by Terry Persun
“I heard the chickens,” Leon said.
“She say anything?”
“She said the chickens were fighting.”
“See, she weren’t worried,” Buddy said.
“I know,” Leon observed the grease sizzling from the piglet hanging over the fire. “That’s a mighty big piglet.”
Cracker-Jack pointed, “Big Josh carry that big brother all the way his self.”
Leon nodded. Big Josh waved him off.
“The lesson,” Cracker-Jack got back to the conversation, “is to pay attention to her. If she ain’t worried, you ain’t worried. But if she tell one the kids to go look, then you run.” He laughed. “But you know how to run. We sees that.”
“Next time,” Bob added to the instruction, “will ya ask for some lip-lapin’ liquor? I could use a drink ‘bout now.”
“We’ll do that juss for you, Bob. Won’t we Jimmy White?” Cracker-Jack said.
“They won’t give no liquor to no boy,” Buddy said.
“I go wit him,” Bob said. “I be white, too.” He sat straight. “Excuse me Ma’am. I been in the sun too long today. Got terribly brown. I think a little cup of liquor be ding-dong dandy for gettin’ me back white.”
“You no browner than a cow turd in the sun. She’d scream, “No liquor for you. You black.” Jesse screeched like a woman and bounced his hands near his mouth in mock surprise.
Bob straightened again. “Right you are ma’am, which mean I already hallucinatin’ without my liquor.”
“Your masters let you have liquor?” Leon asked. “We only had it when there a couple jumpin’ the broom.”
“Don’t mock us, boy,” Cracker-Jack said.
Leon turned away.
“My Cookie use to bring it to the shack late,” Bob said, lips twitching like he remembered the flavor. “We stay up late talkin’ and laughin’. I know the children think we didlin’ and they pretend a sleep. But we juss playin’.” He stared off. “Juss playin’ and bein’ in love.”
“I recall those days,” Buddy said. “They no sweeter than now.”
“Every day you alive is sweet,” Cracker-Jack said.
Big Josh started to sing, then. “Swing low, sweet chariot…”
The others joined in as a quieter background.
Leon knew the song. He’d sometimes sing it when his own words didn’t come. He joined in. After a few bars, the others all stopped singing and stared at Leon. “What are you lookin’ at?”
Cracker-Jack said in surprise, “You got a strong voice, boy.”
“Yeah, you sing alone for a moment,” Jesse said.
Big Josh nodded and motioned for Leon to continue.
After Leon sang a few more bars, Bob slapped his knee. “Big-dammit, you sings like a nigger.”
Leon stopped singing. “I am,” he said.
The men got serious and looked at each other. Bob was about to say something when Cracker-Jack spoke up. “Could you maybe read to us from that there book you got?”
“Yeah, Jimmy White, that a good idea. After we eats maybe,” Bob said.
“Eatin’s ready,” Jesse took up a knife and carved the piglet.
Everyone leaned near the fire to get his share of the meat. Leon wanted to go back to singing where he felt safe, but ate quietly with the rest of them.
After licking his fingers and running them down his pant leg, Leon opened the burlap sack and took out his book. He blew dust and burlap string from it, then opened the cover.
The fire snapped and popped. Jesse bent toward it and poked a log with his finger. The fire settled and sparks flew into the air, floating magically upward into the dark night before cooling and fading.
After Leon read a few poems, the others found their blankets and sleeping spots. Leon curled next to the fire, his back to it. In the woods, fireflies, like loose coals from the fire blinked in the dark. The sounds of animals foraging, grunting, and hissing, came into their camp from the woods. Leon drew the smell of loam, sweet and strong, into his lungs. The fire warmed his back, softening his tense muscles, relaxing his skin until he fell asleep. He woke in the dark with a start. He dreamed that Big Leon had fallen into the muck, bleeding from his wounds. He heard rifle shots over and over again.
The cold had seeped into his back. His arms ached. Leon shuffled to a sitting position. The fire was nearly out, but he found a stick lying nearby and turned the coals until bright red blazed again. He crawled over and grabbed two small pieces of dried wood and placed them on the fire. In a moment, yellow flames snaked around the wood and the air became warmer.
