A Peach For Big Jim

by Lisa Belmont

  “It belonged to your great-grandmama, Dolly Mason.”

  Dolly’s husband, Col. Briscoe Mason the Third, had given it to her before The War Between the States. I’d heard Pa go on countless times about Briscoe Mason. There wasn’t much he was more proud of than his kinfolk who’d fought in the Confederate Army.

  “She wore it every day he was out fighting,” Pa said.

  “Every day?”

  “She was loyal to him, Chloe. Best thing a woman can be to a man.”

  I turned around, and Pa fastened the choker around my neck.

  “Fits good,” he said, as I worked a finger under the band to make sure I could breathe.

  “You oughta read Dolly’s diary that she kept at Rosehill. She wrote lots of letters.”

  I knew Pa ain’t never read a one of them letters, but he was always trying to find some way to connect me to my roots.

  “Yessir,” I said, stroking the feathers of the little bird.

  “You come from real fine stock, Chloe,” Pa said. “Real fine.”

  Caleb set the butt of his shotgun on the porch, and Pa glared at him.

  “Where’s the coon, boy?”

  “Big Jim came and scared him off.”

  “What was he doing down there?”

  “Don’t know. He just showed up and liked to scared the coon and Chloe both.”

  Pa sat back in his chair and lit his pipe. It was an old corncob filled with Daniel Webster tobacco. He gestured Caleb over and gave him a real good stare.

  “Tell me something,” Pa said, his pipe hanging from his mouth like a loaded gun. “You make that nigger think twice ‘bout getting near Chloe?”

  “Yes, sir,” Caleb said, swatting a mosquito.

  “Good. Ain’t no fraidy cat gonna look after my Buttercup.”

  It was last winter when I found out why Pa called me his little Buttercup.

  “Them flowers grew all over Rosehill,” he said. “Couldn’t hardly walk in spring without steppin’ on a buttercup.”

  Rosehill Plantation was where Pa’s granddaddy, Col. Briscoe Mason, lived. It once was a breathtaking Southern plantation near Columbia. Of course, there wasn’t much left of it anymore. Now it was nothing but charred ruins. When The War Between the States broke out, Briscoe left to fight for the Confederacy. Dolly and about a hundred slaves were left behind at Rosehill. Pa said the Negro slaves got real uppity when they saw the Union Army come marching through. They didn’t think twice about burning Rosehill to the ground.

  “Just up and torched it,” he said. “Didn’t care what they destroyed. Let them flames go all over the plantation, burning through the house and the fields. ‘Bout liked to killed Dolly seeing her beloved Rosehill go up in smoke.”

  Pa would get real worked up when he’d talk about the ruins that were left. Sometimes though, he’d tell us what the plantation looked like when his father, Ashton, was a little boy.

  “There were beautiful white pillars along the portico. And a wide veranda where you could sit and drink a mint julep. Briscoe even had a chandelier imported from Austria that hung in the foyer. All them crystals would get to sparkling something fierce. And don’t get me started on the hardwood floors. They gleamed like bourbon. Not to mention the sweeping staircase and the oak trees lining the front drive. There were lots of them glorious oaks. It was a sight.”

  I’d picture it in my mind and wish we lived there.

  “Lots of slaves worked the cotton fields on the plantation,” Pa would tell me. “And if they’d stayed in their place, we’d be sipping sweet tea on Rosehill’s veranda right now.”

  That was how Pa thought about things. Like everything had been taken away. Sometimes I couldn’t hardly blame him, not when I’d hear about all them slaves burning down his granddaddy’s plantation.

  Pa got up from the rocking chair and went inside. Caleb followed him, removing his hat and setting his shotgun on the mantle.

  I cupped Little Chirpie in my hand and showed him to Momma. Momma loved all them critters that’d come around the house. She’d hang pinecones smeared with peanut butter from the trees and leave mulberries on the front porch so them critters would always have some food. I’d never seen Momma when she wasn’t fussing about some animal. She even stayed up all night when Rufus got bit by a chipmunk. Dog liked to whimper all night, but all he had was a little puncture wound that Momma treated with comfrey oil.

