Delta Blues

by Carolyn Haines

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  Little Eddie tried another tack. “Some people go around the country to fish, to find the best spots. You could have a fine new home near one of them with all new furniture and fancy appliances, and still have enough to travel. Wouldn’t you like that?”

  Jester didn’t look up from his playing when he spoke. “Why don’t you buy that place with fancy stuff for yourself instead of here if it’s so much better?”

  Little Eddie laughed and shook his head while he tried to think of an answer. “I guess I’m looking for some soul, too. All I’m asking is that you think about it.”

  We turned at the sound of a car coming up the drive. One of my deputies.

  “Folks,” I said, “everything’s okay. Mr. Dupree, I stopped by to see if you’d seen Mr. Long here.” I took out my warrant and waved it at Terrell. I motioned for him to walk toward me. “I need him to come down to the station to ask him some questions.”

  Terrell came forward with an unsteady gait, like he’d hurt his legs, but smiled as if nothing in the world was wrong. Little Eddie’s smile disappeared. His eyes moved, assessing the yard, as he considered his next move. Jester rose slowly from his chair.

  “Sheriff, while you’re at it, these boys need arresting, too, all of them, now that you got help.” He said it in a calm way. His voice cracked only once. He stood as straight as his crooked frame allowed. “I lied a while ago. This one here,” he said with a nod at Little Eddie, “said they’d hurt me if I didn’t sell. They been beating up that young man. He’s as bad as the rest. They been talking mean and nasty, talking about how they know where my granddaughter lives, like they’ll hurt her if I don’t sell them my place here. They think I don’t know why. They want to set up a drug stop, come in with boats and such at my cove. That young one wants to run it for them. Said they’d cut off my fingers where I couldn’t play no more if I didn’t do what they want.” His voice cracked again as he rubbed his hands, looked at the table where the wire cutters lay.

  A hush fell over the yard. Seconds passed with only the sound of the deputy car coming closer. Jester had spoken too soon.

  Terrell changed. Sweat beaded on his face. His eyes looked wild, like he was on the verge of panic.

  Little Eddie faked dismay, walked backward toward his men, called the old man crazy. Jester stepped away from the tree, closer to him. His dog rose and followed, not blinking, not taking his eyes off Little Eddie. The car stopped. The deputy got out, shut the door and walked toward us.

  It was not Jester’s fault. He lived in his own world, came from a place and a time when no bad guy would dare harm an officer of the law. I doubt it ever crossed his mind that these men would do anything other than what I instructed them to do. But even down here, Little Eddie and his boys were still in their own world, one with no such rules. The family business and keeping it healthy rated higher than the lives of a two-bit hustler and a few hicks, even hicks wearing badges.

  Terrell stole a look behind him just as Little Eddie whispered an order. His goons reached under their jackets, came out with guns. One turned about face and dropped the deputy with one shot.

  The other aimed at me and fired as Terrell rushed me from the side. We both went to the ground, my bullet in his back.

  Another shot rang out and then a short barrage from two, maybe three guns as I rolled Terrell off me. The first shot had missed Jester due to the dog’s intervention. That bullet and the rest went into the dog.

  I pulled my sidearm and yelled, “Drop ‘em now.”

  They didn’t hear me. At the same time, Jester screamed and threw himself, arms out, toward the nearest gunman. The other one turned my way, raised to shoot, but I got him first, a split second before his friend shot Jester between the eyes. I yelled again and shot the killer, saw a movement to my right, swiveled and had no time to think. Little Eddie’s arm was extended, gun pointed at me. I shot him in the belly. He groaned and crumpled.

  He died in the hospital. The others didn’t get that far.

  It takes forever for things like this to be over, but we got through it. Other than myself, the only survivor was the deputy. He sells insurance now. Everybody else went back to Chicago in boxes.

  A low-ranking punk in Little Eddie’s organization testified that Terrell worked on small jobs for them. An opportunity to steal over seven hundred thousand dollars from a drug transaction accidentally came Terrell’s way and he took it. He ran, but thought better of it once he got to Solley. Like Jester said, he got the idea of setting up his own kingdom there by the river. He thought he could talk Little Eddie into moving him into upper management. He didn’t know Little Eddie like I did.

