Madewell Brown

by Rick Collignon

  “Venga, Rufino,” Nemecio said, his voice pitched high and sharp. The two of them were standing beside the ditch in the shade of the cottonwoods. Rufino’s mother was in the house, cooking with his little sister, Lupita. Out in the field, his father was irrigating the alfalfa.

  “Venga,” Nemecio said again, his hands and feet moving about. He was a small boy. The top of his head rose just above Rufino’s shoulder. “You know what I think?” he rushed on. “I think those Indians didn’t bury people in holes. I think they put them up in tree branches. And if they did that, then the trees will be full of bones and teeth. And there will be gold and silver on the ground. Eee, I would like to see that.” He reached out and pulled Rufino by the arm.

  “Venga, Rufino,” he said. “Venga. No one will ever know.”

  “I swear to you that’s how it began,” Rufino said to his son. “With Nemecio and his talk. And so we went, the two of us. We went to Perdido mesa. And we didn’t find what we thought, either. What we found was something else.”

  By early evening, the wind that had blown all day had stilled. The air was hot and dry and tasted of dust. Dirt and sweat streaked the faces of the boys, and the backs of their necks were burnt raw from the sun. A burlap bag hung from Rufino’s waist. In it were the carcasses of five rabbits. As he threaded his way through the sage, the bag chafed against his thigh, leaving a damp stain of blood on his trousers. Every so often, he would glance up at the sun. And when he did, he’d think that they would never get home before dark, that if they didn’t, his father would beat him until he wept.

  “Hurry, Nemecio,” Rufino called out, glancing back over his shoulder. Nemecio was lagging far behind, his feet kicking dirt and small stones. “Nemecio,” Rufino yelled again. “Hurry, jodido, or I’ll leave you.”

  “Eee, I’m coming,” Nemecio mumbled. He took a few hurried steps and then, just as quickly, slowed again to a walk. All he had found on this day were a few chipped arrowheads and a pile of rusted cans. Nowhere had he found gold, and the only bones and teeth he’d come across were those of some small animal. He kicked at a rock and sent it flying.

  “I don’t care,” Nemecio said under his breath. “Go ahead and leave me. It wasn’t my idea to go hunt rabbits.”

  By the time the two boys came to where the mesa sloped down to the valley, the sun was hanging red and swollen just above the horizon. Off to the east, more than a mile away, was the road that wound up into the foothills. And beyond that was the grove of cottonwood trees where Rufino’s house lay.

  It’s not so far, Rufino thought. If they hurried, they would be home before his father returned from the mountains. As he shifted the rifle from one hand to the other, Nemecio grabbed his arm.

  “Look, Rufino.” The boy’s voice was harsh. “Look there.”

  A few hundred yards away, a man was flailing through the sage. He was doubled over at the waist, one hand pressed against his belly, his head bent down. In his other hand, he held a canvas bag that dragged along behind, ripping through the brush. With each breath he took, a hoarse groan, like the low bawl of a sick animal, came from his mouth.

  “I know who that is,” Nemecio whispered. He was shaking Rufino’s arm. “That’s the nigger.”

  “What nigger?” Rufino said. Below him, the man had stopped. He was stooped over, breathing hard. And then, without even a look around, he began to move again.

  “The nigger,” Nemecio said, his hand still on Rufino’s arm. “You remember. The one your father told us about.”

  The two boys had been helping Rufino’s father stack wood when Nemecio had asked about the black man. “He came to this village years ago,” Rufino’s father said. He leaned his ax against a block of wood and stared at his son as if it had been he who had asked. “I don’t know what he wants here. And I don’t know why he stays. But I’ve heard that at night he steals chickens and clothes left out on lines and whatever else he can get his hands on. If you see him, keep away. You watch, someday something will happen to him. He should have known better than to come to a place he doesn’t belong.”

  At the mesa’s ridge, in the shade of an ancient juniper, Nemecio stepped in front of Rufino and squatted down. “Eee,” he said. “I always wanted to see him.”

