Darby

by Jonathon Scott Fuqua

  I told her, “Everybody thinks you’re pretty.”

  She got red in the face.

  Then I heard Evette calling for me. Excited, I told Beth, “Come on this way.” I started running and she chased close behind me. Veering around the Grab, we passed beneath the pecan trees and out into the fields, where Evette was standing. “Hey!” I hollered, skipping up and down, waving.

  Evette hollered back.

  When we got to her, I said, “Beth’s spending the weekend at Ellan ’cause somebody threw a brick at her daddy’s office window.”

  “That ain’t very nice,” Evette said, but she didn’t sound like she even cared.

  I said, “It wasn’t nice at all. And you know what people are saying? They’re saying it was the Ku Klux Klan. Isn’t that scary?”

  Beth declared, “I don’t know why they’re bothering my daddy. He’s important in town.”

  Evette looked down at her shoes. “Bet I know why.”

  Beth stared at her. “If you know, you should say.”

  Evette hesitated. “It’s . . . it’s ’cause he might take Mr. Dunn to court for killing Devin Hawkins, that boy he was asking about. That’s what my daddy was saying.”

  Beth stood quiet for what seemed like five minutes. Then tears started from her eyes.

  “What?” I asked her.

  She didn’t want to say and turned her back and looked at Ellan.

  “You gotta tell me,” I told her.

  Wiping her cheeks, Beth blubbered, “If . . . if that’s all it is . . . if this is because my daddy might take Mr. Dunn to court, I wish he’d go back to his normal lawyering. Until he started helping Mr. Hawkins, he never had a brick thrown at him, and I never had to get outa my house on account of them being scared somebody might hurt me.”

  The three of us walked slowly through the cotton fields, our feet digging up the wet dirt like we were mules. Near the edge of the woods, we looked back and saw the dairy barn and, mostly hidden behind it, the hog house. “Our swing is back here,” I explained to Beth. “McCall made it so it goes over a gully. That’s why it can seem like you go so high off the ground.”

  “McCall made it?” she asked.

  I tried not to smile. “Yeah, he did.”

  Evette told Beth, “We takes turns swinging. We makes it a game sometimes. We say you gotta switch the way you do it. Sometimes we say you gotta hold on from the bottom. Sometimes we say you gotta stand on the plank. It’s so we don’t get bored. If one of us gets too chicken to try somethin’, the other wins. That’s how we play it.”

  I said, “Once we were gonna swing to the other side of the gully and jump off, but we were too scared. If we missed, we might’ve tumbled in and broke our necks or legs even.”

  Doing a cartwheel, Evette stopped and wiped her hands clean on a cotton plant. “Nearby the swing is a tree where we keeps us thread and cloth for catching mosquito hawks. You done that before?”

  Beth shrugged. “I don’t even know what a mosquito hawk is.”

  “It’s a dragonfly,” I told her. “Me and Evette call ’em mosquito hawks.”

  Beth stopped and smiled like we were fooling her. “How do you catch a dragonfly with string?”

  Evette explained, “You drop the cloth on ’em, then you tie the string round their tail parts. When they’re good and roped, we walk ’em like little dogs, ’cept they fly.”

  Beth smiled. “Really?”

  “Yup,” Evette told her.

  After swinging for more than an hour, we fetched the thread and cloth and went back out to the fields, where we hunted till we each had a mosquito hawk tied to a thread and fluttering above us. We let them go where they wanted, chasing behind so that after a half-hour Evette was clear over by the ditch separating Mr. Dunn’s property from ours and Beth was near the roadway, while mine was so lazy it went in big, zigzaggy circles, like a saw blade.

  After a while, we dragged our mosquito hawks back to the edge of the woods and let them go. Beth called, “Bye-bye!” to hers, so me and Evette did, too.

  Walking back to hide our thread and cloth, I declared, “My mosquito hawk wasn’t so good. It didn’t go anywhere.”

  “Me and Evette had good ones,” Beth bragged.

  “Yeah,” Evette agreed.

  I stopped and gawked at both of them. “See, y’all, now it’s like we’re sisters.”

  Beth nodded. “Maybe a little.”

