"The mule is already hitched and ready to go," Freeman told him, "but I ain't so sure 'bout you."
"I'm fine, Mr. First."
Freeman gave him another hard look, then stepped closer to him and sniffed. He smelled sweat and a dirty body, but no whiskey. "Then y'all better get goin' 'fore the sun gets too high. And I guess I better get you somethin' to eat and drink."
Tom sighed in gratitude, then spoke it; he hadn't eaten since the previous afternoon and had had nothing to drink but a root beer he'd stolen from the ice chest in the rooming house where the card game was held. He followed First Freeman around the house to the huge back yard where the mule and cart were standing ready to go. He noticed how neat and clean everything was, how close the grass was cut, how even the shed and barn were painted, how no weeds grew among the flowers. Freeman entered the back door of his house and emerged less than a minute later with at tin plate of fried chicken necks, grits, gravy and biscuits, and a gallon jug of water.
Jenks thanked him again and ate the food where he stood, returning the plate to Freeman. He then drank most of the water, wiped his mouth, and managed half a smile. "Thank you, sir. I'm ready to go now."
He walked the mule and cart out the back gate, down the alley, and around to the front of the house. Nellie was standing on the walk waiting for him. Her good-byes already said, she let Freeman lift her into the wagon seat. She bid Tom good morning, settled into the seat, opened her parasol, and prepared for the journey home, a trip as silent as yesterday's.
Tom thought long and hard about why he'd allowed himself to play cards with men he knew were better and smarter than himself, and no thought he had made any sense. Why hadn't he hired himself out to wash dishes or bus tables for the night? He'd have gotten a free meal, earned a few cents, and perhaps gotten a place to sleep for the night. Now I got nothing, he thought; I got less than I had when I left Carrie's Crossing. I'm going back there with less than I left with.
Nellie's thoughts were brighter, stronger, happier. She had good news to share with her family. She also was thinking that she owed her husband an apology for having been so hard to get along with. And now that she was certain that Eubie would be coming home, she also could be certain that she'd no longer succumb to the kind of sickness that frightened her family into calling Maisy Cooper, though she was grateful that they had.
The sun was high and hot, but they moved along at a good clip, not having to share the road with too many motorized vehicles this time of morning, though Nellie scrutinized every one that passed by, comparing its worthiness with that of Beau's truck and feeling a secret pleasure at knowing that her son could drive any vehicle on the road and do it better than most of those behind the wheels of the vehicles they saw. Then she saw a truck like Beau's and exclaimed, "My Beau's got a truck just like that one."
Startled from his thoughts, Tom said, "Ma'am?"
"That truck yonder. Beau's got one just like it."
"Beau's got a truck?"
Nellie nodded proudly. "He got it yesterday."
Beau Thatcher's got a truck, Tom thought, and money enough to pay me to drive his ma up and down the road, and I got nothing. Maybe I oughta go to work for First Freeman. It wasn't a pleasant thought; he didn't like the physical, back-breaking work of moving and hauling and loading and unloading. However, he liked even less having to walk from one side of town to the other for lack of a nickel to ride. If he could get a job working for Freeman, he could live again in Belle City and maybe, by driving around all day, he could luck up on a better kind of job.
"Hey! Hey, you, Boy!"
Tom snatched his mind back at the same time that Nellie Thatcher made a sound and put her hand on his arm, and he saw a white man standing in the middle of the road yelling and waving his arms. If I'd been driving a truck, I'd have hit him, Tom thought. As it was, a mule cart didn't run fast enough to hit a box turtle crossing the road. Tom pulled up on the reins, and the man walked to the side of the cart. He was red in the face and sweating profusely in the midday heat.
"I need to ride the rest of the way to Carrie's Crossing," the man said, even as he had a foot and a hand on the cart to climb in. Tom looked at Nellie, then toward the empty cart, but before he could say anything, the man said, "and I ain't ridin' in the back of some nigger mule wagon," and he pulled himself up next to Nellie.