  At the base of the mesa was a small clearing of loose dirt. As the man approached it, the canvas bag caught in a web of branches and was wrenched from his grasp. With a groan, he stumbled out of the sage and came down hard on his knees. He tried to push himself up, but his feet slid out from under him and he fell again. For a few seconds, he knelt there, and then, as though pushed, he leaned forward and rested his forehead on the ground.

  Nemecio spat out a stream of air and jumped to his feet. “Did you see that, Rufino?” he said.

  “He’s dead,” Rufino said. He pulled at the burlap bag hanging from his waist. It had grown stiff and heavy. One of the rabbits inside shifted slightly. Rufino jerked his leg away as if it were alive.

  “No,” Nemecio said. “He’s drunk. He’s just a drunk man, Rufino. Let’s go look at him.”

  “What if he wakes up?”

  “Who cares? You saw, he can’t even walk. Venga, Rufino. That’s the way home anyway.”

  By the time the two boys crept down the slope, the sun had set and shadows spread across the valley. Far off, a flock of ravens picked up out of the sage and veered toward the river. Above them, deep in an arroyo, came the wail of coyotes. Rufino held his father’s rifle down close at his side. Behind him, Nemecio stood peering over his shoulder at the black man.

  “He doesn’t look so good,” Nemecio whispered.

  The man lay not sixty feet away. His back was hunched up, his face was pressed into the ground and his arms were outstretched as if in prayer. One hand was bent wrong at the wrist. His hair was matted with blood. It had run around the back of his neck, turning the dirt near his face to mud.

  “What do you think happened to him?” Nemecio asked, crowding up close behind Rufino.

  “I don’t know,” Rufino said. His voice was dry and hoarse, as if his mouth was full of dirt. He wondered if they shouldn’t have gone another way and left the black man to himself. He thought that this was all Nemecio’s fault, that he wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Nemecio. From the highway came the low drone of a truck climbing the road into the foothills.

  “Look at his bag,” Nemecio said. Out in the sagebrush, the canvas bag was lying as if lost. “What do you think’s in it, Rufino?” the boy went on. “I think it’s full of gold. Gold and silver. Eee, I would like to see that.”

  “No,” Rufino said harshly. “We should go home now. We should go home before it’s too late.”

  “What happened then?” Cipriano asked. The old man had fallen quiet, his gaze was off to one side, his eyes empty. He was sitting on the edge of the bed, his legs wrapped in the blanket. His hands lay still in his lap.

  “Rufino,” Cipriano said, raising his voice.

  “What?” The old man jerked his head.

  “What did you do? You and Nemecio.”

  Rufino had thought that telling this story to Cipriano would make him feel better, but it had only made him feel worse. For all his talking, not one thing had changed. Outside, the sun lay hot and dry on the ground. Rufino remembered years when it would rain through the spring and into early summer, years when his alfalfa would be green and lush.

  As if from a distance, he heard his son stir in his chair. “Rufino,” Cipriano said again.

  “What did we do?” the old man said, his voice suddenly hard and bitter. “We ran away. That’s what we did. It was Nemecio who took off first. He gave me a little push from behind and then he ran off. He went straight across the clearing, into the sage and grabbed the bag. ‘Hurry, Rufino,’ he yelled to me. ‘Hurry,’ and then he was gone. A little boy running with his bag of gold.” Rufino looked down at his hands. “I waited a little while,” he went on, “and then I followed him home.”

  “You left the man out there?”
r />   “Yes,” Rufino said. “I did that. I left him out there. We both left him out there.”

  Cipriano could barely hear what his father was saying. The old man was mumbling as if half asleep. His nose had bled again and there was a drawn, pale look to his face. Cipriano didn’t know what to think about Rufino’s story and wasn’t even sure why the old man had bothered to tell it. The man had probably been jumped by someone and then lost his way out in the valley. It was a scene Cipriano had seen played out in the village his whole life, from too much beer to messing with someone’s wife or for no reason at all. The only difference here was that the man had been black. But, even at that, he was just somebody in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  “Who was he?” Cipriano asked.

