In Tall Cotton

by Charles G. Hulse

  Captain J had initiated the “Woody-Two” for Junior on our first day at 1548, insisting that Junior wasn’t a name, it was a designation and as for “Totsy”, he shuddered when he heard it and steadfastly called me Carlton.

  Dad of course was the undisputed baseball coach and he worked with both boys, well, all three of us, but you could tell that his eye was on Junior. When Dad coached Junior, it was with as much seriousness and professionalism that Captain J brought to boxing. Dad’s eyes would shine with that special light—that name-up-in-lights light.

  Any excuse for an outing was a good excuse as far as the Captain was concerned and the beautifully polished station wagon was often pulled up near the practice field at school where both men could watch Junior put into practice the coaching he’d been getting at home. And the coaching was paying off. The seventh and eighth graders had a team that was shaping up pretty well and Junior was making a name for himself already in just the practice games with a couple of other schools.

  We finally got the notice from Railway Express that our trunk had arrived a week after school had started so that I could get out of the detested girls pants and into something with a fly. I told Junior that I was going to leave my fly unbuttoned all the time so kids would notice and point and giggle. At least they’d be giggling about boys’ pants. I went with Dad in the station wagon to the depot and as always when we passed the Arizona State Mental Hospital, I had a delicious shiver looking up at the windows and wondering which one Winnie Ruth Judd might be looking out. She had been sent here after she was convicted of chopping up her lover and somebody else and had been in the headlines in the local papers almost constantly ever since. She had a talent for escape that was compared to Houdini’s. Parents could keep their children off the streets after dark by simply saying, “Winnie Ruth’s out again.” She could be anywhere, behind that bush, that dark corner, that vacant lot, anywhere and everywhere. Most recently, she’d got out rolled up in a carpet that was being sent to the cleaners. She was one of Phoenix’s most famous citizens and her lively escapades kept everybody amused. “She’s escaped!” people would say with that same pride they’d used back home in referring to Bonnie and Clyde. “You think she’s crazy? Anybody who can figure out how to get out of that nut-house is not a nut.” She was always caught again, but she managed to get out another day. Winnie Ruth-Watching was almost as great a sport in Phoenix as the annual rodeos.

  “Now, when you go in with the notice,” Dad said as we neared the depot, “don’t let it out of your hand. It’s our only receipt.”

  “Yeah. OK.” He’d told me that four times already. We were al anxious about the trunk, me to the point of obsession. It somehow represented our identity. We weren’t anybody without it.

  In it were photos, certificates of marriage (perhaps a divorce?), births, even deaths, our books (not many), momentos that couldn’t be parted with, school records, some clothes (fewer than I’d thought), Dad’s riding boots, and three porcelain dinner plates that Mom hung up on a wall in every house we’d ever lived in. They’d belonged to a set her family had had and were the only remaining pieces. There were some odd bits of silver and … I guess that was about all. Not much. But it was us.

  I jumped out of the car and was headed into the office when Dad called, “Don’t get mixed up and get the wrong one, Tots. There’s still one of Winnie Ruth’s they haven’t found yet.”

  I was through the door before I realized what he had said. Winnie Ruth had chopped up her lover and someone else, but what I’d forgotten was that she’d stuffed their bodies into trunks and sent them by Railway Express somewhere. Here? Could it have been here? She was locked up here. Here in Phoenix. This must have been where she’d been tried. Was it here that the victims had been found? Wherever it was, they’d given themselves away by the leaking blood and smell of rotting flesh. Supposing …

  I was feeling a bit whoozy when a voice from behind the counter said, “What can I do for you, sonny?”

  I showed the man the notice with a trembling hand. “A trunk. For Woods. From Galena. Missouri.”

  He glanced around and I saw our beat-up old trunk just behind him. The sight of the old familiar black tin case was such a relief that I almost jumped over the counter to help the man load it on a hand-truck. It wasn’t oozing blood—I knew what was in it.

