Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  Shirley often recalled that comment, and after a while she began to think of the war years in different terms. Most women, she now saw, had reacted like Margaret: having no choice in the matter, they’d waited for a chance to put things back together. They remained, more or less, in a hopeful frame of mind, and they learned to live beyond their own bodies.

  If any sentence had been handed out, it was men who served it. The war had wrought destruction, of one kind or another, on almost every man she knew. Those who might have led ordinary lives, minding the counter at the hardware store or raising cotton on Choctaw Creek, came to see themselves as cowards or killers, as losers or profiteers. Some sacrificed their sons. Others sacrificed themselves.

  What Miss Edna Boudreau sacrificed on Shirley’s first day back at work was harder to describe, but it was a sacrifice nonetheless, and Shirley had the good sense to recognize it as such. She’d just taken her place before the console—being careful as she put on her headset, given how tender her scalp still was—when the door to Miss Edna’s office opened and she stepped out, carrying a pitcher of lemonade and a plate of cookies, followed by Cassie Pickett, who held a tray with three glasses on it.

  “We’re glad you’re back,” Miss Edna said. “I’ve been filling in for you, and that stool of yours is so high, it gave me acrophobia.” She set the lemonade and cookies on a table, then reached over and gently pulled the earphones away from Shirley’s ears and lifted off the headset. After laying it aside, she scrutinized her head, assessing the damage. “I burned my hair once, too,” she said.

  “How?”

  “Stuck a match to it.”

  “Why?”

  “Just decided I didn’t like it. I was only seven or eight years old. I would’ve burned my whole self up if I could’ve. My daddy poured a bucket of cold water over my head.”

  “There’s been days I felt like setting myself on fire,” Cassie said, placing the tray on the table. “I ain’t never done it, though.”

  “Well, Cassie,” Miss Edna said, “you’re still young. You’ve got time to do it yet. But I don’t recommend it.”

  “Nor do I,” Shirley said.

  Miss Edna dragged a ladder-back chair out of her office and sat down, and Cassie perched on her stool, and the three of them ate cookies and drank lemonade. Once or twice, a button started blinking on one of the consoles, but Miss Edna waved her hand and said whoever it was could wait.

  She held forth for a while on a subject that interested her a lot more than it interested them: the future of the local telephone company. She said that when the war ended, they’d get a new building, right down the street from the library. Plans had already been drawn up. The building would be completely modern, with offices for Fred Harney and her, assuming she hadn’t decided to retire. The older consoles would be replaced with the most up-to-date equipment. It wouldn’t be long, she said, before everybody in town had a phone, and if either of the younger women had been around back in the early days, they would know just how unthinkable that had once seemed.

  “The day we opened up, on the second floor of that little building where Hanson’s Gift Shop is now, there were exactly twenty-four telephones in the entire town. I took the first call at nine a. m., on October third, 1901. Mayor A. L. Gunnels phoned Leighton Payne at the Weekly News to complain that his views on the subject of whether or not to outlaw the hitching of animals to porch railings had been misrepresented. Of course, he wasn’t really mad, it was just for show. Because everybody was so proud to have phone service, he had a photographer at the courthouse ready to take his picture, and another one was at the newspaper to photograph Mr. Payne. Nobody took my picture, but then, I wouldn’t have taken it, either.”

  “I saw your picture in the school yearbook,” Cassie said. “You had a pretty face.”

  “Cassie Pickett, if you went looking for my picture in an old yearbook, it’s because you hoped I was just as big back then as I am now, and you know it.” The girl’s mousy features tensed, but Miss Edna chuckled. “I was every bit as big back then as I am now, but I’ll tell you something, Cassie. It would be a mistake to think I never had any fun in my life. I did. It was about thirty-five years ago, and it was over in just a few minutes, but I had it. And there’s another thing I’ve learned, Cassie, which you might do well to learn, too, and so might you, Shirley, if you don’t know it already. Would you two young ladies like to hear what that was?”

