I don’t think he cared. I think he just told that story because he liked to tell it, and maybe he half-believed it himself, and maybe it was just his way of messing with me. That knife had belonged to my Pap. Pap told me someday he was going to give it to me, and I thought about saying something about it, but figured it might not be the thing to do. Not the smart thing anyway.
If Johnny would kill my Pap, I figured he might kill me too. Mama wasn’t all that fond of me either, when you got right down to it. She put Uncle Johnny over me and Pap. I guess it could be she was scared of him, and I could understand that. I was scared of him, and everyone else was too.
There was good reason. He was big and strong and in plenty good shape and had a temper like hot water about to boil. I had actually seen him run a wild boar down once, jump on it and kill it with a knife, and it trying to get its tusks in him. It had already killed two of Uncle Johnny’s dogs, which is what made him so mad. He didn’t care for much, but he loved them dogs. As for Mama, he had wanted her because he didn’t have her. Once he got her, he didn’t want her, least not all the time. Everyone knew he had other women. Everyone knew he had killed several men and one woman, and there was rumor of a child. A baby that was drowned. One of the men he killed was a lawman that came after him, and the woman that was killed was his first wife. It was pretty well understood, if not proved, that he and Mama had killed my Pap.
Like I said, there was good reason to be scared.
Uncle Johnny stood over me for a moment, a bottle of Jax in his hand, sipping at it like a kitten at its mother’s tit, then said, spraying me with beer breath, that I ought to hurry on up, ’cause the grease was hot and the cornmeal was ready to roll the fish in.
I had the three catfish hung up on a limb by a rope run through their gills, and they was huge. I had a kerosene lantern dangling from a nubbin of a limb, broken off by drought and wind, and I was working mostly by that light. I took the lantern down from time to time to hold up next to the fish to make sure I was doing the job right. One alone would have made a meal for five or six, but we had three of them, all of them caught by Uncle Johnny. He had snagged them out of the river that day. They had been kept fresh on lines that let them hang in the water and swim about. I ain’t stretching it too much to say them fish was as big as me, and I’m twelve years old and pretty tall and solid of weight. Smaller catfish are supposed to taste better, but when Mama Mooney rolled the cuts of them fat old fish in cornmeal with salt and pepper, put them in a big cooking pot full of boiling, hot grease, it would all come out sweet and tender as the first breath of spring.
While I was working, I could see the grown-ups starting to drive down there in the bottoms. In bad wet weather they couldn’t have done that. The river would have been all the way up to the woods and the dirt road, and sometimes over it.
I watched them get out of their cars and trucks and gather around the fire that was too hot for the night but gave plenty of light. They gathered and greeted each other. There was a lot of them, which was how it was expected, this being about the only thing around to do outside of squirrel hunting or drinking potato skin liquor.
Mama was there too, of course. Her long blond hair hung way down her back and she had on a long dress, the way Pentecostals are supposed to wear, but it fit her a little tight, and when she moved she moved like a fish in its skin. I figured there was plenty of Pentecostal men that night would look at her and think of sin, which I figured fit since they was also drinking. Of course, what they had all come to see didn’t have much to do with religion either.
There was side dishes brought by all the ladies. Shelled corn, beans and breads, casseroles, pies and cakes, and all manner of fixings. I watched as they stacked them on a row of long plank tables. The men and their wives had also brought gifts for Conjure Man, and those they laid out on a table that had been put away from the food and the fire. The gifts was in brown sacks or wrapped up in newspaper.
I was right seriously scared of Conjure Man, on account of not only how he looked, but because of what he could do. I was scared of Uncle Johnny, but I was more scared of Conjure Man, and nervous about what I was going to be seeing.
When I had the fish cleaned, their guts spilled out on the ground, I checked through their innards by using a stick to push them around, but there wasn’t nothing inside them that interested me. Only thing was one of them had swallowed an old white china cup with blue flowers painted on it. It wasn’t broke up even a little bit, until Uncle Johnny came over, saw it lying by the bluish intestines of the fish, stepped on it, and smashed it. He didn’t like nothing that was whole. Anything like that, a cup, a person, he wanted to break it.
