by Glenn Taylor
‘You know what they opened up a mile from this place the year before I come in?’
‘What?’
‘Coal mine.’ He was still looking down, down at those tucked away hands. ‘You know what the warden’s name was back then, in ’22?’
‘Huh-uh.’
‘Pilcher. Otto Pilcher. That name mean anything to you?’
Chicky sat back in his chair. He went dizzy.
‘Ol Otto was Anse Pilcher’s first cousin, come up through the lawman ranks and married a little girl from up thisaway. Everybody loved Otto. “He’s a reformer,” is what they always said. Otto cleaned up the mess left to him. No more inhumane treatments put on those convicts, not up at Moundsville. But he had a special spot for a nigger that done kilt his cousin. Nigger got found guilty by a jury for it, so he got some payback comin.’ Arly was rocking back and forth a little now, trying to keep himself from busting wide open.
Chicky’s face went white.
‘So I noticed first thing he did was take out the heavy bag in the exercise yard. Took away the gloves for sparrin, the striking bag. Man’s got but one choice and that’s baseball, and I ain’t never seen the point in no baseball.’ Both men thought back to the days when they’d laced up the gloves together. Arly went on. ‘Then, they sunk me down in that prison mine, contracted out from Sewickley, eighty feet deep, but I wasn’t no trustie like the rest of the boys. They slept in the mine camp, a mile outside the wall. I come back every night on foot, followin the guard on horseback. Get to sleep in my five by seven, only cell in the block without a ray a sunshine during daylight. Call it the ‘bad angle cell.’ Saturday nights, Warden Pilcher come past the bad angle, ask me how do I like it up in Marshall County. I say I like it just fine and stare at him, cold. And he knows that I’m the kind a man to whup a cracker quick as look at him, and he waits on me to break, reach through and bust his mouth open so he can really put it on me, but I don’t. I keep goin underground for the Pittsburgh Vein, keep footing it back and watchin them lifers go on to Camp Two at Martinsburg for the Public Road. Road campers was on the honor system, guards don’t even carry no rifles. They slept in cabins, slip whiskey in, women I heard too. I didn’t slip nothin but punches from an invisible sparrin partner, bang out sit-ups and push-ups on my knuckles.’ Arly spoke the words as if he’d done so many times before, but he never had. Not out loud. Never to his mother and father, who’d quit coming years before at his request. Never to the few friends he’d made inside.
Chicky wondered why he’d come there. He watched the slightly bowed head of his boyhood friend, stared at that balding pattern. It occurred to him that as a boy, Arly Jr had been known as quiet. As one who spoke as little as possible. Not on this day. Chicky tried in vain not to hear what he heard.
‘So by the time ol Otto retires, I got me a couple of close-as-you-can to friends in here. Stretch and Nat, both from McDowell. They say the new warden goin cut out this ridin me down. Say I got road camp comin. Farm work instead of mineshaft. Beets and cabbage, horseradish and kale and tomatoes and rutabaga. Cons keep what they can’t can, eat it fresh in they cells. But then, all at once, that T.B. hits hard. Stretch and Nat sunnin themselves at the tubercular, that’s the prison hospital back in ’31. Boom, Stretch dies on a Friday the thirteenth, Nat six days later. Back to no friends. That same Thursday, new warden assumes his post, comes by my cell. Warden Jones. “Your fat friend croaked,” he says. “And my wife is Anna Elizabeth Pilcher, niece of Anse. And you can damn sure bet you goin down that mine shaft and you’ll keep pickin that bone if that’s what the boss wants, Saturdays and Sundays too. Cause that’s what little boys get for striking against the mines, takin up arms,” he says to me. Then he says, “You done bit the hand that fed you, and you goin pay for it till you thought parole was just a word in a dictionary.”’ Arly bent his neck down deeper, and it was hard to tell if he laughed a little or just sniffed. ‘Well, I came up off my bunk and got that son of a bitch by the throat with my left, brought my right back and let it sail. I don’t know how I came back and forth through the bars clean, but I did, eight or nine times until he was out on his feet, got so heavy that I had to let him drop. He was face down snortin his own bloody teeth fore the guard knew what happened.’
For a moment, Chicky let himself believe that Arly’s story might end right there.
