by Jim Grimsley
Nora said, “You lie.”
“It’s the truth.”
“I ain’t seen nothing out there. It’s no witch.”
“You wait. When you see it, you wish you listen.”
Cunning and Nora faced each other. “Who was the Hawfords?”
“It was people who live there who pick one season for Mr. James. They from Georgia, they real backwoods.”
“They was colored.”
“That’s right. They went on back home.”
Nora nudged clods of the black earth. Sweat had smudged her face, running in dark lines down her neck. The whole way home in the truck, she was quiet. When we got home, she sat on the bed for a long time.
ME AND OTIS went walking in the high grass sometimes, in the late sun after supper, trying to find a whip snake, until Mama said it was getting to be too late in the year to find them in this part of the country.
Daddy found the shed skin of a rattlesnake at the base of the tree where Cunning Bates said the witch was hung. Daddy counted sixteen rattles, and Mama said to count one for each year the snake lived, but Daddy said that was a bunch of shit.
Daddy liked to chain the dogs under the elm in the front yard, because the pack of them had a vicious look and a hateful sound to their bark, and they made folks nervous. He had trained the dogs to hate everybody, even the rest of his family. But in Holberta everybody reckoned we had trained our dogs especially to eat black folks, and we became known as the trash with the ugly dogs in the yard.
Nora liked to sit with the dogs, she had no fear of them and even brought them the little we had to give them as food in those days, grease-soaked biscuit and wormy oatmeal. She and Carl Jr. were the only ones, other than Daddy, who dared go near their tree. When we lived in Holberta, Nora sat under the elm scratching their ears and brushing the knots out of their coats with half a brush she found under the porch. Whenever she was not working around the house, she sat dreaming with the dogs, their heads in her lap, flies buzzing around their ears. Mama fretted that her blood would come on her and the dogs would turn. “Dogs is wild like that, sometimes,” Mama said, as Nora stretched, stood and walked toward us. “It was a man in my family who was eat by his own dog, one winter. They didn’t have nothing else in the house to feed it.”
“Oh, Mama, you make up a bunch of mess,” Nora said, continuing to the bedroom we children all shared.
Mama tottered after her. “You better pick that dog hair out of that skirt else you won’t be able to wear it to school.”
“I’m quitting school.”
“You hush that. You ain’t no such thing.”
“I ain’t going to school.”
“Well you ain’t quitting, not unless I say so.”
“You let Carl Jr. quit.”
“Your Daddy did that.”
A shiver was beginning to running through Nora’s voice. “I hate school. I hate them other kids. I don’t want to go back.”
“Well, you’re going back.”
Nora reappeared in the door, her voice shaking and her eyes flooded with tears. “Then let me go to school with the niggers. We live in a nigger house. That’s all anybody’s going to talk about. So let me go to school with the niggers too.”
Her words shocked Mama, who slapped Nora sharply, almost by instinct. A blank look on her face. She slapped Nora again, hard, with the flat of her hand, and all her weight behind it. Then, moving mechanically, she returned to the kitchen, sweetened herself a cup of coffee, took a biscuit off the plate and sat on the back porch, where two stray cats waited for a field mouse to die.
MAMA BOUGHT CLOTHES with some of the cotton money, and I got one dress for school. I got no shoes because some church lady had given us a pair from one of her daughters. We did all the school shopping in one day. Uncle Bray drove us to Smithfield, and Mama marched us from a shoe store to a dime store. I tried on the dress in the fitting room with the mirror. I was ashamed to undress at first because I was wearing only step-ins under the dress.
The new dress was green and blue plaid with buttons and a smart collar. I looked at the dress and at me in the mirror. I could hardly breathe, my heart was pounding.
Nora knocked to find out what was taking so long, and she slid inside when she saw. She looked me up and down. “Show it to Mama,” she said.
I held the bag in my fists all the way home, careful to keep the wind from snatching it out of my hands. Mama gave me a hanger at home, and I hung it on the tobacco pole in the corner that we used for our clothes, next to the blue-flowered dress that had been Nora’s till she outgrew it.
