Red River

by Lalita Tademy

  Lucy has gone stouter with each successive baby. She is significantly shorter than he is, so short he can look down on the top of her kerchief when they stand side by side. She has a broad, agreeable face and thick, powerful arms equally adept at cradling a baby or splitting logs for the fire, and the early graying of the hair around her temples somehow softens her. She carries this baby low, and Israel knows this one has made her movements slower than usual, her hand often at her back as a counterbalancing weight. In the courthouse, even the quietest men have taken to talking about their wives aloud, longingly, even those whose wives are known to be scolds. None of the volunteers is a stranger to crowded living and crowded sleeping quarters, but at home they are surrounded by the rhythms and habits of their own families, not jammed tight into small courthouse rooms, set adrift among nervous, snoring men with personal habits as annoying as their own.

  Israel keeps the run out of his step but fast-walks toward the cabin, and when Lucy finally catches sight of him, she hastily throws the slops toward the pig and waits on him in the front yard.

  “You back,” she says, relief so evident in her face that Israel feels a stab of guilt at leaving her alone for so long. She looks him up and down to assure herself he is the same as when he left.

  “Not to stay,” says Israel.

  Lucy stands still for a moment, then turns her back to Israel and moves toward the cabin. “You’ll be wanting to eat,” she says.

  Israel follows her inside. While Lucy spoons up a thin stew from the kettle in the fireplace and cuts him a wedge of two-day-old corn bread, Israel breathes in the familiarity and comfort of his cabin. He eats, comforted by the familiarity of his wife’s cooking.

  “Where the boys?” he asks.

  “’Round back cleaning out the barn. We hard pressed to keep things going without you here. They working sunup to sundown.”

  Israel nods, continues to eat the tepid fish stew, unwilling to begin.

  “I seen Polly Tademy just this morning, down to Walden Bayou,” says Lucy. “Polly say Sam swallowed up by the courthouse too, same as you. Say we got to keep each other strong while our men stand up. Say if she wasn’t a woman, she be down to the courthouse with the rest of you.”

  “Polly speak out too much like a man to suit me,” says Israel. When Lucy doesn’t respond and the silence threatens to go stony between them, he adds, “But I know how tight the two of you is.”

  Lucy dishes up more stew for Israel, and he eats this helping at a more leisurely pace. Finally, he makes a start. “This afternoon the new sheriff put the call out for deputies.”

  Lucy drops all pretense of calm, unable to mask the alarm in her voice. “You didn’t step forward, did you, Israel?”

  “Nah. McCully and one of his sons signed up, but Sam and me didn’t.”

  “Praise be.”

  “Sixteen colored men official deputies now.”

  “When you home for good, Israel?” Lucy asks. “Supposed to be the Federals defending the election men.”

  “I only come back today to carry you all to Smithfield Quarter,” says Israel. He doesn’t look Lucy in the eye. “We can’t leave go of the courthouse till the Federals come, and the ugly got a face to it now. Smokin’ Jimmy Hadnot the one intending to take the courthouse back.”

  “The head of the White League? How a sprinkling of colored farmers gonna hold off the White League?”

  “We almost sixty men strong, with guns.” Israel doesn’t admit to the dwindling numbers of the last few days. “Smithfield Quarter closer to Colfax, closer to our patrols and our rifles. You safer staying with McCully’s wife in Smithfield Quarter than out here alone. Some of the others moving they families too.”

  “Polly don’t say nothing this morning about moving.”

  “Sam coming for her today, same as me for you,” Israel says.

  “Our life is out here in The Bottom, Israel. We got crops in the field and animals to tend. What you thinking?”

  “Hansom Brisco refuse to join with us at the courthouse, but he gonna look after our place here best he can while we gone. I talk to him just before coming. We packing up what we can and bringing the cow. This the way it gonna be, Lucy.”

  Lucy only stares at her husband for a moment, enough to come to terms with the hardness of his face and the resolve rooted in his eyes, then gives a small, resigned shrug. She calls for the children and begins to pack up the few belongings they will need for their journey into town.

