The Rock Hole

by Reavis Z. Wortham

  Pepper made a shocked squeak behind me.

  Calvin was back on his feet, and the way Cody was turned, Calvin had a clear shot at hitting him in the back of the head with the wrench. Cody sensed the blow, because he jerked his head back and instead of caving in his skull, the wrench glanced off and only addled him. He staggered forward, but not for long. He threw one of those kicks again and caught Calvin in the stomach. His breath went out in a whoosh and he took a step back.

  I believe Cody intended to hit him again, but a fellow in a slouch hat I hadn’t seen before jumped down from the top of the stacked hay and knocked Cody off his feet. By then Tully Joe had recovered his breath from the kick against the truck and he waded back into the fight. They swarmed Cody like wild dogs. Slouch Hat had him in a stranglehold from behind and Tully Joe started hitting Cody in the ribs.

  Pepper screamed again, mad this time. I held on tighter so she wouldn’t get hurt.

  “No, Pepper!”

  Mark was off the porch and into the fight like a bottle rocket, but he didn’t last long in amongst grown men. He hit Slouch Hat in the ear with his fist and Tully Joe caught Mark a backhand lick flush against the jaw. Mark was down in the bottle caps and he looked to be dead to me.

  Donny was screaming about his shoulder and thrashing around next to him while Tully Joe and the other feller worked Cody over. For a minute there I thought someone was stabbing at him with a knife.

  I hollered and ran down the steps with Pepper right beside me. A couple of the men watching the fight grabbed ahold of my arm to keep me from getting in the middle of things and I couldn’t get away.

  They had Pepper by her arms, too. She kicked and screamed so loud I could barely think. “Let go of me you, sonsabitches!”

  All the commotion wasn’t loud enough I didn’t hear the crack of the punch though, and Tully Joe fell back, holding his jaw and spitting teeth. I didn’t see that punch or the one that caused Slouch Hat to hunker up and go rolling the other way, holding himself between his legs and gagging.

  Cody stood up, bloody from the wrench blow to the head, and grinned. I swear it. He was grinning like he was back at the dance while blood ran from his eyebrow and covered half of his face. It was the most frightening thing I’d ever seen. If it had been anyone but Cody, I’d have run off screaming when he chuckled to himself.

  Calvin caught his breath, got back up and took another half-hearted swing, but Cody socked him again in his bloody nose and he went down. Cody got dirty then. He kicked Calvin in the head to make sure he stayed down, and then he went over and deliberately kicked Slouch Hat right in the nose, too. Blood spurted and Slouch Hat flopped over on his side and curled up in a ball. Cody turned to Tully Joe, who was lying on his back and pushing with his feet to get under the hay truck. Cody grabbed him by one foot and pulled him out to finish him off.

  A fight was one thing, but this was much, much more. It wasn’t a fight anymore and somehow the honor of winning was gone. I started to turn my face away, sick to my stomach.

  “What’s going on here?” I looked up to see Grandpa getting out of his car with a sap in his hand. I don’t think anyone else in town could have stopped Cody because he was finally mad, but Grandpa did it without even raising his voice.

  The fight was over. Cody quit dragging Tully Joe and straightened up like he’d finished hoeing a row and was waiting for Grandpa to pay him. The ring of men surrounding us parted and Grandpa walked through.

  When he heard Donny hollering in pain and saw two of his grandkids held in the parking lot and Mark’s nose bleeding, he looked scared for a minute, but then his eyes went cold. “That’s enough. Y’all better turn my kids aloose.”

  The men holding us let us go real quick and Pepper hurried over to check on Mark who was sitting up. He shook his head, dazed.

  “Shitfire. I think his nose is broke.”

  Cody knelt down and held Mark’s chin gently in his hand. “It ain’t broke, and you watch your language.” He blinked the blood out of his eye.

  Grandpa looked around the parking lot. “Somebody tell me what’s going on here.”

  Since it was the parking lot of his store, Neal Box stepped forward. “Calvin and these three fellers jumped on Cody and he cleaned their plows for ’em with what he learned overseas.”