  The old man raised his head. “How should I know?” he said. “All I know is his name. It was printed on his bag. When I got home that night, Nemecio had already gone through it and taken what he wanted. What that was, I never asked. He left me the nigger’s bag and I hid it where my father wouldn’t find it.”

  The two men stared at each other until finally Cipriano shook his head. He ran a hand through his hair and smiled slightly. “I got to get to work, Rufino.” He stood up slowly, his legs tight from sitting. “I’ll see you a little later.”

  “It’s still here, hijo,” Rufino said.

  “What’s still here?”

  “The bag. The bag Nemecio stole. It’s in the shed beneath some old adobes.”

  For a while neither of them spoke. Warm air was drifting in through the open door, and outside there wasn’t a breath of air. “I’ve got to go, Rufino,” Cipriano said. Then he turned and left the house.

  Out the window, Rufino watched his son walk to his truck and then climb in and drive off. “I’m glad you came to see me, hijo,” he whispered. Rufino pictured Cipriano driving the back roads across the village. His son would drive by fields with dry ditches and stunted alfalfa. He would drive by the trailer where Nemecio lived and the old adobes where the viejos would live out the rest of their lives in quiet.

  Rufino eased himself down on the bed and pulled the blanket over his chest. He wondered how he could be so cold on such a warm day. He closed his eyes and listened to his heart beat slow and steady. He thought that later, when his son came back to see him, they would go outside together and find the bag that he had hidden so long ago. And maybe they could talk some more about the things he hadn’t said.

  “My son came to see me,” the old man said in the empty room. “My son came to see me today.”

  Two

  Aweek after Rufino Trujillo died of a bad heart, the only other man alive who had known Madewell Brown finally passed away.

  By that time, Obie Poole was ninety-eight years old and not much more than skin and hollow bones. Both his eyes were milked over with cataracts, and every joint in his body was dried out and aching. The vertebrae in his spine were so fused together that all he could manage anymore was to hobble from his bed to the bathroom. Although there were times it pleased him that he’d lived for so long, he couldn’t come up with one good reason, other than Rachael, for why he had. And even then, there were days he’d pleaded for her to go away and let him die in peace.

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, old man,” she’d say, standing by the side of his bed. She was a young woman now, in her midtwenties. Her hair was a mess of long, tight braids tied back behind her neck. “Leave you alone just so I could feel bad,” she’d go on. “You’re not going to die today anyway. You still too mean.” Then she’d help him up and take him outside to his front porch. And there he’d sit with the breeze on his face, river smell in the air.

  It was a cool, wet day in late May when Obie Poole passed away. He was resting in his bed when his heart, as though it had waited for that one moment from the day he’d been born, stopped beating in his chest. The old man let out a grunt of surprise and then found himself unable to draw a breath. He managed to push up quickly onto his elbows, his lungs straining, his head flung so far back that the skin on his neck was stretched smooth. Then, letting out a little pull of air, he eased back down on the mattress.

  The light was off in the bedroom, and the door that led to the kitchen was closed. Outside the small window, the cattails and flat grass were bent low from the rain and a hard wind tossed the surface of the river. The thought suddenly jumped through Obie’s mind that he had forgotten something, one last thing that should have been done before he died. But he had no idea what it was.

  As the damp gray of the sky filled the room and the muscles in Obie’s legs began to tremble, he remembered a time when his life had been full of sweetness and promise, a time when he had found these things in just one place. A moan came from his mouth and he shifted his body slightly. He laid his arms out straight at his sides and put his head back on the pillow.

  Across the room, the floorboards gave out a sudden creak. When he glanced that way, Obie saw Madewell Brown standing in the shadows. He was dressed in his walking clothes, a cap pulled down low. The old canvas bag he always carried was on the floor beside him.

  “Madewell,” Obie rasped out. “You come back, Madewell.” Then, in a rush, he remembered not what he had forgotten, but who.

  “Madewell,” he said again, but this time his voice was only air. “Rachael, she never.”

