by Sam Torode
“He looks dangerous. For all we know, he could be a vicious criminal on the loose. Did you see that hook on his arm?”
“Aw, Millie—he’s nothing but a harmless old coot. I know the type. As soon as he finds out how tough the work is, he’ll be back on the road in no time. You can count on that.”
I hoped he wasn’t right. I didn’t want to lose Craw again.
CHAPTER 16
AFTER a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs, Uncle Will fitted me with some old leather boots. “Never go outside without these on,” he said. “You’ve got to guard your ankles around here.”
“From what—cactus?”
He laughed. “I reckon you don’t have to worry much about rattlers in Michigan.”
A chill crawled up my spine.
“But keep clear of the cacti, too. A jumpin’ cactus can reach right out and bite you. And I don’t care if you are kin—I ain’t gonna be the one to pull the needles out of your ass.”
After lunch, we all packed into the truck for a tour of the farm. I was stuck in the middle, crunched between Uncle Will’s shoulders and Craw’s. The main crop used to be cotton, Wilburn explained, before the topsoil dried up and blew away. Henry Farms survived by diversifying. We drove past row after row of fruit- and nut-bearing trees—apple, pear, peach, plum, orange, grapefruit, walnut, pecan. Among apples alone, Wilburn pointed out McIntosh, Cortland, King David, Jonathan, Smokehouse, and a dozen other varieties. Picking apples—now that sounded like a breezy way to spend the next month while searching for Father’s money on the sly.
Uncle Will showed us the common garden, which was shared by him and Millie, Will Junior and his wife, and the hired hands. We went by the small houses Craw and I had seen last night—it turned out that Will Junior and the others lived in them. As we drove around, I kept an eye peeled for anything resembling an abandoned well. I thought about asking, but didn’t want to arouse suspicion.
When we came to an open field, Wilburn shut off the truck. “This,” he said, “is where you’ll be spending most of your time.”
What? It was a bare plain, all dirt and grass with not a single tree in sight.
Wilburn turned to Craw. “You got any experience handling bulls?”
“Yes siree,” Craw said. “I’ve been dodging them all my life.”
I nudged Craw. “I think he means cows—not cops.”
“The orchard’s carried us through the depression,” Wilburn said, “but fruits and nuts are chump change compared to cattle. That’s where the real money is these days.” He kicked back against his truck and lit up a cigarette. “Right this morning, Will Junior’s checking out some bulls in Fort Worth. And I’ve got ten acres of pasture that needs to be fenced in before the first one arrives.”
Putting up a fence would be more work than picking apples, but it still sounded easy enough. Of course, I had no idea how large an acre was. “Do you want us to do it right now?”
Wilburn spit out a cloud of smoke and slapped my back. “Atta boy! With an attitude like that, you’ll go far. But truly, I’ll be happy if you finish by the first of July.”
+ + +
Craw kept quiet for most of the tour—which was unusual for him. But he made up for it the next day when we started to work on the fence.
As I unrolled a bale of barbed wire, trying not to slice my fingers, Craw sat beneath the shade of a pecan tree, chopping rough branches into smooth fence posts. He steadied the branches with his hook and swung a hatchet with his hand. “This isn’t exactly what I had in mind by carpentry.”
I rolled up my sleeves and took a few whacks at the earth with a post-hole digger. The metal blade bounced off the hard ground, sending up a little cloud of dust.
After a while, I became aware of a constant buzz in the air. “What’s that noise? Sounds like an electrical line.”
“Cicadas,” Craw said. “Also known as locusts. Or, as John the Baptist would say, lunch.”
I laughed, surprised that Craw knew his Bible characters so well.
We hacked and hammered all morning. By noon, Craw had carved five fence posts and I had stuck two of them in the ground. I rested on the end of my digger and squinted up at the black birds circling overhead.
“Buzzards,” Craw said.
After a few minutes, they swooped down to where I could see their gnarled, bald heads.
“They’re waiting for us to die, aren’t they? So they can pick our carcasses clean.”
