by Donis Casey
The itinerants wouldn’t be picking Shaw’s crop this year. Shaw had feared this spreading boll weevil plague, and had not put in but a few acres, even though the price of cotton had been excellent the year before. It was just as well he hadn’t planted more, since cotton prices were dropping like a stone since this new war had instantly killed the European market. Shaw had already made arrangements for local help when his crop was ready; in only a few days, Alafair suspected. She could see Shaw and James and Sarah’s husband W.J. come around the house and walk up the hill toward the workers. Two slender young women at the long breakfast table had begun gathering dishes into piles. A tall, middle-aged black man in overalls broke away from the knot of pickers and went to meet the white men. The foreman of his group, Alafair thought.
Alafair’s dreamy reverie and water pumping were interrupted by someone saying her name, and she started and skewed her gaze back over her shoulder.
“I said ‘morning, Alafair,’” her eldest sister-in-law Josie repeated, amused. She was carrying an armload of plates from the family’s breakfast.
Alafair straightened up and replaced the lid on the coffee pot, eyeing Josie critically for a moment. She seemed her usual self: tall, plump, and lively. Her black hair, barely touched with gray, was usually fluffed and poufed, but today was wrapped in a scarf for work. Her hazel eyes were lively enough, but her face looked drawn and tired, the skin around her eyes pinched.
“Morning, Josie,” Alafair said at last. “I was in the clouds, I expect. Sarah told me you were here. How’s your folks holding up? How are you?”
Josie’s gaze slid away from Alafair’s face, and she shrugged. “Glad to be doing something useful.” She looked back at Alafair. “I’ve been over to Mama’s most all the time since Bill died, trying to do for them, visiting with the callers when Mama and Papa couldn’t face it any more. Keeping the house clean, dishes washed up and all. They’ve been pretty grieved. I reckon you know how it is.”
Alafair did know. Her mother-in-law Sally McBride was no stranger to grief, having lost her first husband and an infant daughter when she was young, and now a grown son. For years, Sally and Alafair had had an extra bond, both having lost children unexpectedly. Alafair smiled, but said nothing. There was nothing that could be said.
“Mama and Papa both seem to have perked up some in the last day or so, though,” Josie continued. “They want to be doing things, keeping busy again. Ma said she appreciated me wanting to be of help, but I ought to get back to my own life. I was getting underfoot, now.” She gave an ironic smile. There was no explaining Sally McBride, so Josie changed the subject.
“How’s my new grandniece? Does she resemble her mama?”
Alafair couldn’t keep from grinning. “She’s a beauty, even if I do say so. She looks more like John Lee to me, with big old eyes and a mess of black hair.”
“What are they calling her?”
“They haven’t come up with anything yet, at least not that I’ve heard.”
Josie sighed. “It’s funny, ain’t it? One goes out, and one comes in.” She moved up next to Alafair as though she wanted to tell a secret. Alafair leaned in toward her, curious. “You know, Mama told me she hears him sometimes, Bill. At night, mostly, she hears him, just next to her. Trying to whisper something to her, but she never can quite hear what it is.”
Alafair drew back a little and looked Josie in the face. “What does she think he’s trying to say?”
“Well, she said she can’t quite hear him,” Josie reiterated. “But from the way Mama was acting, I just feel that he’s trying to tell her something about Laura—that something needs to be done about Laura.”
In spite of the already sultry heat of the August morning, Alafair felt a chill around her heart. She gazed at Josie’s face, unable for a moment to form a thought. Alafair had no doubt that Sally was sensing something about Bill. The woman had spent most of her life deep in the Ozark hills where the ordinary rules of nature didn’t apply. She was half Southern Appalachian white and half Cherokee Indian. Sally knew for a fact that the veils between the world of the living and the world of the dead were mighty thin, and this wasn’t the first time that she had admitted to contact with someone on the other side.