THE DAY BEFORE school started, Otis found a piece of bone under the house and picked it up. When he had it in his hand, Mama warned gravely that he should have left it where it was because it was a rattlesnake’s fang and it probably still had poison in it. If there was poison in it, it could kill anybody who touched it. But Otis had already touched it and, when Mama went back in the house, he wondered whether he was going to die.
“First you start to swell up, then you get numb,” Nora had taken his plump white hand and began to stroke it with comforting gestures. “Then you get blue in the face and your heart stops and you choke to death. That’s what Mama says.”
“Daddy found a snake skin,” Joe Robbie murmured. “If it was a fang I bet it was the same snake.”
“How do you feel?” Nora asked Otis.
“I feel fine. I don’t feel nothing.”
“That could be a bad sign,” Nora predicted.
We walked with Nora around the house. With the bright summer sun pouring across the road and dirt yard, we could almost see through the walls of the house to Mama’s squat, round figure treading the rough floors of the kitchen. I was not thinking about the snake’s bone or tooth or whatever it was, I was thinking about my new dress, and school to start, and the grandeur of things. But all of a sudden Otis started to cry and sat down and balled up his fists and shoved them against his eyes. “I feel funny,” he wailed.
“Hush, Otis,” Nora says. “You’re being a crybaby.”
“It’ll be all right,” Joe Robbie whispered. Nora carried Madson, who still refused to walk most of the time. I was dragging Joe Robbie in the wagon. We had worn a path around the yard, where the tree roots would not tip the wagon over.
“My shoulder stings. And my ears is popping. And I can’t hardly breathe.”
“That’s because you’re crying,” Nora said.
“I ain’t crying.”
“You are too. Look at you.”
“I can’t help it, I’m scared.”
We got him moving again and rounded the house to where Carl Jr. and Daddy were drinking. Daddy had started to drink with Carl Jr. pretty much every evening after they got home. They propped under the elm tree where a rusted-out icebox sat in the grass. Daddy was fussing with the snout of the bitch dog; he called her Patsy. “What’s that fuss?” Daddy asked.
“Otis found a snake fang and it had poison on it.”
“What snake fang?” Daddy drew one thin hand out of his overalls and reached. “Ain’t no goddamn snake fang. Let me see.”
Daddy always scared Otis, and Otis never would go near him. Otis was still carrying the fang in a rag, in case it was needed for the antidote. He gave the thing to Nora, who carried it to Daddy under the tree. Daddy took one look at it and spit. “Who told you this come out of a snake?”
“Mama. She said it was from a rattlesnake and if it was poison in it whoever touched it could die or get paralyzed.” Nora reported the facts with the slightest smirk.
“Your Mama is full of shit about a snake. This ain’t even no kind of a tooth, it’s a goddamn fish bone.” He scowled, gave Otis the once over, and curled his lip in disgust. “You sissy. Look at you, crying like some sugar-ass little darling. Ain’t you got no better sense than to listen to your goddamn mama?”
He started laughing and passed the piece of bone to Carl Jr., who laughed too. Nora stood with them with her arms around Madson and
one of the dogs licking a scab on her leg. Otis walked off, cussing. “Goddamn Mama,” he said, and then added, “old fat-ass big-titty bitch,” and he was headed in my direction and suddenly I couldn’t get my breath. “She’s an old goddamn fat-ass big-titty stupid bitch for lying to me.” He swept by me still cussing, with tears stinging his face and his voice trembling, so angry that even when he had passed, the wave of him was still moving through me.
“He cussed Mama,” Joe Robbie whispered.
I agreed that was what he had done.
WHEN YOU RIDE through Holberta nowadays, you find there are a few changes. The colored store is still there, painted fresh a few years ago and faded again. The houses have mostly improved, some of them pretty nice, bricked up, with fences and flower gardens. Yards decorated right up to the road with flamingos and cement art and whatnot. Not as many people live there as used to, that’s true. But it’s also true that most people, black and white, have moved away from Moss Pond.
