Constellations

by Tim Bryant

  Also by Tim Bryant:

  Dutch Curridge

  Southern Select

  Spirit Trap

  Keachi

  CONSTELLATIONS

  Tim Bryant

  Copyright © 2015 Behooven Press

  behoovenpress.com

  twitter.com/behoovenpress

  Edited by the Behooven Press Round Table.

  CONSTELLATIONS is a work of fiction. Names,

  characters, places, and incidents either are the product

  of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

  events or locales is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book

  may be reproduced in any form or by any means

  without express permission from the publisher.

  ISBN: 978-0692430279

  For Jimmy

  Special thanks to the many good people

  from the Nacogdoches community and

  beyond who brought me firsthand knowledge

  and stories of its colorful past and characters.

  Each of you can be found

  within these pages.

  “What show of soul are we gonna get from you?”

  Mike Scott, The Waterboys

  Artillery Conray Patton stepped out of the Angelina River in the summer of 1958, ending a journey that began some forty years earlier. Several people saw him on that hot July morning, including Bill Chandler, the game warden, who was checking his trot lines before starting his daily rounds. Bill said Art surfaced from the deepest part of the channel, and he broke the surface gasping like he was wakening from a dream.

  Art had nothing but the clothes on his back and a small pine box that he carried under his arm. Bill said the way he was clutching it, the way it was shaped, he thought it might hold a gun. He pushed himself into the shallows and then marched ashore, never looking once at Bill who stood right in the clear, just about where the old boat dock had once been. One end of his trot line tied off on one of three wooden beams that remained. He said Art came ashore not ten feet from him, set the box down at his feet and crumpled next to it.

  "I thought he was dead for sure," Bill said. "He had a long coat on and a hat, and I really couldn't see anything but a heap of clothes and that box."

  Bill approached the man, moving around him in a wide arc and then cautiously advanced.

  "Don't touch the box."

  Bill jumped back, startled more than afraid. He reached across and under his coat and adjusted the .38 Special in its holster. He had never drawn it on a human before, but he'd gone over scenarios for years. He felt the day coming, and he wondered if this was it.

  "What's your name, boy?"

  Art rolled over on his left side and pulled the hat from his head. Water seemed to pour out of him. He wiped his face with his coat sleeve and looked up. The man looked young. Certainly too young to be calling Art a boy. But that was nothing new. He also looked vaguely important.

  "My name is Art."

  Bill placed his hand on the revolver. It gave him a feeling of being in control.

  "Whereabouts you from?" he said.

  It was a standard line, usually to be followed by the one that he'd best just get back to wherever that might be real quick. Art sat up on his left hand and waved his right from one side to the other.

  "Right here. Pattonia."

  Bill had been game warden in Nacogdoches County for almost ten years. He knew everybody in the area. White folks and negroes too.

  "Who you belong to?"

  He went down the list of negroes in the Patton's Landing area real quick. There were only three families left, and they all lived closer to Marion's Ferry. Something wasn't right. Bill pulled the gun from its holster and pointed it right at the man's head.

  "I used to belong to the J.T. Conray family," Art said. "Then I became a free man."

  He reached for the box and pulled it to him. It was all he had left, and if he was fated to die within sight of his old home place, it would feel better if he died holding on to something. He closed his eyes and imagined himself being pulled back under the water. He listened to the water moving away, and he thought he heard the sound of dogs barking somewhere in the rush. The sound of someone hollering.

  "If I gotta go back on that damned farm again, you just as soon shoot me right here, kick my ass back in the river."

  He fell into the red mud and waited. It seemed like he waited for a real long time.

  When Art came ashore at Pattonia, he was wearing an undershirt, a white work shirt and black trousers. Black boots. A vest with all of the buttons missing. A long trench coat like Bill hadn't seen in years. And a hat.

  Bill Chandler and a friend of his called Roy Clowney managed to get Art up the bank and to Bill's '56 Cameo pickup. He was water-logged, which doubled his weight, but his legs worked, as long as Bill and Roy were able to hold him in an upright position. The hat came off twice, at which point it was left behind, but Art never loosed his grip on the box. With him safely deposited in the truck's bed, Roy looked at Bill.

  "Where you taking him?"

  Bill hadn't had time to consider it.

  "Should we get him to the hospital?"

  Nacogdoches was a good twenty minutes away, but there wasn't anything closer.

  "Will they take niggers?" Roy said.

  During that day, negroes weren't welcome in most of the local restaurants. They could knock at the back door and place an order sometimes. Stores would usually let them come in the front door, as long as they had money to spend.

  "Sure," said Bill, "long as we drop him at the back door."

  Driving down Patton's Landing Road, they soon thought better of it. More specifically, he thought of Ivory and Oda Whitaker. Bill remembered taking a negro to their house several years earlier. He had been out in the bottoms between Nacogdoches and Lufkin and found the guy sitting against a tree and bleeding like a stuck pig.

  "Somebody shoot you, boy?"

  "No sir," he had said. "I fell from out this tree, trying to get at a squirrel."

  Bill remembered telling the guy that he was supposed to shoot the damn things out of the tree, not climb up after them.