Alafair was not quite so sanguine. Not that she didn’t have perfect faith in her own senses. She knew what she knew and would have scoffed at anyone who tried to talk her out of it. But she wasn’t inclined to share her otherworldly experiences so readily. Still, since Josie had brought it up…
“Have you been to see Laura?” she asked Josie.
“No, I meant to sooner, but I didn’t have the heart. I’m afraid it’s too late now. I hear that Calvin sent her off to some folks of his after the fire the other night.”
“Did he, now? Well, that makes sense. I’m sure he’ll bring her home as soon as this murderer is caught.”
“I was hoping that she’d come out of the darkness, though, and tell Scott who did it.”
“Mary and I went to see her before the funeral,” Alafair said. “She’s not doing well at all. Not dead, but not quite alive, either. I think she’s lost her soul. I think maybe whatever happened to her was so awful that she couldn’t deal with it and now her spirit is wandering around lost.” She hesitated, but Josie was gazing at her attentively, without skepticism. Alafair took a breath and continued. “I’ve been hearing her, you see. I can hear her crying in the night.”
“Are you sure it’s Laura?” Josie asked.
“I recognize her voice.”
“And she isn’t trying to say anything?”
“No, she’s just crying like her heart will break.”
Josie thought about this before she replied. “Do you suppose this is what Bill is trying to tell Mama?” She suddenly straightened to her full height, and the dishes in her hands rattled alarmingly. “Maybe he’s trying to tell her something that will help Laura find her way home, and until then he won’t consent to go to his reward.”
They were interrupted by James’ wife, Irene, who came around the corner of the house with her own armload of dishes. Josie and Alafair turned to face her, both looking so shaken that Irene stopped in her tracks. “What’s wrong?” she demanded.
Josie shook her head tightly. “We’re just grieving about Bill.” Irene relaxed and nodded.
***
After the dishes were gathered up, the women ate their own breakfast. Cleanup occupied the next couple of hours, and then it was time to begin preparing a dinner to be taken to the workers in the field. The younger boys, black and white, served as water bearers, spending the long, miserably hot day running between the field and the well, hauling buckets of water to the hands as they picked the cotton. Alafair kept a weather eye on Charlie as he lugged the heavy buckets back and forth on a yoke, each trip under the blazing sun longer than the last as the workers moved further and further into the field. She could tell that he was flagging as the afternoon dragged on, but he persevered. He would earn the two bits he had been promised for his labor.
Gee Dub and his cousins began the day picking cotton beside the laborers, but as the afternoon wore on, the older boys loaded cotton into wagons. As the pickers brought them in, the men weighed the full pokes by hanging them on a spring scale suspended from a sturdy tree branch, then entered the weights into the record book next to the worker’s name. Then the bag was dumped into a wagon and the worker returned to the field with his or her empty poke to start all over again.
Late in the morning, the girls and their aunt Josie washed the worker’s dishes in a couple of washtubs in the back yard, while the rest of the women did the family’s dishes in the kitchen. They hauled a meal of cornbread, chicken, ham sandwiches, and jugs of buttermilk and sweet tea wrapped in wet burlap out to the field on little wagons. Dinner was usually the main meal of the day, but nobody was going to stop for a sit-down meal while there was still daylight. When the shadows grew long in the afternoon, James, Gee Dub and his cousins, and the black foreman dro
ve the first wagon loads of cotton to James’ gin, half a mile down the road.
Mary spent the day with her little sister and four-year-old cousin under the shade trees by the side of the house. The workers had declined her offer to watch their children. They had left their babies on a blanket under a few big sycamores closer to the cotton field, tended by a girl who looked to be about twelve. Every few hours throughout the day, one woman came in and lay her bag aside to nurse her infant, then trudged back to work. After nap time, when the children were hot and bored and full of energy, Mary herded her ducklings over to the group under the sycamores. The little children played together for half an hour, then Mary shepherded her charges back to their spot beside the house.