  After putting the cloth and thread away, we sat down beneath the swing and told one another what we wanted to be when we were older. Beth said, “I wanna marry a prince or a rich man and become a schoolteacher for real little kids. I wanna teach ’em arithmetic. Plus I wanna have three girls when I get old enough, but I don’t want any boys. If I do, I’ll give ’em away.”

  “Same here,” I declared, wiping the sweatiness from my head.

  “I don’t mind boys,” Evette said. “My brothers’re so dumb they always make me laugh.”

  I said, “I wanna marry a prince, and I wanna be rich and have nice dresses and pretty hair. But now I also wanna be a newspaper girl. I wanna always write my newspaper column about things because it’s fun when people tell you how good it is.”

  Evette said, “Me, I just wanna be a newspaper writer and have a house in New York City like my aunt and uncle. Plus, I wants me a fancy car that my butler can drive so I can come down here to see my mama and daddy. Thing is, I don’t care if I ever gets married. It don’t matter to me so much.”

  “You don’t want kids?” Beth asked.

  Evette shrugged. “Not so much.”

  “Why not?”

  Evette stuck a finger through a big hole in her dress. Then she found another hole and even two more after that. “If . . . if I could have kids that was treated like white kids, I might want ’em okay. But black kids round here don’t got much chance to do nothing and not much chance to own nothing, either.”

  Beth asked, “What stuff don’t you guys have?”

  Evette lifted a finger that was stuck through one of the holes in her dress. She pointed off toward the tenant house her daddy rented from my daddy. “We don’t got a real home. We don’t got good clothes. We don’t got books at school. We don’t got jewelry and cars and any land or money, and when my daddy goes into town, he can’t shop in the white stores and has to take off his hat when he passes white folk and say ma’am and sir to ’em even if they’s real young.”

  “Is it terrible being a black girl?” Beth asked.

  Evette looked down at the dirt. “It ain’t so bad. It’s just you don’t ever get things you wants. But my daddy and mama, they say we should be real proud about our place and keep our self-respect. They say that’s more important than having. That’s what they say.”

  “Maybe.”

  We stayed quiet for a little while. Then Evette looked at me and Beth. “What’s it like to be white girls?”

  I thought about it, but I didn’t have any answer. “It’s not like anything. It’s just the way I am.”

  “It’s true,” Beth said.

  Evette kicked dirt with her raggy shoes. “That’s ’cause y’all don’t gotta think about it. You don’t gotta know all the time you’re a white girl. That’s why I don’t want no kids, ’cause they’d always know that they’s black.”

  The next day, after church and Sunday dinner, we drove out and walked my daddy’s cotton, corn, and tobacco fields between Clio and Dunbar. Me and Beth and McCall followed along behind Daddy, Mama, and Aunt Greer. Trudging through that hazy and humid white air, McCall said that just the night before he’d made up a list of the top fifty meanest animals on the entire earth. Giving it a scientific going over, he’d decided the number-one meanest was a tossup between wolverines and white sharks. “Wolverines are nasty things. That’s a fact. But you wanna know something that’s a surprise? The first snake isn’t on the list till number twelve. Alligators are. I got ’em at six. Lions and tigers are number three and four and grizzly bears are number five.”

&
nbsp; Beth said, “I don’t even know what a wolverine looks like.”

  “They ain’t so big, like about three feet is all, but they can kill caribou and even a moose, I suppose. They look somewhere’s between a raccoon and a bear with the most gigantic claws you ever saw.”

  Beth looked like she was thinking about what he’d told her. “Are any around here?” she asked.

  “Naw. Don’t worry. They’re up in Canada and the like.”

  I had a question. “Were any bugs on your list?”

  “Darby, bugs ain’t mean. They’re just annoying.”

  “How ’bout wolves?”

  “Got ’em at twenty-six.”

  Beth asked, “Did you put crabs on it?”

  “They ain’t so bad, either. Mostly I got sharks and bears and some of the big cats.”

  We stopped at one of the slumping houses in my daddy’s fields. The six of us sat on the porch in wicker chairs that were unraveling and turning gray. A rabbit ran from a bush, and I told McCall he ought to put one of them on his list of meanest animals.