  At the moment Obie Poole died, Rachael was home boiling a chicken for the old man to eat. She was staring out the window above the sink at the trashed-out yard next door, thinking about the time she’d thrown a soda-pop bottle at Obie, nearly killing him. It missed his head by inches, but when it shattered on the wall behind him, a thick shard of brown sugared glass stuck deep in his cheek.

  It was a warm day in October when that happened. The leaves were just starting to turn, and the river ran so low that the cattails had dried out and the shoreline was black caked mud. The sky was a clear blue, and though the air was warm, there was a cool feel just below the surface of it. Rachael was by the porch railing, sometimes leaning back against it, sometimes hoisting herself up on top of it. She was fifteen years old and bored half to death.

  Obie watched her take a drink out of her root beer and then jump down on the porch deck. “Goddamn,” he said. “Can’t you sit quiet?” The girl was making him edgy as hell with her fidgeting. Just looking at her was making this sweet day turn sour. “Why don’t you sit down and let me finish my story?” he said.

  “I already heard this story,” Rachael said. A thousand times I heard this story, she thought. Each time it was a little different, but not enough that she cared. She took another drink of root beer, her eyes big over the bottle staring over at Obie. “Besides,” she said, “I got something to tell you. I’m leaving the Home tomorrow.”

  “You what?” Obie said.

  “I’m leaving the Home,” she said again, louder, as if the old man were deaf. “I found a place to live next to Shala’s cousin. And he says I don’t have to pay a cent to stay there.”

  Obie let out a grunt, leaned forward and spat out a stream of tobacco juice. “You stay where you are,” he said. “That Home’s a damn sight better than living next to some man who say move on in, I don’t want nothing. You too young to be off on your own.” He eased back in his chair. Out past the cattails the river lay low and flat as glass. Up near the shore, a mess of mud hens picked up with a splash of wings and flew away upriver.

  The lip of the bottle was against Rachael’s mouth and her breath clouded the glass like a pulse. A thread of drool hung off Obie’s chin. She watched him wipe it away with the back of his arm. “You just an old man,” she said softly, still staring.

  “What you say to me?” Obie said.

  “I said you just an old man.” Her heart was starting to beat faster, a hard knot growing in her stomach. “What do you know? Trying to make everything bad.”

  For a little bit, Obie didn’t say a word. He could see the slight swell of Rachael’s hips through her jeans and the sure look in her eyes. On top o
f that, even if there wasn’t much to see, she was wearing a t-shirt that didn’t hide one damn thing. He wondered how he ever got stuck with a girl so dumb.

  “Maybe I’m old,” he said, folding his hands and rocking a little, “but I ain’t blind. You be ruined if you not careful. Look at yourself. What you think going to happen, you walking around like that?”

  The next thing they both knew was that the root beer bottle came flying across the porch and would have struck the old man full in the face if he hadn’t moved his head slightly to one side. Just like a high, inside pitch, Obie thought, thrown in the near dark where all you got is that piece of a second to move. It flew by the side of his head and smashed into the wall behind him. It broke so hard that he felt a cold splash of root beer and a shard of glass cutting him deep in the cheek.

  For a second, neither of them moved. Blood was running down the side of the old man’s face, dripping off his jaw into his lap. But he sat there with a little grin, his hands still folded like nothing had happened.

  “Your granddaddy,” Obie said, “he never would have missed. No sir, he would have hit me square in the face.”

  “I hate you,” Rachael said to him. “I hate you and I’m not ever coming back here.”

  A splatter of chicken grease jumped from the boiling pot and burnt the back of Rachael’s hand. She cursed softly and lowered the gas flame. As she ran cold water over her hand, the screen door to the house next door burst open and a nine-year-old boy came running out. His pants hung low on his butt, the cap on his head was twisted sideways and he was off to who knew where in this rain. A second or two later, his mother stepped outside. She was a thin, wasted woman, not much older than a girl. Her hair was dull and matted and cropped short. The dress she wore hung flat against her body and sagged so low that the sharp bones of her chest stuck out. An infant was slung in one arm, and the two of them came out of the house yelling—the mother at her runaway son, and the baby at the cold rain falling on its back.