It must have been close to sun-up because a damp, low fog had crept in. Leon rubbed his arms to get warm, then reached for another log.
“Cain’t sleep?” Bob was sitting up.
“No.”
“Who you watch die?” Bob whispered.
Leon stared into the fire.
“If you ain’t kilt nobody, then you seen somebody kilt. I kin see it in you face. Seen it that first day I seen you eyes in the clear sun.”
Leon lowered his head. “My pappy.”
Bob pursed his lips, then opened his mouth, but made no sound.
“He died savin’ my life.”
The fire popped.
“We be your pappy now,” Bob said. He lay back down.
CHAPTER 10
Leon woke damp and chilly. The fog held thick to the ground. Heavy dew lay over the leaves. The air was still and quiet except for an occasional crow call. Once again, Leon grabbed a stick and stoked the fire.
Jesse must have heard the fire logs shift. He sat up and reached over to grab a few wood chunks to throw into the coals. Embers scattered into the air. He reached over with his foot and kicked Buddy. “Hey. Egg man.”
Buddy stretched his arms and twisted at the waist. Bones cracked. He twisted in the opposite direction and cracking occurred again. “It foggy,” he said.
Jesse said, “No? You juss take notice?”
“Watch it, sonny, I still tougher than you.”
“That a picture nobody want to see, two old black men wrestlin’ over breakfast,” Jesse said.
“I’d win,” Buddy said.
“Sure, Pappy.” Jesse stood and held his hand out to Buddy. “You’d win once I helped you up.”
Leon chuckled.
“Don’t laugh, boy, it might take both us, but we knock the piss outa you, too,” Buddy said.
“I’m sure you would,” Leon said.
By this time, the others were awake and preparing for breakfast. Buddy pulled out a folded piece of cloth and laid it on the ground while Jesse got out a frying pan. As Buddy slowly unwrapped the cloth a dozen eggs came into view a few at a time.
“Hot dig-dam,” Bob said.
“A little longer we have half a cow, too” Cracker-Jack said while glaring at Leon.
Leon shied from Cracker-Jack’s penetrating stare.
Jesse pulled a pot from near his sleeping area. He had put the piglet in there the night before and grease filled the bottom of the pot. He scooped some out using a wooden spoon and slapped it in the frying pan.
Buddy broke eggs into the pan while Jesse shook the pan, flipping the eggs up and back, folding them in mid-air before letting them fall into the pan again.
Leon watched the eggs cook. He could taste them already. Each time they went into the air they looked more solid, closer to being eaten.
At the end, Buddy handed out plates and Jesse carved the eggs into equal size portions and dropped them onto the plates.
Leon ate from a smaller frying pan.
Jesse carved some piglet and handed a piece of ham to each of them. Leon was amazed at their eating efficiency, as if they had somewhere important to be.
A breeze blew through the valley and pushed the fog out of the woods. The sun helped, too, heating the air and blistering the fog away one layer at a time.
When they cleaned up, almost immediately after eating, Leon tried to help. Every time he reached for a plate o
r pan, another hand shoved his aside. Once he realized that he was getting in the way, he sat back and watched them work.
They were old. They were slow. He wondered how they ever got together, and once they did, worked in such harmony, as if they’d been doing it their whole lives.
Leon observed Buddy cleaning plates and Jesse wrapping leftovers. Leon knew that he didn’t fit in. Again, Cracker-Jack had Leon pack the heaviest bundle. Bob carried nothing.
Leon learned about their families and backgrounds. Big Josh was the youngest of the five. He killed a man by accident, while physically and single-handedly holding up one end of a wagon as the man repaired a broken axle. The weight caused his grip to loosen and the wagon slipped from his fingers. The man was crushed and Big Josh ran. There was a debate among them whether the man died or was knocked out, but Big Josh didn’t care. He ran. “Either way, they strap me good,” he said.
