Devil on My Heels

by Joyce McDonald

  Chase pulls down one of the musty old mattresses with gray-and-white ticking that are piled against one wall, and we spend the next hour making out. With Chase, kissing is everything I always imagined it would be. Even better.

  The next night Chase shows up beneath my window again.

  “I have to finish this paper on Thomas Jefferson for history tomorrow,” I tell him.

  Two minutes later I’m climbing down the oak outside my window, against my better judgment of course, and we drive into town again. But instead of going to the movie theater, Chase parks the T-bird at the railroad station. Across the way is a park. It’s only a small park, with a big old mulberry tree in the middle. Folks around here say this is where all the public hangings used to take place before things got “civilized” and they started executing criminals at the state prison.

  The mulberry tree is not exactly the most romantic spot in town, but it has its advantages. For instance, not too many people come here at night. They say the spirits of the dead—the ones who swung from the mulberry tree branches at the end of a rope—are still lurking about waiting to murder their next victim. So as you can imagine, the park is a pretty private place after dark.

  For the next week and a half, Chase and I either sneak into the movie theater and head straight for the old dressing rooms, or we sit on a partially hidden bench near the mulberry tree. I don’t care about homework or my grades or anything else. There is only one thing on my mind these days: Chase Tully.

  Rosemary Howell is hovering by the front door, waiting for me one afternoon as I’m leaving school.

  “Can I talk to you a minute?” she says.

  Her expression is so darned earnest, it makes me nervous. “Well . . . sure.”

  She falls into step beside me as I make my way across the lawn toward the school buses.

  “Something happened last week. It has to do with one of your pickers. I thought maybe—”

  “One of our pickers?”

  Rosemary nods. Her shoulders are hunched over from the weight of all the books she’s carrying. She shifts them around, balancing them on her hip. The books have left deep red gouges on her arms.

  “Who?” I’m wondering if maybe she’s talking about old Eli, or maybe Gator, and I start to worry.

  Rosemary looks over at the kids running past us, heading for the buses. “Not here, okay? You want to come over to Luellen’s with me?”

  I watch the school buses. One by one the bus drivers rev up their engines. By the time the last bus leaves, I am on my way down Main Street heading to Luellen’s with Rosemary.

  Luellen’s apartment is above her shop. Rosemary and I go through a door wedged between the beauty shop and Tuckett’s Hardware. When we reach the upper landing, I get a strong whiff of rutabaga. It about makes me gag.

  Rosemary sets her books on the landing, fumbles around in her purse, and pulls out a key. The odor of rutabaga wallops me in the face the second Rosemary unlocks the door. The door opens right into Luellen’s living room. To my left is the kitchen. Something is simmering on the burner. My guess would be rutabaga.

  Rosemary dumps her books on the kitchen table and heads for the stove. She lifts the lid, then picks up the wooden spoon lying on the counter and stirs the contents. “Salt pork and rutabaga,” she says, as if I haven’t already figured that out. As if everybody in the beauty shop downstairs and in Tuckett’s Hardware and probably half of Main Street haven’t already figured that out. “Luellen must have just put it on.”

  There isn’t any reasonable response to this, so I just stand there and wait.

  “Make yourself to home,” Rosemary says. She seems a little fidgety. I can tell she’s not used to having company. She doesn’t seem to have any friends at school. Every time I see her, she’s alone. Maybe she has spent so much time picking fruit with her family and moving from place to place, and working at other jobs, like washing people’s hair at Luellen’s, that she doesn’t know how to act around the kids at school.

  The sofa bed is still open, exposing a tangle of sheets. I look over at the only other chair. It is buried under a mountain of wrinkled clothes. I sit on the coffee table instead, shoving aside a mess of fashion magazines to make room.

  Luellen’s apartment reminds me of a trailer home, only wider. At first it looks to be just the living room connected to the kitchen. But now I can see a short hallway to the left, off the kitchen, which probably leads to the bathroom and Luellen’s bedroom.

