Red River

by Lalita Tademy

  “We got enough,” says Jackson. The tranquillity of being in the woods on a clear, untroubled night with his friend and brother is fading away, and he suddenly pictures Amy and the children asleep in the cabin. He wants to go back to them. “We still got the possum in the sack to deal with.”

  “Tomorrow’s soon enough for the flat part of a shovel to its head,” says Green.

  “Least we won’t be picking out lead from the meat of that one,” says Jackson.

  “We need one more,” says Green. “Then we each got one pelt.”

  “Time to start back. You and Noby take the pelts,” says Jackson. “Church come early.”

  Jackson thinks Green will protest, but his brother begins to break down their little camp, kicking dirt to smother the flames, gathering the lamps and gunnysacks. They walk south, in the direction of home, each lost to his own thoughts. They make good time, already back in The Bottom when Noby calls out “Whoa” and stops dead in his tracks. In the middle of the path, directly in front of them, a skunk stands motionless, tail up, waiting. The wide stripe down its back is unmistakable, a white so bright it seems to glimmer in the moonlight.

  The three men freeze.

  “You carrying the gun, Jackson,” says Green. “Shoot him before he let go the spray.”

  Jack has gotten ahead, and when he circles back and catches sight of the skunk, he bristles and starts yipping.

  “Quit it, Jack,” Green says softly. Although the dog doesn’t advance, he continues to growl. The skunk just watches them, tail lifted, part of a motionless tableau. It is a standoff.

  “Shoot, Jackson,” Green scolds. He is angry now. “You the one in range.”

  Jackson doesn’t move, and Green inches toward him slowly. Jack won’t back off, and now he barks wildly, makes an abortive lunge at the skunk from the side.

  Green grabs for the rifle, snatching it by the barrel out of Jackson’s leaden hands. The skunk chooses that moment to release a noxious stream of spray, and Jackson feels a sharp stinging in his eyes and recoils against the sharp, piercing smell. Green fumbles with the grip of the gun and drops the rifle, stock side down. Jackson’s eyes burn and begin to water, and he thinks of the disgusting odor and how much Amy will complain about having to get the smell from his clothes. The gun goes off close to his ear, and suddenly, Green is on the ground at his feet.

  Jackson drops to his knees. The stench is overpowering, settling over them like smoke, and Jack starts to whimper. Jackson and Noby roll Green over on his back carefully, but they can’t find a wound. He is unconscious, bleeding from his ear and nose.

  “Maybe he hit his head on a rock,” says Noby.

  “We got to get him to help,” says Jackson.

  Jackson scoops Green into his arms while Noby retrieves the rifle. Jackson starts a fast walk, his brother heavy in his arms. He begins to trot, faster, and then he is running. He hears Noby and the hound behind him but doesn’t turn to see where they are. He runs in the direction of his father’s cabin, closer than Green’s house, until he thinks his knees will collapse, the weight of his brother’s body increasing with each stride. Jackson falls back into a trot.

  “Let me carry him the rest of the way,” Noby calls from behind.

  Jackson hears Noby, is aware of everything. The choking odor of the skunk spray, the brightness of the constellations in the clear night sky, the distance he judges to be about half a mile between his father’s farmhouse and where they are, the abandoned possum in the gunnysack, maybe dead and maybe alive in its sealed prison back at the camp, the increasing heaviness of his brother and how stiff he feels in his arms. His practical mind fights with his need to hold on. He cannot force himself to allow Noby to carry Green. He can’t. It is only a matter of yards to his papa’s house. Everything will be fine.

  They holler as they approach Sam’s farmhouse, calling for everyone to wake up. It is at least three in the morning, but by the time Jackson carries Green up the steps and into the front room of his father’s house, Sam Tademy is out of bed and mobilized. Jackson lays Green flat on his back on the sofa, on bedclothes still warm from his youngest brother, who was sleeping there just a few minutes before. The front room reeks with the scent of skunk and the fear they bring inside with them.

  “Accident” is all Jackson can say to his father, apologetic.