  Jester and the way he played can’t ever be replaced. It was himself that he pressed out in twangs and steel bends, a shy man with sad stories, using the only language that goes straight from heart to heart. The sound was like an extra dimension over the land and riverbanks, a part of the scenery. I still hear it faintly, and it makes me wonder if what he played still echoes off the trees and plowed fields and laps in at the water’s edge again and again, or if the whisper of it has always been here, and that Jester only magnified it.

  I think of these things now as I watch the measured walk of folks in this town, something I never noticed before. Usually it’s the older people, men and women, who move to a blues soundtrack. They know the horrors of the world but they keep on moving through it.

  That old skinny dude in Chicago, the night I got shot, he felt a similar thing. The clamor of city life, bouncing off concrete and pummeling in the wind, gave him a different groove in his walk, harder and more stiff than those of us down here. That’s the

  Chicago style. Harsher tones, a faster clip on top of the beat. Less give, less soul.

  He saw what was fixing to happen to me that night. His city survivor instincts kicked in automatically and though he gave no sign, I knew from his eyes that the calm he displayed was a lie. Inside, he felt the push and the pull, the need to hurry away from trouble, the equal need to stay slow, not draw attention, to delay what trouble might be ahead.

  It comes natural after a while, always will, so long as the world is looking for a man to hurt or to blame, to shoot in the back if he runs, to knife up close if he stays. All we can do is keep going, pour out the sorrow in measures, by the river, in the fields, on the street, in dark clubs; not too fast, not too slow.

  16 The Sugar Cure

  Carolyn Haines

  THEY SAY THE MISSISSIPPI HEAT IN AUGUST is the match that lights the fuse of violent men. Used to be, when I was young, my mother would recline on her bed, naked, dribbling cold water over herself. She said such heat made a woman turn to the Devil. She’d drip a rag in a bowl of ice water, hold it over herself, and squeeze, laughing at the chill bumps that danced across her pale skin.

  “Lord, Nilla, it’s a shame to sweat like this with no pleasure attached.”

  Pleasure was the quest for my mama. She set quite a store by having it. And she taught me the hard coin it could earn. I guess you could say my mama educated me in the lessons of survival. That’s what she sent me out the door with when I married Dale Walters and became the wife of a captain at Parchman State Penitentiary.

  It was a hot mid-August day and the sun had cleared the end of the long, empty horizon when I walked through the dew-soaked grass to the small barn. Dale had eaten his breakfast and left for work. Rusty Bellow, one of the inmate trustees, was cleaning up the kitchen, and I was free to ride. Free. An interesting word in the world where I lived.

  One of the inmates would have groomed and saddled for me, but I liked doing it myself. Running the brush over Piper’s white-speckled coat, I tried to tamp down the panic. I was surrounded by men, many of whom had acted either in stupidity or desperation—or perhaps been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they hoed the cotton or chopped the trees, sweating in the state-owned fields to atone for their crimes, perceived or real.

  Piper snuffled and pushed ag
ainst my shoulder as I put the saddle on her back. “Easy there,” I whispered. “We’ll get goin’ soon enough.”

  After I mounted, we walked out of the barnyard and down the dirt road that ran straight and true as a plumb line. I never left in a hurry, never wanted anyone to suspect my desperate need to run as hard as I could. I’d taken up riding after I married Dale. Looking back at the house, freshly painted white with zinnias and marigolds blooming around the front porch, I felt a stab of panic. Though it had been rat infested when I moved in, it was the finest house I’d ever lived in. Not nearly as big or lavish as the warden’s house, but the hardwood floors were waxed to a high gloss. The porches were tightly screened and safe from the hordes of mosquitoes, so that at night I could slip from bed when I couldn’t breathe. I’d sit in an old rocker and listen to the moths beating against the screen mesh. Sometimes I thought it was my heart trying to break out of my chest.

  Today the air was hot and heavy. Once the house was behind us, I let Piper gallop. On either side of us the fields stretched out forever, green and profitable. This was rich man’s land, fertile, bathed by the Mississippi River before the levees were built to hold back the floodwaters.