Cracker-Jack had been the boss of thirty men on some ranch farther west. He was used to being in charge. But when a ‘young buck’, as Cracker-Jack called him, stepped in to do the job, Cracker-Jack asked to be let go. “It was only a matter of years, anyhow,” he said. “Spent time fightin’ after gettin’ caught stealin’ meal from some Yankee troops. Put me in a Negro brigade, they did.”
The men told stories, repeating some exactly the same, while others were changed, altered to fit into the present mood. They created their own histories over and over for one another to hear. They wanted every detail brought in, to share the exact picture of the event as it actually happened, even if it were an outright fabrication.
“Tell us again how you asked to leave,” Buddy said to Cracker-Jack.
“After I was tol’ I no longer in charge, I didn’t hang my head one bit. Fact is I was taller that day. Several people tell me that actually true. I growed several inches. I raise my eyes to my long-time friend and master. Look ‘im square. ‘Sir,’ I says, ‘would you kindly set me free?’”
“And he say, ‘Shoo, boy, shoo.’” Buddy joked.
Cracker-Jack giggled, then got serious. “I wish he had, but he ask me to stay on. He want me to help out. Said he’d feed and care for me. But I ain’t no old bull cain’t ride the cows no more. I ain’t no worthless, sway-back, no sir.”
“What he really say was, “Don’ you make me work fo’ that boy don’ know his job yet.” Buddy interrupted.
“Slap-dammity,” Bob cut in, “let the Negro tell he story.”
“I could stop,” Cracker-Jack teased.
Leon laughed to himself.
* * *
The day wore on. The sun burned hotter. As the men told stories, Leon daydreamed about the life he no longer belonged compared with the life he now lived. Two sides of the river. Two different lives, but still much the same. He still felt as if he didn’t quite belong. Perhaps he never would. He wasn’t black or white. He could read like a white man and sing like a black man. Away from his history, blacks thought he was white, and growing up on the Carpenter farm, the whites treated him as if he were black. None of these men even guessed that he was black by birth and upbringing. At best they thought he was foreign.
Sweat dripped down along his sides from armpits to waist. Mosquitoes buzzed around his face and arms. The bugs were especially nasty in open areas. Leon noticed that Bob had ripped off a small bushy pine branch and kept it moving all around his head like a fan. Bob didn’t have to swat a mosquito so often as the others.
Leon tried the branch trick and it helped. Except one time when he caught a sweat bee in the crook of his arm and it stung him, leaving a round, red welt.
Leon had always wanted to go downriver and now he was doing just that. Besides Indian paths, there were wagon trails that were not used any more.
An hour after high noon, they found a place near the river where they could sit and enjoy the breeze coming off the water. Jesse cut more meat from the piglet for each of them.
“Are there any towns up ahead?” Leon asked.
“What you need a town for, boy?” Cracker-Jack passed Leon his cut of pork last, after taking it from Jesse.
“I can’t keep traveling like this.”
“You have to work?” Cracker-Jack said.
“I do.”
“You don’t work now.”
“I know that, but I can’t live like this through the winter,” Leon said.
“He need to be with people his own age,” Buddy said.
“Why the slam-happy hell would he need that?” Bob said.
“He young. He need soft womanly company. You forget already, old man?” Buddy said. “I understand, boy.” Buddy turned back to the others. “Besides, what he do after we all die? He know nothin’ but liein’ and beggin’. And he be alone. This life ain’t fit.”
“Buddy right in his thinkin’,” Cracker-Jack said. “There a nice town maybe three, four days. You help out that long, we leave you there. They’s work there.”
“It hard work,” Buddy said.
“I’m not afraid to work.”
“Nobody said you was, boy,” Cracker-Jack said. “Besides, we get caught runnin’ a white boy, they think we kidnap you. They’d kill us all. Lynch us for sure.”
Jesse cut more meat and handed pieces to Cracker-Jack to ration out.
Leon took his and bit a piece off. His fingers glistened with grease. There were fewer mosquitoes near the river-flow, so Leon put his pine branch on the gravel next to him.
“You be good in a town,” Buddy said. “You strong. You sturdy enough to work.”