The house where we had lived was a different case. I stopped there and walked a bit. The grayed siding had been replaced and the underpinning filled in, the whole thing painted a pretty pink with cream-colored trim on the windows and under the eaves. Smooth new double-glass windows replaced the grease paper and tacks. Best of all, a lawn was growing, with beds of impatiens, where only a dirt yard had lain before.
A sign out front read, “Mama Lisa’s Homemade Mighty-Fine Quilts, All Patterns,” then, underneath, the hours of the store. Closed now, but bright quilt squares peered through the windows. At the bottom, in small letters, was an addition, “See Where The Witch Was Hung.”
But at the side of the pretty building, under the edges of the shade of that elm tree, the same junked icebox sat on the same patch of ground. The rust had eaten it to a lump of brown, and I stared right at it for a long time before I recognized it. The memory shot through me, Daddy and Carl Jr. propped there, the piece of bone passing from hand to hand. That happened lately, on one of my drives, that I visited Holberta and remembered about the rattlesnake and the tooth.
When I stopped at the Holberta store for a cold drink, paying in correct change, the owner, Mr. Detrice, shrunken as the Jarmans up the road, was explaining to another gentleman that a flying snake had killed a man near Luma, oh, a month ago, swooped down out of the trees and latched onto his shoulder, and the man couldn’t draw one breath, the snake gripped him so tight. “You don’t see them kind of snakes around here like you used to,” the other man added at the end of the story. “Used to find aplenty of them.”
“It’s that new road,” Mr. Detrice swore, “the pond half dried up after they put that road in, you can’t even fish,” and nodded to me as I was leaving, a nice white lady stopping at his store. I stood there in the middle of Holberta sipping my Nehi. I could not remember that I had ever stood there before.
JOE ROBBIE
WHEN THE DAY came that I started school, Joe Robbie finally understood he would never do the same. I got home from the first day and found him in the corner of the bedroom with his eyes red and swollen. “Hey,” he said. “I was by myself all day. I didn’t play with Madson.”
“You can play with him. It’s okay.”
He shook his head. His lip was trembling and he scowled. “Did you like it?”
“It was okay.”
“Who is the teacher?”
“Miss Sterndale. She’s fatter than Mama.”
He nodded his head. “Did you learn to read books?”
I sighed. “Not yet.”
We sat quietly together. His eyes were wet, but he kept himself rigid. “Do you know why I can’t go?”
Because he kept watching me, I shrugged, and waited beside him. “You can look at my books,” I said.
He shook his head. I wiped the spit from his mouth and then wiped the rest of his face with a wet rag.
HE SPENT THE days alone after that, not by his own choice but because Madson lacked the patience to sit with him and Corrine was too tiny to be much company. I wished I could have shared Alma Laura with him, but he had never seen her, not even once, despite all the times she kept us company.
Maybe he could have functioned in the schoolroom, but he could never have made the trip. To catch the school bus, we had to walk the mile and a half to the end of the dirt road, to the Little Store. The bus refused to drive into Holberta because, other than us, only black kids lived there. Every morning, while we walked along the road toward the pond, the colored school bus passed us, throwing up dust, the driver smiling and lifting a pink-palmed hand.
We might have dragged Joe Robbie to the end of the road in the wagon and then toted him onto the bus and hauled him into a seat and out of the seat and off the bus and then into the school building. But even then we would not have any wagon and would have to drag him to his desk too.
Mama said it worried her that he sat there all day, doing nothing except looking at the pictures in comic books that the county woman brought to him, paid for by donations made by the Junior League of Luma. Studying them superhero books, she said, and gaping off into the sky like he was out yonder somewhere. She had no understanding when he cried because he could not go to school; she herself had survived with nearly no schooling and figured that he would survive too. He had his family, she always said. God had given him that.
