999

by Al Sarrantonio

  The crowd grew tighter around us. I turned to look for Mr. Smoote, but he was gone from sight.

  Mr. Nation said, “You ain’t so high and mighty now, are you, Jacob? You and your nigger-lovin’ ways aren’t gonna cut the mustard around here.”

  “Hand him over,” Daddy said. “I’ll take him. See he gets a fair trial.”

  “You said you were gonna turn him loose,” Nation said. “I thought about it. Yes.”

  “He ain’t gonna be turned loose, except at the end of the rope.”

  “You’re not gonna hang this man,” Daddy said.

  “That’s funny,” Nation said. “I thought that’s exactly what we were gonna do.”

  “This ain’t the wild west,” Daddy said.

  “No,” Nation said. “This here is a riverbank with trees, and we got us a rope and a bad nigger.”

  One of Mr. Nation’s boys had slipped off while Daddy and Mr. Nation were talking, and when he reappeared, he had a rope tied in a noose. He slipped it over Mose’s head.

  Daddy stepped forward then, grabbed the rope and jerked it off of Mose. The crowd let out a sound like an animal in pain, then they were all over Daddy, punching and kicking. I tried to fight them, but they hit me too, and the next thing I knew I was on the ground and legs were kicking at us and then I heard Mose scream for my daddy, and when I looked up they had the rope around his neck and were dragging him along the ground.

  One man grabbed the end of the rope and threw it over a thick oak limb, and in unison the crowd grabbed the rope and began to pull, hoisting Mose up. Mose grabbed at the rope with his hands and his feet kicked.

  Daddy pushed himself up, staggered forward, grabbed Mose’s legs and ducked his head under Mose and lifted him. But Mr. Nation blindsided Daddy with a kick to the ribs, and Daddy went down and Mose dropped with a snapping sound, started to kick and spit foam. Daddy tried to get up, but men and women began to kick and beat him. I got up and ran for him. Someone clipped me in the back of the neck, and when I come to everyone was gone except me and Daddy, still unconscious, and Mose hung above us, his tongue long and black and thick as a sock stuffed with paper. His green eyes bulged out of his head like little green persimmons.

  On hands and knees I threw up until I didn’t think I had any more in me. Hands grabbed my sides, and I was figuring on more of a beating, but then I heard Mr. Smoote say, “Easy, boy. Easy.”

  He tried to help me up, but I couldn’t stand. He left me sitting on the ground and went over and looked at Daddy. He turned him over and pulled an eyelid back.

  I said, “Is he … ?”

  “No. He’s all right. He just took some good shots.”

  Daddy stirred. Mr. Smoote sat him up. Daddy lifted his eyes to Mose. He said, “For Christ sake, Bill, cut him down from there.”

  Mose was buried on our place, between the barn and the field. Daddy made him a wooden cross and carved MOSE on it, and swore when he got money he’d get him a stone.

  After that, Daddy wasn’t quite the same. He wanted to quit being a constable, but the little money the job brought in was needed, so he stayed at it, swearing anything like this came up again he was gonna quit.

  Fall passed into winter, and there were no more murders. Those who had helped lynch Mose warmed themselves by their self-righteousness. A bad nigger had been laid low. No more women would die—especially white women.

  Many of those there that day had been Daddy’s customers, and we didn’t see them anymore at the shop. As for the rest, Cecil cut most of the hair, and Daddy was doing so little of it, he finally gave Cecil a key and a bigger slice of the money and only came around now and then. He turned his attention to working around the farm, fishing and hunting.

  When spring came, Daddy went to planting, just like always, but he didn’t talk about the crops much, and I didn’t hear him and Mama talking much, but sometimes late at night, through the wall, I could hear him cry. There’s no way to explain how bad it hurts to hear your father cry.

  They got a new schoolmaster come that spring, but it was decided school wouldn’t pick up until the fall, after all the crops had been laid by. Cecil started teaching me how to cut hair, and I even got so I could handle a little trade at the shop, mostly kids my age that liked the idea of me doing it. I brought the money home to Mama, and when I gave it to her, she nearly always cried.

