The Rock Hole

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  She looked through the screen door and managed a grin. “Looky yonder who’s comin’.”

  Cody slammed the El Camino’s door and stomped the dirt off his shoes on the porch. We hadn’t seen him since the night of the murders.

  Miss Becky held the screen door open. “Come in this house. How can you look so purty this morning after being up all night?”

  “I’m naturally beautiful, I guess. How’d you know I was up all night?”

  “Cause you smell like cigarette smoke and whiskey.”

  “Glad that’s all.”

  Miss Becky gave him a slap on the shoulder and pointed at the table. “You devil, you. Been to breakfast yet?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, set down and I’ll fix you something to eat.”

  With his curly hair and tilted back hat, I once again wished I could grow up to look like Cody. Pepper almost danced around the table to hug his neck. He loved on her a minute and took Grandpa Ned’s place at the head of the table.

  “You want some coffee?” Pepper asked. I couldn’t believe she was serving him. Mark ducked his head and grinned at his plate.

  “Sure.” Cody slid his cup toward her.

  She carefully poured coffee into a thick mug. Miss Becky fried him a couple of eggs. Cody crumbled a biscuit on top of the yolk and mashed the whole mess together.

  While he ate, I noticed his eyes kept flicking back to Mark. “You ready to get a civilized haircut?”

  Mark shrugged his shoulders. “I’ve never had short hair. We never had no money for haircuts.”

  “Well, when it’s cut people won’t think you’re a girl anymore.”

  “I know a couple of fellers I tangled with can tell you I ain’t no girl.”

  Mark knew he was being kidded, but his long hair was starting to get on people’s nerves. Men and boys wore Boy’s Regular cuts even though a few of the local outlaws let their hair grow longer to slick back on the sides with H.A. or Brylcreem.

  Cody stuffed the last bite into his mouth and stood up. “Come on, kids. Miss Becky, that was the best breakfast I’ve had all morning.”

  “That oughta hold you ’til dinner.”

  “We’ll be back pretty quick. I want some of those snap beans I’m smelling.”

  “Y’all get out of here.” She shooed us toward the door with a dish towel and turned back to her stove. “You kids stay close to your Uncle Cody.”

  None of us answered. Pepper jumped into the front seat and slammed the lock down with her palm. She stuck her tongue at us through the open window and made us stand outside until Cody unlocked the driver’s door with his key. She pulled up on the other latch and I scrunched up against her. Mark got in last and smashed against the door. We couldn’t have all fit in the seat if we’d been adults, and as it was, Pepper was almost under Cody’s arm.

  On Saturdays Uncle Arthur cut hair on the front porch of his house up on the hill not far from the cotton gin. It was funny, him being a barber and all, because he had the worst hair of anybody in Center Springs. Miss Becky always figured he cut it himself by looking into a mirror and I think she may have been right.

  The morning chill was almost gone by the time we got there. Half a dozen men were loafing around the sunny porch when we arrived. I was startled to see two waiting customers with guns on their belts. A worn lever action Winchester that belonged to Uncle Arthur leaned against a porch post. Though guns were common, it was a shock to see so many armed men in one place who weren’t hunting. It seemed like everyone was nervous about the killings.

  Every eye flicked to Mark’s long hair the moment we arrived. They all knew the story behind the Indian boy with us.

  Cody shook hands all around. “Mornin’, men. This looks like the safest place in town.”

  They chuckled. Roland Roach, the game warden, waved his hand at the group. “It’s a sign of the times, Cody.”

  Uncle Arthur snipped his scissors in the air behind the hand-me-down barber chair on his porch. He frowned at the unruly head in front of him and changed the subject. “I’ll be with y’all in a little while. Howdy, Top, I heard you was living here now.”

  Uncle Arthur always scared me a little. I could see him snipping off an ear and then saying, “Sorry, boy. Here put this in your pocket and Miss Becky will sew it on when you get back home.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You ain’t growed much since I last saw you. You need to eat another biscuit.”

