Then Like the Blind Man: Orbie's Story

by Freddie Owens

Granny stood with the spoonful of soak. “Stop that now, Strode. Poor thang cried hisself to sleep last night.”

  Granpaw put a mean eye on Granny, then turned it back on me. “I killed me one t’other day. You know they’s two kind of black snake?”

  The egg white slid down my throat. “No, Granpaw.”

  “Well, they is!” he almost shouted. His voice then shrank to just above a whisper. “One’s regular and t’other’n’s a racer. One I killed come at me with its head all raised. And I killed it! Killed it deader’n four o’clock! Now. What do you think of that?” Seemed like all the holes on Granpaw’s face had opened at the same time — the mouth hole, the eye holes, the nose holes — even the little blue-purply holes on his chin, the ones Granny said he got from the fever.

  Out the screen door I could see the barn. I could see sunshine beating down all over the yard. “I don’t know Granpaw.

  I don’t know what to think.”

  “I killed it with a grubbing hoe. Chopped its head plum off, back of that barn.” Granpaw jerked his head back toward the screen. “Ain’t that somethin’?”

  I looked down at my plate. Three long strips of bacon lay on the side, all bubbled out and swimming in grease. I picked at one with my fork. “I don’t know, Granpaw. Did it bite you?”

  Granny snorted. “It ought to’ve child! Might’ve learned him a thang or two!” She held the spoon over the cup just below her mouth — full of that brown spongy stuff — laughing so hard now some drops of coffee fell down the front of her dress.

  “Fooling with them black snakes! You know better’n that!”

  “Hesh up woman! Me and Orbie’s talking here.” Lizard skin came down over one of Granpaw’s eyes, went back up again. A wink. He was making us out to be like partners.

  I didn’t want to be no partner. I looked at my plate.

  Granny slurped up the soak from her spoon, one eye on Granpaw. “You ain’t supposed to kill’em no how. They eat rats.” A brown drop found a wrinkle under her lip and slid in.

  “Black snakes is good for rats but this’n — it was one of them racers I think — it come at me so quick!” Granpaw jerked back from the table, raising both hands; big gray calluses all up and down his fingers. Again his voice crawled out over the table. “With its head all raised, and a slick black tongue, spittin’ and slaverin’ out its mouth. That one was ugly. Slicker’n dog shit too! Why, wasn’t nothin’ I could do but grab up a grubbing hoe!” He popped the tabletop with both hands. “Chopped its head plum off, that’s what I done! Wasn’t no time to think.”

  He reached up around his neck and pulled a leather drawstring over his head. Attached was a small leather pouch. “Looky here boy.” He tossed the pouch with the string over the table, landing it a little ways from my plate. “There’s its head, in there! Open it!”

  I sat back in my chair, frozen, thinking of that snake’s head in there, its tongue slicking out at me, dead.

  “Go on, boy. What you scared of?”

  “Get that nasty thang out of here!” Granny snatched up the pouch and flung it back Granpaw’s way. It hit him in the chest and thumped down on the table. “Scare that child so bad he won’t never want to go outside!”

  Granpaw doubled over; laughing so hard I thought he might be near to choking. Then he just stopped everything and cocked his brow. “I’ll skin it back for ye, if you want me to. You can put its skull on a strang fer a necklace. What do you think of that?”

  “I don’t want no damned snake head Granpaw!” My fork got away from me then, clanking loudly against my plate. A strip of bacon flipped over and landed on the table, a greasy dead piece of meat.

  Granpaw hee-hawed and slapped his legs. “What’s the matter boy? It’d be like one of them charms, by grabs!” His gray eye fixed me where I sat. “Where’d you learn to cuss like that anyhow?”

  Granny flapped at him. “Get out Strode! Go on! Go do them chores like you was aiming to! Orbie don’t need you making fun of him, poor thing. All the way down here from Detroit. He don’t need that kind of foolishness! Besides we going to pick blackberries this morning and I got to get this table cleared.” She pointed toward the door. “Get out now!”

  Granpaw, still laughing, got up from the table. He took one limping step and looked around at the kitchen. “Where’s my hat, Mattie?”

  With her spoon, Granny pointed toward the door. “Out there where you left it, I reckon. Get on now!”