They ate for a short while and stared at the wide river going by in front of them. The mesmerizing sound of the water took each of Leon’s companions to a different place. Some stared down reaching back to the past; others glanced skyward into the future. The turning ripples of water helped to rearrange thoughts. The ker-plunk of a fish hitting the surface set whatever thought Leon had at the moment into place in his mind, set it more vivid than it had been a moment earlier.
Leon brought his thoughts into words, not recognizing that it was the shock of the fish-sound that forced the words into the world. “You ever get guilty about causing a man’s death?” he asked Big Josh.
“Ain’t guilty for his death. Guilty for runnin’.”
“You pappy do what he done outta love, boy. He give he life like a gift. You don’t need no guilt,” Bob told Leon.
“What’s this about his pappy be dead?” Cracker-Jack asked.
Leon narrowed his eyes at Bob. “It’s nothin’. It’s a private matter.”
“A private matter,” Cracker-Jack mocked. “Ain’t we speakin’ proper now. You a preacher’s son or somethin’?” Cracker-Jack stepped close to Leon and slapped the back of his head.
“Leave ‘im be. He allowed his private matter,” Bob said. “I’m sorry I brung it up, boy.”
“We got a right to know what in his past if it might git us kilt,” Cracker-Jack said. “Somebody after you? You on the run? We already in danger juss keepin’ you along.”
“I knowed he runnin’,” Buddy said.
“I’m not on the run,” Leon said.
“Then who kilt you pappy?”
“Some men. They killed him instead of me. Then they went home. They don’t care about me. All they wanted was someone’s life.” Leon’s jaws locked.
“Let ‘im be now,” Bob said.
“If’n I hears one footfall don’t belong to one of us,” Cracker-Jack threatened.
“You won’t. That’s my word.” Leon went back to staring at the river. He didn’t want to remember his father the way he did, red blood around him, his eyes staring blindly up at the sky beyond Leon’s head. Somehow the river sound helped him forget. In the movement, the swirls and slapping, Leon could see Big Leon in the fields, still moving, still alive.
Sweat trickled from the hat band down the sides of Leon’s head. He took the hat in his hands and traced the brim with his fingers thinking how he almost got to wear it to another funeral. Had Big Leon known their
running would turn into a funeral too?
The sky had sucked up all the fog, turning it into clouds that floated in small groups, changing shape as they meandered east. The black foothills became visible all around them, light glowing off treetops in one area and logged flats in another area. There were signs of men, but no men.
A bald eagle flew overhead, spying on the river trout.
“Wish I had his eyes,” Jesse said.
“Wish I had his wings,” Buddy said.
“Damn-flammity. I wish we had the fish he gonna catch.” Bob said, ending in a chuckle.
“We could stay hear tonight,” Cracker-Jack said. “Heard that sometimes the fish gets loose and falls on the ground. Eagle jus’ leaves ‘em. People finds ‘em half a mile from the river.”
“We could try fishin’,” Jesse said.
“I still got a couple o’ Cookie’s pins.” Bob searched inside his bedroll.
Leon knew where to find the fish if they were there. If the river was any bit like the creek, there’d be fish resting upriver a bit, where the water slows and settles near the flat.
The six of them turned all their attention to fishing. They pulled thread from their own blankets, found long sticks, bent the pins. Leon searched around the edges of the river, where the water stopped, or slowed way down, where it pooled. There were trout and American shad, big ones, lying wait in shallow places, close enough to reach out and touch.
Leon had caught fish with his bare hands before. In late spring after the swell receded, Pine Creek suckers, pike, trout, all slapped their way either upstream to spawn or downstream through the ripples. Leon used to stand in the rocky ripples with his feet planted between a few big rocks, the cool water rushing around his legs and the fish flapping and slapping the water. He’d grab the slippery fellows as they flipped and flopped between his legs. At other times several men would net the fish using burlap or old cotton linen the Carpenters had thrown out. And that’s when he thought of his burlap sack.
Leon emptied his knife, book, and revolver, and placed them under some brush, then went back to the river determined to feed the six of them that night. In the distance, fish gulped up the mosquitoes, clump, clump, clump. The sound continued as background music. There were so many fish in the river, they had to be able to catch them.