‘That’s when Warden Jones opened up the little room in North Wagon Gate. It’s where they used to hang men before they built the death house, where they hang em now. Anyway, they quit usin the weighing machine over there back in 1900 or so, but he hired out a engineer buddy to fix it back up. Just for me. Longest a man lasted in the machine was thirty seconds, that’s what I heard.’ He looked at Chicky, really looked, for the first time. ‘You know what a weighing machine is?’
Chicky shook his head no.
‘That gold I see on your teeth?’
Chicky nodded yes.
‘Watch out on that. Somebody’s liable to pry em out of your head for pawn.’ Arly laughed and looked back at his lap, his hands in his pockets. ‘Weighing machine is nothin but a plank, solid oak, set inside a groove on a frame. This makes it so you can raise it or lower it to any height you want. Hook came down from the plank, chain on that, handcuffs on the chain. Warden put the handcuffs to me hisself. He raised up that cross piece till I had to tiptoe to keep from screamin. They didn’t hardly touch the floor. Then he raised it just a hair, set it for me by pluggin in those two iron pins, in the holes up there, held it steady. I watched it all. I said to myself, shit. No wonder ain’t nobody gone past a half minute.’ He laughed again then. Looked Chicky in the eyes. ‘My fingertips popped open like firecrackers. Blood ran all over, fingernails just flew, like they was on a hinge. I reckon I almost made forty seconds, but my Lord, I heard myself scream like a little ol child, like Warren Crews that day, you remember how he sissy-wailed, T.?’ Arly smiled at Chicky. He was reminiscing through thick glass and thirty years of anguish.
Chicky cringed at the initial that had once signified his name. T. He tried not to cry, not to sissy-wail from all of it right there in front of him. All that madness he’d thought he’d known the pinnacle of until then.
‘Anyway,’ Arly went on, ‘they don’t tell you that the worst of it comes later. You think weeks, months. But it don’t work that way. That swelling just goes and goes, and you don’t say nothin, and they don’t come put you in the mines anymore, or put you anywhere, and you just hope them sores and bubbled-up splits don’t turn to blood poisoning. Cause then you die. But then you think, hold on now. There wouldn’t be nothin better than blood poisoning, just like you thought one time that there wouldn’t be nothin better than tuberculosis. But none of death’s ways ever come to you, and you stop takin visits from your people outside, and the warden don’t come by no more, and you can’t do no push-ups or hang yourself with your bedsheet cause your hands ain’t nothin but bricks.’ He pulled them from his pockets and held them to the glass.
Chicky’s stomach clenched and his breathing went funny so that he had to wipe at what had come from his nose. He saw something behind that glass that he’d never speak of again. Something he’d spend days and nights trying to forget. As much as he knew he shouldn’t, he looked away.
Arly put his hands back in his pockets and went on. ‘And then you get to thinkin crazy, real crazy. You hear a visitor’s comin for you, and you decide you’ll see that newspaperman name of Bern who gets on the docket after fifteen years of nobody, cause you know damn well who it is. You wondered if he’d come, what he’d say. Ol Stinky T. If maybe he’d get shackled up since he’s the one who done pulled the trigger. But he sits down and wants to know how you’re doing, what it’s like in here. So you tell him what it’s like. See how he takes it.’ Arly watched him for a moment, how he was taking it. ‘And you tell him, right fore he leaves, that you and him wasn’t never friends. Cause even a white boy with a messed up mouthful of teeth’s got more worth than a colored boy. Wasn’t never f
riends, just somebodies who ain’t enemies cause you both lookin down a barrel at some other white man who is. Ain’t no friends when it comes to black and white.’
Arly stood and knocked his chair down with the backs of his knees. He turned from the glass and the man on the other side, whose own head was now bowed.
Arly Scott Jr walked back to the cell block without ever breaking stride.
Then came the nightmare of the piker. He could not go home and he could not sleep. He belonged in a cage and he had to roam free. A would-be-brother-in-law was a man of the law, and he sniffed the wind for a chance to be hero of a time long since gone.
