Two of the women walked through the front door just as if they lived there. I stooped down and looked under the house to see what the kids were doing, and I saw three or four of them hopping around like rabbits on four feet. Just then the screen door on the front porch slammed shut, and I looked up and saw one of the women run down the steps with something tucked in her arms. She went straight to one of the wagons, put something inside, and ran back to the house again.
I ran around to the backyard right away. The men were looking in the woodshed, in the stable; and everywhere else they could. Some of them were turning over boards and sticks of wood as if they were looking for something. While I was watching them, Handsome came leaping out the kitchen door with one of the long-skirted women behind. He ran straight to the woodshed and got inside.
“Now, let’s just take it calm and easy,” Pa said to one of the men wearing a vest. “I want to make some swaps as much as anybody, but I can’t think what I’m doing if I’m rushed. Let’s just take it easy and talk things over.”
Nobody paid any attention to what my old man said, because everyone was busy looking at things and dashing about. One of the men went to the woodshed and stepped inside. Handsome came out as fast as he could.
Just then I heard Ma scream at the top of her voice inside the house. She had been taking a nap, and it sounded as if the women had waked her up out of her sleep and scared her. It wasn’t long until Ma came tearing out of the house.
“What’s going on, Morris?” Ma said. “Who are all these strange people, anyway? I was sound asleep when I woke up and saw two women I’d never laid eyes on before in all my life. They were taking the sheets off the bed!”
“Now, just be calm, Martha,” Pa said. “I’ll have things straightened out in no time. I’ll fix things right in a jiffy.”
“But who on earth are these strange people?” Ma said.
“They’re just some gypsies I met downtown who said they wanted to make some swaps with me. I invited them to come up where we could talk things over. There’s a lot of odds and ends about the place that have needed swapping for a long time. I’ll be glad to get them out of the way.”
Two of the women came out of the house and went up to Ma. Ma backed off, but they pinned her in a corner and started talking so fast nobody could understand what they were saying. One of them began to dance up and down and wave her arms. Then one of the men came to the porch and told Ma the women wanted to swap her for her dress. Ma told them she didn’t want to swap her dress, but the women didn’t pay her any heed at all.
The kids that had been crawling around under the house came out with my baseball bat and a fielder’s glove and raced around the corner of the porch toward the wagons. I started after them, but when I got to the corner, I decided I’d better not try to stop them just then. I called Handsome and told him what they had taken, but he said it would be better not to argue with them. Some of the kids were bigger than either of us, anyway.
“Now, wait a minute, folks,” Pa said, trying to grab the men by the back of their vests. Let’s quiet down and talk these swaps over. I want to know what I’m going to get for the things I trade you.”
“Morris!” Ma yelled. “Get these people away from here! Do you hear me, Morris!”
Pa was so busy trying to calm them down that he didn’t hear a word Ma said. He went to the woodshed and brought out an old ax with a broken handle. One of the men took the ax and looked it over carefully. Then he handed it to another man. The other man hurried out to the wagons with it.
“Now, hold on here!” Pa said. “This ain’t no way to swap. I don’t seem to be getting nothing at all for my end of the deal. That ain’t a fair way to swap. No, sir, it ain’t!”
Another gypsy picked up an old tin bucket with a hole in the bottom while Pa was talking, and he handed it to another gypsy who carried it out to the wagons. Pa grabbed one of the gypsies by the back of his vest and tried to argue about the ax and the bucket. While he was doing that, another one of them went into the woodshed and carried out our saw-horse. Pa saw our saw-horse going towards the wagons, but it was gone before he could grab it.
“A swap’s a swap,” my old man said, “but not when it’s as one-sided as this. You folks have been getting your share, but I ain’t got a single thing for mine.”
One of the gypsies came over and put his hand in his pocket and brought out a jack knife. Pa tried to open it to look at it, but both blades were broken off.
“Now, hold on,” Pa said. “I didn’t bargain for nothing like this.”