  Momma cupped her hands under mine and looked at me with engaging blue eyes that always made you feel like she was going to draw you into a hug. Course, Pa said it was her toffee brown hair that he noticed when they first met. Momma kept it real shiny with a hair rinse she made from nettle leaves.

  “Chloe,” she said. “It looks like this bird woulda died if you hadn’t brought him home.”

  “Yessum.”

  She gave me a little squeeze and said, “Ain’t much I’d rather have than a daughter who can’t turn away from helping a poor, innocent critter. Have you got a name for him?”

  Momma named all the animals we owned, including the hens and chicks. She even marked down their birthdays in a little journal and made a special celebration by baking a cake to mark the occasion. Pa thought it was a bit much, but he never said nothing.

  “Little Chirpie.”

  “Well, that’s a real good name. Why don’t you give Little Chirpie some chicken feed and fix him a warm place to rest?”

  We had a wooden basket we used for picking fruit, so I cleaned it out and sprinkled it with the sawdust Pa was always bringing in from the mill. I laid the little bird in the basket and took him to my room. I sang a song Momma always hummed around the house.

  Put on the skillet, slip on the lid, Mammy’s gonna make a little shortnin’ bread.

  That ain’t all, she’s gonna do. Mammy’s gonna make a little coffee, too. Mammy’s little baby loves shortnin’, shortnin’. Mammy’s little baby loves shortnin’ bread.

  I laid the basket on my pillow and told the little bird I’d be back after supper.

  Four rough-hewn chairs huddled around our knotty pine table. Pa would sit in his hand-carved chair and talk to Caleb about hunting while Momma and I’d bring the food to the table. Then, we’d all sit down and say grace.

  Momma had made ham hocks and beans, and I served myself one helping after another. Those beans would stick to your ribs, like butter on bread.

  “What do you think Big Jim was doing?” I asked when everything got quiet. “Looking for crawdads?”

  “No,” Caleb said, his eyes getting bigger than a full moon. “He wanders around the swamp at night, looking for something to devour. I’ve even heard he eats possums for breakfast.”

  “A whole possum?”

  “No, just the innards. After he slices it with his big, long fingernail,” Caleb said, scooping his beans up with his cornbread.

  “Enough of that talk,” Momma said. She never liked unseemly conversations around the supper table.

  Momma was what you’d call a real Southern lady. Even though we were poorer than church mice, Momma would put her hair up in pin curls at night so she’d look real good in the morning. Not to mention she was always wearing one of her pretty print dresses that she’d make on her Singer sewing machine.

  “You think he goes down there often?” Pa said, eyeing Caleb.

  “Don’t know. Ain’t seen him but the one time.”

  Pa was smoking his pipe real easy like, but I knew something was troubling him. I could see it in his eyes, the squinty way he looked through that haze of smoke.

  “Caleb,” he said. “Best not to bring Chloe with you anymore.”

  I looked up, wanting to say something, but Pa’s glare shut me up.

  “Never know what a big buck like that might do.”

  Momma got real uneasy looking and said, “Didn’t Joss have him frame up the sawmill last winter?”

  “Sho’ did,” Pa said, leaning back in his chair.

  “Didn’t get much for it,” Caleb said.

&nbs
p; “Boy got paid,” Pa said, eyeing him.

  Joss Bleekman was the supervisor at the sawmill where Pa worked. After the trees were felled and limbed, Pa would run the lumber through the mill and make sure them boards came out real nice looking. Talk was that Joss had cheated Big Jim out of a fair wage, but Pa was good friends with Joss and never spoke a word against him.

  “I owe Joss everything,” Pa would always say. “We went hunting in the backwoods for white-tailed deer when I was twelve. Ain’t never seen a wild hog as mad as the one that came out of the brush that day. Ornery cuss grunted real loud. Course, I’d used up all my bullets, shooting at birds and such. That hog came barreling straight for me, tearing through my coon dog, Calhoun, with his tusks something fierce. Poor dog was lying there whimpering as that boar headed straight for me. The rest of them dogs tried to chase it away, but it was madder n’ all get-out. I would’ve been a goner if Joss hadn’t shot it.”

  That was the story me and Caleb always heard. Pa would be deader n’ a doornail if it weren’t for Joss Bleekman. Maybe that’s why it seemed there was some kind of brotherhood between them. Something thicker than blood.