  Chapter

  3

  Lucy doesn’t enjoy living in someone else’s house. Already she misses their farm. Smithfield Quarter is foreign, as different from The Bottom as her sons are from each other. The colored settlement only a half mile from the courthouse is a dense warren of close-set log and plank cabins. Fifteen or so houses spill out along the length of the community on either side of bisecting dirt paths. As spring weather turns, newly washed clothes flap on cord lines strung behind cabins, occupants blanket the reddish soil of their small garden patches with thick layers of pine straw to protect their root vegetables from the possibilities of late frost, chickens boldly strut across the cut-through walking trails. Children play noisy games of hide-and-seek or marbles in the middle of the dusty thoroughfare, burning off energy until called in for the evening. Old folks sit on their front porches day and night, greeting passersby, and housewives bring out baskets of their darning and sewing work to join them. Stray lean-ribbed dogs forage, feisty cats chase mice. Compared to the self-contained isolation of more remote farms, life teems in Smithfield Quarter, the families here used to being cheek by jowl. The vast majority of the townspeople in Smithfield Quarter stay neutral, refusing to display defiance, despite the drama taking place in the courthouse and the town only minutes away.

  They look of a type, these one- or two-room cubes in this section of the quarter, with a single small window by the front door, peeking out to the porch. Each has narrow wooden steps leading up to a raised, warped porch in front and back; each has gaps between the wall boards patched with crisscrosses of wood and tin, and each has some sitting place, a stump, bench, or chair out on the porch, under the eaves. Without exception, every one of the small wooden houses is propped up at each corner on stacked blocks, raising the wooden slats off the ground by several feet. When the inevitable floodwaters rise above the sunken ground level each year or two, the added height is sometimes enough to save belongings or an entire house from washing away. The tilt of the porch depends on how much the ground underneath has shifted since the last flood.

  Lucy feels no safer at McCully’s house near town than she did two mornings ago waking in her own bed. Big-bellied pregnant, she sleeps in the bed with McCully’s wife and her two youngest. Six of Lucy and Israel’s children sleep on the floor alongside the McCullens’ four, a sea of brown and tan child-flesh tussling for coverings, quilts, and space, a jumble of jabbing elbows and knees fighting for a crowded night’s sleep. Israel spent only enough time to oversee the transfer, and then he was off to the courthouse again, leaving Lucy to her own devices.

  “I thanks you,” Lucy says to McCully’s wife, Carolyn, in a rare moment of quiet. “All these children too much for anybody’s house but mine. Mighty kind of you to take us in.”

  “We no stranger to children in this house. You already been a help, what with the meals and the cleaning,” says Carolyn. “And the cow benefit mine and yours both.”

  Lucy’s youngest wakes with a startled cry. What starts as whimpering soon becomes a steady wail of abandon, building in volume.

  “Teething,” Lucy says with an apologetic shrug as she picks up the baby and begins to massage his gums. “Maybe sassafras tea help this time.”

  Carolyn sympathizes, but the constant crying just adds to the chaos of the household and keeps everyone on edge.

  By the time evening comes, Lucy is exhausted. Of the six children still with her, the two girls are the only real help with housework and the baby, and both are still too young, at seve
n and eight, to take charge completely for very long. The girls have fallen fast asleep inside, cocooned together on the front-room floor near the fireplace. The baby has had a particularly bad day, has barely stopped crying even to eat. Lucy breaks off a small piece of the sassafras bark she used to steep the sedating tea potion and ties it around her baby boy’s neck. Despite the chill in the evening air, she takes him out to the front porch, away from all of the bodies crammed inside. He continues to bawl, his face a contorted mess, his wriggling body a rebuke to her ineffective efforts to soothe him.

  Lucy is surrounded by people she doesn’t know very well, in a strange place, under an enormous, indifferent night sky. Her husband, normally cautious, has thrown his lot in with radicals carrying guns and challenging white men, and she doesn’t have control of her children. She sits and rocks. A smattering of people pass the cabin along the dirt path out front. Lucy speaks to each, just enough to be polite, lost in her own misery, until a tall, familiar figure walks briskly toward the house and turns up the trodden path leading to the porch. She would recognize Polly Tademy’s simple olive housedress anywhere. Her neighbor from The Bottom is five years younger and lanky, a wisp of a woman, especially compared to Lucy’s girth. Her inky-dark hair is without a trace of gray, pulled back in a severe style, and fastened at the nape of her neck with a strip of cloth.