  Far in the distance I saw a work crew wearing the black and white ring-arounds tending the cotton. The long line, maybe a hundred men, labored over the land like single-minded insects. The men chopped in unison, backs bent to the hoe. A captain on horseback, shotgun resting on the pommel of his saddle, watched with the help of several trustee shooters—convicts given guns and the job of guarding other prisoners. It was a system with a lot of flaws.

  I turned west, headed to the fields behind Camp Nine, wondering if the men dreamed of escape. There weren’t fences at Parchman. Wire wasn’t needed to keep a prisoner inside. The long stretches of open land left no place to hide.

  The old oak that was being chopped down held an attachment for me. Last winter I’d ridden there often, letting Piper graze beneath the branches while I perched on a limb, sometimes reading, sometimes dreaming of any life but the one I had. When Dale told me the tree was going to be removed, I wondered if it was because I’d shown some partiality to it. But that wasn’t a question I could ask, and if I did, there would be no answer.

  When I could see the branches reaching into the sky on the flat horizon, I heard the work crew, axes biting into that old oak tree that had been the only shade in the back field near Camp Nine. The tree was going down, another few rows of cotton going in. It was the way of the Farm, as the state prison was known. Amos Sample called the beat, helping the men work in unison.

  The convicts’ axes rang in the heat. Chomp. “No more, my Lord.” Chomp. “No more, my Lord.” Chomp. “Lord, I’ll never turn back no more.” Chomp.

  Amos Sample had a clear baritone. I’d heard talk about him, and though I’d convinced myself that my mare needed a gallop, it was really an excuse to find this Amos Sample and take a look. He was a bluesman, a Negro with some education and a taste for fine things. To hear my husband tell it, Amos Sample was a man who’d gotten above himself, which was the thing that got him put in Parchman in the first place.

  Before I married, I’d bought one of his records. The man had a voice that walked right down my body to the place I didn’t let no one touch. Now I was fixin’ to see him. I’d heard he was six foot five and fit. That it had taken five deputies with weighted blackjacks to bring him down, and he’d seriously injured two of them. Within the week he was tried, sentenced, and put on the farm for twenty years.

  There was other talk about Amos Sample. Whispers that faded away whenever I entered the room. I caught the gist of them, though. While I worked to make Dale think I was as thick and bland as the white gravy he sopped his biscuits in, I knew things.

  Some of the talk involved women, of course. The other, though, was what interested me. Amos Sample walked on the dark side, or that was the gossip, and it had planted a seed inside my head that was nudgin’ into life.

  I slowed Piper while I tried to see which captain was workin’ the crew. With some, I could draw closer. Others were trouble I didn’t care to court. Being pleasant to some of the men resulted in false stories to Dale. I’d learned to keep a good distance between the prison employees and myself.

  Piper’s ears moved forward and back, listening to the men and reading my mood. We ambled down the road, dust rising from her hooves. She seemed to walk in rhythm to the singing. Pic Davison was the captain in charge, and I took a breath. Pic minded his own business and didn’t feel a need to curry favor with Dale by making up tales about me. I let Piper continue forward until we drew abreast of him as he sat his horse, gun angled to the ground.

  “Mornin’, Mrs. Walters.”

  “Mornin’ to you, Pic.” I focused on the tree. Bits of wood flew from the axes as the men worked. In less than an hour the tree would be down. The urge to cry nearly overcame me, but I beat it back. Amos Sample worked the ax as he sang out the beat.

  “Sad to see something that grand die.” Pic’s words reflected my thinking.

  “Yes, it is.” My opinion on such things, I’d learned, was like a gnat in my husband’s eye.

  “You’d best enjoy your ride before the sun gets up much higher.” Pic glanced at me and I looked away from the men working. “August at noon ain’t kind to no one.”

  “Yes, I thought I’d ride down toward that little branch then head home to make some lunch for Dale.”

  “He tells us what a good cook you are. Says he won’t have no trustees cookin’ when you make everything just the way he likes it.”