“Ain’t them cleaned yet?” he said.
“They got to be filleted,” I said, “that’s all that’s left to it.”
“I can see that. Get ’em on over to the cutting table,” he said. “Quit messing around.”
He took a gulp of his Jax and went back to the fire. Pretty soon I could hear all of them men and women talking amongst one another about this and that, but mostly about the Depression that was going on, and how the president said all we had to fear was fear itself. One man said, “Yeah, that and starving to death.”
That might be, but wasn’t nobody going to starve this night. I pulled the fish one at a time off their hanging lines and carried them to the cutting table where Mama Mooney was. She was smooth skinned and black as the night. She was meaty and always smelled sweet like honeysuckle. I asked her about it once. She said it was her soap. That it was made with ash and hog lard or bacon squeezings, and sometimes store-bought lye. Said she broke honeysuckles into it when she made it, or mint when she had that, and sometimes both. She said if she didn’t do that, the bacon squeezings she used to make the soap would make her smell like breakfast. She said that wasn’t entirely a bad thing. Her husband liked it.
Mama Mooney had already started cutting up the catfish when Uncle Johnny came over. He was impatient and nervous, getting ready for what was to come. “You getting it done, auntie?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Johnny,” she said. “I’m working on it right smart.”
“Get on it smarter,” he said. “We got a crowd here already and more coming.”
“Yes, sir,” she said, as if she was getting paid a king’s ransom instead of five dollars.
I seen then Uncle Johnny had a look on his face that made me feel uncomfortable. He had that Jax half-lifted to his mouth, and was watching the younger girls that had come with their folks and was helping lay out the food. They was maybe thirteen or fourteen.
“Looks like them girls is getting pretty near ripe,” Uncle Johnny said.
I felt cold all over. Mama Mooney reached out and got me by the elbow, said, “You come on over here and help me sort out these cuts of fish.”
Me and Mama Mooney took the fish she had rolled in her mix of cornmeal and spices, and dropped them carefully into the boiling pot of grease so it didn’t splash up on us and burn our skin to the bone. It wasn’t hardly no sooner than them cuts was in the grease, than they was fried and Mama Mooney was scooping them out with a wooden ladle long as me.
She dipped the fish out and put them in large bowls on the cook table. She filled bowl after bowl after bowl. Fact was, we run out of bowls and had to put some of the fish out on a white tablecloth folded up thick on the far end of the table. The chunks stained the tablecloth and filled the air with a sweet, hungry smell. My mouth watered.
It was time to eat, and a little later on would be the Conjure Man.
• • •
My Pap was a bad-luck fella, and he wore that bad luck like a suit coat on a bum. He treated me all right, though. He worked hard at the cotton gin, but the job wasn’t good like it had been ’cause the cotton crop was smaller, and what things was made from cotton wasn’t selling like they once was. Folks didn’t have money and were making do with what they had, so the need for
cotton wasn’t as high as it might have been, least not at the gin where Pap worked. They gave him fewer hours, and this meant he worked a lot of pickup jobs while Mama stayed home, such as it was, and painted her nails and read magazines and was messing around with Pap’s brother, my Uncle Johnny.
Now, I didn’t know this right away, though I reckon Pap did, but didn’t say nothing. I never could understand that. Guess he was so in love with Mama he wouldn’t dare to say anything ’cause that would make it real. As for me, I have to say I didn’t much care for her, even if she was my mama. She didn’t like me neither. I think it’s ’cause I look just like Pap.
I found out about her and Uncle Johnny one afternoon when I come in from the river, fishing for our supper. I brought the fish I’d cleaned into the house, heard moaning, the kind you might make when you sat yourself down in a washtub full of clean, hot water.