"Get off my wagon," she said in such a cold, low tone that both Tom and the man were startled, then she shoved him and he tumbled on to the ground. "Drive, Tom," she said, hitting his arm. Tom drove, but a mule cart being slower than a box turtle, in a few moments the now angry, sweating white man was running beside them, and he had a gun.
"Stop!"
"Don't you stop, Tom Jenks. You best keeping driving."
Tom drove but it wasn't fast enough—almost but not quite. The white man, still running beside them and cussing a blue streak, reached out and grabbed Nellie's dress. The fabric ripped but the pull was sufficient to confuse the mule and it slowed, enough for the man to get a good hold on Nellie's arm. He pulled and as she tumbled from the cart, something flashed in her hand. Then the gun roared and the mule took off at something resembling a gallop. Tom wrestled with the reins to gain control of the cart and get it turned around. What he saw when he turned back hurt his eyes. "Oh no, oh no, oh no, OOOOH NOOOOO!"
The two bodies lay at the edge of the road, the white man with a knife in his chest and the Colored woman who had been Nellie Thatcher with a bullet hole in hers. "OH GOD NO!" Tom kicked the dead white man. "Look what you done, you dirty bastard! Look what you done!" He looked up and down the road as some measure of common sense returned to him; it wouldn't do for him to be found beside two dead bodies, one of them a white man. He half lifted Nellie and dragged her off the road and into the bush and arranged her ripped skirt neatly around her.
Then he ran back for the man and saw the mule headed toward home at a faster than normal pace, and he wasn't even angry; he didn't blame the mule; he wished he had a home to run to. He grabbed the white man by one foot and dragged him into the brush, taking no care how he landed as long as it was away from Nellie. The he saw the gun still in the man's hand and the gears in another part of his brain engaged: He could sell the gun in Belle City. He bent down and felt the man's pockets, retrieving a leather case which he could tell without opening it held money. The man's clothes were nothing special, and he'd been sweating and stinking like a pig, so Tom didn't want them; but his shoes. Tom looked at his own worn brogans and at the man's almost new ones and, after only a moment's hesitation, he dropped to the ground and exchanged the shoes.
Standing at the edge of the road, Tom considered his next move: Where should he go? Or more precisely, when should he head for Belle City? Now or wait until dark? His attention was drawn by heavy buzzing, and he looked toward a black cloud of flies on the road and realized that they'd discovered the pool of blood left by the bodies. He hurried over, unbuttoning his pants. A steady stream of urine not only discouraged the flies but washed away some of the blood. Not all of it, though. "I got to get away from here," Tom said to himself, and he stepped off the road into the woods and aimed himself back toward Belle City. He'd have the cover of the forest all the way to where the road forked at the country club. From there he could take the trolley car, and, thanks to a dead white man, he had the money to ride. That thought almost cooled him, for today was so hot that not even the tree canopy of the forest provided a respite from the blistering heat.
Jonas was thinking the exact same thought from his perch where he observed the doings of the Thatchers. His school was closed today, and he was hoping that Ruthie and Little Si would be free too. He hadn't seen them in so long that he almost forgot how they looked. He knew from Beau about the school and how "Ruthie's almost teaching the teacher," but he didn't know how much of that was fact and how much was a brother's pride in his sister, and there could be no doubt of the extent of the Thatcher siblings love for each other. It still made Jonas a bit envious. His sist
ers were marginally more tolerant of him, but he knew that was due to his position of prominence in his father's business, not to any intrinsic familial attachment to him. In fact, he sometimes felt closer to Beau Thatcher than to his sisters or brothers-in-law. His monthly meetings with Beau were the highlights of his very ordered life, for as much as he enjoyed being in the position—the much envied position in Carrie's Crossing—of running three businesses, of having money enough to buy a car, he preferred to listening to Beau talk about life in Belle City and, just recently and in very small bites, his European war experiences.