  Both of them nodded.

  “Some minutes,” Miss Edna said, “last longer than others.” Then she laughed so hard her hips shook.

  TWENTY EIGHT

  ROSETTA STEVENS was not a Stevens, but nobody knew it except Mr. Alvin and Miss Shirley, and neither of them would tell. Some might say that they didn’t tell because they couldn’t afford to, what with her knowing so much, deep down, about them. But what she did or didn’t know had very little to do with it. They didn’t tell because it never mattered what you put them on the inside of, they would find a way to become outsiders fast, and they recognized the outsider in her. She was outside whiteness because she was black, and she was outside blackness because she was herself.

  She was thinking about outsidedness that morning right before Frank Holder and the other man came in. How folks love to draw lines and make boxes. You’re inside this one, outside that one. You’re this kind, that kind. The previous Sunday, Reverend Selmon had preached a sermon called “Dogs in the Church.” According to him, the brethren could be divided on the basis of their resemblance to one kind of dog or another.

  “Got the hunting dogs,” he said, his jaw aglow. “Hunting dog’s always sniffing around, and when he finds something that smells like game, everybody watch out!” He threw his head back and bayed. “Yes, Jesus,” folks hollered. “Amen.” Reverend Selmon pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the sweat from his forehead. “Yes indeed—Jesus, amen, that’s right.” He folded the handkerchief and put it away. “Now the hunting dog makes noise,” he said, “and that can’t be denied. And after a while, all that noise gets old. Bay, bay, bay, all night and all day. How in the world is anybody supposed to rest? But at least with the hunting dog, you know where you stand, because you know what the hunting dog’s after. Hunting dog wants to hunt. Hunting dog says what’s what.

  “Then you got the lapdogs. What does the lapdog do? Why, the lapdog sits in your lap and licks your face. Yes indeed. Lapdog will lick you till he puts you to sleep, and the second you drop off, what happens? Why, the lapdog grabs your sandwich and runs. The lapdog laps, then leaves. He’s a stealthy and dissembling type of creature. See any lapdogs, brothers and sisters, in the church here today?”

  “Yes, Jesus! Sho’ do!”

  “Yes, brothers and sisters, and I do, too! But the lapdog’s not the most bothersome cur in the church. Oh no. That honor is accorded the feist. For the feist is always nipping at your heels!”

  If Frank Holder had belonged to the dog world, he would have been a mastiff, and Rosetta preferred the feist any day of the week. When Holder came through the door, stomping the mud off his work shoes, the floorboards creaked and canned goods rattled. The other man, in his late twenties, had no mud on his shoes, a pair of swanky wing tips. He wore a seersucker suit and a white straw boater and carried a leather satchel. He looked around the store as though he’d never seen anything quite like it. If Rosetta had held with wagering, her money would have gone on Jackson as his likely point of origin, though she supposed Memphis or Little Rock were possibilities, too.

  Frank Holder never even looked at her. “Mr. Alvin around?”

  “No sir.”

  “Say he ain’t?”

  “No sir.”

  “Where’s he at?”

  He’d gone over to Greenville again to see somebody about a big shipment of lard, but it was doubtful he’d want Frank Holder to know that. “He ain’t said.”

  “He ain’t said. Well hell, why would he? If I was him, I wouldn’t say, neither.” Frank Holder waved his hand aro
und the room: at the shelves packed with canned goods, sugar, coffee and tea; at the refrigerator case, which was full of fresh meat and cheese; at the big stack of first-grade tires in the corner. “Ain’t much you can’t get here, Mr. Johnson,” he said. “If you know what I mean.”

  “Yes sir,” Johnson said. “I can see that.”

  “You want you a cold drink, maybe?”

  “Well, I believe I could probably stand one.”

  Frank Holder walked over to the box and slid the lid open. He peered into the icy water. “Look like we got some Orange Crush in here and some RC colas, Barq’s chocolate, strawberry and root beer. Any of them strike your fancy?”