  “I’m trying.” For a moment I wished for a regular barbershop with two or three dozen outdoor magazines that I could bury my head in to escape their attention. Instead, I sat on the edge of the high porch and thought about wandering off around the house to find something to do until they quit noticing me. But I didn’t want to miss Mark’s haircut, so I toughed it out.

  He got me off the hook by changing the subject. “Cody, didn’t your mama see a ghost once?”

  Cody laughed. “What are y’all talking about, Roland? Somebody see a ghost deer?”

  The men chuckled. “Naw, we’re just sittin’ here and got to talking about ghosts and haunted houses and buried treasure and such.”

  “Well. If you mean the time when Mama was a girl and sitting in bed when a dark woman walked through the window on one side of the room and left through the wall on the other side, then I guess she did. Daddy always said she was asleep and dreamed the whole thing, but Mama vows up and down she was wide awake.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me.” Uncle Arthur snipped his scissors in the air. “Y’all’s family has always been able to see or do things no one else can. Top, some of your kinfolk can dream the future, and there’s only a couple of other people I’ve known who can do that.”

  Cody tilted the hat back on his head. “Great Granddad always told about the time his mama died. He and Granny knew she was bad off and they’d hitched the wagon up to go into town to get the doctor. They hadn’t much more than got out of sight of the house when a wooden casket floated across the road, about two feet off the ground. Grandpa reined the mules up and turned them around. He told Granny they didn’t need a doctor no more, because his mama was dead, and he was right. And boys, that happened in broad daylight.”

  A shiver went up my spine. Pepper, Mark and I exchanged glances, and I was proud to see they felt a little spooky, too.

  One of the men noticed. “Possum run across your grave, son?”

  Pepper poked me in the ribs. “Titty-baby,” she whispered in my ear. I gigged her back.

  “My granny could put spells on people.” I was surprised to hear Mark say anything at all.

  Uncle Arthur stopped snipping. “What kinds of spells?”

  “Oh, she could make people sick, or make them well, if she wanted to.”

  The statement wasn’t taken lightly. Everyone knew the Indians and Negroes had some secret connection to the other world.

  “We’re losing a lot when those old witch Indians across the river fade away.” Uncle Arthur clicked his scissors. “I bet fifty years from now, when Top there is my age, you won’t hear tell of people who can do these things. Hey, Cody, tell them about the time you saw the ghosts in Mr. Hall’s house.”

  Cody showed his white teeth in a smile and leaned his chair against the wall. “Y’all heard it before, but I guess the kids haven’t. I slept over with my cousins in Doc Ordway’s spooky two-story house right up behind Neal’s store. It was built back in the eighteen-hundreds.”

  I knew the place. The highway forked into a blacktop road behind Neal’s store and led past the Ordway place. It had a huge wraparound porch, and giant burr oaks shaded the entire house.

  Uncle Arthur forgot he was giving a haircut and stood with the scissors idle over his silent customer’s head.

  “Well, we’d all stayed up until way in the night. We were sleeping on a pallet in the floor in front of the fireplace, and I woke up and needed to wet real bad. It was cold and I really didn’t want to get up to take a leak, but I did. I hadn’t much more’n
gotten into the hall beside the staircase when something caught my attention and I looked up and saw a man and a woman coming down. They were all dressed up. He had on a top hat and she was wearing one of them long, fancy dresses.

  “I about peed on the floor right there because I could see through them, like they were made out of smoke, but the colors were bright. They didn’t notice me, though, and floated down the stairs and through the door to a buggy tied to an iron ring driven into one of those big ol’ oaks. He untied the horse from the tree and they drove away.”

  Mark’s eyes sparkled bright and shiny and he kept looking at Cody like there was more. “What did you do then?”

  “Well, I ran to the bathroom and peed and got my little ass under the covers as fast as I could.”

  The men roared and Pepper blushed. I guess she didn’t like to think about Cody having to pee in the middle of the night, even when he was a little kid in the story.

  “Tell the rest of it.” Uncle Arthur snipped his scissors.