Craw tossed another finished post on his pile. “You know, in all my years I’ve never encountered such pessimism in one so young.”
“I don’t trust birds,” I said. “Not after what happened to my father.”
“It’s more than that,” Craw said. “You don’t seem to trust anyone. Here you are, entering the prime of life—a world of possibilities before you—and you’re more cynical than Job.”
First John the Baptist, now Job. “You read the Bible?” I asked.
“Not much. More often, I’d say it reads me.”
“Take Job,” I said, hoisting my post-hole digger. “He was the most faithful man on earth, and look what happened to him—his kids died, his flocks died, and his body got covered with boils. All because of a bet between God and the devil.” I jammed my digger into the ground. “If I were around back then, I would have been one of the sons who got killed. And you blame me for being cynical?”
Craw chuckled. “No one ever said life was fair, did they?”
I threw down my post-hole digger and walked over to where he was sitting. I’d been waiting for an opportunity like this, to voice my doubts with someone who wouldn’t judge me. I stammered around for a while, then dumped the whole load—the confused creation accounts, Cain’s wife, the flaming sword, the angels raping women, the dinosaurs getting left off the Ark.
By the end, I was shouting like my father on a Sunday morning. “Foreskins—foreskins! Can you believe it? How can anyone believe this stuff?”
I closed my case and waited for Craw to agree that it was all a farce, but he only smiled and shook his head. “You’re going about it all wrong, my boy. You read Genesis like a textbook. It isn’t science or history—it’s a myth.”
“You mean it’s a lie,” I said.
“Not at all.”
“But a myth is a made-up story. A fairy tale. A lie.”
Craw laughed. “That’s the problem with you Baptists—
We both read the Bible day and night;
but you read black where I read white!
“Just because a story didn’t actually happen,” he continued, “you think it’s a lie. But myths and fairy tales aren’t lies—they’re deeper truths.”
“My father doesn’t believe in stories,” I said. “He says we should only believe in the facts. And to him, the Bible is a book of facts.
“Doesn’t believe in stories? The Bible isn’t a damn book of facts, it’s a collection of stories. And Jesus wasn’t a scientist or a mathematician—he was a storyteller.” Craw threw up his hands. “Why, all of life is a story!”
“But if it’s just a story,” I said, “if all that stuff in Genesis didn’t actually happen—how the hell can you say it’s true?”
“Oftentimes,” Craw said, “a truth is so big, so far beyond our understanding, that the only way we can grasp it is through a story. The creation of the whole universe is like that. How can our puny brains contain it?”
“So it’s a lie … but it’s a deeper truth. My brain can’t even contain what you’re saying.”
“Hell,” Craw said. “You don’t believe Genesis is true-to-life? Show me a man and a woman in love, and I’ll show you Adam and Eve. Give them a few weeks, and you’ll have a fall from grace. A few years after that, Cain and Abel will running around the house in diapers trying to kill each other. It’s the plain stuff of life.”
I began to see what he was getting at. But it still didn’t explain a lot of things, like Abraham and the Jews. “What about circumcision?” I asked. “Where�
�s the deeper truth in chopping the foreskin off your pecker?”
“It’s a rite of passage, my boy. A mark of belonging to the tribe.” Craw picked up his hatchet and eyed the blade.
“Put that down,” I said. “I’ve already been sliced.”
He tossed it between my feet, laughing as I jumped back. “I hate to tell you this,” he said, “but I doubt if it’s even possible for you white folks to understand the Jews.”
“Why not?”
“The Jews were tribal people. Nomads. Wanderers, fighting to keep their dignity. They were always being oppressed, exiled, sold into slavery. In America today, who does that remind you of?”
“Hoboes?”
“Not quite. I mean blacks. Negroes. Or—as your aunt would say—niggers.”
My cheeks flushed red.
“The way I see it,” Craw said, “white folks in this country have more in common with the Babylonians and Assyrians than the Jews.”
I walked back to my digger, trying to avoid the subject. A minute later, I muttered under my breath. “I just need some proof, that’s all.”