  I nodded. “That’s my job, now isn’t it?” I closed my legs on Piper’s side and she walked forward. “Have a good day, Pic.”

  “It won’t be a good day til November when this heat breaks.”

  I didn’t answer as I rode past the tree. Up close, I could see that it shuddered with each blow of the axes. Amos Sample caught my eye but he never missed a word or a lick with his ax. But he’d seen me, and I’d seen him. It was a start.

  THE SUMMER HEAT finally passed off. Standing at the open kitchen window I washed my cup and saucer and enjoyed the cool air. Dale sat at the kitchen table finishing the breakfast I’d cooked. I blocked out the sounds of his eating and focused on the view out the window. I could see the barn and my horse, with her head out of her stall waiting for me. She had a little buck in her as the mornings came in brisk, and I saw the first frost covered the fields, a sure sign it was hog killin’ weather.

  My first year on The Farm, Dale volunteered me to help make the cures for the pork. One was a vinegar brine and the other was a sugar cure, Dale’s favorite. After that slaughter day with the hogs squealin’ and screamin’, I can’t eat pork and the smell of cookin’ sugar makes me sick. It didn’t stop Dale, who gobbled down a quarter pound of bacon at each sittin’. He said there was no help for it, the first cold snap was the time of year when pigs died.

  It was also the season when my plan took root and began to sprout.

  “Nilla, I’m sending some of the boys over this morning. Buster’s gonna cook a couple of hogs. You’ll do the side dishes. Cotton’s in and we’re gonna have a little shindig.”

  “Yes, Dale.” Obedience lingered in the curve of my lips.

  “Tell Luther where to set up the tables. Around back, near where Buster digs the pit. Get Luleen to bring six or seven washtubs from the laundry. Warden said I could use what I needed.” He grinned. “Says he and the missus are stoppin’ by. I’m gonna make a run into town, get some beer to put on ice.”

  I nodded. In the two years of my marriage, I’d learned to let Dale tell me how he wanted things done. Didn’t matter that I’d suggested the party and nourished the thought for the past eight weeks. Next he’d bring up the entertainment.

  “Some of the boys gone play and sing.” He caught my hand as I walked by and pulled me roughly into his lap. “You think you might dance with me to some Ne-gra music?”

  I hated the way he pronounced Ne-gra, li
ke the high class white folks. I kissed him full on the lips. “I’d dance to seventy-six trombones if you asked me, Dale.”

  He frowned. “Where do you get the stuff you come up with, Nilla? Maybe you ought to keep outta them books or turn off that radio you love.”

  Before that idea took root in his head, I kissed him again, wiggling a little on his lap. For all intents and purposes, my mama sold me to Dale, but she didn’t send me out without some weapons. At eighteen, I could look like a vixen or a child. Whatever it took to keep Dale on the smile side of life.

  He pushed me off his lap and stood. “I told Luleen to come on over. I want these floors scrubbed to a shine. They bringin’ some a them red-like mums for the flowerbeds. Festive. That’s what I want. See to it.”

  “I’ll take care of it.”

  “Stay here and be sure they work. You know if you turn your back, they’ll—”

  “I’ll make sure. I know exactly how you taught me.”

  He patted my ass as I walked by. “Might pick out a dress for you in town.”

  “Thank you, Dale. You’re so good to me.”

  He scooted back from the table, belched, and then he was gone to devil the inmates who shared my prison.

  Luleen showed up fifteen minutes later, and I helped her unload the galvanized washtubs that weighed at least twenty pounds each. We set them up near the place Dale had marked off for the two pits Buster would dig. He’d burn oak logs down to a bed of hot coals. The hogs would roast for the whole next day til they could be pulled from the bone with the gentlest touch.

  “What got Mr. Dale in a mood for a party?” Luleen asked as she took her bucket of hot sudsy water and a brush and settled onto her knees in the hallway.

  “He took a notion. I think it was that bluesman, Amos some-thin’. Dale’s been talkin’ about him since he came here. Says he’s the best caller he’s ever seen. Dale wants to hear him sing, I guess.” My face fell into innocence. “I hear the church doors slam shut whenever Amos Sample walks by. They say he consorts with the Devil.”