I saw what was making the moaning pretty quick, ’cause our house wasn’t so big you had to hunt for anybody. The door to the bedroom was wide open, and there was Mama and Uncle Johnny on the bed, neither of them with a stitch of clothing on, and what Uncle Johnny was doing to Mama wasn’t the sort of thing you’d mistake for a fella trying to help someone get a cinder out of their eye.
I knew enough about farm animals to have that figured, but there I stood, statue-stiff, watching, and then Uncle Johnny looked up and seen me, and smiled. Just smiled like wasn’t nothing going on that anyone ought to be concerned about. I took myself and my fish out of there and started walking, and somewhere along the way I just tossed them clean fish and the pail they was in to the side of the road. I don’t remember how long I walked. Finally I came back and there was Pap’s old car in the yard, him home from work, and when I went in the house he was sitting in a chair, looking as if a rain cloud was right over his head and it was about to blow water and drown him.
Uncle Johnny and Mama was sitting at the table eating some cornbread with honey, and wasn’t neither of them mindful of Pap or me. It was right then I knew Pap knew what I knew. I don’t know that he found them in the same way I did, but I think they just told him and said for him to get over it. Pap was like that. He could take a lot and would. He wasn’t really a strong person like his brother, Johnny. He just didn’t have it in him to be forceful. He was strong all right. I had seen him lift the back end of a car up and hold it while a fella changed a tire, and he could bend a tire iron until it darn near looked like a horseshoe, but in his head and heart he wasn’t strong. That part of him the wind could blow away.
Mama finally looked at me, and when she did, the look on her face was so odd it made me uncomfortable. Pap got up slowly, walked over to me, put a hand on my shoulder, and before I knew it he was guiding me out the door and to the car.
He drove us out in the country. The trees were high and green and the hills rose up and were split by the red clay roads. We drove on and on, and sometimes we drove back the way we had come, and on out again.
The night came down and the moon went up and we kept driving, out on the bad clay roads, on through the shadowy woods, and down to the edge of the Sabine River. Pap got out of the car and walked over and stood on the bank. I walked down there with him. The river smelled like wet dirt and fish and rotten things. There was on either side of us some tall reeds growing and there was a little bit of wind. The wind rattled the reeds and whistled in between them in a way that could make your hide stand up off the bone.
Pap stood there and looked at that brown, moonlit water like it was calling to him, like he wanted it to swallow him up and wash him away, as if it were the River Jordan wanting to carry him wet and quick, way on out to the Promised Land.
I reached out and took his hand. His fingers wrapped around mine, and he turned and looked at me. The moonlight glistened off the wet stains on his cheeks and made his eyes glow like a deer’s. He smiled. It was a slow smile, and he had to fish for it, but he hooked it and pulled it up.
Without saying a word he went back to the car, climbed into the front seat, stretched out, closed his eyes, and crossed his hands over his chest like a dead man. I got in the backseat and lay there and waited on him to say something, anything, but he didn’t say a word. I could hear him breathing, though, so I knew he was alive.
After a time the moon got sacked by some clouds and there was a rumbling of thunder and a skywide slash of white lightning made the sky brighten up. That lightning cracked so loud it was like someone had taken a whip to the roof of the car. When it cracked I hopped up a little and made a noise, and Pap said, “That’s all right, son. It ain’t gonna hurt you none. You try and sleep.”
“Okay,” I said.
I lay back down.
Pap said, “You know what’s going on, don’t you?”
I said I did, and he said, “That’s too bad, son. It really is. But you’re old enough to know sometimes things are just what they are and not what you want them to be, or what they ought to be, and then you got to decide if you’re going to put up with it. I been putting up with it a long time, but today they’re telling me to put up with it. It’s one thing to put up with it, another to be told to put up with it.”
