Roadwalkers

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Fire pushed away the darkness and left them safe within the round cave of light. Fire showed faces, companions for as long as the glow lasted. When a fire went out, when a sudden burst of rain turned it into sizzling small plumes of gray smoke, they were all frightened, and they scrambled into their shelters of brush and canvas. The night smothered them, sucked their breath, as a black cat would. Times like this Baby hid behind her eyelids like drawn curtains, envisioning fire, tremendous fire, so that the inside of her head blazed with light and she was safe within its sphere.

  As soon as the rain stopped, they hurried to build the fire again, to make it even brighter.

  During the large gatherings, there were often shouts and curses and shoving and fighting and sudden blood on rock or knife.

  And there was sickness: red crusty spots of measles and chicken pox, coughing and retching and gasping for breath. Bones grown crooked after a fall. Sores on elbows and lips that would not heal.

  Like darkness, sickness frightened them all. There’d been one boy, ten or twelve: thin face, heavy lips, and hooded sleepy eyes. Dirt-stiffened overalls stood out around him like a barrel. His black skin had a shiny polished quality, as if there were a greasy stuffing inside it. When the group moved, he could never keep up but straggled along behind, coming in long after everyone else had settled down in their places. He had a friend, a bigger boy, who brought him food, but he took very little except water. He was always thirsty. Once he drank so long at a creek that he lost his balance and pitched in headfirst. He seemed not to remember how to get up but lay facedown, creek water running across the back of his neck. His friend pulled him out and shook him until he sputtered and strangled and began breathing again.

  One night, late, that boy began moaning. At first the sound was so soft that it seemed to come from nowhere, might almost have been a sudden night wind that set the pines to soughing. It grew into a wail, like a distant train whistle, shrill and shivering. The boy began to move, rolling on the ground, flipping over and over, coming to rest at last on his back, surrounded by the stiff casing of his overalls. His arms stuck straight up, fingers curled like the claws of a bird. He shivered. Then, slowly, the way an inchworm moves, he lifted his back. A flattened patch of wire grass and a small pink flower appeared beneath him. His clenched toes scrabbled against the ground. His chest rose higher and higher; his body became a perfect arc, touching ground only at head and heels. His arms still reached straight up, fingers hooked in empty air.

  They all scattered in fear. Sylvie grabbed Baby’s arm and dragged her stumbling across the night-shrouded ground. Joseph was right behind them. He had his largest knife held ready, as if he were expecting an attack.

  After a bit, their courage returned; they went back to gather their things silently, swiftly. By dawn the entire camp was empty, except for the boy, who now seemed to be sleeping, curled on his side, and his friend who sat with him.

  As the days shortened, groups drifted away by twos and threes. Sylvie and Joseph always stayed until the last, hating to leave the wide yellow circle. Winter fires were different. They were blue like frost, and small like the winter days. No longer in the open, winter fires were built against the face of a bluff, so that their heat reflected out. Summer fires were for joy. Winter fires were for survival.

  One year they were especially late starting south, and the cold followed hard on their heels. They travelled slowly and cautiously, avoiding the sight of people. They’d been fired at twice, pellets pattering like rain into the deep dust at their feet, so Sylvie and Baby stayed hidden, leaving Joseph to forage by himself. He moved like a shadow, even in daylight, stealing pork from pickling barrels and pitchers of cream from unlocked springhouses, taking apples and small late tomatoes, pulling handfuls of green onions from garden rows. Occasionally, too, he’d find a house where company was expected, where Sunday dinner waited in the kitchen and everybody gathered on the front porch. In less than a minute he’d fill the flour sack he carried with him. Later, safely hidden, the three of them bolted the warm salty food in silent delight.

  Mostly, though, he foraged by night. On one of those trips, he noticed a sign: OYSTER OPENERS WANTED, APPLY SOUTH PLANT. (He’d gone to school enough to read that, though it took him a while to spell out the letters.)

