jerome or anybody in Peach Grove saw how close they were. Not seeing nobody really, but him. “Why ain’t you stopped by?” Aidan recognized the lonely ache in her voice. She missed him the way he missed her. “You too busy letting your crops go to seed?” She teased him in broad daylight.

  “Well,” he stammered. She waited for more, but he wasn’t sober enough to make sense talking. “I’ll come, as soon as...I will.”

  “That’s something to look forward to.” She squeezed his arm, taking some of the hurting off him, and then sauntered away, a Queen of Dahomey in Peach Grove. She waved and smiled at folks all down the street.

  “Coop, how do you get an invitation?” Jerome said.

  “They’re my neighbors.”

  “You ever had a colored gal? One who was willing?”

  Aidan grunted.

  “Did you see her smile? She takes after her mama. A gal fine as that would be wasted on an ignorant nigger, don’t you think?”

  If A
idan hadn’t left his gun on the porch, Jerome would’ve been dead meat. The fool was so busy watching Redwood’s behind, he didn’t notice how close he come to death.

  “You been sleeping up a tree, Coop?”

  “Better than a bed in this god-forsaken town.”

  Jerome studied him and then looked back at Redwood. “I never know what you’re going to say.”

  “The boy is a genius in the rough,” Doc Johnson said. He slipped up from behind and clapped Aidan on the shoulder.

  Aidan jumped. “Don’t come up on me that way.”

  “You been rough-housing?” In a flash, Doc had Aidan in a firm grip, observing every detail of his current condition. There was no hope of escape. Doc’s twin brother, Hiram Johnson, was right beside him, shaking his head at Aidan’s filthy get-up.

  “In between drinking and fighting, the boy read more than I do,” Hiram said.

  Doc and Hiram only had ten years on Aidan, but they were well-off, up-standing white citizens — they owned most of Main Street — Peach Grove aristocracy, like Jerome Williams. ’Cept the Johnson twins thought they were better than most rich folk in this backwater county, more intelligent, more civilized. They’d gone off to college; traveled the world. They read the best books money could buy. Doc donated volumes for a public library and stocked the schoolhouse. He gave books to Miz Elisa to teach the colored kids. Rumor had it he paid her wages. But Aidan knew colored folk did the paying themselves.

  “What did you do to your hand?” Doc picked glass from Aidan’s wound and poured a clear liquid from a silver flask on the ragged flesh. It stung like hell.

  “You’re lucky, Aidan,” Jerome said. “Doc will treat any sick body, whether they can pay or not. He even let colored folk walk in the front door.”

  “If somebody minds, they can take their sick selves twenty-five miles to the next doctor,” Doc said.

  “I want to see you carry on this way in Atlanta.” Jerome laughed, not hiding his bile.

  Doc glowered at Jerome; so did Hiram. The twins were odd-looking, having inherited their father’s bulging blue eyes, craggy cheeks, and dagger-sharp chin. They sported the latest men’s coats from Atlanta and fancy boots from Europe. Aidan always felt ill-spoken and shabby by comparison, a curio. Doc, in particular, liked to collect curios, while Hiram put out a weekly town journal and liked to spread the news.

  “Preacher fell down his own well,” Hiram said.

  “Indeed. Coop tells me God has forsaken us,” Jerome said.

  “Preacher was running from a voice on the wind. In the twentieth century!” Doc said.

  “Garnett’s curse.” Hiram shook his head.

  Aidan was trembling all over now.

  “You think the preacher was in that posse? Nobody knows who rode out after her.” Jerome looked pale.

  “I suspect there are some who know.” Doc wrapped Aidan’s hand in a white handkerchief. “People be spooking themselves and call it the voice of a dead colored woman.” Doc was a man of science. He didn’t believe in haints and spooks. “They feel so bad for what they did or didn’t do, they’re haunted. Isn’t that right, Coop?”

  “That’s right, Doc. Hoodoo is mostly in your head.” Aidan wasn’t ’bout to argue with him on this or any point. Doc could argue a man to death. “You get spooked by what you already believe. Haint don’t hound you if there’s no reason to.”

  “Most people in Peach Grove sleep fine, even in the trees,” Jerome said.

  “More restless spirits than you think.” Hiram gazed at the good citizens of Peach Grove, coming and going in a warm winter sun. “Things are never what they seem.”

  “Do you think that’s true, Coop? Everyone has a secret up his sleeve?” Jerome sounded like he had something to hide. “You keeping something from us?”

  “Coop is up in the tree branches reading the book of life…and half my library.” Doc inspected a cut on Aidan’s cheek.

  “You have to watch out for the smart ones.” Jerome studied Aidan again, like a boxer assessing an opponent he’d underestimated. “They’ll turn on their own kind.”

  Aidan hated getting caught in the middle of their spat.

  “You’ll mend.” Doc released him as a wagon pulled up to the post office. “Is that the Atlanta Newspaper coming in?”

  “Hiram, Doc, Mr. Williams, be seeing you.” Aidan lurched ’cross the street away from them.

