Post Facto

by Darryl Wimberley

“Why, Hiram. You woan a Coke? Mebbe some peanuts?”

  “Not why I’m here, Butch.”

  “But you woan one?”

  “Coke then. Give me a Coke.”

  “Can or bottle?”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  Butch paused a long moment to work out the distinction.

  “Seventeen cents.”

  “Pardon?”

  “The diff’rence between can or bottle? Be seventeen cents.”

  Hiram wadded a dollar bill from his wallet onto the long icebox that chills Butch’s soft drinks.

  “Gimme a can.”

  Butch pulled one from the cooler and produced a church key from his apron to pop the top.

  “Here you are, sir. I get you change.”

  “Keep it, Butch.”

  “You sure, Hiram?”

  “Keep it.”

  “Why, thass . . . Awful nice. You . . . You awright, Hiram? An’ Roscoe?”

  “We’re good. Couldn’t be better.”

  “Mmm hmmm.”

  Butch smiling perplexed beneath the long bib of his cap. Hiram half bent over with a can of Coca-Cola sweating in his fist.

  “Actually, Butch, I came here to make you an offer. A damn good offer.”

  “Offer?”

  “Money, Butch. A pile of money.”

  “Oh, you don’ need to do that. Old Butch, why, he fine. Doin’ just fine, yes he is.”

  “I can help you do better.”

  “Naw, I’m good.”

  “Butch I mean to buy your store.”

  “Buy it?”

  “Hard cash. You name a figure.”

  “But . . .”

  Butch runs his hands from his cap to his belt. Over the narrow ledge of the icy footlocker that chills his sodas.

  “I cain’t sell my store, Hiram. This here’s all I got.”

  “Yeah, but if I paid you—”

  “Naw. Huh uh.” Butch shakes his head. “Ole Butch need his store.”

  Hiram crushed the Coke can in his hands.

  Soda now fizzing onto the icebox, a brown carbonated stain.

  “You fuckin’ idiot, I got to have this property, you understand? I have to get this half-acre plot, Butch!”

  “But you daddy, he gave me the land, Hiram. You know that.”

  “I’m not askin’ you to give it back, dammit. I’m not askin’ you to give it to me at all; I’m willing to pay! All I need’s the land. Hell, you can move the store. Move it down the block. I’ll even help with that.”

  Butch shook his head.

  “Chirren cain’t go down the street. They cain’t leave the playground; Principal Wilburn won’t let ’em.”

  “Fuck Wilburn, this is me you’re talking to, Butch. Me! I’m the one shared a table with you! Took you in when you didn’t have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of!”

  Butch’s hands now shaking on the lid of his cooler.

  “I had a house. Mama said ya’ll took it.”

  “You and your Mama! Look. All I’m askin’ is that you sell me your lot. I don’t wanta take it from you, Butch. I’m offering to buy it. I’ll give you more for this half acre than you can make in ten years of sodas and PayDays.”

  “But then I wouldn’t be here.”

  “ ‘ Be here’? Be here for what?”

  “Why, for them. When they come back.”

  Butch turned to pull a candy wrapper from a stack near the cooler.

  Smoothing out the wrapper on the icebox lid.

  Scanning for some cipher, some sign.

  “Is awl here. Right cheer.”

  “God damn it!” Hiram slammed the lid closed on the ice chest.

  “You know, Butch, I didn’t wanta do this! I really didn’t. But people are talking about you. You and these children? They’re talking. And about Jenny too. Jenny O’Steen? You know Jenny?”

  For the first time Butch raised his head to meet Hiram eye to eye.

  “How’s Jenny? How she doin’?”

  “What I hear people think maybe you did somethin’ to her. What about that, Butch? You found her right by herself.”

  “No! No, they was another girl there! Little Mexican girl.”

  “You give her somethin’, too, Butch? You like givin’ sweets to little girls!”

  Butch smiled impassively.

  “I brung Jenny a Pepsi Cola. Did’n take no money, neither. An’ now she ain’t sick no more.”

  “You’re the sick one, Butch, what I hear. And there’s no way they’re gonna let a man likes little girls stay this close to the school. Just stands to reason. They’ll take the store, Butch. Just flat take it away from you and when they do you’ll lose everything. Lose it outright! And you won’t have a goddamn dime to show for it!