  Sam rushes to his oldest son, laid out on the sofa. Green’s face is grayish, devoid of animation, his head rigid and at a peculiar angle to the rest of his body. Dried blood dots his nose, ears, and cheeks. Polly runs into the front room in her nightgown and bare feet, stops short of the sofa. She takes one look.

  “Lord, my boy is dead,” she moans.

  Sam looks from Green’s inert body on the sofa to where Jackson is hunched in fatigue, splattered with blood, drenched in the sweat of failure. Sam takes Green’s hand, already stiffening and cool to the touch, in one of his own. There is a private moment between father and son before Sam looks to Jackson again in disbelief, stares at him with eyes so dark there seems to be no reflection. Then he turns back and closes Green’s eyelids with his free hand.

  “I couldn’t save him, Papa,” Jackson whispers.

  Sam never looks up, never diverts his gaze away from his dead son’s face. Even so, Jackson feels the chill wind of accusation.

  The day after, Jackson sleeps late. Amy comes to him twice, shakes him by the shoulder.

  “Your father be expecting you,” she says. “Breakfast waiting on the table.”

  Reluctantly, Jackson forces himself out of bed and reaches for yesterday’s clothes on the bedroom hook. All save his jacket are gone. He remembers then that they were splattered with his brother’s blood. Amy must have taken them to wash. His other cotton shirt is laid out on her side of the bed, starched and ironed, along with an old pair of patched dark trousers. His jacket is still wet in spots where she scrubbed at the blood. Amy must not have gone back to bed at all after he came home with the news.

  They eat in silence, Amy serving. Even the children, young as they are, seem to know that this morning won’t tolerate any challenges. Nathan-Green and Andrew don’t say a word, and Jackson finds himself lost in his own thoughts, dreading the trip, loath to see his father again. As if the longer he sits at the table, the more unlikely it is his brother is really gone. As if by walking to Sam Tademy’s farmhouse, he condemns Green to death all over again.

  Jackson rises from the table and puts on his hat.

  “Wasn’t your fault,” Amy says to him as he leaves. “Your papa gotta be hurting too.”

  Despite the cold, Sam Tademy is on the front porch when Jackson arrives, a horse blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

  “Rigging around the waterwheel shaft on the gristmill need mending,” Sam says to Jackson before his foot even touches the bottom porch step.

  Sam has worked tirelessly for years to carve out a section of The Bottom as a community of Tademys, determined to uncouple his future from the town of Colfax wherever he can. They always have two or three communal projects in the works—irrigating the fields, fashioning a makeshift mill, shoring up the barn, expanding the church, digging a well, rigging up a gin for removing the seeds from the cotton fiber they harvest, building a windmill.

  “I’ll get on it, Papa,” says Jackson.

  Polly Tademy comes out to the front porch, drawn by the voices. Her face is full of grief, and her eyes are red and drooped. Jackson is tentative, not certain what to do, but Polly walks down the steps and draws him to her, wraps her arms tightly around him, and doesn’t release him.

  “Our Green is gone,” she says into Jackson’s ear. “Back with his Maker.”

  Jackson is taller than Polly now, but he is taken back to a time when she made him feel small and safe.

  “A sad morning, Jackson,” she says. She releases him and looks deep into his face. “Amy feed you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The mere thought of going back into his father’s house after last night is unbearable. “Green
still inside?” he asks cautiously.

  “His wife come already and carry him away in the wagon,” says Polly. “Mary take the body to their farm. Service be Sunday.” She walks back up the steps and stops to tighten the horse blanket around Sam’s shoulders, a protective gesture. He doesn’t respond. “I’ma bring out some coffee. The two of you needs to talk.”

  Jackson remains standing at the base of the steps. “Papa, when we was hunting last night—”

  “Time running out for me and the school, Jackson,” Sam interrupts. “You know how much your brother committed to starting up a colored school.”

  “That your dream, Papa. Yours and Green’s,” Jackson says softly.

  “We not talking Green now. We talking about you. Why a man so fond of books not ready to take up his duty? Tademy men does three things. We farm, we preach, and we teach. Nothing help the colored man so much as education.”