  “Cain’t nobody have no fun around here.” Granpaw picked up the pouch and ditch-stepped it over to me. “Looky here boy. Ain’t nothin’ in that but chewing tabacco.” He opened the pouch and held it down for me to see. Sure enough that’s all there was — just a gnarled hunk of black chewing tobacco curled in there like a snake with one end bit off.

  “Now ain’t that something to be scared of?” Granpaw winked and cupped the top of my head with a hand thick as a baseball mitt. I tried to jerk loose but the hand was too strong. Looking right down into my eyes, he said, “You down here with us hillbillies now son, and ain’t a one of us got a lick of sense. Why, if we did, we wouldn’t know what to do with it!” He threw back his head, laughing. Then a tired sound came in his voice. “I reckon you’ll learn that soon enough though.” He let go of my head, raised himself on one leg and let his body down on the other. He went out the screen door that way, went out and let it slam.

  I watched him standing out there on the porch, looking up at the sky, the palms of his hands on his butt, the elbows stuck out in back of him. “Yep, he’ll learn. He’ll learn soon enough,” Granpaw said to the sky. Then he walked his bum leg down the steps and was gone.

  3

  Harlan’s Crossroads

  Granny set her cup with the spoon in a big empty tub and started piling Granpaw’s dirty dishes. “Pay Strode no mind, youngun. Going on about them black snakes. You wouldn’t think he was a preacher the way he does. Ornery old devil.”

  I stared out the door Granpaw had gone. The barn sat out there with its main and two hay loft doors wide open — a black skull laughing at the day.

  Who did he think he was anyhow? Scaring me like that?

  Granny wiped egg yellow and brown coffee circles off the top of the table. Then she grabbed a hot kettle from the stove, brought it over to the tub and poured hot water in. A cloud of steam rushed up to the ceiling and crawled away. “We won’t have to bother with him now no how, this your first day and all.” She began ladling cold water into the tub from a bucket by the door. “You haven’t said two words since you been down here. What you been doing up in Detroit?”

  “Nothing, Granny. Playing.”

  “Playing at what?”

  “Ball. With my friends.”

  Granny busied herself over the dishes. “They’s kids down here too you know.”

  “No there ain’t,” I said.

  “Who said they ain’t?”

  I looked at my plate. Two orange egg-eyes looked back. “Momma,” I said.

  “She don’t know. She ain’t been around to know.” Granny stood now, toweling off her hands. “How come you so quiet? You never used to be.”

  “I’m thinking Granny.”

  “Thinking?” Granny laughed. “You too young to be thinking. You remind me of some old farmer a worrying over his crops.”

  I poked one of the eggs and watched the orange run out. “I can’t eat these Granny. I ain’t hungry.”

  Granny reached down and got a hold of my plate. Her white hair was pulled straight back, gathered on either side into pincushion-sized buns. One white strand floated out over her ear like a stray feather. “Go on outside then. The hogs’ll eat these and be thankful.” She dumped the eggs into a dented bucket and set my plate off to the side. “I’ll finish these dishes and we’ll go. We got a lot to do, you and me. Picking them blackberries.”

  I left my dump truck and Granpaw’s cross under the table and went out onto the back porch. I put my hands in my back pockets and looked up at the sky like Granpaw. I couldn’t
see the sun but I knew it was up there — somewhere behind the blinding white clouds. Cows decorated with splotches of white on black grazed the hillside above the barn. Pigs sniffed and snuffled inside a fenced yard near the house. A few lay sleeping in the shade of a little blue and white egg-shaped trailer that squatted in the tall weeds next to the fence. There was a chicken yard too, and a foreshortened wagon road that ended at the barn, which separated the chicken yard from the pig yard, two red clay tracks with a grassy hump down the middle.

  “Orbie!” Granny called. Through the screen door I could see her still picking up utensils and wiping the table, sending out her words while she worked. “You be careful about that well now! Storm blowed the roof cockeyed and I think some of them stones is loose. I don’t want you falling in.”

  “Okay Granny,” I said.

  “We’d be worried to death, not knowing where you’d gone off to.”