He was pulled from his reverie by a shout, and he saw Ruthie and Little Si's Uncle Will running toward the road waving his arms. Jonas stood up on the tree branch to get a better look. He saw a mule cart enter the yard—an empty mule cart, no one at the reins. Then he saw people running toward the cart: Big Si Thatcher, the two men who worked what was left of the farm, and then all the children from the school, and, finally, Little Si and Ruthie emerged, and Jonas's breath caught. She was even more beautiful than before...and...and...the man beside her…
Something was wrong. Jonas couldn't hear the words being shouted but he could hear the alarm in their voices. Then, suddenly, everybody was in motion. Big Si jumped into the cart and put it back out on the road as Little Si, Ruthie and the man with her took off running through the woods. The old man, Uncle Will, began walking up the road toward the Colored part of town. Then Jonas realized what was wrong. He didn't see their Ma. Something bad had happened to Miss Nellie, he could feel it. He hurriedly climbed down the tree and froze when he hit the ground. Now what? He walked a tight circle around the trunk of the tree, pausing now and then to peer futilely through the dense brush toward the house. He couldn't see anything from down here on the ground, which is why he'd been climbing the tree for so many years, so he stopped himself from pacing and peering and did what he did best: He thought. It was the return of the empty mule cart that got everybody all excited. Nellie Thatcher was nowhere to be seen, so maybe Nellie should have been the driver of the empty cart and if the cart returned without her, then that's what's wrong and no wonder they all were frantic. But where would Nellie Thatcher go in the wagon alone? He knew a lot about the family from watching them for so long and from his talks with Ruthie and Si, but he couldn't begin to answer that question. So, if he wanted to see what was happening at the Thatchers—and he did—he needed to be back up in the tree, so he climbed back up. Nobody was there. He told himself to wait and see what happened, to wait and see if they would need his help—would want his help—dealing with whatever the problem was, and he believed he knew what it was: Nellie Thatcher.
Uncle Will returned first, accompanied by a woman as old as himself, both of them moving faster than anybody their ages should have been able to move. The woman ran into the house, then back out again, as if she didn't believe Nellie wouldn't be in there. Uncle Will clearly was distraught and the woman worked hard to calm him, hugging and holding him, and once grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him like a child. He sat on one of the tree stump stools at the table and put his head down and she bent over him, caressing his head and back. Jonas watched them and, as he had so many times, wondered about them, for in truth, he didn't really know them and knew nothing about them, but he did know that everything he heard said about Colored people was not and could not be true, not based on what he'd seen from his tree. And who was this woman? Something about her was vaguely familiar to Jonas, yet he didn't think that he knew her.
He grew drowsy in the damp heat and dozed for a bit, though it couldn't have for very long because he wasn't stiff or cramped and he hadn't lost circulation to a limb when he was aroused by sound—the turning of cart wheels on a rutted road, not a paved one. Why hadn't he noticed this before, the fact that the paved road stopped where the Colored town began? The wagon came into view, Big Silas Thatcher at the reins, Ruthie seated next to him, Little Si, the man he didn't know, and the two field hands walking behind. And laid out in the back, the body of Nellie Thatcher, and Jonas knew that she was dead, for even at this distance, he could see the huge red stain in the middle of her, and he knew very well what the drying blood of a dead animal looked like. Uncle Will and the woman with him heard the wagon and started toward it. Then they stopped at the sight of the funeral procession, for that's what it was. They stared in horror and disbelief at the back of the cart. The silent stillness was oppressive. Then Big Si Thatcher, like a wind-up toy top, spun into action. Jumped down from the cart and bore down on the old woman. At first she shrank away, then she reached for him, grabbed him, held on to him with two hands, tried to embrace him, but he pushed her away and, stumbling backwards, she fell, and that's when everybody else moved. Little Si and Uncle Will hurried to help her up while Ruthie and the man with her both grabbed Big Si, and they had to struggle to hold him.