  Rosemary turns on the radio and takes two bottles of RC Cola from the fridge. She opens them, hands me one, and stares down at my coffee table seat. “We can sit in the kitchen, if you want,” she offers.

  My backside is already getting numb. “Good plan,” I say.

  I sit across from her at the kitchen table. “Lonesome Town” is playing on the radio. Ricky Nelson’s voice echoes off the walls of Luellen’s apartment.

  “Don’t you just love this song?” Rosemary asks.

  “Rosemary, you wanted to tell me about one of our pickers, remember?”

  She stares down at her soda. “Something happened over at the camp,” she says, finally. “Somebody, some . . . men set fire to a clothesline full of clothes. They came through in trucks, blasting their horns. One of them hung out the window with a lighted torch. He set all these clothes on fire.”

  My fingers are clenched around the RC bottle. The icy chill seeps into them; it races through my whole body. “Is everybody okay? I mean, nobody got hurt, did they?”

  “I don’t think so. It was more like a warning. Some of the other pickers formed a bucket brigade, hauling water from the taps. There wasn’t anything left, nothing but some soggy, charred pieces of cloth, lying in little piles on the ground.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” I ask.

  “Well, because those clothes? They belonged to Julio Gonzalez and his family. Someone said Julio and his wife work in your daddy’s groves.”

  I remember overhearing those two men speaking in Spanish in our groves a while back. Gator had called the barrel-shaped man Julio. I’m pretty sure he said Julio Gonzalez.

  “How come you know all this? Is your family staying at the same migrant camp or something?”

  Rosemary shakes her head. If she’s suprised that I know her folks are pickers, she doesn’t let on. “White pickers don’t usually live in those camps,” she says. “They generally keep to themselves. Camp out somewheres, like my folks do. They don’t like to be beholden to the crew leaders any more than they have to be. Some live in the white section of the camps, if there is one. Mostly there isn’t.

  “My family lives in a trailer. Sometimes the owners of the groves they’re working in let them camp on their land. Depends. Some are real nice about it. Others don’t want any of the pickers living that close by.”

  “Then you didn’t actually see these men set fire to the clothes?”

  “No.”

  “Well, if you weren’t there, how did you find out about this? How do you even know if it’s true?”

  Rosemary takes a deep breath, as if she’s about to go off the high dive. “A friend told me. Somebody I trust.”

  What I’m trying to figure out is why Rosemary is coming to me with this story about the Gonzalez family. It’s not as if I know these people.

  “Why didn’t you just go to the police? Why tell me?”

  Rosemary slumps in her chair. She rolls her bottle of RC back and forth between her palms. Maybe she is thinking she’s made a mistake. That I’m not the person she should have told her story to.

  “This friend, he thought you should know.” She takes a long swallow of soda. “He thought you might be interested in what’s happening to some of your pickers is all. Maybe even thought you could help.”

  “This friend wouldn’t happen to be Gator, would it?”

  She looks away. And I know I’m right.

  “That day, in the cemetery, you didn’t just happen to be walking by, did you?”

  Rosemar
y glances up at the clock above the sink. She is on her feet in a flash. “Omigosh! I’m late for work.” She heads for the living room and starts digging through the mess of clothes on the chair. She pulls out her blue uniform and white apron. I stare hard at that apron. “How long have you and Gator been . . . friends?” Even I can hear the disapproval in my voice. But I can’t help what I’m feeling right now. Rosemary and Gator, seeing each other, well, it’s just plain unnatural.

  Rosemary holds up the wrinkled uniform. “Luellen’s gonna kill me when she sees this. I don’t have time to iron it.” She slips out of her school dress and pulls the uniform over her head.

  “Rosemary! I’m talking to you.”

  “Sorry. I’ve gotta go.” And she is out the door before I can say another word.