  Jackson has heard this all his life, and he believes in the liberating power of education as much as his father and Green. A world of the mind opened up for him as soon as he learned to read, and he can hardly imagine his life without the comfort of words on paper. But no matter, day-to-day reality is an endless landscape of unfurrowed rows to plow, crops to harvest, fences to mend, animals to tend. Yet his father asks a good question. There is a gnawing of something unknown in Jackson, maybe unknowable, that he can’t articulate. The absence of some undefined, missing thing in his life hurts him almost as a physical pain. Maybe his calling is as an educator, the direction his father is pushing him so very soon after Green is gone. Jackson knows at a fundamental level that he wants to do more, be more than a farmer. He has a deep respect for men who bring bounty from the earth, and he works harder at farming than anyone he knows, but even when he punishes his body in service to the soil, he feels there is something different, more satisfying, he could do given the chance.

  What Jackson loves passionately, besides Amy and the children, is not music, not politics, not farming, but the clean precision of numbers, of groupings. Plowing tires his body, but figuring how a field should be planted, subdividing sections and forecasting the potential yield, calculating probabilities and comparing combinations, those are the things that unshackle his mind and give him joy. He spends hours designing layouts in his head while he labors behind the broad haunches of a mule.

  “I want my own land, Papa,” Jackson says. “I’m working every hour of the day and most of the night to save enough to buy my first piece.”

  “Amy a strong girl. She make up the slack, take in washing, tend a bigger garden so you can sell off the crop.”

  “No woman of mine serve white or work the field,” Jackson snaps. “Ever.”

  He regrets his tone as soon as the words are out. He turns his back to his father and collects himself, then faces him again. “Amy’s only job is to take care of me and take care of the children.”

  “You got high-flying notions, son. Polly wouldn’t never stand for that. That woman at my side come flood or famine. You can’t shake off your responsibilities. God, family, community. We in service to all three.”

  “My God help me be responsible to my family,” Jackson says, defensive. Jackson won’t allow his wife to drain herself as he has seen Polly drained. He believes it is as much a man’s duty to shield his wife as to provide food for the household.

  Sam doesn’t budge. Jackson recognizes the look his father puts on when he lays down the law and expects to be obeyed.

  “Colfax need a colored school,” Sam says, standing to signal the conversation is drawing to a close. “Not many able to send their children off to Montgomery. We done it for you, scraped so’s you get yours, and now Green gone, you the one most able to make a way for others. Those that can, do. Time to step up, son.”

  Green is less than one day cold, and their father wants to push all responsibility on Jackson. He can’t refute his father’s logic. He is obligated to family, and community, and has been given more than most. Still, he feels he is being pressed into something when all he wants is to take care of his own. He isn’t willing. He isn’t ready.

  Green Tademy, the chosen son, is dead. Green leaves behind three children and a pregnant wife, and a cleft in Jackson’s heart so hollow that he doesn’t know how he can possibly fill it.

  For twenty-four years, Jackson has defined himself by the yardstick of his family, confident and secure of his place deep in the shade of his father’s shadow, grounded in his role as Green’s younger, quieter brother. Even after he’s married, rented his own farm, and had two children of his own, people in The Bottom see him this way too.

  The turnout is large for Green Tademy’s funeral, and members of the colored community come to The Bottom from as far away as Pineville to pay their respects. They feel robbed, family and nonfamily alike. Green represented the best of them—young, God-fearing, intelligent, hardworking, well spoken, respected, sociable.

  Jackson stands with the rest of the family at the grave site, shoulder to shoulder with his father, next in line in the broken-legacy chain, in between Sam and his younger siblings, and waits for the pine box to be lowered into the yawning, freshly dug hole. He can’t bear to look his father in the eye, as if Sam knows that Jackson’s refusal to fire a gun at a startled skunk led to this.

  Of all of them, Sam Tademy seems most composed. He has slowed in the last five years as he inches toward sixty-six, more calculation in his step, his hair now totally white under his brown fedora with the heron feather, the hat McCully gave him in the courthouse years before. Others cry, but Sam is a block of stone, and when mourners approach him in commiseration, he extends his swollen, arthritic fingers in a gesture of handshake, but he lets the condolences fall around him without taking comfort. The only weakness he allows himself is his tilt toward Polly, who stands by his side.