  The plates went up on the wall in the living room so quickly that I realized Mom must have placed them in her mind when she first saw our house. Books were out and on shelves. Clothes tried on—I was pleased that I could still wear my things but secretly bothered for not having grown more. The riding boots were polished and Dad looked at them lovingly. “It looks like the closest I’ll get to a horse here is the horseshit I’m fertilizing this whole place with,” he said resignedly.

  “Why don’t we just hang the boots up on the wall too,” Junior suggested drily.

  “Sure,” I agreed. “And we can put some pots of ivy or geraniums in the top.”

  “Smart-alecks, both of you,” Mom said.

  Mom cooked two Thanksgiving dinners that year. She had to prepare the dinner for the Joneses and for us too. We were really celebrating. We were going to have Aunt Dell, Uncle Roy, Sister and Mavis to dinner—our first party in our new house.

  Everybody was gay—Aunt Dell hadn’t fallen down recently, so didn’t have to limp or groan; Sister was a knockout in a pale-blue wool jersey dress that showed off her figure to a spine-tingling T; Mavis was flashing an engagement ring with a pretty good sized stone—whether it was actually a diamond, nobody would hazard a guess; Uncle Roy preened in new cowboy boots and western trousers cut as tight as Levis and Mom’s dinner was quite up to our smartly turned-out guests. Sister had brought some wine and what with a few drinks before, by the time the meal was over, we were twice as gay as before.

  We were a bit reluctant to go outside on the lawn that separated the main house from ours because we could see the Joneses all sitting out on their covered porch (Mrs. Jones called it a “lanai” but Captain J confided to Dad that if it were in Hawaii it might be a lanai, but here in Phoenix it was a porch) that faced the lawn. Junior and I broke the ice by having a bit of post-prandial roughhousing near our own smaller porch. “Tell them all to come on out,” the captain called to us. “You’ve got to shake that good cooking of Miz Milly’s down so you can have some more.” He’d called Mom Miz Milly from the first day as some sort of private joke that only he seemed to understand. Mom said she liked it because it reminded her of teaching since that was what most of her pupils called her.

  Mavis had been the only one to comment on the obvious (something Mom had always taught us not to do) when we first took the job with the Joneses. “My God, Milly, I don’t see how you can go from being a teacher to being a maid.”

  “Well, Mavis, if you think about it for a minute you’ll see that it isn’t a very big step. One way or the other. Taking care of children or taking care of grownups. Pretty much the same thing.”

  “I guess so,” Mavis shrugged. “But you were my teacher.”

  “Oh,” Mom laughed. “It’s you I’ve let down, is it?”

  One by one, we moved outside. We started a game of badminton in which Bradford joined without his usual reticence. I soon thought I knew why. Sister jumping in the air with a flash of tanned leg and bouncing breasts had him mesmerized. I was also aware that Captain J was his son’s own father. He was fairly slathering. I heard him say to Dad, “Woody, you are the luckiest devil. A niece like that! Well, both of them for that matter and that’s not mentioning your sister.” He poked Dad with an elbow and added, “Or Miz Milly.” All our women were on the lawn, shoes off, barefeet flying over the grass. “But that one,” nodding toward Sister, “that’s for eating. I may be paralyzed, but I’m not dead yet.”

  Dad blushed for some reason, something I’d rarely seen him do and shot a quick glance at me. “Yes, well.” He cleared his throat. “We all have pretty good teeth. Runs in the family.”

  Capt
ain J turned his head slowly toward Dad and looked up at him with a quizzical expression then roared like a lion from the depths of that emaciated body with choking laughter that was only stopped by Dad holding his glass to his mouth—bourbon and water, which was never far from his side.

  Enthusiasm for badminton, even with enthusiasts, is limited and it was soon replaced by a most unathletic activity. We all sprawled out on the lawn in the late November desert light—soft and purple—listening to music from Captain J’s phonograph which had been turned up by Bradford and filled the area between the two houses, bringing them together, the two houses and the people in them, our family and theirs, wrapping us all in melody, tying knots around us all in a sweet musical euphoria. I’d never known such happiness. I felt I could float up so that I could look down on 1548 with a bird’s eye view like some maps I’d seen so that each corner of the place that I knew and loved and was beginning to feel so secure in—the whole square, the three acres themselves, cut out by streets and adobe walls as straight as dies, the houses all basically square, the flat roofs, the great rectangle of lawn now with us all on it, seen from above, languid, flowing bodies, all beautiful, smiling, happy and still—caught in a moment like a painting or a snapshot—forever in my head, bodies not touching, exactly, but relating to each other, forming patterns of infinite intimacy and beauty.