The men climbed up in the woodshed loft where Handsome slept at night, and Pa started up behind them, still trying to make them listen to him.
The gypsy women were plaguing Ma until she was almost out of her mind. They had gone inside and had brought out Ma’s sewing basket, a hairbrush, and the water pitcher from the washstand. Ma was trying to take the things away from the women, but they wouldn’t turn loose. One of the gypsies handed Ma a string of beads, and the others made off with the pitcher, the brush, and the sewing basket.
One of the men climbed down from the loft carrying Handsome’s banjo under his arm. Handsome let out a yell and grabbed the banjo before the gypsy could make off with it.
“Morris!” Ma yelled. “Get these people away from here! Do you hear me, Morris! They’re going to ransack the whole place!”
One of the gypsy women grabbed Ma’s hand and looked at the palm. She began telling Ma things about her future, and ma got so interested in what she was saying that she didn’t yell any more right away. While the woman was reading Ma’s palm, the others went inside the house.
Pa was so rattled by then that he didn’t see one of the men lead Ida out of the stable. The man had put a halter around Ida’s neck and she followed him just as though she didn’t know a thing was wrong.
“There goes Ida, Pa!” I yelled. “Pa, don’t swap off Ida!”
Ma heard me and she let out a yell.
“Morris Stroup!” she said. “Are you clear out of your head! Don’t you dare let that mule out of this yard!”
Pa turned around and saw Ida walking off, and he looked as if he was so distracted he didn’t know what to do. Handsome grabbed the halter line and pulled Ida away from the gypsy.
“No, sir!” Handsome said. “Ain’t nobody going to take this here mule!”
“Now, you folks just ain’t acting fair and square,” Pa said. “I’m in a good frame of mind to make trades, as long as it’s pure give-and-take, but I ain’t going to stand for such one-sided going on. I’m going to have my say-so about what’s traded for what.”
Handsome led Ida back to the stable and locked the door.
Some of the kids dashed out of the kitchen with biscuits and baked sweet potatoes that had been left over from dinner. Ma saw them, but she was so mad she couldn’t say a word. One of the gypsy women put the string of beads around Ma’s neck, and the others tried to take off her shoes. Ma kicked like a mule when they tried to make off with her shoes. Handsome yelled at me, and I turned around. The gypsy kids were crawling out from under the porch carrying the steamshovel we built railroads with under the house. But that wasn’t all. One of them had all the engines and cars. The first thing I knew Handsome had grabbed the kids and had taken the things away from them. He gave the kids a shove that sent them flying around the corner of the house.
“They sure got mixed up when they thought they could get away with these,” Handsome said hugging the steamshovel and train in his arms.
Just then another gypsy woman, one that we had never seen before, came walking into the yard. She looked like all the rest of them, except that she had on a long bright red dress and a lot of bracelets on her arms. The other gypsies all fell back when she walked up to Pa, and all the arguing stopped right away.
“Who’re you?” Pa asked, looking her up and down.
“I’m the Queen,” she said.
The Queen picked up Pa’s hand and looked at the palm. Pa backed up
against the stable door while she ran her fingers over his hand as if she was trying to find out something.
“You have a good hand,” she said. “You have a strong life line. There is a good future ahead of you. You are a lucky man.”
Pa laughed a little and looked around to see if anybody else had heard what she said. All the other gypsies were backing away towards the wagons. The women on the porch left, too. They went through the house towards the front door, but Ma followed them to make sure they didn’t touch anything else on the way.
While Pa was thinking about what the Queen had told him, she took him by the arm and led him inside the woodshed. They went in and closed the door.
Handsome went around to the front to make sure the gypsy kids didn’t try to come back and take something else from under the house. I could hear Ma walking around inside as if she was looking to see what was and what wasn’t missing. I was standing by the bedroom window when Ma leaned out.