  Sylvie knew how to shuck oysters—Aunt Rosie had taught her—so she scrubbed her hands and face and put a handkerchief on her hair and went to the South Plant to show them how good and quick she was. She got the job, and all that winter, six days a week, she and a dozen other women, wearing white aprons and heavy gloves, stood at a long table, prying open oysters and dropping them into chipped enamel bowls. She was paid at the end of every day. The first thing she bought was a pair of heavy rubber boots, the concrete floors were that cold.

  While she worked, Joseph and Baby searched for a place to make their camp.

  It was a small settlement, too small to have a name: seven or eight houses, a cluster of sheds and a dock where the oyster boats unloaded. All the houses were tin-roofed and whitewashed, with screened front porches and cisterns at the side. They were all set far back from the road with twin paths leading to front porch and kitchen door, deep rutted paths filled with oyster shells. Under the winter sun swarms of flies swept back and forth across the warm reeking surface.

  In the empty scrub country a mile or so beyond the settlement Joseph and Baby found a small stream, not deep but fast and clear, that skirted an old Indian mound. Against its sloping side, in a shallow depression, they built their fire pit. They would winter here; real cold hung in the damp air.

  One night Sylvie and Joseph stole three large tin 666 signs from the wall of the seafood plant. The same night they pried off four Coca-Cola signs that were patching the walls of a barn. Joseph stole a new wood door from the back of a carpenter’s truck. It was so heavy he hid it in a clump of wax myrtle and came back for it later, with Sylvie to help him.

  Baby waited for them. She was too little for running and climbing and hiding from dogs. What she could do was this: she could wriggle through the least crack in a fence or window and open it wide for them to come back to later. They stole all they dared. An almost new tarpaulin and a coil of rope from an oysterman’s shed. Two shiny new cooking pots from a general store. Armloads of old license plates from a junkyard.

  License plates were the walls that held back the sandy crumbling soil of their fireplace. Coca-Cola and 666 signs made walls and ceiling, with the tarpaulin fastened over them. On top of it all they piled brush, the way people made mule breaks, until the whole thing seemed to disappear entirely. The new wood door was the floor, placed carefully on a mat of pine branches. They’d cut those branches from trees half a mile away and dragged them along the rocky creek bed, leaving no human mark behind.

  Every day Joseph left with first light and returned long after dark. He was looking around, he said. Alone, Baby stayed close to the shelter. She kept a fire burning, feeding it one stick at a time so that there was always a small red eye gleaming in the depth of the dark sandy hole. Sometimes, even, she sprinkled a few pine needles on it. She liked the way they smelled, burning.

  Once in a while some curious woman tried to follow Sylvie home. Then, whistling loudly, Sylvie led her a couple of miles in the wrong direction before disappearing in a silent double back to the camp. No matter how late she was, or how tired, Sylvie always took out her money and counted it carefully. Then counted it a second time to be sure. The bills and coins were increasing steadily. They did not need to buy food. There were plenty of squirrels and rabbits; Joseph took them almost every day with his throwing knife. And once a week Sylvie brought home a sack of groceries, a present from her friend Milo. Sometimes there’d be a crumpled dollar bill in the bag; that was from her friend too, she said.

  Milo was the white man who delivered ice to the plant, a short thick man with a beard so heavy his jaws looked bruised. Twice a week he backed his truck up to the locker doors and kicked the hundred-pound blocks down th
e chute into the cooler. When he finished, he reached for the bottle of corn likker he kept under the driver’s seat. He made a great show of it, shaking the bottle to study the bead as it rose in the clear liquid, testing the proof. Satisfied, he’d shout: “Johnny Allen, you black son of a bitch, where are you?” Johnny Allen, the plant’s manager, came out of his office, which was only a boarded-off corner of the packing floor. If the weather was fine and sunny, they sat on the dock and watched the women work. If it was cold or raining, they sat by the stove in the cramped office. They got drunk quickly in the stifling warmth.

  Milo sometimes invited Sylvie to sit with them. She ate handfuls of the peanuts that were parching on the stove top, and she even had a small taste of the whiskey. But most of all she was glad of a few minutes’ warmth before she went back to work.