  “Better sell it to me. Right away, before they take it. Sell it to me and I’ll move you downtown. It’ll be all right.”

  Butch now cradling the candy wrapper as though it were a Torah.

  “Jenny saw him, but I awready knew.”

  The stain on Hiram’s face glowed like an ingot in a furnace but Butch is impervious to those signs.

  “I been waitin’, Lord!” Butch exclaimed. “A long time waitin’. But little Jenny, she saw ’im first. Eyes of a child. Right behind ole’ Butch’s store.”

  Butch’s own eyes now damp and bright.

  “I knew he’d come. Knew it all along.”

  “What the fuck are you talkin’ about?”

  “It’s all here.” Butch displayed the wrapper’s bar code. “It’s all here, but ole Butch, he can’t read it. Not yet.”

  “You need help, Butch.”

  “I got to stay. I got to be here when they come.”

  “You’ll be here, all right. And it’ll either be the sheriff or the men in white coats comes and takes your ass, but either way you’re losing this store, Butch! One way or the other! Take the money, Butch. Take the money, you moron!”

  Butch shook his head.

  “I doan won’t yer money.”

  Hiram grabbed Butch by the throat.

  “YOU FUCKING MORON.”

  “You . . . ! You hurtin’ me, Hiram!”

  “Think you’re hurtin’ now?!”

  “Hiram, you—! Lemme go!”

  “Remember what happened to your daddy? Your whore mama? It can happen to you too, Butch!”

  Hiram dragged Butch away from the flimsy shelves . . . “SON OF A BITCH!”

  . . . and slammed his foster brother into a wall stacked floor to ceiling with candy and snacks. A shower of inventory collapsed to the floor, Butch McCray now gulping for air like a guppy in mounds of Doritos and M&Ms and PayDay candy bars.

  Hiram stalking back out to the street.

  Snarling over his shoulder.

  “Not gonna ask you twice, Butch! Fuckin’ retard, you hear me? I AIN’T ASKIN’ TWICE!” '

  ON THE very day that Hiram Lamb took out his fury and frustration on Butch McCray, his younger and unsanitary brother was pushing a cadre of Latinos on a stand of slash pine. The younger Lamb brother had planted this particular grid of slash pine only five or six years earlier on his own section of land. The trees were not mature enough to cut for pulp, but that didn’t mean they weren’t profitable. You can always sell straw. However, the day’s harvest was delayed by weather. An October cold front triggered thunderstorms, which struck unusually early in the day, thunder breaking with enormous bolts of lightning that left the atmosphere with a taste of iron. By midday the storms were depleted, and an unseasonably warm sun broke through to raise a humid and stifling vapor. Roscoe Lamb pulled the sleeve of his shirt across his forehead as he received a progress report from the jefe on site.

  “Three trailers, full,” the foreman apprised the owner of the day’s progress. “Rain slowed us some, but we should maybe get two more trailers by sundown.”

  That would be five tractor trailers stacked top to bottom with bales of straw.

  People never cease to be amazed that you can m
ake money off the adult leaves of pine trees. Through the sixties and seventies, the number-one crop in the county was tobacco, followed by hay and watermelons. Chicken houses were big for a while, industrialized sheds hundreds of yards long pumping feed and antibiotics into tens of thousands of chicks. No longer. The chicken houses are mostly idle or razed and land that once yielded nicotine, grass, and melons has been harrowed to make way for endless tracts of hybrid pine, the fallen needles of which are harvested for sale to nurseries, contractors, and road crews.

  It takes nine or ten years for a stand of slash pine to mature enough to be harvested for pulp, but you can rake straw year in and out and, if you keep labor costs depressed, you can make a fair profit. There are a surprising variety of uses to which pine needles can be put, but they are mostly sold for erosion control and mulch. Straw is light in weight and attractive, a cheap hedge against assaults of wind or rain. A bed of needles insulates exposed soil from extremes of heat or cold, and a mulch of straw reduces the evaporation of water from unshaded ground.