“William!” she said. “Go get your Pa this instant! The sheriff is going to hear about this! I’ll have those gypsies arrested if it’s the last thing I do! I’ve already missed your Grandpa’s picture from over the mantelpiece, and I can’t find my best Sunday dress that was hanging in the closet! Goodness knows what else is missing! Go get your Pa this instant! He’s got to notify the sheriff before it’s too late!”
I went around to the woodshed where the Queen and my old man were, and when I tried to open the door, it was locked, I started to call Pa, but just then I heard him giggle as if he was being tickled. In a minute the Queen began to giggle, too. Both of them were giggling and saying something I couldn’t hear. I went back to the window where Ma was.
“Pa’s in the woodshed,” I said, “but he didn’t hear me.”
“What’s he doin in the woodshed?” Ma asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He and the gypsy woman who said she is the Queen are both in there.”
“Then call your Pa out of there this instant,” Ma said. “There’s no telling what he’s up to.”
I went back to the Woodshed door and listened. I couldn’t hear a single sound, but when I tried to open it, it was still locked. I waited a little while and then called my old man.
“Ma wants you right away, Pa,” I said. “You’d better come.”
“Go away, son,” Pa said. “Don’t bother me now.”
I went back to tell Ma, but when I got to the window she had left. On the way back to the woodshed, I heard Ma come tearing out of the house. She came as far as the back porch.
“Morris Stroup!” she yelled. “You answer me this instant!”
There wasn’t a sound anywhere for a long time, and then I heard the lock on the woodshed door rattle. In a minute or two the Queen stepped out. She took a good look at Ma, and then she hurried around the corner of the house towards the teams and wagons. As soon as she got there, all the men whipped up the horses, and the wagons rattled down the street out of sight.
I looked around, and there was my old man peeping through a crack in the woodshed door. Ma saw him, too, and she hurried across the yard and jerked the door open. My old man was standing there with only his underwear on, and he looked like he didn’t know what to do.
“Morris!” Ma yelled. “What on earth!”
Pa tried to duck behind the door, but Ma caught him and pulled him back where she could get a good look at him.
“What does this mean?” Ma said. “Answer me, Morris Stroup!”
Pa hemmed and hawed for a while, trying to think of something to say.
“The Queen told me my fortune,” he said, cutting his eyes around to see how Ma was acting.
“Fortune, my foot!” Ma said.
Ma turned around.
“William,” she said, “go inside the house and pull down all the window shades and shut the doors. I want you to stay there until I call you.”
“It really wasn’t much to get excited about, Martha,” Pa said, standing first on one foot and then on the other. “The Queen—”
“Shut up!” Ma said. “Where are your clothes?”
“I reckon she made off with them,” Pa said, looking around the shed, “but I got the best of the deal.”
Ma turned and motioned me toward the house. I started off, backing as slow as I could.
“While she wasn’t noticing,” Pa said, “I got hold of this.”
He held up a watch in a gold case. It had a long gold chain, and it looked as if it were brand-new.
“A watch like this is worth a lot of money,” Pa said. “I figure it’s worth a lot more than my old overalls and jumper, and anything else they carried off. The old ax wasn’t worth anything, and that old bucket with the hole in the bottom wasn’t, either.”
Ma took the watch from Pa and looked at it. Then she closed the door and locked it on the outside. After she had gone into the house, I went back to the woodshed and looked through a crack. My old man was sitting on a pile of wood in his underwear untying a yellow ribbon that had been tied in a hard knot around a big roll of greenbacks.