  At the grave site, Jackson feels like an imposter. If one of the Tademy boys had to be taken early, removed from the world, it should have by all rights been him. He is a poor substitute for Green Tademy.

  Days and then weeks pass, and one morning in mid-December, Amy shakes off the gloom and throws herself into celebrating Christmas. She cooks for three solid days leading up to the holiday, claiming a side of pork from Jackson’s smokehouse. She picks winter squash and beans, pulls out preserves and fruits canned during the summer, and uses precious sugar from the general store to bake cakes and pies the boys love. She hums to herself as she works, church hymns, and they hold back from talking about Green. Jackson works longer hours than ever, but even he begins to feel a taste of the excitement, despite himself. A bit of the caution and tiptoeing in the cabin dissipates. The boys respond to the change in mood immediately and, with so much sugar coursing through their systems, are constantly underfoot.

  After supper on the Saturday evening before Christmas, Jackson decides not to go back out to plow and to enjoy the evening with his family. He settles in his favorite chair by the fireplace and savors the rare idleness. His sons play on the floor at his feet as Amy washes supper dishes in the back of the house. Not used to sitting still, Jackson dozes.

  “Nathan-Green!” Amy’s scolding voice cuts into his sleep, and he opens his eyes. Amy stands in the hall with her hands on her hips and a dishcloth draped over her shoulder, speaking to their oldest son. “Come away from there right now,” she says. “You know not to touch Papa’s book.”

  “That’s all right,” Jackson says to Amy. “Bring it here, Nathan-Green.”

  The little boy looks back and forth between his mother and father and gingerly picks up the slim volume, as if there is a trick involved.

  “Rough handling of a book won’t never be tolerated in this house, L’il Man,” Jackson says. “But if your mama or me in the room, and you treat a book with respect, I let you sit beside me and listen to me read. You understand?”

  Nathan-Green nods and comes and sits stiffly next to his father.

  “Get your brother, and the two of you shout out for me.”


  This is more familiar territory for Nathan-Green. He jumps up, pulls Andrew to his feet, cups his hands around his mouth, and yells, “My name is Nathan-Green Tademy.” He looks to his father for approval. He helps his little brother put his chubby hands on either side of his mouth and prompts him until the two-year-old says, “My name Andew Tadmy.”

  “That’s very fine,” says Jackson. “Now the two of you come sit, and we gonna read.”

  Jackson stabs with the pitchfork at the hard soil packed down from winter and unearths the coffee can buried in the yard behind the cabin. He removes the notes inside and counts. Two hundred and seventy-three dollars. He smooths the money, folds the stack of bills, and pushes them deep into his pantaloon pocket, leaving the coins in the can. He reburies the canister, brushing over the dirt and covering it with debris as if no one has been there. The mule is cooperative when he unhitches it from the plow, and Jackson sets out for Widow Cruikshank’s place.

  Three workers till in her field. He goes around back and taps on the screened door of the main house, hat in hand, and Widow Cruikshank herself answers.

  “Jackson Tademy,” she says, as if he comes calling at her property every day. “How’s the family?”

  Widow Cruikshank is the same age as his father, white hair carelessly pulled back in a bun, the roly-poly outlines of her body barely contained by the patterned shirtwaist dress and white apron over the top. A small girl, her youngest granddaughter, peers out from the folds of her skirt, staring at Jackson with fascination. Widow Cruikshank is long used to living without a husband, surrounded as she is by sons, daughters, in-laws, and their children, who have never moved beyond the boundaries of this farm.

  “Fine, ma’am,” Jackson says. “Amy sent this mayhaw pie for you. When Nathan-Green seen me carry it out the house, he put up a fuss until she promise to make him another. L’il Man love his sweets.”

  Widow Cruikshank sets the pie on the table and comes back to the doorway. “Thank Amy for us.” She waits, but Jackson doesn’t speak. “And your father?”