About the time the wagons drove away, the women started supper. It would be an enormous meal for forty very hungry and exhausted people. As the sun was westering, Alafair left the sweltering kitchen for a few minutes to check on Mary and the children.
Mary was sitting in a straight-backed chair, languidly fanning herself with a paper fan adorned with a picture of Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount. Grace and four year old Katie were stretched out on their bellies on the quilt, playing some desultory game of pretend with several round rocks. The air hung heavy, smelling of dust and the sweetness of dry grass. The shrill singing of the cicadas was relentless.
“Looks peaceful out here,” Alafair observed.
Mary looked up at her, red-cheeked, and smiled. “Nobody’s got the energy to be getting in trouble.”
Alafair put the back of her hand against Mary’s face. “How you feeling, honey?”
“My head’s like to split. It’s the heat, I reckon.”
“Katie, go into the house and ask your Aunt Irene to give you a glass of water for your cousin Mary,” Alafair instructed. Both Katie and Grace leaped to their feet.
“Me too, Mama!” Grace exclaimed, and the two girls ran off toward the kitchen.
“They been behaving themselves?” Alafair wasn’t really concerned about the little girls. She was just making conversation while she inspected Mary’s face for any signs of illness or other trouble.
“They’ve been very good, considering. They’ve been wanting to go back down to the field and play with the little colored babies some more.”
“Now, sugar, I doubt if their mamas minded y’all going down there once, but they may not want you pestering them. They ain’t baby dolls for the girls to play with.”
Mary was mildly insulted at the uncalled-for admonition, but before she could comment, the little girls reappeared, both carrying tin cups of water clutched gingerly in two hands. Apparently there had been a disagreement over who was to be the water bearer, which Aunt Irene had solved in the most egalitarian manner possible. Katie arrived with the water she had started out with, but most of the contents of Grace’s cup was left in a damp trail from kitchen door to Mary’s side. Mary drank down Katie’s offering and Grace’s too.
“Thank you,” Mary told them. “I feel much better now. Y’all girls can take these cups back to Aunt Irene, now.”
Delighted with their accomplishment, the children skipped away. As soon as they disappeared around the corner of the house, Mary turned back toward Alafair and took a breath to speak.
Years later, thinking back on it, Mary never did remember how she got on the ground with her mother sprawled on top of her. There was a loud crack, she remembered that plainly enough. Then she found herself lying face down on the ground without ever being aware of leaving her chair. Alafair was lying over her, pushing her into the quilt, holding her down and screaming for Shaw. Out of the one eye that could see over a wrinkle in the blanket and out from under Alafair’s arm, Mary could see movement in the distance, in the field, where pickers were straightening up, looking toward them. She saw the blur of someone beginning to run in toward the house; a white man, Uncle Howard, or Daddy, maybe. She had a strange feeling of dislocation, of having skipped a portion of time, of suddenly waking up in a foreign land, or a hundred years in the future.
“Mama, you’re smothering me,” she said calmly.
“Sarah, get back in the house with them girls,” Alafair was yelling. She seemed not to have taken notice of Mary’s statement, but she shifted, and Mary’s lungs expanded.
“What’s happening?” Mary asked, still in a state of unreality.
Alafair lowered her face down next to Mary’s, practically cheek to cheek on the ground. “You just stay still,” she whispered. “Somebody’s shooting at us.”
“Shooting,” Mary repeated. She remembered the cracking noise and, suddenly enlightened, exclaimed, “Oh!”
Shaw was on them by now, closely followed by his brother Howard. He fell to his knees beside them and put his hands on the women’s heads, feeling for wounds.
“We’re all right,” Alafair informed him impatiently. “Did you see him?”
“No.” Shaw was breathless from the run. “Just heard a shot. How many shots? Could you tell where they came from?”
“Only one shot.” Alafair raised herself up on one elbow and pointed to the west. “That way.”
That way was the barn, three grain silos, and several outbuildings a few hundred yards away.
“I’ll get the guns,” Howard said.