  “I’ll take an Orange Crush.”

  Holder pulled the drink out, popped the top off in the opener and handed the bottle to Johnson. Then he got a root beer for himself. He walked over to the counter and threw a dime down. And he still didn’t look at her.

  Tucking the satchel under his arm, Johnson moved around the store, examining items, occasionally sipping Orange Crush. “Got a nice selection of goods here,” he said. “There’s enough sugar on these shelves to keep every whiskey still in Mississippi bubbling for a month. I bet a lot of merchants around the state would love to know who his suppliers are. Not to mention Senator Truman’s preparedness committee.”

  “Yes sir,” Holder said. “I reckon they would. Old Alvin would make a devil of a quartermaster, wouldn’t he?”

  The younger man laughed.

  Holder laughed, too. To nobody in particular, he said, “That boy that drives the rolling store around?”

  “Which boy?” Rosetta said. “Colored or white?”

  Then he did look at her, and instantly she wished he hadn’t.

  “Boy means colored,” he said. “If I’d been talking about Danny Timms, I would’ve said so. So I’m gone ask you again, is that boy that drives the rolling store around?”

  “No sir,” she said.

  “No sir,” he said. “All right. Where you reckon we could find him?”

  “He’s on his route, I imagine.”

  “I imagine so, too. One more time now. One, two, three. Reckon whereabouts on his route that boy’d be?”

  She could tell the most elaborate lies to a white man without prior preparation. In this instance, nothing fancy was called for. “He probably be somewhere up close to the Fairway Crossroads about now. I believe he run from there to Forty-seven and head on back.”

  “You hear that, Mr. Johnson?” Frank Holder said. “He run from there to Forty-seven. And then he head on back.”

  Johnson laughed again. He finished his drink, placed the bottle on the counter and looked around the store once more, as if to memorize every detail. Then he glanced at Holder, who said, “Ready to go?”

  “I believe so,” Johnson said.

  Holder turned his root beer up and drained it, then stood it next to the other empty on the counter. “When Mr. Alvin gets back,” he said, “tell him Mr. Frank Holder dropped by with a friend of his from Senator Bilbo’s office. The senator just wanted to make sure the store was secure, since there’s enough supplies in here to feed the U. S. Army.”

  She made no move to pick their bottles up until she heard Holder pull into the road; then she rose and grabbed them. She meant to stand the bottles in the wooden drink crates, nice and neat as always, but the sight of the little square holes, twenty-four per crate, each hole the same size, all of them there for the purpose of containing a single bottle, keeping that bottle separate from all the others, got the best of her, and the bottles dropped out of her hands, clattering against the worn floorboards.

  TWENTY NINE

  IN FRONT OF L.C., a green cotton trailer rattled along, moving so slowly it might not reach town before Thanksgiving. He waited until he crossed the rusty bridge that spanned the Sunflower River, then pulled around. The driver of the tractor towing the trailer was a Negro who lived on the Vaiden place. L.C. waved, and Cecil waved back.

  For a long time now, he’d been passing any slow-moving vehicle without waiting to see who was driving it, despite the lengthy lecture Alvin Timms had given him about proper comportment at the wheel. He said white folks, whether rightly or not, believed that if a colored person passed them, he was trying to get beyond his station. L.C. probably didn’t know it, but lots of them thought that once a colored person got in front of them, he’d slam on his brakes, hoping to provoke a rear-end collision and collect damages from their insurance company. L.C. couldn’t help smiling, and Alvin said, “It may be funny now, but it won’t be for either one of us if it ever happens.”

  “Mr. Alvin?” L.C. said. “Let me ask you something. When was the last time you saw a nigger get in a wreck with a white person and the police say the white person at fault?”

  “I ain’t saying what I’ve seen,” Alvin said. “I’m saying what folks think. But just for the sake of argument, L.C., when was the last time you saw a ghost?”