  You see pine straw piled beneath shrubbery bunting private homes and office buildings everywhere, and contractors purchase baled straw by the ton to prevent erosion along thousands of miles of roads and highways. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and Roscoe Lamb has a near monopoly on local supply, his profits measurably enhanced by a cheap and docile source of labor.

  It takes people to harvest straw. You can’t mechanize the process; the rows between trees are too narrow for any wheeled machine or similar contraption which means you have to recruit human beings to gather the fallen needles. But where to find the workers? You’d never see Roscoe’s nephews raking straw into a baler. Trent Lamb never bent his tall, golden frame over a bale of straw, and neither did his dark-haired brother. In fact, you couldn’t get any local cracker, young or old, to hunch over a rake and baler for ten hours a day.

  Certainly not for twenty-five cents a bale.

  Luckily for Roscoe, the county has an undocumented pool to replace the absent hands of native borns. And the jefe with whom Roscoe contracts pays his hands by the piece, which relieves Lamb of any responsibility for payroll taxes or social security numbers, not to mention pensions, Porta-Potties, or fresh water.

  Raul Herrera and Edgar Uribe were used to these sorts of arrangements. “Big Papi” and his much smaller amigo had labored side by side with their parents and extended families to pick grapes in California and beets in Colorado, migrating with the seasons to harvest vegetables and fruit all over the country. Migrants find work where mechanization is either impractical or impossible, where there is no substitute for legs, limbs, and hands. Tobacco, for example, is planted one seedling at a time, suckered one stalk at a time, cropped by hand, and bagged with little to no mechanized assistance. Almost any fruit that grows on a tree requires hand labor. Cherries and peppers are still picked by hand. Machines can sometimes assist, but someone with a strong back still has to heft a forty-pound watermelon onto a conveyor’s mechanized belt.

  It’s always tedious, mind-numbing work.

  Raking straw is certainly a backbreaking job, and conditions in the field are deplorable. There are no latrines among the pines. No privacy. There are no cooling stations or refreshment. Often the only water available is what workers lug in themselves, and there are no medics. You sprain an ankle or break a leg, somebody had better be nearby to run for help. Rattlesnakes thrive among the pulpwood trees, and anyone who has raked straw has either seen or suffered heatstroke and dehydration.

  Added to these miseries is a unique sensation of isolation more subtle than thirst or ache or outright poison. It starts with a sense of disorientation. Once inside the endless rows of trees, all sense of direction evaporates. There is no horizon. No sky. You can’t tell if you’re a half mile into the grid or twenty yards from the fence. Workers often report a sense of claustrophobia, dread, or even blind panic. Not easy to calm a man running blind in the pines. Veteran workers familiar with these and other hazards always work in pairs, blazing trails to mark their way, and mothers tie bells onto the waists of impúbero prone to wander.

  This partly explains why Edgar Uribe’s sighting was so easily discounted. You can be forty feet from a neighbor and be invisible, but even if the young Latino had been able to produce a dozen witnesses to vouch for the vision he recounted, it would not have brought a dime’s worth of credence to his description. This boy was a Mexican, after all. Undocumented. Illegal. Prob’ly half-stoked on dope.

  Roscoe liked to say that if a wetback told him the sun was going to rise in the east, he’d fire him for lying.

  People trust messengers before messages, and the tendency to locate belief in persons rather than facts spans all ages and all beliefs, modern-day ditto-heads no less enslaved to their prophets than zealots on the right and left. If you hold that our planet’s climate is warming at a rate largely determined by human activity, chances are you’re basing that belief on a yen for Robert Redford or a trust in scientists rather than on your familiarity with fluid dynamics, cloud formation, or geology. On the other hand, no scientist is likely to convince a person who admires Rush Limbaugh or Reverend Robertson that God’s creation can be unhinged over so flimsy an insult as carbon dioxide.

  Edgar Uribe’s alleged encounter was not amenable to any sort of rational discussion.

  Edgar is the slightest built of the Hispanic teenagers, you may recall, a young man, with an artistic bent, afflicted from childhood with polio. Imagine a slender teenager in a plaid shirt with a knife, twine, and rake limping between tall rows of pine trees. Dragging a baler alongside. A straw baler looks a lot like an outsized dustbin, its forming box maybe a couple of feet wide and a foot and a half deep into which the straw is loaded. A long lever activates the press which compresses the straw into a standardized bale.