I was a little confused on that at first, but finally it come to me what he meant. I lay there waiting for more, but there wasn’t any more. I watched the lightning for a long time, listened to it pop and crackle, listened to the thunder pound and roar, and then there was the rain. It fell down on the car roof, and at first it was loud, but then it got a kind of evenness to it, and that caused me to close my eyes. With my eyes closed I could still hear the thunder and the sizzle of lightning. Now and then there was such a hot blast the light came right through my eyelids. But I didn’t open them. I just lay there, and pretty soon, lightning or no lightning, thunder or no thunder, I was asleep.
In the morning, when I woke and sat up, the rain was gone. Pap was sitting up in the front seat with the window down. The air was turning warm and steamy from the rain, and flies had come into the car and were buzzing around. I waved my hand at them to keep them off my face. Pap shooed them out of the car window, and when they was all out, he rolled up the window and we sat there for a bit. With the window rolled up it was terrible hot, so Pap started up the car and drove us away.
I climbed up front with him as he drove. We rolled down our windows and let the wind come in then, ’cause the flies couldn’t, not at the speed we was driving, which was pretty damn fast on wet clay roads. Finally Pap slowed down and drove right. We came off the clay roads and onto a gravel road and rode into town.
Pap drove us to the café, which was something we hardly ever done. We went inside and he ordered up some coffee and breakfast, and while we ate, Pap said, “I once fought your Uncle Johnny. We was both wanting to box. We fought each other all over the place. I had some skill, more than him. I was stronger and the same quick as him, but I didn’t have no backbone. Still don’t. When it came to the getting place I didn’t get any. I gave in because I couldn’t stand it and didn’t want to stand it. My will wilted like a flower in winter. I ain’t one to care much for my brother right now, and haven’t cared much for him in a long time, but what I want to say to you is you got to have backbone, not be like me. It ain’t got me nowhere in life, not having any. You don’t got to be mean or cruel or just wrong acting like your Uncle Johnny, but you might want to get that other part, the backbone, and wear it up tight under your skin.”
“Pap,” I said, “it’s you I want to be like.”
Pap didn’t seem to hear what I said. He sat there with the coffee still full in his cup, his food untouched. He said, “I tell you what. I’d like one more crack at Uncle Johnny, gloves on, or gloves off. Just a hard, square fight, and not even square, now that I think about it, but a fight to the death, ’cause I think maybe now I could find some backbone.”
That was the last real conversation we had, ’cause a few days later they found him dead and dumped out by the r
iver with a bullet in the back of his head. Wasn’t no way to prove it, but I knew, and everyone else knew, it was Mama and Uncle Johnny that had done it, Johnny being the one to pull the trigger. With Pap shot in the back of the head I got to figuring maybe Uncle Johnny didn’t have all that much backbone after all. But then there were fights, and who he fought went against that thinking, because so far he had fought Bob Fitzsimmons, Gentleman Jim Corbett, and John L. Sullivan, who gave him the best fight, ’cause he was more like a street brawler and strong too. He had fought them all and won, and them wasn’t men you fought if you didn’t have no backbone; you fought them that backbone had to be made of steel.
No one was at the funeral or the grave burying besides me and a preacher and the colored folks that worked with Pap at the cotton gin. One of the men when he come by me at the grave, said, “Your daddy was all right. He was a good man.”
I thought maybe he was too good. So good he didn’t have that backbone he said he needed.
Right after that I went home and got to thinking on how I could kill Uncle Johnny. I wasn’t feeling all that favorable toward Mama neither. This went on for a year, me thinking, and watching my back, ’cause I didn’t know for sure I wasn’t next. I didn’t stay at home any more than I had to, to sleep mostly, ’cause that’s where my bed was, on the screened-in back porch. But I slept nervous. It was like the sheep in the Bible that was supposed to lie down with the lion. He might do that, but I figured he’d keep an eye open, and that was me, one eye open. And maybe like the sheep, I lay there thinking on how to kill the lions in my life. I was thinking on this one night, lying in my bed on the back porch, when Pap came to see me.
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