  Walking home from Luellen’s place, it suddenly dawns on me that setting fire to the migrants’ clothes and trying to scare them sounds like something the Klan would do. I remember this photograph Billy Tyler passed around school every chance he had, back when we were in the fifth grade. He said he got it from his cousin in Alabama when he was spending the summer with his aunt and uncle. The photograph showed this colored man hanging from a tree limb. Off to the far right of the picture you could just make out part of a white robe and hood. Billy was real proud of that picture.

  Up until then I never knew much if anything about the Ku Klux Klan. When I asked my dad, all he said was, there are some angry people who use organizations like that to hurt others. He told me the Klan had disbanded after World War Two and wasn’t around anymore. But that didn’t help much. I still had nightmares for weeks after that.

  I push these thoughts out of my head real quick. The Klan would never be in a place like Benevolence, Florida.

  14

  Delia is vacuuming the living room when I get home. She has a book in one hand, the handle of the vacuum cleaner in the other, and she is humming some tune I don’t recognize. I stand in the archway in the foyer, watching her and thinking about what Rosemary told me.

  Seems to me, the more I think about it, that maybe Willy Podd and his friends might be behind what happened over at the migrant camp. I wouldn’t put something like that past them.

  I sit down on the couch. Even with her eyes on the book, Delia maneuvers the vacuum cleaner without hitting a single piece of furniture.

  When Delia finally turns the vacuum cleaner in my direction and sees me sitting there, her gasp about empties the room of every ounce of air.

  She flips the switch off and rests both hands on her hips. “You trying to send me to an early grave?”

  When I don’t answer, she says, “You got something on your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Well, then, I got work to do.” The vacuum cleaner roars into action.

  “Yes!” I shout. “I do have something on my mind.”

  She flicks the switch off again and stands with one hand on her hip, staring me down.

  I wasn’t planning on asking her about Gus. I wasn’t even thinking about him. But for some reason his face popped into my head the exact minute Delia asked me if I had something on my mind. Only now that I have her attention, I don’t know how to begin.

  “Well, come on then, tell me what it is if you’re gonna. I haven’t got all day.”

  “I want to hear about Gus,” I tell her. “About how he died?”

  Delia’s back goes rigid. She bends down to unplug the vacuum cleaner cord. “You on that again?”

  I know she will try to run me off like she usually does. Only I don’t plan on giving in this time.

  Delia leaves the vacuum cleaner where it is, sets her book on the dining room table, and heads for the kitchen.

  I follow right behind her. “Please, Delia. I want to know.”

  She rests her hands on the edge of the sink. For the longest time she stares out the window at the groves beyond. Then she lifts a colander of green beans from the sink, fills a pot with water, and sits down at the table.

  I sit across from her and wait.

  “You remember how Gus loved playing that beat-up old sax of his?” She snaps a bean into four small pieces and drops them in the pot.

  “Course I do.” Sometimes, while Gus was waiting to take Delia home, he would sit on the steps of our back porch playing his saxophone, making these mournful sounds that came right up out of his belly into his mouth and through that sax for the whole world to hear.

  “Well, our boy, Jeremiah, he’d been accepted to this college. A real good school.”

  “What school was that?”

  “Howard University up there in Washington, D.C.”

  “I’ve heard of it.” All I really know is that it’s a college for colored folks.

  “Jeremiah was working summers digging ditches to save money for school. It paid better than picking oranges. We knew we didn’t have enough money to send him for the whole four years. So Gus, he took on extra jobs. Did some picking for your daddy till the season ended. Then on weekends he played with this jazz band over at Cholly Blue’s juke joint. Cholly always had live music on weekends. Mostly they turned into jamming sessions, but they were good.”

  I know the place Delia is talking about. White folks don’t go to Cholly’s. It’s over in the colored section of town, on the west side. But I know some kids from school who sometimes hang out in the woods behind Cholly’s just to listen to the music.