Marshall County wasn’t dry like so many others. Chicky had stepped from the prison doors into the liquor store. He still had money from all those women, all those years past, and he aimed to spend it. Two pints of Old Cobb Whisky put him on the road to shaking loose the sight of Arly’s hands. It almost put him to sleep on the train back to Bluefield.
Old Cobb was dark as maple syrup. It was the opposite of his dead mother’s shine, the single remaining jar of which he still had not sipped. Old Cobb was rotgut stuff, 90 Proof, and it made a man mean. From his seat inside the passenger car, Chicky shook his head side to side to wipe away visions of the weighing machine. He thought he could smell the blood that had run.
At the station in Charleston, he stepped off the platform to get some air. But he was drunk and fell to his knees. A man offered to help, and Chicky hissed at him, got back on the train.
Outside Beckley, when the porter asked if he might be more discreet with his pint-sipping, Chicky stood up and faced him. Had the train not swayed and sat him down again, he would have hit the man square on.
He stared at the empty seat next to him. He thought of Clarissa, their overnighter back from Huntington when he was a boy. The nut house and his birth mother. But still, visions of Arly’s hands interrupted, screeching their way into his mind’s eye without warning. He sipped hard and winced, finally fell asleep.
He slept through the stop at Matewan, avoided the eyes of Mose and Warren Crews, sent to the depot by Fred Dallara to watch folks boarding and getting off.
When the porter woke him up, they’d made it to Bluefield. He took a scrap of paper from his backpack and read the address written there. 12 Magnolia Way. By one a.m., he was at the address, lying on his stomach under the porch. He passed out again.
At six, Chicky awoke, slid out from the crawl space and took the derringer flask from his pack. He looked at the thing and marveled on how he could have believed, for twenty-four years, that it could magically refill itself. He wondered how men could get how they got.
He popped the latch and checked that the gun was loaded, both barrels.
When he stepped through the back door to the kitchen, its squeal did not rouse the old man asleep at the table. His oatmeal had gone cold, and the newspaper had fallen to the floor. Hair grew from his earholes, gray wisps given up by scissors.
Chicky stepped to where the man snored in his hardback chair. He pressed the little pistol to the base of the neck, raising up the old man’s head. ‘Charles E. Lively,’ Chicky said. ‘Murderer in cold blood of Sid Hatfield, I come to carry out your sentence of death.’
Lively did not speak at first. He did not even move, save straightening his neck. Then, as Chicky’s finger tensed before the nickel plated trigger, Lively spoke. ‘There are two words in the English language you should familiarize yourself with, son.’ He paused, then uttered them: ‘Self-defense.’
Chicky thought back to a time he’d heard this same utterance from another man. It occurred to him that folks could define damn near any word in damn near any fashion they pleased to fit their aims. The mean edge provided by the Old Cobb Whisky was about to wear off, and it was time to squeeze or walk away. Chicky had decided on the former when a little girl walked from the hallway through the swinging kitchen door.
‘Granddaddy,’ she said. Her nightgown had little stitched roses across the chest, yellow and pink and red. Somebody had taken time in making it. She looked at Chicky, then her grandfather, who spoke to her.
‘Go on back to bed, Alice,’ he said.
She stood her ground, eyeballing them both. In her eyes, Chicky saw what he’d seen in the little girl on the train back in May 1920. The little girl who’d had the bad luck to see seven dead men, knocked down like dominoes on wet dirt. That time, still a boy himself, he’d looked away from the girl. Everything had gone red and wrong. This time, he’d not look away.
None of the three in the little kitchen spoke.
Something occurred to Chicky, as he stood there, gun pressed to another man’s head in front of his own granddaughter. Swollen and gauze-mouthed in Welch that day so long ago, he’d refrained from asking Mr Bern who’d pulled the trigger on Sid Hatfield. He’d done so because the answer would have put him where he was right then. Running and hiding and shooting.
‘You got a gun?’ the girl asked.
‘Go on back to bed,’ Lively said.
Running and hiding and shooting, Chicky thought. It was time to drop one of the three forever. Two of them were necessary still, but one was not. He lowered the derringer and stepped to the back door. He watched the little girl called Alice who had caught him at his worst, saved him from becoming what he’d once been. When he stepped off the last porch stair, he turned and ran.