  Everyone knew that Milo would drink with a black man and would sleep with a black woman if she was young and pretty and the price was right. What he wouldn’t do was use a black man’s outhouse. When he left the plant, a little unsteady with liquor, he always parked just past the big swamp maple and went into the woods.

  One day Joseph waited for him, slashed two tires, and slipped away unseen. Milo put on his one spare, then walked back to the plant to find a second. Sylvie said they could hear him coming—he was cursing so loud.

  That was a winter for sickness. Some mornings there’d be only a half-dozen women in the plant, and Johnny Allen had to double their pay. People were dying from congestion of the lungs, Sylvie said, and children coughed so hard that blood ran out of their mouths. Those children, Sylvie said, repeating what she’d heard, made sounds like somebody drowning, and their arms made swimming movements in the air.

  Sylvie herself was never sick, nor was Joseph or Baby. They even began to put on weight from regular eating.

  Even when the weather was very bad, they stayed warm and dry. The fire burned steadily and the greasy smell of food hung on the unmoving air. They played cards, teaching Baby as they went. They sang songs, softly. Joseph told stories, long stories of devils and ghosts. And Sylvie told stories of what their life would be like when they got to Mobile and found their father. He would have a house like Aunt Rosie’s, only bigger, so they each would have a room of their own. There’d be plenty of hot water; they could take three baths a day. Their father’s woman would be so happy to see them, she’d kiss them on both cheeks. That’s what Mobile would be like, Sylvie said; she saw it clear because she had the second sight.

  Sylvie also told fortunes—cards or toss of stones or, her special favorite, the shoulder blade of a rabbit. She’d turn the bone around and around in her fingers, looking at the depth of the socket, counting the spots of mottling. That’s your house, she would say, and that’s your goods and there’s your children, those dents there all in a row, one’s born dead and one soon to die and the others fine healthy boys.

  Through all the long nights and the rainy days when the sides of the little stream froze and the hollows and ruts of the woods were skimmed with a gray glaze, when the morning hoarfrost was thick as snow on the ground, they never stirred from their shelter. Like the little animals they lived among, they dozed and waited, black noses and black eyes withdrawn from the world beyond their burrow.

  Winter ended. They grew restless. They shook themselves like puppies, packed their bundles. Joseph and Sylvie pulled down their shelter so that it lay against the Indian mound, a jumble of wood and tin and cloth and branches.

  On the road a truck passed them, fast, bouncing, spraying water from ruts and puddles. It was Milo returning from his ice delivery, friendly with liquor. He stopped, skidding side-wise, backed up to them.

  “You want a lift?” he said to Sylvie.

  “I’m with them,” she said.

  “All you niggers get in. I’m going to town.”

  He drove strangely, sometimes fast and sometimes slow, sometimes down the center of the road and sometimes along the gravel shoulder.

  “End of the ride.” He stopped and waved them off.

  They were in the center of a town, stores and buildings on four sides of a small park—its grass just beginning to turn a bright spring green—with a flagpole and benches and a statue of a man holding a gun.

  “You ain’t allowed in this part of town,” Milo said. “So you’d best just go right straight through.”

  On the far side of the park, there was a two-story brick building, a line of rocking chairs across its porch and half a dozen cars parked at the curb. A smell of cooking came from the open windows.

  Carefully, explorers in unknown country, Sylvie and Joseph and Baby circled the building, slipped through a narrow brick alley to a back courtyard. Behind a torn screen door four black women worked in a crowded kitchen.

  Sylvie walked straight up to the door, knocked. The women stopped, turned their heads. One, who had been scraping plates into a wide flat pan, said, “Wait.”

  She pushed open the door, a thin black woman whose apron was so large it wrapped twice around her narrow hips. She put the pan of plate scrapings on the edge of the steps, the way she’d feed a dog. Sylvie carried it across the courtyard to Baby and Joseph. The pan was almost full, the food covered with stiffening grease.

  They ate quickly, silently. Sylvie returned the empty pan.

  “Give it here.” The same woman reached through the tear in the screen. “Clear off now,” she said. “We got people of our own to look after.”