  Redwood angrily squeezed cold water from a month of shirts. The wringer was busted. She twisted one thin shirt ’til it was wet ribbons. A man from a Negro institute in Atlanta come to Ladd and Elisa’s door and asked to photograph the family in front of a “typical colored dwelling.” Elisa broke out laughing and Ladd waved his axe in the man’s face. Redwood would’ve at least talked to the fellow ’bout this colored institute of higher learning, but Ladd chased him away with tales of bears, gators, and clouds of mosquitoes that suck the blood and juice out your brains and make you stupid. Aunt and Uncle didn’t want fancy people sitting somewhere, laughing at their modest four-room cabin, home to nine hard working people. Ladd made sure the man didn’t take any pictures on the sly and then went back to chopping wood. Elisa went to haul water from the well to the house. Hard to shove Aunt and Uncle off their course.

  “I bet company coming for supper.” Elisa squinted at someone raising dust down the road. Redwood coughed and turned her back. Bubba had just as much sense as a falling rock. She’d have to do a hot-foot or drive-away spell to get him to leave her be.

  Iris and the five cousins chased the two scrawny chickens they’d be eating for dinner. Bill was ten and Ruby nine, yet six-year-old Iris was almost as tall as them, busting out her favorite green dress, a rag really. All the children’s clothes were worn thin, but the young ones didn’t notice the chill in the air or how poor and shabby their life would look in a photograph. They were having too much fun. Redwood moved on to hanging sheets.

  Iris tumbled over a chair and fell into a battered shovel. The cousins yelped. Iris ran to Redwood through billowing white. Wide-eyed and hopeful, she presented a bloody, sliced knee, but no tears or squeals.

  “Shall I make it better?” Redwood said.

  Over Iris’s shoulder she spied Aidan, not Bubba, loping into the yard for his third visit in two weeks. His clothes were clean; his hair was slicked back and tucked in his collar. He carried his banjo over one shoulder and a deer over the other. Quite a handsome man for all his foolishness. He smiled at Redwood kissing Iris’s bloody knee.

  “Crazy Coop! Crazy Coop! Crazy Coop!” Iris jumped up squealing now with joy.

  The five cousins joined her and ran toward Aidan. He had only a second to hand Ladd the deer and Elisa the banjo before he was mobbed. Ladd headed to the smokehouse with the deer. The children talked all at once. “What you bring us? What’s in your pockets? Where you been?”

  “Out hunting up that deer,” he replied.

  “Hush all that noise. Mr. Cooper ’llowed to go deaf,” Elisa said, smiling.

  “It’s Aidan, Ma’am. I figured I couldn’t eat it all by myself. So if you don’t mind.”

  “It’s been a lean month. All the men go out and come back with nothing. You put a spell on them deer?” Elisa said.

  “He be singing them right into a trap,” Redwood said.

  Aidan gaped at her.

  “Well, ain’t you?”

  Aidan pulled candy and carved wooden toys from his pockets. He crouched down and hugged each child. “The bear is for little Iris, you hear? Y’all can share the rest.”

  Iris held up a carved black bear with a half-eaten apple in its paw. A raccoon peered through the bear’s leg at the fruit. “Cairo and Star.” She hugged them to her chest.

  “You named that bear been coming ’round?” Redwood said. “Don’t be feeding him.”

  The cousins ran off playing with/fighting over the carved bobcats, gators, and otters. Aidan took his banjo back from Elisa.

  “What you got for me?” Redwood asked.

 
“Something I just wrote.” He played the banjo and sang:

  My love is like a falling star

  A passing phantom high overhead

  You do not see her fall, not far

  For oh my lord, she’s dark as the dead

  Redwood applauded the melancholy melody. Ladd walked toward them, tapping his feet to the rhythm. Aidan’s voice and playing were beautiful, but Elisa scowled, muttering ’bout the Blues.

  “You a conjure man with that banjo,” Redwood said quickly.

  “I play what I feel. Even Josie said that,” Aidan said.

  “Sorry to hear ’bout your wife leaving,” Ladd said.

  “Drunk all the time. She couldn’t stand me.”

  “Well, uh…” Ladd didn’t want to talk on this. “I got a wife who’ll put up with anything.”

  “Almost,” Elisa said.

  “Ain’t nobody should put up with me.” Aidan left off strumming and looked down.

  “You’re right nice when you’re sober.” Redwood touched his shoulder.

  “Woman run off with your little boy…make anyone take a drink or two,” Elisa said.

  “Baby wasn’t mine,” Aidan said, so matter of fact everyone gulped.

  Elisa wiped her hands on her apron and snatched winter herbs from the garden. Ladd lifted his axe and grabbed a hunk of wood to split.

  “You staying for supper?” Redwood said. “Ain’t much, but if you can stomach my cooking, you’re welcome.”

  Aidan looked at Elisa and Ladd.

  “You, cook? Listen to her now.” Eliza grinned and poked Redwood in the ribs.

  “Man bring fresh meat; what you talking ’bout, ain’t much?” Ladd almost smiled at him. “Mr. Cooper can help me chop this wood while you women do your magic.”

  Flames danced and crackled in the fireplace. Aidan sat in Elisa’s plain, cozy kitchen, so stuffed with good food, taking a breath interfered with his digestion. The ruins of dinner littered the large wooden table in case anybody wanted to try for more. Ladd was telling a story. Elisa rocked her chair like drum accompaniment. The children sat in grown-up laps fighting sleep. Iris was curled up against Aidan’s chest. She tugged his collar and showed him the knee that was bleeding when he arrived. The wound was healed now, just a wiggly purple line. They made funny faces at Redwood who had her eyes closed, hugging Becky and Jessie.