  Edgar was paired with Raul Herrera that morning, that kid as huge and smooth as a sumo wrestler. The earlier storm left the boys soaked to the bone and freezing, but by midday they struggled to pick up the pace of their labor in a virtual sauna. There was no water. The boys had long before emptied the Gatorade bottle which was their water jug. Hector struck off on a quest to refill that modest canteen, leaving Edgar queasy, thirsty, and alone.

  The account to follow is qualified by Edgar’s frank admission that at the moment the vision presented, he was dizzy and nauseous.

  “We did not eat so good that morning, and I was thirsty,” the boy volunteered candidly. “When Hector went for water,I put down my rake and sat beside a tree. That’s when I saw her—the lady. She was beautiful. She float in the air like a hummingbird. Her hair long and shiny like silver. And there was like a light around her head—a halo. So warm! It fill me inside like honey.”

  Did she speak to you? the boy was asked.

  Did she say anything?

  Do anything?

  “She smile to me,” he replied. “An’ she say, ‘Edgar, I see you care for your sister, which pleases me. But try to be kind as well as brave, muchacho. Forgive those who trespass against you.’ And then she say, ‘I see you are thirsty. Here. Drink this.’”

  A drink? She gave you something to drink?

  Which connects to the only portion of Edgar’s tale that is corroborated because when Raul Herrera returned with his newly filled jug, he found his compadre reclined against the rough bark of a pine tree with a glass of ice-cold water beading in his hand.

  Both boys swore they’d brought nothing beside the Gatorade bottle to the worksite, and certainly no ice.

  “We din bring nothing.” Raul confirmed Edgar in this detail. “Nada.”

  Edgar had no doubt that his drinking vessel was a gift from the Virgin Mary, but on examination it proved to be an ordinary tumbler, the sort of thing you can get at the Dollar Store for fifty cents.

  Too cheap for divine provenance.

  “Boy was dehydrated.”

  Sheriff Buchanan put the most logical gloss on the tale.

  “It’s hotter than a June b
ride in a feather bed out here. Boy prob’ly was overheated and low on fluids. I been bear-caught myself, and I tell you what, you get behind the bear you can see some pretty squirrely shit.”

  So Edgar Uribe got behind on electrolytes and overheated. Bear-caught, as locals describe the condition. That made more sense than visits from the mother of Jesus. There was, however, one other talisman not so easily dismissed.

  Colt Buchanan and I followed Roscoe Lamb to the place where Edgar reported his heavenly encounter. What we found at the tree where the kid located his vision was a circle burned into the straw, a scorch of some unnatural flame that left a jet-black marker like a brand in the earth.

  Roscoe was dead certain that his two field hands got bored or pissed off and set a fire.

  “Fucking wetbacks. Got nuthin’ better to do, they set a fire to my trees!”

  “Nope.” Sheriff Buchanan’s reply was characteristically laconic. “That’s not it.”

  “What was it then?”

  Colt took a knee to place his hand on the charred boundary.

  “Look here, Clara Sue.”

  I squatted beside our native sheriff.

  “Remind you of anything?”

  “Pickett Lake,” I grunted to affirm. “This isn’t as elaborate, but, yes, it reminds me.”

  “You been out to the lake? I mean, since you and me was there?”

  “No, Sheriff, I haven’t.”

  “I have. Couple times. Damnedest thing, that marker we saw? That circle or whatever it was?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “It’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Not a trace. Like the wind blew it away.”

  “You get a sample to Sheryl Lee?”

  “Yep, and you were right. It was tar. Just like ordinary roofing tar.”

  “I was just guessing.”

  Roscoe’s stamping around clueless to our conversation. Wringing his hands on a Garth Brooks T-shirt like it was a washrag.

  “The got-damn hell are ya’ll talkin’ about?”

  Colt rose to his feet, and I followed suit.

  “Boy got hisself bear-caught, Roscoe. He didn’t do anything untoward. And this here burn around your tree? It’s just lightning.”

  “The fuck you say.”