by Jeffrey Lent
“That doesn’t seem right.”
“You ask me, a law says a man can’t go looking for food on any day of the week isn’t right. Most of those sort of laws, they’re not aimed at the high and mighty, they’re aimed at keeping the poor fellow down. On the straight and narrow. In a church pew of a Sunday morning. You think on that a minute, before you condemn a man who doesn’t give a damn and knows he can thumb his nose at it.”
“It’s still about money, isn’t it? And power?”
“Girl, everything of this earth is about money and power. Who has it and who doesn’t. Now let me finish this up.”
“I’m listening.”
“Well,” he said and went silent a moment. “I guess that’s pretty much it. What we do here is farm on a big scale every crop that works and allows us to raise birds, and through the winter we sell quail hunting to people can afford it. Which is a good number. And the dogs. I run the farm but mostly I raise the dogs and train em and work em in the fields with the Sports. There’s a colored man, Robert Jay Haskins, everybody calls him Robert Jay, who helps with the dogs and the hunts also. Robert Jay, he’s a rare one—there’s not a thing I do that he can’t do as well. He’s got the touch. And the rare Sport what rears back and insists he’s paying for me and not a colored man, I just toe up a little dirt or rub my eyes and glance down and tell em what they’re paying for is good dogs and good hunting and a man knows how to put him there and for him, that day, it’s Robert Jay. Or he can load up and drive on out of here. That most always works. Hell, missy, there’s some that when they call, they request Robert Jay. Been out with him and that’s who they want again. I take no offense, you understand?”
“Sounds like you’ve got no reason to.”
They were in the midst of another slash of cut-over land. Along with the brush piles and tangles of vines and canes, they were parked by an old house, a small rough-sided house, a story and a half, the bricks from the end-chimney loosened and fallen away at the chimney’s top. The house had never been painted and the glass was out of the windows, the shingled roof was curling and the whole house seemed to list toward them, as if the scant front porch was all that was holding it up. The dogs had worked through the slash and pointed three coveys and come back, both of them with red welts raised on their sides from the cane thorns, heaving from the work. He’d poured them water out of a big tin can from the bed of the truck into a pan set on the ground and now the dogs rested in the box in the bed of the truck. It was, Katey thought, brutally hot.
Coming in to the slash they’d passed along between two large tobacco fields and there had been a cluster of Negroes out by the end of one of the fields, gathered around a very old truck, taking a break, drinking water from a similar tin can in the back of the truck, some few with bottles of soda, passing among them food from grease-stained paper sacks. Not only men but women and children too. They seemed to ignore the truck, even though Brian maintained his slow speed, but Katey, looking back, saw a couple of the smaller figures raise their heads and study them as they passed by. And they, all of them, were oddly dressed.
Now she looked again at the old house. It felt sad and lonely, a house given over to some larger plan, some greater need than for human habitation. And knew there was something in all of his talk, all of this place, something key she was missing.
She said, “Those people we passed just now? That were dressed funny? What’s that all about?”
“You mean the hands?”
She looked at him. “I don’t know. It was men and women and children. Negroes.”
“Yup. Field hands.” He nodded as if explaining something obvious.
She didn’t smile. “You mean people who work in the fields? But you just call them hands. Like, that’s what they are to you, each of them? Is a set of hands?”
He kind of reared back from the wheel, turning his upper body to face her. He squinted and said, “I know em all. By name, by family, which is what you were looking at. Three different families. And yes, obviously, they work in the fields.”
“Your fields.”
He held his squint. “Yes. Well, legally the farm belongs to Judith and me. And her two brothers, Eric and Tyler Trask. Eric’s a lawyer in Richmond and Tyler owns the tobacco warehouse and auction barn in South Hill, also a string of movie theaters around southern Virginia and a jukebox and arcade business—we joke that he’s in the entertainment business although tell the truth I think he makes more money than the rest of us. He won’t admit it, though, likes to say he’s just another poor dirt farmer trying to get by.”
“What do they do? Those people working in the fields.”
“Why, they do whatever needs doing. It changes with the seasons, sometimes with the week. Just now they’re suckering tobacco. Which explains why, as you say, they were dressed funny.”
“Not to me it doesn’t. Explain why they were dressed as they were.”
“Suckering tobacco is essential at this stage of the plant’s growth. It’s removing side stems and some leaves, so you end up with a strong and uniform plant. But doing that, there’s what we call tobacco tar that gets all over you. It’s funny, you can’t really see it, but it’s there. A thick heavy juice that flows off the plant, where those stems and leaves are removed. It coats a person head to toe and is the very devil to wash off. Which is why when you do that job you cover up with long pants and long shirts, a hat or a poke-bonnet. Doesn’t matter how hot it is, the heat’s easier to bear than the tobacco tar. Just a part of the job.”
“That you don’t do.”
“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t do that work. I do other things.”
“So, your, hands, as you call them, they do that work. What else do they do?”