“Get some of them men in the field to help us find this…” Shaw hesitated and looked down at his wife and daughter. “…shooter. I’ll pay a dollar to anybody who’ll help us, and twenty dollars to whoever finds him. Send somebody into town to find the sheriff. Go on, Howard, I’ll get the guns.” Shaw hunkered down over Alafair and Mary. “Come on, now. Get up and let’s get to the house.” The three of them stood and scuttled toward the house in a tight huddle, with Shaw on the outside acting as a human shield. They hurried around the corner and up the back steps into the kitchen, where they found the other women and girls standing far away from the windows next to the stove at the back wall, in a wide-eyed bunch with their arms around one another.
“What in the name of gingerbread is going on?” Josie managed. “Who’s shooting? Is everybody all right?”
“As near as I can tell everybody’s fine,” Shaw assured them. “Somebody took a shot at the house.” He looked at Alafair when he said this. Neither had said so, but their common opinion was that somebody had taken a shot at Mary. “It was just the one shot,” he continued, “so I expect it was a stray. Me and Howard are taking some men to hunt for the chucklehead that done it. He’s long gone by now, probably, but it’s best that y’all stay in the house for a spell ’til we get this straightened out.”
“What about the boys?” Sarah wondered, distressed. “What about the pickers?”
“I don’t think anybody is out to get the boys or the hands,” Shaw soothed. “Just don’t go outside until we get it taken care of. Irene, where does James keep the key to his gun cabinet?”
Chapter Fourteen
Bill told us that just before they were scheduled to start for home, him, Nix, and Farrell Dean had decided to go to the blacksmith’s in Waco to look into getting Nix’s foal re-shod before they left. The smith was situated at the edge of town, a bit away from other buildings because of a pretty good-sized corral he had next to his stable. It was late in the day, about dusk, and Bill said that as they walked up, they could hear a ruckus coming from inside the blacksmith’s workshop. Men hollering, a bunch of whomps, then a yelp like somebody kicked a dog, is how Bill described it. The fellows ran inside to see what was going on and to see if anybody needed help. Didn’t even think twice about the danger, I expect. That’s how young men are, to my observation.
***
It was a long evening for the women and girls, stuck in the sweltering house, not knowing what was going on outside, unable to even go to the windows in hope of a breeze. The women cooked. No matter what happened, when it became so dark that the workers in the field could no longer see to pick cotton, they were going to have to be fed. The women simply proceeded in faith that one of their men would give
them the all-clear eventually, and they could fulfill their obligations. Grace became so hot and bored and impossible to live with, and Alafair so annoyed, that she considered giving the child a teaspoon of Mother’s Helper. Finally, she and Sarah put the tin bathtub in the middle of the kitchen and filled it with a few inches of cool water and let the two little girls splash around in it. They were messy and noisy, but at least they were out from underfoot.
Alafair volunteered to venture out the back door and pump more water when they ran low. She was priming the handle with water from the little bucket that was kept by the pump for that purpose when she heard voices around the side of the house. Curious, she set her bucket down and moved close enough to the corner to be able to see a huddle of men standing under the elms, close to the spot where Mary’s blanket had been. They were bringing each other up to speed on the hunt and planning their next move. Shaw was in the group, along with his relatives, including his cousin Scott, the sheriff. Close to the house where the horses were tied, very near her corner, the deputy Trent Calder stood alone with his thumbs hooked in his belt, watching the older men parlay. He had already offered his opinion, Alafair speculated, and was anxious to carry on.
Alafair liked Trent. He was a tall, serious young man with a dry sense of humor—a redhead, like Bill, but where Bill’s hair had been a coppery auburn, Trent was a true strawberry blond, with blue eyes that sized you up one side and down the other. Trent had been a friend of Bill’s, Alafair remembered. He was also a friend of Art Turner’s, and Scott had sent him down to Tishomingo on the day of Bill’s funeral to talk to Art. She had not known until this minute that he had returned.