  "What's so funny?" said Roy.

  Bill turned and looked at the man in the back of his truck. He looked to be asleep, or maybe dead, but he was still holding on to that box.

  "Think we should check out that case he's carrying?"

  The only other time Bill had carried a negro in his truck— and it had been his old International that time— he had carried that squirrel hunter back toward Nacogdoches and through Marion's Ferry and dropped him off with Oda Whitaker, who was a nurse and promised to get him all fixed up and sent back home.

  Bill pulled off the gravel road and onto the short pathway that led to the Whitaker place. He had no idea if the Whitakers still stayed there. Hell, who knew if they were still alive. The old house had a new coat of green paint, but the yellow still poked through here and there. Otherwise, it all looked pretty much the same. He pulled up under the same oak tree he had parked beneath before and looked at Roy.

  "Old lady here's a nurse of some kind."

  Roy nodded.

  "I suspect we might ought check that box out," he said.

  A lanky negro boy in shorts and no shirt stepped out onto the porch and then hollered out for Big Momma. Oda Whitaker suddenly appeared at the screen door. She looked irritated. Bill waved at her like they were old friends. She didn't look to be a day older.

  What was in the pine box wasn't a gun. Bill Chandler wasn't exactly sure what it was. He and Roy had both stood there eying it until Oda Whitaker came out onto the porch and down into
the yard. Nothing had been said about it until the Cameo was a good half mile back down the road into Marion's Ferry.

  "That was some kind of guitar," Bill said.

  Roy was inspecting a field of new pines that had just been set out. Bill cranked his window down and lit a cigarette.

  "Looked more like a banjer or something," Roy said. "I kind of wanted to pick on it a little."

  Roy had played guitar in a western band for half of his life, before finally settling down with a woman named Fern who followed him from town to town, bar to bar, until he finally bought her a drink, and then another drink and, before too long, a wedding ring. Now he never played or maybe he just picked now and again for Fern.

  "He seemed pretty attached to it," Bill said.

  It looked more like a banjo because that's what it was. A four-string gourd banjo, made out of a calabash, cut in half, a goat skin stretched across it, dried and nailed into place. The neck was made out of oak, cut from a tree that had been struck by lightning and burned to a dark almost black color, and strung with gut strings. It had been painted and repainted more than a couple of times. You could see faded designs beneath brighter colors. They seemed to tell stories in some archaic language that no one remembered. Then there were the place names and dates, each added in a different hand, a different style.

  The banjo had been made in New Orleans in 1814, the year before the Battle of New Orleans. You could plainly see the city and the date etched into the gourd right where the neck was attached. After being played there for twenty years or so, it traveled upriver to Natchez (up the fretboard on the banjo) and then to Vicksburg in the 1840 before traveling to Galveston Bay and then up the Angelina River to Patton's Landing on the steamboat Laura sometime around 1860. From there, the list of colorful names wrapped back around the back of the neck and then circled the gourd. Havana. Haiti. Trinidad. Cape Verde. Dakar. Morocco. Nassau. And then back to the beginning: New Orleans.

  Art Conray Patton claimed to have first seen the instrument on the cotton farm of J.T. and Lucy Conray, who owned him, his brother Wash, his parents Jodora and Victor and somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty other slaves. He had no memory of who might have played it, only that it sat in the house undisturbed for years after the slaves had been freed. When he and his mama finally moved off the land and onto a small strip of their own, it was one of only a handful of things he took with him. The story sounded reasonable except for one minor detail. Art swore that he had been born on the Conray farm in the year 1848. That he had been a young man when the Union army sent four soldiers up from Houston who read aloud from a piece of paper saying all of the slaves were free to go. That he had stood in front of the big house there and watched as J.T. and Lucy tossed a few bags onto a wagon and rode away, leaving the workers there on the land for the next couple of years, until a rainy season dealt the final blow to the cotton and forced everyone to move off in search of better fortunes. This made Art Conray Patton 109 years old.

  "I'm an old man," he said. "I've been transfigurated."

  Even fresh out of the Angelina River, he didn't look half his age.

  Saw mills. Banks and stores and restaurants wouldn't hire a negro in the 1950s, not in Nacogdoches, not in just about all of east Texas, but every community had at least one saw mill and usually more. Some were saw mill towns. Towns that sprung up around the saw mills instead of the other way around. And almost every one of these saw mills, in turn, had a juke joint somewhere in the near vicinity. A place where workers could relax after work and have a few drinks, play cards, trade stories and listen to music. Negro musicians made meager livings by traveling between these saw mills and playing either in the jukes or at parties. It was at a juke joint called The Pepper Pot, close to Kelty's, that I first ran into Art Patton. It was also where I first laid eyes on that gourd banjo.

  "Strum it," Art said, holding it out with the playing side facing me.

  I raked my finger across the four strings, which buzzed like the gourd was full of bees.

  "See what I tell you?"