  They walked the roads again, days flowing one into the other. They collected things as they passed, discarding them a day or an hour later: shotgun-shell cases, shreds of old tires, bits of metal. Once they found a box of handkerchiefs, a small flat cardboard box, rain streaked. There was only one handkerchief inside, white with a green border, flowers and a windmill embroidered in the corner.

  Sylvie left them for a man she’d met at one of the WPA road projects. She didn’t tell Baby goodbye; she just disappeared one day. “Gone off to Mobile,” Joseph said.

  They never spoke of her again. The space where she had been filled up with time and vanished.

  In the warm lengthening days the two of them, Joseph and Baby, felt themselves grow large with courage and boldness. The winter spent hiding in a burrow was over; their feet thudded on the solid surface of the earth; their lungs grew like flowers in the freshening air; their blood bubbled through their veins like Coca-Cola. They walked, openly and unasked, into any yard that didn’t have a dog, and drank from the well, laughing when people screamed threats at them and sent shotgun blasts over their heads. They entered henhouses in broad daylight, choosing the sleepy time of afternoon. Joseph killed a chicken with a single motion of his hands while Baby filled her pockets with eggs, cramming them in so hard that some shells broke and the yellow-and-white liquid ran down her body. The eggs they did not eat they threw against stones to watch them spatter. They stole milk from cows in far pasture corners. Joseph always cut a cross on the animal’s flank when they were done; he’d rub his finger along the track of the oozing blood while flies circled eagerly. Once they stole a mule, a big ambling cotton-field mule, and rode for a day and a half until the hungry animal turned mean and surly and bit Joseph on the hip. While the wound healed, Joseph and Baby ate duck potatoes and berries and the rabbits Baby caught in her grass snares.

  Then they were moving again, through country where cotton fields stretched for miles, green and tall with just the first bit of white showing in the brown boles. There were always dozens of people working up and down the rows, chopping. They sang and shouted back and forth. Baby and Joseph stopped to listen to the faint far echoes.

  The sound made them restless, as did the sight of so many people. (They no longer went to the summer gatherings; they travelled alone.) They left the bottomlands for the ridges, where even the midsummer breeze was cool and light, and pine needles made soft sleeping, and the ground was covered with brightly colored mushrooms.

  Early one morning, while the air was still filled with night
damp and mosquitoes’ wings had not yet dried, they made their way along a slow descending sweep of ridge to a small valley. There were two farmhouses, tin-roofed, with narrow porches all around, and fenced dooryards of clean-swept dirt. Between them a raggedy line of barns and smokehouses, lean-tos, and stock pens strung out along a rocky fast-running creek. Beyond, up the valley, were alfalfa pastures and fields of corn, heavy tassels drooping in the unmoving air. A white woman in a yellow dress fed chickens in the yard. Her voice floated out, faint and rasping, like one of her birds. A black woman hung out washing. A black man harnessed a team of mules to a wagon, whistling.

  Joseph nodded toward the house and began to scramble down the long slopes. Baby followed slowly, stumbling. She was sleepy, her head ached, and daylight burned her eyes so that she couldn’t look up. She followed by sound alone, seeing only the small blue and yellow flowers that passed beneath her feet.

  At their approach the chickens scattered in a bobbing run; their toes had been smashed to keep them at home. The woman in the yellow dress walked to the gate and looked at them.

  “Where’d you two drop from?” Her gray hair was pulled to a tight knot, and a red sunbonnet was tied to her belt, its long ties flapping down her thigh.

  Joseph shifted slowly from one foot to the other, silently.

  Baby scratched at the sore on her leg, pulling up the scab to look at the pulpy yellow skin beneath. Her head hurt more when she bent over.

  “You want something to eat?”

  “Yes,” Baby said.

  Joseph swung at her with the stick he always carried against snakes. She jumped away.

  The woman chuckled. “Going at each other like feists, and no doubt about it. Maybe we got something left. Come over by the porch.”

  There was a square dark patch of shade at the side of the house, close to the foundation stones. Baby dropped her bundle and stretched out there, feeling the cool air from underneath, smelling the soft sweet breath of mud. The pain in her head fanned out, like a sunset, shot out bright colors, flashes and periods of black.