  The explanation satisfied Grandpa. He squinted at Cody’s face. “Get your point made?”

  “Yessir.”

  “You do this all by yourself?”

  “Yessir.”

  “I’d give a purty to have seen that.” Grandpa grinned for a minute once he was over his shock of seeing us kids in the middle of everything. “You boys got hold of a snapping turtle, didn’t you?” Growing up, we’d always heard a snapping turtles bite and won’t turn loose until it thunders. “Any of y’all need another dose?”

  Tulley Joe was spitting blood and pinching his nose closed. “Naw, we’re done.”

  Grandpa’s eyes darted around the crowd to see if there was going to be any argument to the story. He walked over to Calvin and nudged him with the toe of his shoe. “You still breathing?” Calvin grunted a response and Grandpa did the same with Donny. “Quit your crying or I’ll give you something to cry about. Tully, who is this feller here in the hat?”

  He coughed and spat. “Name’s Donald Adams. He’s from up on Boggy Bend. Calvin hired him to help haul today.”

  “Good.” Grandpa dug his cuffs from his back pocket. He knelt and snapped them on Slouch Hat’s wrists with an oily clicking sound. “I recognize the name. You have a flyer out on you, boy. You’re under arrest and so are the rest of you, so just lay there until I can get somebody out here to help haul all y’all in. Now, which one of you sonsabitches hit this young boy here?”

  Pepper answered for them. “Tully Joe hit him with his fist.”

  “Um hum.” Grandpa looked hard at Tully Joe. “I’ll deal with you later.” Then he took a hard look at Mark. “What happened to his head?”

  “Haircut,” I said. Grandpa gave me a quick once-over. “Y’all all right?”

  “Yessir.”

  He turned to Cody. “What’s all this about? Can’t you take them kids anywheres without someone getting hurt or killed? Y’all get off from the house apiece and get in trouble every time. I ain’t forgot about Top’s fight at the dance.”

  “Norma Faye.”

  “What?

  “You asked me what it was about. It’s about Norma Faye.”

  Grandpa grunted and walked back to the car and his Motorola.

  Cody checked us kids again and waved toward his car. “Y’all get in. I’ll take you home.”

  Pepper started toward Tully Joe, intending to give him a kick, but Mark took hold of her sleeve and she went with him. They got in the back of the El Camino. I got into the passenger seat and Cody pulled out on the highway.

  I didn’t say anything, and he looked across the cab. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “You won, but you kept kicking them fellers. You didn’t fight fair.”

  “Well, there ain’t no such a thing as a fair fight. Even if it had just been me and Calvin, one of us would have been better, so it wouldn’t have been fair to the other. A fight is never even. When the rest of them joined in, then it had to go to a different level.”

  I kept looking at my feet, wondering why Cody felt he had to explain himself.

  “I could have quit when they were down, Top, but the truth is they’d have gotten up and come after me again and then maybe I’d have gotten the worst of it. Men have to defend ourselves or family any way we can. I didn’t know if Uncle Ned was coming or not. No one else was helping. So it was all up to me. Do you see?”

  I raised my eyes and looked at Uncle Cody. He looked ahead through the windshield, driving with one hand on top of the wheel and his elbow out the window. “But you kept hitting and kicking them while they were down.”

  “Yep. I was keeping them down. They had to know, I mean know, what they’d tangled with so I wouldn
’t have to do it again some time down the road.”

  Feeling a little better, I nodded. “Would you have killed them?”

  “Nope. They’re not worth going to jail for. But there ain’t nothing wrong with being in the right and killing a man who’s trying to kill you first. But we were just fighting and I intended to win. Do you see the difference?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Look at it this way. I know you got in a fight at the dance a while back.”

  I gave him a shocked look, but he grinned and kept talking.

  “You didn’t have to go outside. You could have stayed in the gym and waited for me, and we’d have left without a problem down the road. But you knew the trouble would still be there somewhere. So you went out and faced it. With a little more experience, you’d have won and it would have been over. That’s what I knew a few minutes ago. It had to end right there, and that’s what I was doing.”