  Soon bodies were touching. Couples formed and danced slowly on the grass, bare feet hardly moving, only the upper bodies touching, swaying to the music, more a suggestion of dancing than the real thing. The light had faded and turned paler and the moon’s brightness didn’t diminish the brilliance of the stars. I don’t remember going to bed. Dad said he carried me in and he said I must have been having sweet dreams because I was smiling.

  Bradford’s fascination with Sister had him dogging our heels. He followed me and Junior practically to school, demanding more information, more stories, anything we could remember about her. He cursed not having money. He was determined to go to The Ship every night and see her. I wasn’t sure how old you had to be to get in but we all three knew that it must cost a lot of money. We had no idea what sort of an allowance Bradford got, but he referred to it as adequate for a six-year-old. He’d be eighteen just after the first of the year and had completed his schooling at the Academy and since his grades weren’t satisfactory he was being tutored three hours a day in an effort to help him pass college entrance exams.

  “Never get into Princeton,” Captain J said. “Too damned dumb.”

  Bradford claimed that he didn’t want to go to college. “Why should I bother? The old fart can’t live forever and when he pops it, I’ll sell this place so fast it’ll make your head spin. And go back to Virginia and live like a human being.”

  To Bradford, living like a human being meant a southern mansion and about a hundred slaves. And to hear him tell it, he wanted the slaves primarily for beating. He told us stories about the Military Academy and most of them involved tricks of humiliation for the “darkies” who worked on the school grounds or as their batmen. Nothing to do with baseball, Junior assured me. How they’d sometimes tie them up and take turns beating them with long whips. We had difficulty understanding how students could have individual man-servants but he said that only happened in the last year of school when you became an officer and had all sorts of privileges. Some of the privileges included corn-holing the younger students which apparently was not only great sport, but great fun. Junior refused to explain to me what “corn-holing” was on the grounds that I was too young to know, but I don’t think he understood what it was either. So I figured it had to do with some sort of torture of a particularly nasty kind.

  We listened to his stories with fascination, but Junior always said not to believe half the things he said.

  “He’s making it up, I’ll bet you. He gets a funny look in his eyes when he tells those stories.”

  “He gets a funny look in his eyes almost all the time,” I pointed out.

  “Dad told me to watch him and see if he drinks.”

  “Drinks what?”

  “I swear to God!” He slapped his hands against his thighs with impatience. “What do you think he drinks?”

  “Well, I saw him in the garage—over by the washtubs with a bottle of Clorox.”

  “He doesn’t drink Clorox, for heaven’s sake.”

  “I don’t know. He says he gargles with it all the time. He showed me. He does gargle with it. Said that it made his breath smell fresh and since it was a bleach, it made his teeth whiter.”

  Junior looked at me for a minute. “You’re making it up now.”

  “OK. I’m making it up. But just get a whiff of his breath some time. He smells like a washtub drain.”

  By Christmas vacation, the rains had hit. We’d never seen anything like it. The Salt River—that desert with a bridge across it near Aunt Dell’s—was full to overflowing. Uncle Roy checked it every morning and evening for over a week. They were afraid they’d be flooded. Parts of downtown Phoenix had flooded. Junior and I were in a movie house one Saturday afternoon when Dad came down the aisle looking for us and drove us home through streets like rivers. We learned later that people had to be evacuated from the movie house we’d been in. “I just had a funny feeling,” Dad explained.

  It wasn’t nighttime when we got home, but it was dark enough for Dad to have the headlights on. Junior jumped out to unlock the big gates and was drenched by the time we’d pulled through. Dad and I ran from the garage in the pelting rain assuming that Junior had beaten us to the house. He wasn’t there.

  “He’s probably having trouble with that catch at the bottom of the gate. Go help him, Totsy, or he’ll be out there all night.”