  Joss and Pa would go hunting to this day, usually for deer or wild turkeys. And, once in a while, Joss’s two boys, Henry and Chester, would go rabbit hunting with Caleb. That only seemed to strengthen the bond between them.

  After supper, Momma and I cleared the dishes. We scrubbed them real good with a bar of soap while Pa sat out on the front porch. He left the door open, and a breeze blew in with the scent of mimosa.

  It was a quiet night, the lightning bugs sparkling at the edge of the woods and the crickets singing. Sometimes I thought I lived in the most beautiful place in the world. Pa was always saying the South had a special place in God’s heart, too. Southern gentlemen weren’t something you could find just anywhere.

  Yet, despite the fact that I was Pa’s little Buttercup, and that he’d beat Caleb half senseless if he ever so much as looked at me cockeyed, I had to wonder what Pa loved more. Me or the South.

  There were certain traditions that Pa upheld as if his life depended upon it. The Confederate flag, or old Dixie as Pa called it, waved off our front porch. And not a Sunday went by that Pa wasn’t polishing his granddaddy’s cap and ball revolver. His granddaddy, Col. Briscoe Mason the Third, had fought valiantly at the Battle of Manassas and shot nearly a hundred Union soldiers on the battlefield. He was something. That’s why Pa wanted Caleb to follow in Briscoe’s footsteps and go to West Point. I doubted it would ever happen though. Caleb was a good shot and could track a coon for miles, but I didn’t think he had it in him to be a soldier.

  But still, Pa encouraged him. Pa was nothing if not sentimental over his Southern roots. Sometimes, on cold winter nights, Pa would take a swig of moonshine and get to looking through the wooden chest his father had given him. It contained one of the tin cups Briscoe Mason drank from when he was out in the field, and it had lots of Confederate money that Pa said he’d take any day over them five-dollar bills with Lincoln’s face on them. Course, Caleb and I were forbidden to touch all them relics of the past. Seemed they were valuable as all get-out. To Pa, they were anyway.

  Course, that was most folks around these parts. Some of them wished the South never rejoined the union. They wished they could just be left alone and live how they wanted. That was Pa to a tee. He never liked nobody to tell him nothing.

  Momma and I finished up the dishes, and Rufus started barking. Crazy dog always found something to get stirred up about. I figured it was a rabbit or coon, but soon Joss and his boys came wading through the knee-high grass. It wasn’t like Joss to come calling this time of night, but he and his boys were carrying shotguns and asked Pa if he’d seen Big Jim.

  “Miss Lilly said someone was looking in the windows of the schoolhouse. Someone real dark.”

  At the mention of Miss Lilly’s name, my ears perked up.

  “You think it was Big Jim?”

  “Wouldn’t put it past that nigger,” Joss said, his dark hair gleaming in the light.

  He was built like a lumberjack and could ax down a few trees for kindling in no time. Most folks called him handsome because of his lantern jaw and deep-set dark eyes. Course, all I thought about was that he could fit a quarter in that cleft chin of his. That, and the fact that I’d never seen him, except on Sunday, when he wasn’t wearing a flannel shirt with his black boots.

  “Always figured him for a peeping Tom,” Chester said.

  He was Joss’s younger boy, and his fingers were covered in warts. It gave me the willies just to look at him.

  “Probably been spying on Miss Lilly a long time,” Joss said, fishing in his pocket and handing me a piece of Bazooka bubble gum.

  “Thanks,” I said, unwrapping it.

  When we were kids, Joss would take us to Uncle Hickory’s General Store and let us pick out a piece of candy. In the fall, he’d take us for hayrides and to the pumpkin patch near the church. Some of my favorite memories were of Uncle Joss chasing a greased pig through his yard or barrel racing with us down a hill. It seemed like he was always out to have a good time.

  “You think we oughta teach him a lesson?” Pa said.

  Joss sat in the chair next to Pa’s. He set the butt of his gun on his knee and the muzzle caught the light. “I think we gotta remind him what happened over in Greenville. Can’t have Alma scared to walk around Mills Hollow.”

  Alma was Joss’s wife. He’s always telling Alma to give him some sugar. Lord, they were always kissing on each other.