  “Well, about ten years ago lightning struck the burr oak the ghost buggy was tied to and they had to cut it down. When they sawed it up they hit something made of iron and had to cut around it after it ruined the set in one saw. G.W. Middlebrooks heard about it and went and got that chunk of green oak and chiseled on it for about a month and you know what he found?”

  No one offered a thought.

  “He found one of them iron hitching rings had grown into the tree. They counted the rings and figured it was there in about the late eighteen-hundreds, right when I dreamed about a horse hitched to the tree.”

  I almost couldn’t stand it. I could feel the hair rise on the back on my neck once again as if one of the morning’s cold breezes was left over.

  Uncle Arthur finished the haircut and called next. No one moved, because they wanted to see Mark get his haircut. He finally gave up and climbed up in the chair. Uncle Arthur held his scissors over Mark’s head. “I’ve wanted to do this since I first saw you.”

  Pepper jumped up, whispered in Uncle Arthur’s ear, and he nodded gravely. He grabbed a hank of black hair, snipped, and handed the long tail to Pepper. She sat on the porch, took a long piece of red thread out of her pocket, and wrapped it round and round one end to hold the hair together.

  Mark had his eyes closed from the time he sat down, so he didn’t see what she was doing. I’ve read of Indians being “stoic” and never knew what it meant, but I learned that day. His face didn’t change as the rest of his black hair drifted down to the rough boards. The men didn’t say a thing as they watched.

  Hap Scurry even forgot he had a chew in his mouth and dang near drowned before he thought to spit.

  In no time at all Uncle Arthur was finished and I was surprised to find that he hadn’t given Mark a Boys’ Regular. I’d say his was more like one of them Beatles cuts. He nodded when he was finished. “I been wanting to try one of those.”

  Pepper ran her fingers through his hair when Mark climbed down. I could see a light in her eyes that went well beyond a haircut. “That looks cute on you.”

  He looked at his reflection in a broken piece of mirror hung on a post so customers could see what their quarter had bought. He turned his head one way and the other and shrugged. “Feels lighter.”

  “First time I ever scalped an Indian.”

  Uncle Cody patted Mark on the shoulder. “You got you a good haircut. Let’s go and get us a Coke.”

  A cold drink sounded good. The next customer was already in the chair, so we told everyone goodbye and drove to the store. Pepper and Mark jogged up the steps and went on inside. They kept eyeing each other and whispering and it was making me sick. Cody hung back as they went in.

  I was at the screen door when Calvin Williams drove up in his hay truck with a heavy load. He was shirtless and sweaty because they’d been hauling hay all morning and it had warmed up considerable. Straw and chaff stuck to his skin and was caught in the shaggy hair sticking out from under his dirty cap.

  I suddenly felt scared and sick inside seeing Calvin there, because Cody had been around Calvin’s wife a little too much lately.

  Calvin jumped down from the cab when he saw Cody. I could tell he was mad from the glassy look in his eyes. The loafers stopped talking, anticipating trouble.

  Cody just stood there without being nervous or anything. “Howdy, Calvin.”

  Calvin pulled off his work gloves. “Wait up there, Parker. I know you been messin’ with my woman.”

  A couple of men on the porch stood up, like they do in a football stadium when someone makes a good play.

  “Well, Calvin, I heard y’all weren’t living together anymore. She’s moved out to Powderly.”

  “It don’t make no difference. We’re still married.”

  Cody shrugged. “You’ll have to take it up with her. She says she’s done with you. I ain’t dragging her out of the house to go with me.”

  “You’re a-lyin’. She’d be home with me if you’d leave her alone.”

  “I ain’t telling no stories, and you know it. She’s been done with you for a long time now. Let it go, Calvin.”

  “You stay away from her!” He stalked across the bottle cap parking lot one slow step at a time, but it was like watching a fuse burn toward a stick of dynamite. He took a big crescent wrench out of his back pocket and held it like a hammer. “I know you was with her at the rodeo a while back and y’all was dancing up at the school house. Everybody’s knows it.”

  Cody sighed. Calvin was working himself up to a fighting mad and there was nothing Cody could do take the fire out of it. “Calvin, let’s talk about this somewhere else. It ain’t nobody’s business but our own, and there’s a young boy standing here.”