Johnnie Johnston was leaving on the 7:30 westbound. Chicago was his destination. He’d never have guessed that Chicky Gold the harmonica man would be sitting next to him, breathing heavy from having almost killed a man, stinking of rotgut whiskey, and trying again to forget everything he’d ever known.
TWENTY
You Carried What You Could
The suitcase was black, split cowhide with silver hardware. The key that worked its locks was no bigger than a junebug. Inside, it was all double silk, gray. Fine quality stitching. All those compartments necessitated such. Four cylindrical housings meant for a lady’s toiletries, sewn tight to the frame. There was a series of snap-down lashes for securing vanity mirrors. And, in addition to the normal inside pockets of such a suitcase, there were those of the hidden variety, small and useful.
It was perfect for a man in need of carrying seven harmonicas, two flasks, a lockbox filled with newspaper clippings, a change of clothes, toothbrush, shaving razor, comb, and hair tonic.
The Civil War backpack had seen its last re-stitching efforts fail in the fall of 1947. It had finally gone rotten beyond repair. Chicky Gold, living in a one-room apartment on Chicago’s West Side, had been unable to throw the old pack out. It had been with him for too long. He cut the best pieces from its holey exterior and made from them a belt to hold up his trousers. The buckle he fashioned from the dismantled derringer parts. He’d smashed the little gun to pieces with a sledgehammer the second night he’d called Chicago home in 1946. It was the same night he’d found the little apartment, the same night he’d sworn off firearms for good. If he couldn’t give up the drink, he could sure give up the gun.
Two blocks from his place, on Western, was a pawn shop called Iffy’s, and about the time the pack went rotten, the toiletry suitcase went on window display. With the money he’d been bringing in for gigs at nightclubs like Pepper’s and Sylvio’s and the Fickle Pickle, Chicky could buy a suitcase if he wanted to.
By late fall 1952, he could have bought a car with the money he’d made blowing harp all over Chicago. He was a lonely white musician among the likes of Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson and Willie Dixon, all of which he’d played with at one time or another. He’d even recorded some in the studio with Dixon, which meant folks could hear him, though they’d not know his name, playing harmonica on all those thick Chess 78s lining stores downtown. But Chicky had found Arly Jr’s words to be true, for though he made music with the best of them, he was never friends with a black man or woman in any genuine way. But he’d come to a place in life where he wasn’t friends with anybody, no matter the stain of their ski
n. And his one true friend, Arly, was a man he made himself forget. A man on the run has to forget.
He kept mostly to himself between gigs. When he played St Louis or New York, he always went ahead of the others, by train, for he’d kept his vow to never sit inside a moving automobile again, even if he could afford one of his own.
Johnnie Johnston had left for St Louis in 1949, after the initial success of The Homesick Dynamite Boys, the band he’d formed with Chicky and a bass player named Bones Watts. Watts went with him, Chicky had stayed.
On Halloween night, 1952, Chicky keyed open his suitcase behind a makeshift red velvet curtain covering the stage at the Stuck Pig on Roosevelt. He put the key back in the inside pocket of his black suit coat. The coat, along with matching black pants, patchwork belt, white shirt, and black tie, were the only digs the man would ever be seen in. He was clean-shaven. Short-haired.
That night he chose the 12-hole Echo Vamper. He unsnapped the long harmonica from its housing inside the case. It was a B Flat night, he could feel it, and he’d bent the reeds of the Echo Vamper earlier that evening using toothpicks. He’d give them something they weren’t used to for All Hallow’s Eve.
Chicky sipped from the gun-less derringer flask covered in etch marks of time. He nodded to the other three men behind the curtain. He could hardly see them through all the smoke. Somehow they fit a stand-up piano and drum kit back there, with enough room left for Chicky and Hubert the singer to get around a little. Hubert nodded back. He was young with conked hair, and he liked Chicky despite his whiteness. The same couldn’t be said for the other two, thrown together at the last minute for this show, but they respected his playing ability just the same. If Chicky wanted to take off on a solo, blow his harp with his noseholes like he was known to do, nobody would cut him short. It meant asses stayed in chairs, and asses in chairs put drinks on tables, and drinks on tables put money in a musician’s pocket, and pocket money put booze in veins, roofs over heads. Money converted everything.