  “Okay.” Already I was beginning to sweat. I went down the steps and out along the side of the house. Grasshoppers were flying every which way over the patchy grass yard, bright black wings snapping like cellophane. A weather-warped rain barrel leaned under a pipe from the roof, empty and smelling of mold. I went on out to the front yard. Granny’s Jesus Tree was out there, just a few feet away from the house, twisting up out of the ground like a bunch of ropes tied together; its thorny crown was no higher than the overhang that went out over the porch.

  A faded picture of Jesus Granny had found at the Circle Stump flea market was wedged in between the branches. It was dented on one corner, washed out looking and stained with rainwater. It showed Jesus lying face down on a thick stone cross rising slantwise out of what looked like a stormy, though faded, yellow sea. Yellow waves lashed at Jesus’ feet, and a washed out angry sky swirled overhead. His back was all bony and gashed and bleeding, and His faded hands were driven through with thick gray spikes. His face lay flat against the stone, and though I looked for it, I could see no love in his eyes anywhere, just misery and gloom. Didn’t look to me like He could save himself let alone the world.

  Across the gravels of Bounty Road I could see Old Man Harlan’s store. Old Man Harlan’s real name was Nealy. Nealy Harlan. The store looked about the size of a small garage but with a porch and a door and a window on the front, white with red trim. Up the hill stood the big house where Old Man Harlan lived with his hunchback cousin, Bird Pruitt.

  Bounty Road went in front of Old Man Harlan’s house and down past the store where it crossed Nub Road, also gravel. That place, where the roads came together, was called Harlan’s Crossroads; called that because Old Man Harlan owned all the land around it — the store, Granny and Granpaw’s place, the graveyard where Daddy was buried and the corner Granpaw had his tobacco on.

  Down from the Jesus Tree and closer to the road sat Granny and Granpaw’s well, above it a round roof of flowers growing out of tin cans. It was tilted backwards, the roof was, and looked a little bit like a church lady’s hat that was being blown back by wind — except today there wasn’t any wind. There wasn’t even a breeze. All kinds of flowers were growing up there. Bloody red ones, smiling on green veins. Some with yellow hair and orange eyes. Blue flowers too, bunches of them, little trumpets turned up to the sun, Joshua’s horns, Momma called them, ready to blast out, ready to make everything come tumbling down.

  Suddenly the screen door on the front porch squalled open. It was Granny. She stepped out onto the noisy plank floor, holding two buckets, one in each hand, a big white bucket with a rusty lip, and a bright silver one that looked like an oversized tin can with the label peeled off.

  “It’s early for blackberries,” she said, “but summer’s early too. We get lucky, we’ll find us a few.”

  ———————

  We’d climbed the hill back of the barn, and now stood looking out over Harlan’s Crossroads. “I’ll tell you what’s the truth youngun,” Granny said. “We don’t get rain soon, Harlan’s Crossroads gonna blow away. Sure is purdy though. Look away over yonder. See that shining?”

  I could see over the four corners of the crossroads, over Granpaw’s field of shiny leaf tobacco.

  “Look up Bounty there,” Granny said. “That shining there.”

  Light flashed back from where she was pointing. “That’s new tin. Storm blowed a tree over, right onto Moses Mashbone’s roof. He got that tin to fix it with. We done picking, we’ll go see.”

  Moses Mashbone was a medicine preacher who was said to have handled snakes, something Momma had told me. I looked away and out over the hazy blue hills. “Bounty goes to Circle Stump, don’t it Granny?”

  “Goes through Kingdom first, then Circle Stump.” Granny pointed off to the left. “Kingdom Church’s over that way.”

  “Colored people live in the Kingdom,” I said.

  “Your Momma tell you that?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “It didn’t have a name till they started that Nigger Kingdom business,” Granny said. “That bunch over to Circle Stump. Why, coloreds is some of the best folks in the world! You know what they did when the white folks started calling their little section Nigger Kingdom?”

  “Got their knives out,” I said.

  “Knives?”

  “Yeah. To cut the Circle Stump people. For calling them names.”

  “Why, they wouldn’t a bit more done that than nothing!” Granny said.

  “What did they do then?”

  “Kept the name of ‘Kingdom’ without that ‘Nigger’ part is what. So they had just ‘Kingdom’, you know, like the Kingdom of Heaven.” Granny turned and started along another path up the hill. “Kingdom Town. Like in the Bible.”