“I already told you—whatever needs to be done. And I see where this is going. So let me tell you. You don’t know the first thing about how things work here. I said earlier that we have tenant farmers, not sharecroppers, and never did. A tenant farmer has a house and pays rent on it. And gets a fair wage for the work they do. The old sharecropping, that was a bad deal for the Negroes. Everything belonged to the white man, the farmer, and the sharecropper, he and his family was paid, well, a share of the harvest. But those shares never amounted to what the farmer claimed was owed in rent and seed and feed and whatever other ways the farmer could work it against the Negroes. Most sharecroppers never saw but a nickel or two in their pocket at the end of the year and most lived on what little they could grow around their house and a hog killed in November if they were lucky enough to get a shoat from someone. Our tenants pay rent but get a weekly paycheck and know exactly what’s expected of them and also know what to expect in return. It’s all of us, working the land, together. And we all do the best we can and all know it. It’s a fair deal, is what it is.”
She gestured out the window at the fallen-down house. “Who used to live there?”
“Girl, I do not know. That pine plantation was planted a long time before I was even born, I’d guess.”
“Was it a tenant farmer’s house?”
“Might have been. Most likely.”
She said, “That weekly paycheck you talked about. Does everyone get that? How does that work?”
“You’ve lost me now.”
“I mean, does every man and woman and child get their own check? And how do you figure out the value of how the work’s divided? Can a child do a man’s work in a day? Or a woman? I’m just trying to understand how this works.”
He looked at her and said, “I’m telling you, you don’t know the first thing about this country or the history or how things work here. It’s this Civil Rights business you’ve been seeing on the television. But these are people, these Negroes, that have been part of this land forever. It’s families. Families, do you understand? That have been living and working together for hundreds of years. We all, all of us, are working together best we can. It’s complicated and not always right but most all of us, white and colored, we’re doing the best we
can to live well, all of us.”
She said, “Did you ever sucker tobacco?”
His right hand came up flat and open and swift and then came down on the dash and he said, “No! I never suckered tobacco! Why would I?”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess you wouldn’t.” Then she said, “So, how’s that paycheck thing work? You never did answer that.”
“I just did. I told you. It’s families. Now, up in Vermont, you know plenty of farm kids that work, year-round. Right? It’s not so different. It’s helping get done what needs to get done. And, also, just so you know, nothing is keeping those families here—plenty of Negroes have gone north: D.C., Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York. Most have stayed but some also have come back. The tenant houses? We keep em up good and tight—if there’s ever a problem, and there’s always problems, it gets taken care of. All of em have a piece of land goes with the house. There’s garden plots and most all have hog pens and chicken coops, not a few of em also keep a milk cow. There’s one fellow, he’s a bachelor, he keeps hives of bees. And that honey is his to sell and what’s more, he gets paid extra to move his hives around to the places where we need bees to pollinate crops. It’s all, and by that I mean all the people, part of one big community. Now, there’s parts of that which are mostly white, parts mostly black—the churches are a place to start, but it comes down to what everybody, Negro and White, are comfortable with. For the most part, and most of the time, we all get along. And why wouldn’t we? It’s a hundred years since that damned war and most folks have figured out what’s what. Which is we all need one another, we all work together. How I see it, for the most part it’s a good thing.”
She sat quiet a moment. She was hot and overwhelmed with the magnitude of the day, with the physical presence of the man across the bench seat of the truck from her, with everything that had brought her here. She wanted to push, to ask about the lunch counters, the March on Washington, about the bombings and the Freedom Riders, about the segregated schools, restaurants, movie theaters, about everything she’d been reading and hearing and watching on the television news the last few years. And remembered then her mother, strident and angry, talking back to LBJ and Cronkite or those larger forces out beyond her reach, her grasp. And this memory sharpened her focus and woke her from the long moment she’d drifted into with him and she realized that, as he’d said, she didn’t know the first thing about this place. But she was learning, and learning about him, which was her job here. How he fit into some larger picture, she could ponder later, when this encounter, meeting, whatever it was, concluded.
Then he spoke again, his voice kind and low, words drawn out slow. “Katey Snow,” he said. “I can’t fix the world and neither can you. It’s a good thing to try, though. But you, here.” And he stopped then and gazed off out his window at the sun-spattered wave of heat. His voice the same, he said, “What world is it, truly, that you are trying to fix, by coming here?” He then looked back to her.
She blinked and thought a moment and said, “I don’t think I’m trying to fix anything. All I knew, starting out, was that I wanted to stand in front of you, I wanted to see you, see what sort of man you were.” She paused and he didn’t speak and she went on. “And, I guess, I wanted you to know I was in the world. That what you … that what you and my mother did was more than just what happened that afternoon.” She paused again and took a great silent gulp and said, “That there were consequences.”
He nodded and again ran his hand over his face. Then he said, “So much of what makes up a life is consequences. Things that happen as a direct result of actions of a moment, that you don’t expect would be what they are.” And a deep sudden sadness filled his voice and his face closed a bit, a darkness shrouding him.
She then boldly reached out and touched his forearm, the first time she’d touched him and her finger jumped away and he looked at her as she said, “I heard about that girl. In Maine.”