  “All right.”

  My mind was reeling with the discussion when Cody slowed to turn in Grandpa Ned’s drive. Constable Raymond Chase passed the highway from the other direction, so I knew some people were going to jail.

  I hoped he wouldn’t come to the house and get Cody, too.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ned was so frustrated he felt like throwing his badge out the window and going home. Cody was running with a married woman and there was sure to be a killing over it pretty soon. Someone was torturing and killing animals and leaving threats toward children. Ralston was causing problems in the field, and even with everyone in Lamar County looking, no one could find Lightfoot.

  It didn’t make sense. How could they expect him to locate a wraith that appeared one night to slaughter eight people in a shack out in the middle of a pasture and then vanish into thin air?

  It was almost too much for a man who just wanted to get his crop in.

  Ralston was already gone from the bottoms when he arrived from the mess at the store. Most of the hands were bent over the cotton plants in the field. A few idled near the high-sided cotton wagon in the shade of a nearby red oak. Ned stopped in the dirt road and got out.

  “What’s the matter?”

  The group by the wagon looked undecided for a moment, until one of the younger men stepped forward. He spoke in a halting, nervous voice. “Mister Ned, we’re kindly afraid to be around here. We hear the Devil is working these fields and we don’t want to be messin’ ’round with him.”

  “The only thing working around here are them.” Ned pointed to the hands in the field. They’d stopped picking to stand in the rows, shading their eyes to watch the meeting under the tree. “Or they was.”

  “You know what I mean Mr. Ned. Somebody’s been sacrificing animals down here.”

  “You’re Sheffield Roosevelt’s boy Gilbert, aren’t you?”

  “Yessir.”

  “He doing all right?”

  Gilbert didn’t want to talk about his daddy. It made him uncomfortable because he and Ned had known each other all their lives. He wanted to settle the matter of the animal mutilations instead of talking like they were in the church yard.

  “Well, since he’s quit working, he’s stove up. He sets on the porch and dips snuff these days, complaining about his back.”

  Ned nodded at the answer and toed the dirt, thinking. “Naw, Gilbert, that sacrificing thing ain’t entirely true as far as I know. Somebody is torturing and killing animals, that’s a fact, but I don’t believe there’s any booger-bear or devil involved in it. I didn’t want to tell anybody because I didn’t know enough to talk about. Still don’t.”

  The hands shuffled uneasily and gazed across the shimmering field. “You ain’t caught him yet?” Gilbert stated the obvious more for himself than for an answer.

  “Not yet.”

  They waited some more.

  “Mr. Ned, we got that to worry about and now Ralston thinks you might need to do something for us since all these killin’s have started around here. You know, y’all ain’t got aholt of the man who killed all them poor Indian folks, either. Maybe if you, uh, paid us a little more for bein’ afraid and all…”

  “Do for you? Where’s Ralston now?”

  “Him and three others left to go back to town.”

  “Did them others used to work for me?”

  Gilbert analyzed the question. The past tense was obvious. “Naw sir.”

  “Well, it’s a good thing. Ralston ain’t nothin’ but trouble and you know it. He’s down here stirring things up so’s I’ll give y’all more money, but I ain’t agonna do it. Y’all agreed to the wages you’re getting, or will get when you get to working.”

  “Ralston and his friends says we oughta strike. He says you ain’t paying us even colored wages, and we can get more money in Dallas.” His voice trailed away.

  Ned started to walk away and stopped. “I didn’t know there were crops to pick in Dallas. You can go to the city if you want to, but you’ll come home empty-handed and hungry. And besides, Gilbert, you can’t strike. Y’all don’t have a union, and if you do think you want to quit, I’ll hire some folks hungrier than you are to pick the rest of this cotton. I’m liable to pay them a little more for not aggravating me.”

  “But the killings,” said a young lady Ned recognized as Olivia, one of Ivory’s daughters-in-law.