"Where is he, Maisy? Tell me!" Jonas heard the man bellow. The old woman was shaking her head and sobbing and still reaching out to him.
Jonas couldn't watch anymore. For the first time he felt that he was, in fact, spying on them. He climbed down and, without looking back, headed toward town; there was nothing he could do here, no help he could offer, and certainly he'd not be welcome in their midst; this was a time for family...family! Beau and Tobias needed to know, and know quickly, that their mother was dead and that was something he could do.
He ran like a deer through the woods, emerging, as Beau did, across the road from the back door of the bar, where he kept the car parked. He'd started parking there as protection as well as convenience for Beau, but right now, in this moment, it offered the same service to him as he could be en route to Belle City without anyone knowing he'd left. And as he bounced up and down on the rutted, unpaved road, he vowed that he'd say something to...somebody...in complaint. He could make the point—the legitimate point—that it was faster to reach the Belle City Road from the Colored Town Road than from the Carrie's Crossing Road. That would get the notice of the decision-makers, for almost everybody complained about the time it took to get to Belle City these days.
He turned on to the BC Road and instead of putting on some speed, he drove slowly. He thought about how quickly her family had returned with Nellie's body. Whatever happened to her had to have happened near the intersection of the two roads. He was guessing that Miss Nellie had been coming back from Belle City. He crawled along on the wrong side of the road so that he could get a good, close look at...hellfire and damnation! He swerved to avoid what looked like a puddle of blood, and parking on the right side of the road, he jumped out of his car and ran to the other side. Yes, it was blood, and just a few steps into the underbrush confirmed that this was where Nellie Thatcher had died. And it didn't require too active an imagination to guess that the man with the knife in his chest was her killer. He bent to get a good look at the man's face, then hurried back up the slope to the road and across to his car, wondering how fast he could get to Belle City. Then he wondered, once he got there, how long it would take to reach First Freeman on Ashby Street. Beau had drawn him a map, a perfectly designed series of lines and squares to which Jonas had added the names of streets and landmarks—like the country club at the junction of Carrie's Crossing Road and Belle City Road and its junction with Hunter Road, which would lead him straight through Belle City, from the downtown shopping district into the Colored part of town. Beau had told him that Mr. First knew about their business arrangement and that if anything should happen to him, he should tell this man—"Not my Ma and Pa—Mr. First!"
When he got to the Colored part of town, Jonas had no difficulty understanding why Si and Ruthie and Beau wanted to live here; if he were Colored, he would, too. He wished that he had the time to stop and stare, to understand what he was seeing: A street wider than his street in Carrie's Crossing with businesses on both sides, and nothing but Colored people. They were dressed in every possible way, from the obviously destitute to the just as obviously well-to-do, and they walked, pushed two-
wheel carts, rode mule or horse wagons and carts, and drove motorcars and trucks. He was looking at everything and everybody, but nobody seemed to notice him at all. It wouldn't have happened turned the other way 'round, he thought, and knew what would happen to a lone Colored man driving through the white section of town.
He saw Ashby Street and made his turn, then slowed almost immediately as he saw the number, then the house. It was small and painted white with green trim and a short, white picket fence surrounded the neat yard. He opened the gate and was following a brick walkway to the front door when he was stopped by shouted words.
"If you lookin' for Mr. First, you oughta know he ain't in the house."
Jonas looked toward the voice, but he didn't see anyone. "Where is he?"
A man stepped from behind a thick hedge in the next yard. He was old and bent. He wore a wide-brimmed straw hat and held a scythe. "He's in the back, where he oughta be."
"Thank you," Jonas said and changed direction, following the brick walkway around the side of the house to the back yard. He saw immediately why Mr. First "oughta be" there: Three men were unloading carts of items, carrying some into a huge shed, lining others up in the yard to be inspected by another old man wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat. The three workers stared at Jonas, stopping their work, and the old man turned, saw him, and headed his way.
"Mr. First?"
"Who're you?"
Belle City Page 17