  For once, L.C. couldn’t think of an appropriate response, so he just kept his mouth shut.

  He drove on down the main road another mile or so, then turned off onto a side road that ran back down to the riverbank, through land belonging to Mr. Angelo Moreli. Moreli was Italian, the son of an immigrant who’d come to this country around 1900, when big landowners like the Starks and the Stancills briefly tried to work white foreigners instead of Negroes. The experiment hadn’t lasted long at all, because a few of the foreigners, like Moreli’s father, figured out how to get a little land of their own, which meant there was less for the Starks and the Stancills.

  Even though he’d been born here, Moreli spoke with a funny accent, saying, I’m uh gonna go uh rather than just I’m gonna go. He was a chubby fellow with dark hair and a pencil-thin mustache, and his eyes always had little creases around them, as if he were about to start laughing. For whatever reason, he generally treated the Negroes who worked for him a lot better than most.

  There were twelve or fifteen folks picking cotton that afternoon, spread out from one end of the field to the other. Cooter Sam, who always did the Lucky Duck at the Saturday-night dances, was way out in front, picking two rows at the same time. He claimed he’d once weighed up four hundred pounds in a single day, and when you saw him picking, you had to figure he might’ve been telling the truth.

  L.C. hit the horn. A few of the pickers looked up and went right back to work, because they didn’t have any money, but the others dropped their sacks and trudged toward the turnrow.

  A couple children bought Popsicles; one or two folks bought candy bars. An elderly lady whose skin had the texture of worn leather wanted a plug of chewing tobacco but didn’t have enough money for the whole thing, so he sliced her off a good-sized chunk.

  Cooter Sam bought a Dr Pepper. While L.C. made change, Sam asked when that worthless white man he worked for meant to let him start selling hard liquor.

  “You looks like hard liquor,” a young woman told Sam.

  “Child, he just the kind of nigger bring a smile to the white folks’ face,” another woman said. “Work like a mule to make a dime and then crawl like a ant to give it right back.”

  Rather than respond to the insult, Cooter Sam trained his gaze on a distant plume of dust. “Somebody coming.”

  “Probably the dago.”

  “Ain’t no dago.”

  “How you know?”

  “Seen the dago go yonder.” Sam gestured in the opposite direction. “Ain’t seed him come back.”

  L.C. handed him a nickel and closed the cash box. The field hands started to straggle back into the field, all except Sam, who stood there drinking his Dr Pepper while keeping his eye on the road. A moment later, L.C. heard a vehicle pull up, the engine cut off and two doors slam shut. Sam’s Adam’s apple bobbed faster and faster, and then he wiped his mouth on his forearm and handed L.C. the empty bottle.

  L.C. refused to look over his shoulder, though Cooter Sam’s eyes indicated it was some sort of trouble, and then he saw Frank Holde
r walk around in front of the bus with a man he didn’t recognize.

  “I reckon them Eyetalians got some funny practices,” Holder said. “I put a picker in the field, I expect him to pick. I don’t expect him to stand around shooting the breeze.”

  “Yes sir,” Cooter said. “How you, sir?”

  “Not so good.” Holder tucked his thumbs into the straps of his overalls. “You got a son?”

  “No sir.”

  “I don’t, neither. Used to, but he died defending this country. There’s plenty more like him dying right now, good American boys, best we got. There’s others that ain’t gone die, because they’re like me—so dad-durn mean that when a bullet gets near ’em, it turns around and heads back. Them boys’ll march into Rome real soon, and when they get there, they gone want some fresh duds. So why don’t you get right back out yonder? We can’t sew them young men no new clothes if we ain’t got no cotton.”

  L.C.’s pulse pounded. “Go on, Cooter,” he said. “Mr. Holder probably want to do business, and I need to get back on my route.”

  Holder waited until Sam was a good distance away, then said, “You tell Mr. Alvin what I said about you mouthing mumbo jumbo?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And what’d he say?”