  “Look, the fact is animals have been killed, but they aren’t just here in these fields, and it’s only been animals as far as I know. The Lightfoot folks were killed at night by their daddy hisself, leastways that’s how I figure it, and I doubt he had anything to do with these animals. It wasn’t the Devil, and we’re gonna catch Lightfoot sure enough.

  “Now, I done told you I’m not raising any wages, and if you don’t want to work then you can ride the wagon back to the gin and I’ll hire somebody else. You see Ivory and his woman out there, they’ve been working for me for over twenty years and I’ve always treated them right and I’ll keep on doing so. Y’all do what you want, but I’m through talking.”

  Ned left the group and joined Edgar Weems, who had quit weighing cotton sacks to listen to the conversation. Ignoring the little cluster of hands still milling around, Ned finished his business with Edgar a few minutes later. When he passed them again on the way to his car, Gilbert and his friends had picked up their sacks and were headed slowly into the field.

  Ned left the bottoms and drove back to the store. He was thankful he didn’t have to drive Adams and Tully Joe to the Chisum jail. Young Raymond Chase had hauled them in after getting over the awe of one man beating four others all by himself.

  Ned arranged for one of the men at the store to drive Calvin’s uncovered hay truck and park it in his barn. No matter that Calvin was no-account, it wasn’t right to let hay sit outside and ruin if it was to rain.

  He went home to check on Cody and the kids. Miss Becky had everything under control there. He found them gathered around the table, eating cornbread crumbled into tall glasses of sweet milk.

  The snack looked good to him, but Ned didn’t have time to eat. “Y’all all right?”

  “We’re fine.” Cody looked around the table and spooned cornbread into his mouth.

  Neither Pepper or Mark spoke. Top simply concentrated on his eating. Miss Becky indicated everything was all right with a slight nod, but there was no reason to question them right then. They’d communicated the same way through decades of marriage.

  Ned left, and when he got on the highway, he called Big John on the radio to tell him about Ralston’s actions in the field.

  “He’s been acting pretty sorry all right.”

  “Have you seen him in town?”

  The radio was silent while John thought for a moment. “I might have seen him at his mama’s house. I’ll go by there directly after I get through here.”

  “Where are you?”

  “In Arthur City. Some of my people who sell catfish up here on the river had trouble today, so it might be a while before I get away.”

  “You talk
ing about the place on the right coming out of Oklahoma?”

  “Yep. They say some colored folks came in and took a lot more fish than they paid for.”

  “I’m already across the creek bridge and headed your way. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “Come on.”

  Still angry at Ralston’s stunt in the field, Ned drove over a small hill and saw Ralston’s ’32 Ford parked nearly in the bar ditch. He recognized it as and stopped behind the vehicle.

  He keyed the Motorola. “John?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Ralston and his bunch are here beside Jimmy Lee Collier’s pasture. Why don’t you come over here real quick. You can talk about catfish later.”

  “On my way.”

  Ned replaced the microphone on the dash bracket and stepped out of the car. The windows were down and the four black men inside watched Ned get out. He hesitated beside the left front fender of his car. “Ralston, get out of the car.”

  There was a moment’s pause before the four doors simultaneously opened and the men stepped out. All four wore dark sunglasses. The two from the back seat were dressed in khakis and white tee shirts. Both had pistols in their hands. Ralston slipped out from behind the steering wheel. He reached into the floorboard by his feet and picked up a jack handle. The fourth man in a neatly pressed red checkered shirt exited the front passenger side with a butcher knife.

  In all his years as constable, Ned had only drawn his pistol once during an altercation. He was surprised to suddenly find the little Colt pointed before he even knew it was in his hand. The frustrated mad he’d been working on for weeks rolled over him in a great, red rage.

  “Y’all stop!”

  The men continued to advance. A covey of quail exploded from the tall grass beside the car and flew into the nearby tree line. At the sound, Ned thumb-cocked the pistol and almost pulled the trigger of the double action. His stomach knotted in fear. Ned aimed at the center of the man nearest him. “Goddammit, I said stop or I’ll shoot you right there.”