He told me the stories of the comic books. Superman was out flying in the galaxy, he said, where he run into the Green Bad Guy near outer space. The Green Bad Guy had a black mask and this green outfit and big muscles, like Joe Robbie showed me in the pictures. But Superman looked like himself and had big muscles too, along with super strength. At first the Green Bad Guy was winning and then Superman was winning, they went back and forth like that. Then the Green Bad Guy chained Superman with the green glowing chains that circled Superman’s legs and arms. He beat up Superman real bad, to the point that Superman was injured and stuff. He even tore Superman’s costume, and Superman almost didn’t have any shirt at the end. The green glowing chains kept him imprisoned and weak until the Batman rescued him. The Batman searched and found him, then took off the chains. The Batman traveled through space in a spaceship that he made himself in his basement. Superman and the Batman teamed up to defeat the Green Bad Guy, and they killed him and exploded him, and then they went home. They lived together, according to Joe Robbie. Since neither of us could read the words then, his accounts remained definitive.
Sometimes he looked at the ads in the back of the comics, the Charles Atlas ads that promised a muscular body through dynamic tension in a few minutes a day. “I wish I could get some muscles,” he would say, “then I could walk.” Almost like a litany.
ABOUT THIS TIME Mama took Joe Robbie for a doctor check and announced afterward that the doctor had told her Joe Robbie had a new muscle disorder. But when we asked her what kind, she had no idea. So for a long time we told everybody that Joe Robbie had a new muscle disorder but we didn’t know what kind, and we supposed that the doctor was planning to tell us as soon as he knew.
The doctor had been trying to tell Mama that Joe Robbie had a neuromuscular disorder, and we learned that when Aunt Addis took Mama and Joe Robbie to the doctor, one day when Uncle Bray couldn’t make the trip. Aunt Addis brought them home and told us what the doctor had said. It was really just another way of telling us what we already knew, but Mama had thought he had given her a new name.
One time, Joe Robbie told me, pointing to the color-filled frames of the comic book, the Flash and the Atom went on this voyage through inner space into the inside of secret buildings, and they made the Flash as small as the Atom through a super discombobulator that shrank him to tiny size. They were saving the world through searching for a secret for weapons, and the secret was hidden in the laboratory of Dr. Einstein, who was the blue-haired man with the big muscles inside his white lab coat. Dr. Einstein planned to rule the world through bombs and guns such as those nobody else had. But the Atom got inside the laboratory because he could get tiny enough to
go anywhere, and the Flash was faster than Dr. Einstein, and they all fought in the lab at the end until the Atom and the Flash had the secret to the guns and the bombs. After that, everybody was arrested. Neither the Flash nor the Atom pulled off their shirts, but they were always wearing tights and performing feats of strength with bulging chests and arms.
When he told me the story of a comic book, he went into a kind of trance. I turned from page to page, and he gave me the particular scenario for each panel on each page when I pointed to it, sometimes in a sentence and sometimes in a miniature story. He described all the objects in the panel and made something of them. He rushed from one panel to the next.
“This is you,” he would say, when I pointed to the beautiful brunette. “This is you when you get big and meet the Batman.”
“But I don’t want to meet him.”
“Yes, you do. He’s a superhero. He’s real good.”
“I don’t care. I’d be scared of him. You want to meet him, I don’t.”
My indifference to the Batman displeased him, but he rose above it by ignoring it. “Anyway, this is you. And you’re with the Batman and he’s got to save you from the bad guy, the Yellow Pearl.” We had been hearing about the yellow peril on the radio, and the villain in this comic book had a yellow costume.
“What is he going to do to me?”
“He’s going to make you do it and then hit you,” Joe Robbie decided. “But the Batman won’t let him.”
“If he does let him, I won’t like it.”
“But he won’t, because he lets good things happen, not bad ones. Then he rescues you, see. You’re swinging with him on the strong rope that he keeps in his belt. It has these hooks. You see?”
“Hurry up and get to the end, I’m tired.”
“We can’t skip any.”
“Just leave stuff out.”
He always remained patient. “Okay. So you and him swing on the rope back to the place where he has a motorcycle hidden and he even has a helmet for you. And then you ride over the long roads home, only the Yellow Pearl still wants to find you and hurt you.”