  Delia goes right on snapping beans. She keeps her eyes glued on them. You would think those beans were the most important thing in the world to her right now.

  Then she starts talking again. “Gus was walking home about two in the morning from Cholly’s, on account of our car was in the shop. He had his saxophone case in his hand, with that sweater I told you about tied around it. He was walking along the side of the road, coming up to our street. He was getting ready to cross to the other side when this car came tearing like streaked lightning round the corner, weaving all over the place. And it was heading straight for Gus.

  “Well, about that time Cholly was coming up the road in his car, right behind these drunken fools, and he swears they were aiming their car, like some big old cannon, straight for my poor Gus. One of them was leaning out the window, whooping and hollering and slapping his hand on the door. Cholly said Gus tried to jump out of the way, but the car swerved and hit him anyway.”

  Delia looks over at me. The lids of her eyes are half closed. It feels as if somebody has grabbed hold of my heart and is squeezing the daylights out of it. I can hardly breathe. Delia stops snapping beans. She rests her wrists on the edge of the colander, letting her hands dangle there.

  “By the time Cholly got to him, Gus was almost dead. But we didn’t know that then. He was unconscious and busted up real bad. Part of the side of his face was tore off. Cholly came running up to the house, half outta his mind, pounding on the door till he got me out of bed.

  “I was in my old bathrobe. I remember thinking I had to put on shoes, but I couldn’t think where they were. An old pair of Gus’s work boots was in the hall, there. So I slipped my feet into them, and me and Cholly—Jeremiah had the car, he was off with his friends somewheres—we got Gus into the backseat of Cholly’s car.

  “I held Gus’s head in my lap. The tore-up side was facing down, so he just looked like his old self to me. I kept talking to him, telling him to hold on, everything was going to be all right. I didn’t know Gus was already dead by then.”

  Delia tilts her head back, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling. “Well, now, looking back on it, maybe I did know. I guess I just didn’t want to believe it. All I could think was that we were taking him to the hospital so the doctors could patch him up.

  “But those doctors in the emergency room, all they did was tell me Gus was dead. I guess there wasn’t much else for them to do.

  “All I remember after that is looking down at my bathrobe and seeing Gus’s blood all over it, soaked right through to my nightgown, which was sticking to my skin where the blood had st
arted drying.

  “Next day Cholly tried to tell the police about how Gus’s dying was a hit-and-run, seeing as how whoever it was in that car kept right on going, like Gus wasn’t anything more than a bump in the road. Never even stopped to look back. But nobody paid Cholly any mind. Especially since he didn’t get the license plate number of the car.”

  I slump down in my chair. “It sounds like the person driving the car was drunk.”

  “Probably was, but aiming that car straight at my Gus, stepping on the gas like he did . . . that man knew what he was doing.

  “Cholly, he thought he recognized one of the men who was in that car, the one hanging out the window. It was a white man, for sure. He didn’t have any doubt about that at all. But he didn’t see who the driver was, and he couldn’t remember what kind of car it was either. Didn’t belong to anybody he knew. All he could remember was that it was a dark-colored sedan. Cholly knew those men hadn’t come to our section of town for any other reason than to cause trouble.

  “The police said they’d check Cholly’s story with the man he thought he recognized. But the man said he wasn’t anywhere near that part of town that night. Said he wouldn’t have been caught dead in the colored quarters. Only he didn’t call it ‘colored.’ Seems he had an alibi. Must have, cause nothing happened after that.”

  Delia is done telling her story. She doesn’t look at me now; she is ripping into those beans like she’s tearing the limbs off a plucked chicken.

  I come over to her side of the table, put my arms around her shoulders, and bend down so I can press my forehead against the back of her neck like I used to do when I was little.

  I’m not sure I can trust myself to talk. A heavy sadness seeps into me. Sadness for Gus and for Delia and for Jeremiah. For all Gus and Delia’s children. “So they never caught the person who killed Gus?” I whisper this into her neck.