  “Yeah,” Pa said. “Took care of him good, didn’t they?”

  I’d found a newspaper article written about it in the Los Angeles Sentinel that Widow Jones had left in her library. She was good about letting me read her books, so when I saw the baby-faced black man, I picked up the article and read it.

  The article said: A 25-year-old Negro, Willie Earle, arrested on “suspicion” of having assaulted a white man, was dragged from the Pickens, South Carolina county jail early Monday morning by a bloodthirsty mob which murdered him in a veritable orgy of cruelty.

  It’d happened last February. It was later discovered that Willie Earle didn’t commit the crime, but the mob didn’t wait for a trial. They stormed the jailhouse, kidnapped him and took him to Greenville where they lynched him. Some reports said that, after the lynching, the mob went back to a café in Greenville to drink coffee. I didn’t know if that was true, but every last one of them was acquitted for Willie Earle’s murder.

  “I’m going to get Mr. Olsen down at the paper to print some pictures,” Joss said. “All them niggers hanging from trees oughta scare him.”

  Momma grabbed me by the wrist and told me to go to bed. I knew she didn’t want me hearing this kind of talk. It’d get her so upset that she’d crush up a bowl of peanuts and scatter them off the front porch.

  Sometimes I wondered why Momma never said nothing to Pa until she told me about her own father. Apparently, he got drunk and ran off with his mistress. Up and left Granny with no place to go and a passel of kids to take care of. I think the shame of it all was the worst part, though. Granny had to take in folks’ wash and barely scraped by. Momma was the only girl in town without a daddy. All her brothers took to the bottle, but not Momma. That’s when Momma started feeding all them animals. I think it helped her to know she was important to someone, even if it was just them possums.

  She told me about one time when she sat out all night under the moon and asked God to bring her a man that wouldn’t leave. I think that’s why she didn’t pay no mind to Pa. No matter how riled up he got, drinking and cussing up a blue streak, she figured it was worth it. At least he came home at night.

  I went to my room wondering if Miss Lilly was real scared. I started thinking she might move back to Wisconsin and leave us with batty old Miss Cooper. Miss Cooper was sixty-three and couldn’t hear a lick. Once she hit me on the back of the head for answering that seven times eight was fifty-six. Apparently,
she thought I was calling her a “filthy hick.” I slept on a cold milk jug for a week.

  Yet all I could think about was that Caleb was right. Big Jim wasn’t right in the head.

  I tried to calm the riled up feeling I was having and nestled the basket next to my bed. Little Chirpie looked so pathetic with his ruffled feathers and uneasy breathing. I didn’t know anything about taking care of no bird, but still, I hoped he’d make it.

  “Good night, Little Chirpie,” I said, pulling the covers up to my chin.

  People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

  James Baldwin

  Chapter Three

  The next morning I checked the basket. Little Chirpie’s eyes were open, but he was perfectly still.

  “Wake up, Little Chirpie,” I said, half hoping he was in a trance of some sort. “Wake up.”

  He didn’t move a speck, and I shook the basket, thinking that’d bring him back to life.

  “No, little birdie,” I said. “You gotta wake up. You ain’t snake bit. Wake up.”

  When he didn’t move, I got a sinking feeling in my stomach that I was the worst person in the world. I didn’t even know how to care for something so sweet and innocent like Little Chirpie. There must be a special place in hell for people like me.

  Momma came to my room and tried to console me. She reminded me that there’s a time for everything. Even dying.

  “You did everything you could, Chloe. It was just the little birdie’s time.”

  I wiped my eyes as she told me that Caleb and I could bury him out by the henhouse. It was the designated burial place for all our animals, including Stonewall Jackson, the golden retriever we had before old Rufus.

  “Besides,” Momma said, going to my dresser and pulling out a summer dress. “Have you forgotten about Widow Jones?”

  In summer there were three things I always looked forward to: eating Moon Pies from Uncle Hickory’s store, spitting watermelon seeds off the front porch with Caleb, and more than anything, having lunch with Widow Jones. When the days would get real hot, and there was no relief in sight, Widow Jones would invite me and Momma over for a fancy lunch with all the trimmings.