Craw wiped the sweat from his brow. “Son, right now I could use a little proof myself. Hundred proof.”
CHAPTER 17
EACH evening after work, I’d wash my hands and go inside for dinner while Craw waited on the back porch for Millie to bring him a plate of food. I felt awful about it—especially after what Craw said about his people and the Jews—but Craw seemed grateful just to have regular meals.
And what meals they were! Fried chicken, pot roast, smoked ham, butternut squash, mashed potatoes slathered in butter, apple dumplings, hickorynut cake, squash pie. As soon as I licked my plate clean, she’d pile on another helping. She fussed over me like I was her own son. “Eat another piece of that pie before you waste away to nothing. What do they feed you up North—snow?”
While Uncle Will was laid-back, Millie was serious. Millie—no one dared call her Mildred—used to play the pump organ at the movie theater in downtown Glen Rose. She’d seen every Chaplin and Keaton film, but her favorite was Rudolph Valentino. In fact, she walked with a slight crick in her neck from years of looking over her shoulder at the screen while she played.
Once, I asked her which she liked better: silent movies or talkies. “Silent movies were an art,” she said, “just like ballet. Talkies are just that—people talking. I wouldn’t pay a nickel to hear anybody gab—not even Clark Gable. If I wanted to listen to a bunch of chattering, I’d go to the Bluebonnet Salon.”
Millie was a woman of firm resolve and stubborn opinions. One evening, after she scolded Uncle Will for tracking dirt on the carpet, he snuck up behind her and pinched her ass. Millie jumped and screamed, “Wilburn Henry!” Then she looked at me, her face flustered pink. “He knows just how to get my goat.”
Aunt Millie felt no need to be consistent in her judgments. For instance, she hated talking pictures but loved radio. Every evening, we gathered around the radio, which sat on a big table in the middle of the parlor. In my parents’ house, that same spot was reserved for the family Bible. That summed up the difference between the two households—the radio stood for everything my father was against: worldly music, comedy, the Chesterfield Cigarettes program, and the brewery’s “Old Foam Hour.”
The farmhouse didn’t have electricity, but Wilburn rigged up the radio to run on a car battery. We took turns choosing stations; Wilburn loved the Louisiana Hoe-down and the Texas Roundup; Millie preferred Bing Crosby and Glen Miller; I wanted to hear Jack Benny and Burns & Allen.
“My father said you and him were in a music group,” I told Uncle Will.
“That’s right—the Golden Melody Makers. We still get together every once in a while, JP and me, my boys, and some of the cousins. In fact, you’ll get to hear us in just a couple weeks—if you care to. The Henry family reunion’s coming up in June, and we always put on a jamboree.”
“You ever think of getting on the radio? I’ll bet you could play on the Texas Roundup.”
Wilburn laughed. “I’m too old for that. Besides, we ain’t much to listen to without your father’s voice. Damn, he was good. If only he hadn’t gone all religious on us.”
If only.
+ + +
My first Sunday in Texas, I woke up and found an old suit of Jimmy’s in the back of his closet. Jimmy was a strapping farm boy, and inside his suit I looked like a skeleton. When I came downstairs, Wilburn looked up over his coffee and smiled. “Where you going, boy? You look good enough to get buried.”
“Don’t you go to church?”
“Sure—for weddings and funerals.”
“Oh Wilburn—don’t you tease him.” Millie handed me a steaming cup. “Tobias, you’re welcome to borrow the car if you’d like to drive to church.”
I considered the offer for a second—but only a second. “No thanks.” After attending services three times a week for all of my life, I deserved a vacation. “I just assumed you’d be going, so—”
“We ain’t churchgoing people,” Wilburn said. “We’re the sort of folks your father would call lost.”
“I’m not my father,” I said.
“I could see that from the start. If you acted like Malachi, I’d have already kicked your ass out of my house.” At that, we both laughed.
“Last time I seen your father,” Uncle Will said, “he was yelling at me to get on my knees and pray. It was some prayer he learned at Bible college—said if I didn’t say this particular prayer, I’d go straight to hell. Well, I told Malachi that I’d rather go skinny dippin’ in the Lake of Fire than to spend eternity with the likes of him.”