  He ignored me.

  Beth told him, “It’s neat that you think about that stuff.”

  “Yeah, it is,” he agreed.

  When we got back to the truck, we were tired. Daddy drove us over to Hunt’s Bluff, where it’s always cooler because of the wind. Sitting atop a rise that overlooks the twisty, turny Great Pee Dee River, which is known for its fishing and moonshiners and flooding, we gulped lemonade and ate biscuits that Annie Jane had made. Spread about on a blanket, the five of us listened to Daddy discuss the Civil War and how the Yankee army had made a mess of the area, burning all the homes along the river, even though some of them were the best in South Carolina. It was a terrible, sad affair, he said. I tried to imagine all that smoke and flames, but I couldn’t. Not too long after that, me and Beth and McCall piled into Daddy’s trunk, and we all headed home with the big ashy sky curving toward the ground and landing like a waterfall on faraway treetops.

  Mr. Fairchild picked Beth up before supper. She gave me a hug, and when she was gone I didn’t have anything to do. Wandering upstairs, I sat on my bed. Thinking I might write another article, I got out some paper, except I didn’t have any ideas, good or bad.

  At six-thirty, like always, we ate. Afterward, I went back to my bedroom and looked out into the dark. I thought about Beth and how she and Evette were finally friends. Scooting into my bathroom, I searched out the window and through the trees and across the field. Evette’s tenant house had the weakest lantern light coming from inside. It looked like a lonely star in outer space. It reminded me of an anthill that anyone could step on, like it didn’t have any chance. I went back to my bed and picked up some paper and sewed out another newspaper notebook. When I was done, I took my pencil and started writing.

  Later, after I had finished my story, Mama came in to make sure I was ready for bed. I asked her if our great-granddaddy had owned any slaves.

  With her eyes sparkling, she said, “Before I answer that, we gotta skin the cat.”

  Raising my arms, she yanked off my dirty shirt, which is what she meant by “skin the cat.” While I slid on my nightgown, Mama said, “Neither of your great-granddaddies ever did. Nobody in our family owned any property before the war. But the fact of the matter is that everybody working a farm had them. It was just the way. A person didn’t even think about it. They lived from the land, and to do that they needed help. There wasn’t any sort of hate or anger involved, which is what everyone seems to have forgotten.”

  I asked, “For setting slaves free, was the Civil War kinda a good thing?”

  Mama straightened like I’d slapped one of her legs. “Now, don’t ever think that, Darby. Don’t you ever. We lost some of our kin in that war. All the families around here lost somebody. The South would be all the better if those boys had lived. I’m not saying things shouldn’t have changed. I’m not saying that it was right for people to have slaves, but don’t ever think the war was a good thing. That’s wrong.”

  I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  The next day, I got home from the Murchison School and fetched my story. Tucking it under an arm, I ran down the rows to wait for Evette. Sitting myself between cotton plants, I looked back at Ellan, the chicken house, the Grab, and all those outbuildings. They wavered in the heat and blowing dust. As poor as we sometimes seemed, my family owned a nice home, and we made do. Mama sold milk and dairy at the Douglas and Johns grocery store in Bennettsville. After Thanksgiving, she’d get me and some sharecropper kids to collect pecans from out of our trees, which she’d sell to a man before Christmas. That’s why, every year, we got Christmas presents. It’s on account of pecans and hard work. But poor Evette, her family didn’t have those extras. They picked in the fields for my daddy and went mostly without.

  Leaning down, I spotted the tiny, curled body of a dead boll weevil, the wormy insect that ruins cotton plants. Taking a toe, I smashed it into the dirt so that it disappeared. Even though Daddy gives me a nickel for every jar of boll weevils I pick, I still hate those things.

  Hearing voices, I raised my eyes and saw Evette and her brothers halfway down the dirt lane to their house. I got up and met them. “Hey, Joebean and Lucius,” I told them.

  “Hey, Darby,” they said.

  Evette pointed at the notebook I had. “You got another story writ up?”

  Nodding, I said, “You wanna edit it?”

  “Long as my name gets in the paper again.”

  “It’s gonna,” I promised.