  “I hear you all the way down the road,” Polly says. “I know the baby be teething, so I brung something for him.”

  “Israel say you coming to town too,” says Lucy. “Can’t say I’m sorry to see a friend in this place.”

  “We staying with McCully’s brother ’round the way, three houses down.”

  Polly storms the porch as if it is her own and pulls Lucy’s baby into her arms. “This one unhappy boy,” she says. She pulls out a small glass vial of a brownish liquid and balances it on her palm.

  “What’s that?” asks Lucy.

  “Just a bit of whiskey,” says Polly.

  Lucy looks over her shoulder to see if anyone is watching. “You know good and well Israel don’t approve,” she whispers. “Neither do Sam. Whiskey the devil’s work.”

  “Is they here?” asks Polly. “Is they the ones with new teeth coming in or wanting some sleep?”

  “But whiskey, Polly. Where it come from?”

  “I got my ways. Come on, Lucy, this sassafras bark not doing no good tonight for the child. Some whiskey on the gums give him some release. And the rest of us too.”

  “Israel won’t like it,” says Lucy.

  “Israel don’t need to know every little thing. We two roads going to the same place, men and women, and don’t need to share each bump and scrape along the way.” Polly rocks the fussy baby, who already shows some signs of quieting. “Men got they own kind of business.”

  “Anything new happen at the courthouse today? I ain’t seen Israel since morning.”

  “Sam just leave from his evening visit. Seem the new sheriff just capture the old sheriff and holding him down at Calhoun’s Sugarhouse. And some colored break into a white man’s house in town and run him and his family out. Things is building to a head fast. Too fast.”

  “Sam or Israel any part of that mess?” Lucy asks.

  “Nah. Spenser McCullen and a few of the young ones gone off on they own and go a little wild.”

  “They gonna get us all killed,” says Lucy.

  “Seem to me we sometimes coming at the Reconstruction too soft, willing to settle for too little, ’cause we was so use to worse before. It got to be hard for someone young as Spenser to understand why things change so slow. Why it seem like everybody want to see our menfolks meek?”

  “You not scared for Sam?” asks Lucy. “We farmers, not fighters.”

  “There’s something to be scared of every day,” says Polly.

  “I’m afraid for Israel. Israel and me, we not like you and Sam,” says Lucy.

  “You be surprised what a person got in them to do when the time come.”

  “Our men in the courthouse gonna bring the white man down on us,” whispers Lucy.

  “Them what gonna be down on us, down already,” Polly says, dismissive. “They’s a time for sitting still and praying the wind blow over you, and they’s a time to rise up and face the storm.”

  “Wish I be bold like you.”

  Polly laughs. “One of me more than enough.” She quickly becomes serious. “Tomorrow let’s us go down to the courthouse, carry some food over for the men, and do some cleaning. With all them guns, they say the courthouse the safest place in town.”

  “I don’t know,” says Lucy. “The children—”

  “The children look after each other while we gone, and Carolyn’s here. Always a help to me to see a thing with my own eyes before it get a chance to grow too big and be discouraging. I’m thinking we both needs to see this courthouse from the inside. We be back here soon enough.”

  Lucy doesn’t commit. She doesn’t say yes, but she doesn’t say no either.

  She and Polly sit out on the porch together in the cold, until the baby falls asleep.

  Early on Friday, Israel finds an unoccupied place on the front stoop of the courthouse and settles himself on the wide planks. He pulls off his boots, lets his legs hang over the side, and tries to stay out of the way. It is still a little chilly for bare feet, but airing his toes feels good. He knocks large clumps of dried, crusted mud off his boots by banging the soles together, and uses an old moth-eaten rag from the back storeroom to buff up the leather. There is little point to the exercise—the boots will muddy again on patrol later in the day—but he has been consumed all morning with the need to tidy up around himself, as if less dirt can inspire more logic and order.