  I hurried to catch up. “Oh. Like with angels and God and Jesus and all the saved people.”

  “That’s right. Except their Kingdom is right here on earth. Ain’t that a nice idea?”

  I didn’t know if it was nice or not. It sounded good, but you couldn’t have angels and God and Jesus walking around on the ground like people.

  “Church house ain’t but a mile from there. Where me and Strode goes. Kingdom Church. There’s a little old creek runs in behind it. Kingdom Creek. Cotton mouth all up in there. Poison.”

  “Moses picks’em up, don’t he Granny?”

  “What? Snakes?”

  “Cotton mouths.”

  “Yeah cotton mouths! Copperheads and rattler too. Kill you deader’n four o’clock! God protects Moses though. Even if he was to get bit, I don’t reckon it would hurt him any.”

  ———————

  We came up to Moses Mashbone’s house from the back way, our buckets not even half full of the sorriest looking blackberries Granny said she’d ever seen. I was sweating and miserable, thinking over all what had happened, all the things I couldn’t change, worried about Momma and Victor, still mad at them for leaving me.

  “Moses won’t be to home, more than likely,” Granny said. “Miss Alma will be though.”

  “That his wife?” I said.

  “No,” Granny laughed. “She just keeps house. Got kids of her own. And a house in the Kingdom.”

  Moses’ house was smaller than Granny and Granpaw’s, covered over with brown sandy shingles. A tree had fallen across the roof at one end and had knocked the chimney sideways. “That there’s a big oak,” Granny said. “Mashed in the roof there and everything. Ain’t that a sight?” The base of the tree had been pulled right out of the ground, a huge circle of red clay and gnarly black roots.

  “Same wind blowed our well cockeyed blowed that tree cockeyed. See that tin there?” Sheets of tin were leaning up against the back of the house. “What we seen from up the hill. Moses gonna fix his roof with that.”

  We walked on around to the front of the house. Granny hollered at the door. “Miss Alma, you in there!”

  Nobody answered.

  “I ain’t got all day girl!”

  Still nobody answered; then came the sound of a door closing, and a voice hollering from within. “Lawd, Lawd,
I comin’! Don’t has to shout now!”

  The screen door opened and out stepped the biggest, blackest colored-woman I’d ever seen. She looked like the woman on all the pancake boxes — the Aunt Jemima woman — so giant-sized she filled up the whole doorway. Her head was wrapped in a dirty orange rag, tied around in front so the ends stood up like little rabbit ears.

  Granny put her hand on my shoulder. “This here’s Orbie.”

  Miss Alma smiled a mouthful of white-white teeth. Her breasts, titties I called them then, were big as watermelons.

  “Ruby’s boy,” Granny said.

  “Well,” Miss Alma said. “I sho’ is pleased to meet you!”

  I tried not to look at the watermelons.

  “He’ll be staying down here a while,” Granny said. “Till his Momma gets back.”

  “Hmmm, hmmm. Well. Look to me like he be shy a little bit. Hmmm, hmmm. He a good lookin’ boy though.”

  “I thank so,” Granny said.

  They both looked at me like it was my turn to talk, but I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Where’s Moses?” Granny said.

  “Oh he be off somewhere,” Miss Alma said. “You know how he do.”

  Granny reached one of the buckets of berries up to Miss Alma. “Ain’t much to look at but they’ll do for jam.”

  “Lawd, Lawd,” Miss Alma said. “Moses be pleased to get deze, sho’ will. Ya’ll come in now. I gots ice tea.”

  “No. We best be getting back, Miss Alma. Thank you kindly.” Granny looked up in the sky. A few clouds drifted up there, dark little clouds with white silvery sides. “Reckon it’ll rain soon?”

  Miss Alma laughed. “It do, I hope dey no wind in it.”

  “No. We don’t need no more of that. Look over there Orbie.” Granny gestured toward a little hill of dirt by the fence. A big rusty door slanted up one side. “That’s Moses’ storm cellar. Only one around except for Nealy Harlan’s. There’s a bad storm we come down here.”

  “How come you don’t use Mr. Harlan’s storm cellar?” I said. “It’s a long way over here, Granny.”