I couldn’t believe that anyone would say such a thing to my father’s face—and I loved Wilburn for it. “What did he say to that?”
“Oh, he huffed that I was damned from the start and there was nothing he could do to help me. Some people are beyond the hope of grace, he said—that was another thing they taught him at Bible school. He went off to that seminary and came back acting all high and mighty, wanting us to call him ‘Reverend Henry’—our own brother!”
“So the seminary changed him?”
“I’ll say. They gave him a certificate, deputizing him to hunt down sinners and claim souls for Jesus. Well, there was nobody left to save around here, ’cept his own family—and we weren’t falling for it. He had to go clear to the other end of the country before he found some folks who’d listen to him. We never heard much from him after that.”
Uncle Will set down his coffee and looked out the window. “A few years back, when Pa passed on, I sent Malachi a letter. Told him Ma wanted him to come down and see her. But he never wrote back.”
It still stung Wilburn, I could tell, and I felt sick that my father had done such a thing. He deserved to be blinded.
CHAPTER 18
AFTER a week at the Henry farm, I was no closer to finding Father’s money than when I’d first arrived. But I had gotten plenty of life experience; I’d learned how to lay a barbed-wire fence, how big ten acres is, and that it would take the rest of my life to enclose the latter with the former. My neck and ears were sunburnt to the point of peeling, and I woke up one morning with red sores on my ankles and crotch. They were chiggers—little bugs that hide in your socks and underwear and then burrow under your skin. Millie said that they can live off your flesh for months if you don’t suffocate them; she gave me some ladies’ nail polish to paint over the bites, which stung like the devil.
Another day, I sat on the john and felt something like a needle prick my bottom. I jumped up and there, crawling out from under the seat, was a scorpion the size of my pinky. All I knew about scorpions was that they were poisonous, and thought I was going to die—no one was going to suck the poison out of my ass, that much was sure. I ran into the farmhouse with my pants hanging down around my knees. “I’m stung! Poisoned!”
When Uncle Will surmised what had happened, he just laughed. “A little scorpion can’t kill you.”
At le
ast Aunt Millie took some sympathy—she brought me some ice to put on the bite and a bromide fizz to drink. “The poison might upset your tummy,” she said.
I was starting to see some good aspects of life in Remus: it was too cold for flesh-eating bugs or ass-biting insects.
+ + +
That second week, I began searching in earnest for Father’s money. Instead of going straight to dinner after work, I left Craw to explore the farm on my own. I cursed my luck for losing the map; with it, I’d have already found that well. I wanted to tell Craw about the money and enlist his help, but I couldn’t. Who knew how much or how little money Father had buried? I couldn’t promise anyone a cut.
On my second or third day of searching, I ventured to the far north end of the farm, which was bordered by a row of tall cedars. Sweaty and aching after a day of digging holes, the sound of rushing water lured me onward.
Beyond the trees and down a steep gorge was the Paluxy River. It was like nothing I’d ever seen—a swath of pure, blue water winding between huge slabs of chalky white limestone, set off against lush evergreens and bright green cacti. I slid down the hill and entered another world, far from Wilburn’s dusty fields.
I wound my way between the big rocks and scampered over the smaller ones, till I reached the shore. Leaving my boots behind, I waded into the shallows. The water flowed around my ankles, warming my feet and cooling my body at the same time. In a spot where the stone formed a deep pocket, I spotted a school of bluegills—next time, I’d have to see if I could borrow a fishing pole from Uncle Will.
Then I got a strange urge—strange for me, at least. I peeled off all of my sweaty clothes and jumped into the water. When I was in up to my waist, I held out my arms and leaned back, gliding wieghtless on a sparkling bed of sapphire blue. All of my aches and pains melted away.
I wondered why I’d never liked swimming before. Then I remembered that the waters in Northern Michigan are ice-cold even in summer, they’re full of green slime and brown muck, and there’s a good reason why the pond near our house was called Leach Lake.