  Israel loses himself in polishing the rough-stitched cowhide the faded color of rotting pecans, worn dangerously thin and soft at the heel. They need mending again. From the corner of his eye, he catches sight of the skirt hems of a pair of women coming past him up the steps to the front doors of the courthouse. He moves aside for them, forced to glance up from his work.

  “Morning, Lucy. Morning, Sister Polly,” says Israel, surprised, and touches a finger to his hat. His wife wears her everyday long skirt, its soft pleats covered by her bleached-white cotton work apron. “What you ladies doing here?”

  “We hear it’s a disgrace, the way you men living in there. We come to clean,” says Polly. Lucy carries a large tin pail of water and several rags, and Polly holds a short-handled straw broom.

  “This no place for women,” grumbles Israel. “You supposed to stay in Smithfield Quarter.”

  “We gonna do our part too,” Polly says matter-of-factly.

  “The politicians meeting in there.”

  “We clean around them, then,” says Polly.

  Polly takes Lucy by the arm, and they climb the steps and disappear through the wide double doors of the courthouse. Within minutes, Sam Tademy comes out into the sunshine to join Israel.

  “They run you out too?” asks Israel.

  Sam nods, chagrined, and squeezes himself in next to Israel on the front steps.

  Polly goes room to room, surveying, pulling Lucy behind her. They are assaulted by mingled, rancid smells the men have grown accustomed to in the last two weeks. Odors lay one on top of the other—musty sweat, spilled homemade wood alcohol, coffee, decomposing food, a sharp trace of urine. The rooms are filthy, strewn with snuff chaws and snuff spit, sticky residues of unidentified origin, tracked mud, blankets carelessly tossed aside. The women are prevented from entering one of the rooms by a man with a rifle at his side. It is blocked off for a meeting where the women are clearly not welcome.

  “Plenty other places to clean,” Polly says, sniffing, but she takes note of Lucy’s tentativeness. “This a big job, and I’ma start out here. You go on back to the storeroom and see if you find us some sacks and cord or something to haul out the garbage. Won’t be no menfolk in your way there.”

  Lucy retraces her steps along the narrow central hal
lway connecting the front and back rooms. Toward the back of the courthouse is a small, jumbled storeroom, stuffed almost floor to ceiling along the back wall with mops, tin buckets, small cans and bottles, kerosene, worn-out brooms of stiff straw, bottles of ink, and miscellaneous bits of this and that.

  Propped against the far wall is an old, battered humpback leather trunk, the clasp broken and hanging crookedly at the front, fastened by a grimy rope. On top, packed in stacks higher than Lucy’s head, are boxes of various sizes, and on top of the boxes is a dusty half-bolt of material of some flowery pattern for dressmaking or curtains. A small ball of twine is nestled on the bolt, almost hidden from view. Lucy stands on her toes, stretches, and almost has hold of the ball when the twine rolls off and falls down behind the trunk, beyond her reach. She lifts each box off the trunk, one at a time, and stacks them on the other side of the small storeroom. When she tries to pull the trunk out from against the wall, it refuses to budge, caught. Underneath are two loose floorboards, and one of the misfit planks holds the trunk fast.

  She jimmies the trunk forward, a few inches at a time, jerking side to side, the floorboards kept in place only by the trunk’s weight. Lucy pulls at one of the planks, and the old rusted nails and rotted wood separate. The board comes free easily. Loosened, the ball of twine rolls in a slow, wobbly line along the tilt of the floor and disappears into the gap. With barely a tug, Lucy gets the neighboring board free, revealing a crawl space below the courthouse floor, maybe two feet from the ground.

  It is too dark to determine how wide it is. Lucy tests whether any of the other boards are loose. At least four more planks could be removed, but she is reluctant to fiddle with other people’s property. Lucy goes back to the front stoop to get Israel.

  Both Israel and Sam follow her to the storage room. Sam inspects the crawl space, retrieves the ball of twine, now covered with thick spider webbing, and even considers lowering himself down into the hole to explore. Instead, he replaces the two boards and carefully returns the various boxes to their previous positions.