VIII. The Time Handsome Brown Ran Away
HANDSOME WAS IN AND OUT of the house all morning, scrubbing the floor and splitting fat-pine lighters and sweeping the yard with the sedge broom, but we didn’t miss him until just before dinnertime when my old man went out on the back porch to tell him to take two eggs from the hen nests and to go down to Mr. Charlie Thigpen’s store and swap them for a sack of smoking tobacco. Pa called him four or five times, but Handsome didn’t answer even the last time Pa called. Pa thought he was hiding in the shed, the way he had a habit of doing, so he wouldn’t have to come out and do some kind of work, but after looking in all of Handsome’s hiding places, Pa said he couldn’t be found anywhere. Ma started in right away blaming my old man for being the cause of Handsome’s leaving. She said that Handsome would never have gone off if Pa had treated him halfway decent and hadn’t always been cheating Handsome out of what rightfully belonged to him just because he was an orphan colored boy and scared to speak up for his rights. My old man, Handsome and me played marbles sometimes, and Pa was always fudging on Handsome and breaking up the game by taking all his marbles away from him even when we weren’t playing for keeps.
“Anything might happen to that poor innocent colored boy when he gets out in the cruel world,” Ma said. “If he hadn’t been driven to it, he’d have never left the good home I tried to provide for him here.”
“Handsome didn’t have the right to run off like he done,” my old man said. “It oughtn’t to matter how much he was provoked and, besides, it ought to be against the law for a darkey just to pick up and go without a by-your-leave. He might have owed me some money.”
“What did you do to Handsome this morning that would’ve made him run off?” Ma asked him.
“Nothing,” Pa said. “Anyway, I can’t think of nothing out of the ordinary.”
“You done something,” Ma said, getting angry and moving towards my old man. “Now, you tell me what it was, Morris Stroup!”
“Well, Martha,” Pa said, “any number of things might have peeved Handsome and made him run off. I declare, I just can’t think of everything.”
“You stand there and think, Morris Stroup!” she said. “Handsome Brown would never have gone away like this if you hadn’t caused it.”
“Well, I did sort of borrow his banjo,” he said slowly. “I asked him to lend it to me for a while, but he wouldn’t do it, so I went up in the loft where he keeps it in the shed and took it down.”
“Where’s Handsome’s banjo now?” she asked.
“That’s something I can’t say truthfully, Martha,” he answered, standing first on one foot and then on the other. “I was walking along the street downtown last night with it under my arm and a strange colored fellow I never saw before in my life asked me how much I’d take for it. I told him a dollar, because I sort of halfway didn’t expect him to have a dollar but, sure enough, he had the money right in his pocket, and so I c
ouldn’t honestly back out of the deal since I’d come right out and named the price.”
“You go find the darkey you sold Handsome’s banjo to and get it back,” Ma said.
“I couldn’t do that,” Pa said right away.
“Why couldn’t you?” she asked him.
“How in the world am I to know what darkey it was I sold it to?” he said. “It was pitch-black on the street, and I couldn’t begin to see the darkey’s face. I wouldn’t know him now from a million other colored people.”
Ma was so mad by that time that it was all she could do to keep from picking up the broom and hitting my old man with it. I guess she didn’t want me standing around listening to what she was saying to my old man, because she turned around and called me.
“William,” she said, “go downtown right away and start asking people if any of them has seen Handsome Brown. He couldn’t have been swallowed up in a hole in the ground. Somebody surely has seen him,”
“All right, Ma,” I told her. “I’ll go.”
I ran down the street, leaving Ma and my old man standing on the back porch staring at each other, and went as fast as I could to the ice house where Handsome sometimes went on a hot day to cool off on the wet sawdust. When I got there, I asked Mr. Harry Thompson, who owned the ice house, if he had seen Handsome, but Mr. Thompson said he hadn’t seen him in two or three days. I was about to leave and go down to the back door of Mrs. Calhoun’s fish market where Handsome went sometimes to get one of the mullets that were too small to sell, when one of the Negro boys who sawed ice for Mr. Thompson told me that Handsome had gone up the street about an hour before to where the carnival had put up the show tents that morning. Everybody knew the carnival was coming to town, and that was why my old man had sold Handsome’s banjo for a dollar. I had heard him try to borrow fifty cents from Handsome, but Handsome didn’t have any money, and Pa had decided right then and there that the only way he could get enough money to go to the carnival was to sell the banjo. Pa had spent the dollar before he got home with it, though.
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