  I was writing for the Doches Gazette, a small colored newspaper out of Nacogdoches. Once a bi-monthly, it had just been cut back to a monthly edition. It took so little of my time and brought in so little money that I could scarcely call it a job. Most of my writing consisted of letting the community know who was visiting which relative in which town and who had come to town visiting family. I wasn't breaking big stories, but I was hoping to eventually get some kind of fellowship to go to Wisely College or maybe Prairie View, study to be a real newspaper reporter.

  I was at the office one afternoon, waiting around to ask for extra assignments, when an albino named Whitey came in. Whitey was a regular. Homeless and usually jobless, he mainly showed up when he was looking for a little money. Not that he would ever accept a handout. He was always ready to do some sweeping or window washing or whatever you had to do but didn't want to do.

  "Got you a big story," he said. "Down in the Sawmill Quarter."

  Whitey was touched in the head but he didn't talk nonsense. I liked him all right.

  "Ain't nothing much good ever come out of the Sawmill Quarter," I said.

  I figured either someone had cut a limb off, which happened on a regular enough basis that it wasn't really that big of a story, or two workers had gotten into it over a woman or something and someone had been knifed.

  "You know The Pepper Pot?" he said.

  The odds just got worse.

  "Whitey," I said, "trouble at The Pepper Pot quit being news a long time ago."

  "Ain't nothing happened at The Pepper Pot," he said, "something about to happen."

  That was an angle I hadn't thought of. And that was enough to pique my interest.

  Artillery Conray Patton.

  The name was scribbled across the bottom of a Nehi Root Beer box. I had never known The Pepper Pot to sell anything other than real beer or whiskey. Jay Henry Britt, who ran the place, said even bourbon and scotch was too fancy for his tastes, and so he wouldn't stock it.

  I had been in The Pepper Pot a few times, mostly meeting friends and listening to music, so it wasn't that out of the ordinary for me to show up. I ordered a Dixie beer in a cup and grabbed a seat close to the stage, which consisted of a piece of plywood balanced on six plastic buckets. The Pepper Pot was unusual in that it had any stage at all. Most of the joints in the area pushed a table or two out of the way, just enough to make room for the musicians to crowd in with their instruments.

  Whitey hadn't told me much about Art. He said he was old. Real old. So when he walked up to the stage and climbed aboard, holding the banjo in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other, I mistook him for someone else. He seemed kind of ageless. Maybe forty, maybe sixty, but probably not far outside either of those points. He had a kind smile, even if his eyes seemed to hold too much sadness.

  With most of the musicians who came through the area, what you got was second hand blues. If you were lucky, somebody doing his version of Lightnin' Hopkins. Smokey Hogg. Even old stuff like Blind Lemon Jefferson. Not many were playing their own songs. None were doing what Art did.

  "My name is Artillery Conray Patton, but you may call me Art," he said. "It's good to be back home."

  The next three hours was a ride I'll never forget. At times, I almost forgot I was inside The Pepper Pot. In fact, the place had more in common with the little churches in the area than one might expect. The one room building, painted white inside and out, the rows of chairs, the stage area, the music. At times, it seemed that the Spirit descended on the place, and I don't mean the alcohol variety. I was riveted.

  "You may call me Art. For a long time, that's all I was. Sum total all. Art. Something to call me so I would come running when I was supposed to come running, cower when I was supposed to cower. You understand. Come running when I was supposed to come running, cower when I was supposed to cower. Something to differentiate me from the others who looked just like me. I know you know what I'm saying. Some
thing to differentiate me. Like a dog. Like you would call a dog. Bonny. Bull. Art.

  "Now a dog will look for something good even in the foot that kicks it. That's the way God made a dog. I knew there wasn't much good on that goddamn cotton farm. I didn't have to look far or hard to know that much. Not much good in Patton Landing, back in that time. Sure as hell wasn't no Pepper Pot. And there sure as hell wasn't much good in J.T. Conray. Might have been something there in Lucy Conray or my momma Jodora, or even my friend Jube, if I had been taught to recognize it. If I had been taught to recognize it. I had only been taught to run and to cower. I could see, but I had learned not to think long on anything I saw."

  Art seemed content with what he had said and turned his attention to that banjo, which had been thrumming like a piston engine in his hands, just waiting for him to crank it up and take off. Which is pretty much what he did. The banjo didn't sound like any banjo I had ever heard. It was run through a small Valco Supro amplifier and cranked up until it all hummed with electric current. I halfway expected sparks to shoot out of the banjo.

  "The whole world seemed brown back then," he said. "The whole world seemed brown.

  "Maybe it's the memories that have browned. All of the people around me, the clothes we wore, the dirt beneath our feet, the buildings, the fields we worked, the mules, even the sky appeared a dirty burlap color, the stars poking through where it had been rubbed threadbare."

  The banjo notes jabbed and slashed away like they were stabbing holes in the air. It was getting hard to breathe. Suddenly, his right hand flailed against the strings, and, just when you thought the strings were about to snap, the tension did instead. The air seemed to cool.

  "Me and Jube were laying on hay bales one early evening, just outside the big barn, and there were already enough stars to work out a couple of patterns."

  He wasn't singing, but he wasn't not singing. The words seemed to roll out of something deep inside of him, like water.