“Oh.” As if softly punched. Then he made a crooked grin and said, “Deedee. Yes. Well. Tell the truth, Katey Snow, it was another girl I was thinking of when I said that. A girl in Germany, a young girl who died and that death was a powerful and terrible thing. For your dad and for me, too.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Well, I’d guess not. And you won’t hear it from me. And if Oliver hasn’t told you, that’s his business. All I was truly trying to say was, be careful where and how you dig, when you’re looking at what you call consequences. Because what you find might not be what you hope or expect or want to find.”
She said, “I don’t want anything more from you. You don’t have to worry about that. Once we’re done here, I’ll be gone. That’s the truth, so help me. I’ve got no interest in bothering you or making trouble for you. Or your wife and those little girls. Maybe especially those little girls.” And she hadn’t known she felt this or even knew it before she spoke but once out the words were true to her as writ electric upon her soul.
“Well,” he said again. “You sounds as if you’re about ready to hightail it out of here.”
“Like I said, I don’t want to make any trouble for you.”
He grinned again and said, “Hell, girl, you already did that. But Judith, she’s a good woman, she’s going to understand this. Probably already has it worked out in her head. Probably did once she got off the phone from my mother. But you need to hold on a minute: You came and saw me and I did my best to give you some ideas about who I am, like you asked. But you know, I’d like to have a little better sense about you. Don’t you think that’s fair?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe. I guess.”
“Yes, it is,” he said. “And what’s more, just to keep things straight, when you do leave, that doesn’t mean I want it to be the end of you. Unless, of course you decide you want it to be. And we can determine that after we talk a bit more.”
“All right,” she said. “What do you want to know?”
He lifted up out of his seat to pull a watch out of his pocket, the watch attached by a fine-lined chain to a belt loop. He peered at it and pushed it back into his pants and said, “First thing, I got to get these dogs back and out of the heat. Then I thought you and me could go get some lunch. A place I like to eat. Means you don’t have to worry about bothering my family and so maybe you can relax a bit. Because, girl? Right now you’re screwed tight as a lid on a jam jar and there’s just no call for that.”
Her mouth was dry and she was so very hot and sweaty and couldn’t remember when she had last eaten and then did and that was a thousand years ago and she also realized he was not ready to be done with her. And she bloomed warm and then was oddly cooler and she pushed back those wet strands of hair and said, “It’s true. I could do with a bite to eat. If you’re sure it’s not a problem for you.”
He fired up the truck and then took his right hand off the wheel and reached to lightly backhand-swat her knee and said, “It’s not a problem, girl. It’s a pleasure.”
They dropped off the dogs and he spent some time in the kennel, taking care of things there, she guessed, as she waited restless and uncertain in the truck. Then he was back and again grinned at her, and backed the truck around. They went past the house without stopping and the girl Veronica was up on the porch watching them go, scowling after them and she thought He’s going to have a time with that one, someday. He was silent and so was she as they drove out along the pond’s berm and came to the road where he spun the wheel and went out fast onto the road, traveling away from how she’d come in.
They passed more fields planted with beans and corn and tobacco, more grass pastures with black beef cattle clumped up around the big shade oaks and they also passed what she realized were the tenant houses, mostly weathered clapboard but neat and tight, some with chimneys leaking woodsmoke, garden plots fenced with slab wood, some with a woman working in them. Outbuildings, as he’d said. And flower beds along the porches, the garden fences. One with stones painted
white lining the driveway. Another yard had, among the flower beds, a sculpture made of automobile parts, of a man, tall and angular with a stovepipe hat and arms that lifted toward the blank mask of a face, holding a real cornet, face and horn tipped upward toward the sky. This last sent a jolt through her as the image formed within her fast-passing glimpse. And it came to her that these were indeed homes, not an idea, but abodes possessed if not owned by the humans within.
They dropped into a river bottom and came out and to the south of them was a lake, or an inlet of a lake, the water stretching far away. To the north of the road was a scrabble of piney woods, not like the plantations Brian Potter had showed her but wild woods with trees of varying size, laced with vines and some few giant hardwoods.
He pointed out his window and said, “That’s Simms Lake. Back in the thirties it wasn’t but a wide place in the Simms River and a bunch of low-lying land but they made a dam down in North Carolina and flooded over this land. Some was against it but most have changed their minds. There’s a pile of good fishing now and people enjoy the lake all sorts of ways, from waterskiing on a hot summer day to duck hunting in the fall. And pret’ much everything else people can get up to on a big expanse of water.” And he looked at her. As if she would understand all the nuance in his remark and she guessed she wasn’t so far from that understanding. She said, “It’s wicked big, what I can see.”
“Damn,” he said. “I haven’t heard somebody call something wicked in years. All right, here we are. It’s a boat landing and a bait shop and some other good thing. Which is what we’re here for.”
He turned into a small jut of land out in the lake. There were trucks with boat trailers parked where the water lapped up shallow and beside that was a modern log cabin that had signs for red worms and minnows and such tacked onto the front and he went on past that to a low cinderblock building with a curl of smoke rising from somewhere behind it and three picnic tables under a tin-roofed canopy off one side of the building. And through the windows of the truck came a dense rich and lovely smell. Atop the building was a giant painted plywood pig wearing a chef’s hat and across the belly of the pig were the letters B B Q. The tail of the Q trailed on out into the tail of the pig.