  I sat outside while Evette changed into her play clothes. Then we went through the field and into the woods. Sitting down on top of a log, she read what I’d done. She read it again, and, lifting her face real slow, she gave me a look.

  “Is it okay?” I asked.

  “Just needs some smoothing out. This one’s done more professional than the last.” She smiled at me.

  “Do you think it’s good?”

  “I do,” she told me, taking my pencil and marking my newspaper article in what seemed like a hundred different spots. She saw me watching, and said, “It ain’t nothing.”

  We worked together for a long while, till dark was coming fast. Then we closed up my notebook and ran out from under all those trees. Stopping at Evette’s yard, I said, “Beth likes you now.”

  “I likes her, too,” Evette told me.

  Through the ratty screen door of her house, her daddy stuck his head out. “You best get in here, Evette,” he called. “Hey, Miss Carmichael,” he said to me.

  “Hey, Elwood,” I called back.

  Running toward Ellan, I went through the back door and slumped against a wall to read my article beneath an electric light.

  In the morning, while we were eating breakfast, somebody knocked at our back door. Annie Jane went down, and a few minutes later she escorted a black man up to the kitchen. He was tall and strong-seeming.

  He told us all, “Morning ma’ams and sirs. I’m sorry to interrupt your breakfast.”

  Daddy stood. “Jerome, what can I help you with?”

  Jerome didn’t meet my daddy in the eye. He looked awkward, and after a moment I recognized that he was the man from Beth’s daddy’s office, the man whose boy had been killed.

  “Are you okay?” Daddy asked him.

  Nodding, the man kept his pupils glued to his crackled boots. “Sir, I am okay, except . . . well . . . I got myself another situation, is all.”

  “Go on,” Daddy said.

  “All right, Mr. Carmichael. Yes, all right. I’m gonna say ’cause my new problem is my family. We been kicked offa Mr. Dunn’s property, and he says if we come back or makes more trouble round Marlboro County, we gonna get ourselves kilt.”

  Daddy stared at him before asking, “When did this happen?”

  “Two nights back, sir. We been staying off in the woods near McPherson’s Pond, but we can’t do that forever. See, I didn’t wanna come here.”

  “It’s all right,” my daddy tol
d him.

  “It’s just we got nowheres to go. We don’t got nothin’, really.”

  Daddy said, “Do you have family somewhere?”

  “Up in Fayetteville, sir. They’s the closest. I got me a sister’d take us in.”

  Daddy studied the air in front of him. “Well, we gotta get you up to Fayetteville. You can’t stay around these parts anymore. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s . . . that’s okay, sir. I knows it myself.”

  Mama frowned at my daddy. “Sherman, what are you thinking?” She stared at him. “You can’t take them up to Fayetteville, not with all that’s been happening.You need to mind your own business is what you need. You need to think about this family and our place in the community.”

  For the first time I can remember, though, Daddy ignored Mama. Looking over at McCall, he asked, “You think you can run the store this morning?”

  McCall told him, “I can do it, yeah.”

  “All you gotta do is take notes as to who’s buying what. This time a year we rarely have people pay cash.”

  “Yes, sir,” McCall said.

  Standing, Mama threw down her napkin and marched out of the kitchen.

  Daddy said, “McCall, if anyone asks, you tell them I’m up in Laurinburg for the morning. You say I’ll be back this afternoon.”

  “I don’t gotta go to school when you return, do I?”

  Daddy said, “I suppose not, McCall. You get the day off.”

  “Can I help?” I asked, wanting the day off, too.

  Daddy nodded. “Darby, sweetie, you can help by not saying anything to anyone about this. Nothing. You just go on to school like normal. Okay?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, feeling low, like I didn’t have a real mission.

  Daddy asked Jerome, “Do you have a lot of belongings with you?”

  Jerome shook his head. “Near ’bouts nothing, sir. We don’t got nothin’ ’cause Mr. Dunn didn’t give us no time to collect stuff. We grabbed up a few things, two pictures of Devin and some clothes.”

  “Jerome,” Daddy said, “I’m sorry. I really am. But we have to get y’all out of here. That’s what’s important right now.”