  I grabbed an umbrella and ran. The gatelight wasn’t on and I couldn’t see whether the gates were open or closed until I was practically at the end of the driveway. They were closed and no sign of Junior. I looked around and called.

  “Be right there, Tots,” he called back. I thought I heard whispering. I was peering into the dark under the magnolia tree and wondered if Junior was talking to MacKenzie, the parrot, when he suddenly appeared, wet hair sticking to his forehead.

  “Where’s your coat?”

  “Come on. I’ll tell you in a minute.” He grabbed my elbow as he ducked under the umbrella and propelled us both down the drive.

  “Did somebody leave MacKenzie out in the rain?”

  “No.”

  “Well, who were you talking to?”

  “Brad.”

  “Brad? What in the world is he doing there.” I stopped and looked over my shoulder.

  Junior tugged at my elbow. “Come on. He doesn’t want anybody to see him.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s naked.”

  I stopped dead. “Naked?”

  “Stop screeching.”

  “But what’s he doing? I mean, why is he naked? In the rain?” Junior pulled me under the garage roof overhang and started whispering, “Now listen, he doesn’t want anybody to know about it … well, he said he thought it might be fun to, well…” “

  Fun? In the rain?”

  “Listen, for God’s sake,” he hissed. “Well, he thought it might be fun to sort of … well, he said he was just going to run around naked. It’d be fun …”

  “He’s nuts.”

  “He looked pretty nutty. He had that funny look again. You know … kind of like he doesn’t quite see you. Anyway, he’s naked. In the rain and he’s cold so I gave him my coat.”

  “Why doesn’t he just go back in the house?”

  “I don’t know. He was mumbling something about his folks finding him like that and he was afraid … Oh, I don’t know. His teeth were chattering and he looked so silly. Pathetic, really …”

  “Listen. Get Mom’s keys. There’s one of those french doors off the guest room and we could slip him back in that way.”

  “You go get them. I’ll go get him. Meet you at the back of the house.”

  W
e flew apart. I opened our kitchen door carefully—the keyboard with hooks was just inside the door. I felt for the keys, rattling some as I counted the hooks to get the right ones, but Mom and Dad were in the living room listening to the radio. I grabbed the keys and closed the door with an inaudible click.

  Brad was standing next to Junior at the french doors, shivering and trembling, his white bare legs sticking out the bottom of Junior’s slicker. He certainly did look silly. I unlocked the door and he squeezed through the door without saying anything. Then he ripped off Junior’s coat and shoved it through the narrow opening between the doors. I could see that he was fairly hairy, but he covered himself with one hand and I couldn’t see anything else.

  The new station wagon was Captain J’s new toy but put to serious use. Almost every weekend found us discovering all the national parks and Indian reserves that could be reached in a day. Captain J refused to spend the night anywhere except in his own bed so we were limited to about a two-hundred mile radius but even so that kept us from repeating trips all through the fall and winter. The sights were superb and varied and apparently endless. Junior studied maps and books on archaeology and Indian history and lore.

  Before the novelty of the station wagon wore off, we’d all crowd in—Dad always driving, Mrs. Jones beside him and Bradford beside her. In the single seats, Mom directly behind Dad, then me, and Junior in the end next to Captain J’s head where he’d read to him about what we were going to see. Actually read to us all. By the New Year, it was usually just the four of us, the captain, Dad, Junior and I. Then even I started bowing out as my interest in my Queen Isabella became obsessive. Mrs. Jones was the first to go. Then Bradford and then Mom. Mom with the legitimate excuse of being just plain tired. If no outing were planned, Captain J would think of something that would engage us all. It was obvious that he liked our company and Bradford’s irritated him. The most enjoyable alternative to the trips was making ice-cream. There was a big two gallon old fashioned freezer with the wooden bucket to hold the ice and we’d all take turns turning under the big arbor near the rose garden. It seemed to take forever to make—Captain J supervised every step, making sure we turned the handle at precisely the right speed, that the ice was packed properly and salted just enough to keep it from melting—but the results were always superb. The best was fresh peach. I can’t even talk about. I start drooling.