  “I don’t care if he is Ned’s grandkid, and I ain’t talking about him. I’m talking about you fooling around with my wife.”

  “I’m not fooling.” The men around them snickered at the crack.

  “How about I whip your ass right here and now? I’m not afraid of any shit they taught you in the army.”

  Cody acted like he was having a normal conversation. “I’m not afraid of you, neither. Now, how about forgetting this right now, and you go cool off somewhere. We can talk later.”

  I started feeling even more scared when two of Calvin’s hired hands came into view from around the hay truck behind him. I knew Tully Joe and Donny were a couple of no-account river rats from up around Kiomatia. Mentally, Tully Joe wasn’t all there, but he was a good hand and stayed busy all the time. He had his hands in the pockets of his overalls.

  His brother Donny was downright mean. He shook a cigarette from the soft pack in his shirt pocket, bit one out with his buckteeth and lit it with a wooden match. Folks knew he’d drive off the road into a ditch to run over a dog or cat. He was known to go across to Juarez to pick a fight, usually from someone too drunk to defend themselves.

  Now it was three to one, and I remembered when I was faced with similar numbers. I thought one of the men in the parking lot might step in and help Cody, but they simply stood there watching.

  Pepper and Mark came back outside because Cody hadn’t given us any money. Mark was rubbing at the back of his neck, still feeling his new haircut. Pepper started to say something about why I was still outside when she caught on to what was happening. Her eyes got real wide and she made a soft moaning sound in the back of her throat.

  Mark stepped up beside me. “What are we gonna do?”

  “Nothing. They’re grown men.”

  “Get on out of here.” Cody jerked his head back toward us. “Or let me take the kids home. You and I can talk about this some other time.”

  “Nope. We’re gonna settle it right now.”

  Cody sighed, like he was tired. “You ignorant bastard. Give it up.”

  The whole incident spun out of control. It reminded me of one time when me and Pepper thought it’d be a good idea to turn over a new 55-gallon barrel and climb inside to ride it to the bottom of the hill in fro
nt of the barn. Neither of us figured what might happen next. I tucked myself in the barrel and Pepper gave me a push to get started.

  Gravity took over and I spun over and over as the barrel picked up speed. I was crying and puking by the time I rolled through the barbed wire fence and slammed to a sharp stop against one of Miss Becky’s sycamore trees.

  Everything picked up the same speed in front of Uncle Neal’s store, and there was nothing anyone could do but watch it happen.

  Tully Joe and Donny fanned out and started forward.

  “You men quit it.” Uncle Neal let the screen door slam loudly when he joined us on the porch.

  Calvin stopped a couple of feet away from Cody and held the big wrench like a hammer. “This ain’t none of your damn business, Neal.”

  I could see Calvin was mad at the whole world and knew if he could, he’d fight until he got rid of all the rage inside him. Everything started moving fast then, but at the same time, it felt like time had shifted into slow motion. Pepper started down the porch steps toward the two men and I grabbed the back of her shirt to stop her.

  When Calvin took another step and Tully Joe started to move in, Cody apparently figured the dance had started. He settled down a couple of inches and threw a right punch so fast I never even saw it. It had most of Cody’s weight behind it and Calvin’s head snapped back. He landed flat on his back, blood spurting from his squashed nose.

  The other two men moved in.

  Cody did something I’d never seen on television or in the movies. Tully Joe was on the right. Cody stepped forward, twisted sideways to get all his weight on his left leg and kicked Tully Joe in the chest so hard he banged into the dusty side of a truck. It addled him and he slid down on his bottom for a minute.

  Donny swung at him. Cody caught the right cross in his left hand, turned his body to put his shoulder in Donny’s armpit, and flipped him over his hip. He landed with a thud on the bottle cap parking lot and then Cody he did the second thing I’d never seen anyone do on television. Still holding Donny’s wrist while he had him down, Cody twisted the man’s arm until his shoulder popped loud enough for us to hear up on the porch. Face down, Donny screamed into the dirt.