  For the first time in my life, the Depression seemed like the Depression to me. Tom and I still hunted and fished together, but there was starting to be more of a gulf between our ages. I was about to turn fourteen and I felt as old as Mose had been.

  That next spring came and went and was pleasant enough, but the summer set in with a vengeance, hot as hell’s griddle, and the river receded some and the fish didn’t seem to want to bite, and the squirrels and rabbits were wormy that time of year, so there wasn’t much use in that. Most of the crops burned up, and if that wasn’t bad enough, mid-July, there was a bad case of the hydrophobia broke out. Forest animals, domesticated dogs and cats were the victims. It was pretty awful. Got so people shot stray dogs on sight. We kept Toby close to the house, and in the cool, as it was believed by many that an animal could catch rabies not only by being bitten by a diseased animal but by air when it was hot.

  Anyway, it got so folks were calling it a mad dog summer, and it turned out that in more ways than one they were right.

  Clem Sumption lived some ten miles down the road from us, right where a little road forked off what served as a main highway then. You wouldn’t think of it as a highway now, but it was the main road, and if you turned off of it, trying to cross through our neck of the woods on your way to Tyler, you had to pass his house, which was situated alongside the river.

  Clem’s outhouse was over near the river, and it was fixed up so what went out of him and his family went into the river. Lot of folks did that, though some like my daddy were appalled at the idea. It was that place and time’s idea of plumbing. The waste dropped down a slanted hole onto the bank and when the water rose, the mess was carried away. When it didn’t, flies lived there on mounds of dark mess, buried in it, glowing like jewels in rancid chocolate.

  Clem ran a little roadside stand where he sold a bit of vegetables now and then, and on this hot day I’m talking about, he suddenly had the urge to take care of a mild stomach disorder, and left his son, Wilson, in charge of the stand.

  After doing his business, Clem rolled a cigarette and went out beside the outhouse to look down on the fly-infested pile, maybe hoping the river had carried some of it away. But dry as it was, the pile was bigger and the water was lower, and something pale and dark lay facedown in the pile.

  Clem, first spying it, thought it was a huge, bloated, belly-up catfish. One of those enormous bottom crawler types that were reputed by some to be able to swallow small dogs and babies.

  But a catfish didn’t have legs.

  Clem said later, even when he saw the legs, it didn’t register with him that it was a human being. It looked too swollen, too strange to be a person.

  But as he eased carefully down the side of the hill, mindful not to step in what his family had been dropping along the bank all summer, he saw that it was indeed a woman’s bloated body lying facedown in the moist blackness, and the flies were as delighted with the corpse as they were with the waste.

  Clem saddled up a horse and arrived in our yard sometime after that. This wasn’t like now, when medical examiners show up and cops measure this and measure that, take fingerprints and photos. My father and Clem pulled the body out of the pile and dipped it into the river for a rinse, and it was then that Daddy saw the face of Maria Canerton buried in a mass of swollen flesh, one cold dead eye open, as if she were winking.

  The body arrived at our house wrapped in a tarp. Daddy and Clem hauled it out of the car and toted it up to the barn. As they walked by, me and Tom, out under the big tree, playing some game or another, could smell that terrible dead smell through the tarp, and with no wind blowing, it was dry and
rude to the nostrils and made me sick.

  When Daddy came out of the barn with Clem, he had an ax handle in his hand. He started walking briskly down to the car, and I could hear Clem arguing with him. “Don’t do it, Jacob. It ain’t worth it.”

  We ran over to the car as Mama came out of the house. Daddy calmly laid the ax handle in the front seat, and Clem stood shaking his head. Mama climbed into the car and started on Daddy. “Jacob, I know what you’re thinkin’. You can’t.”

  Daddy started up the car. Mama yelled out, “Children. Get in. I’m not leavin’ you here.”

  We did just that, and roared off leaving Clem standing in the yard bewildered. Mama fussed and yelled and pleaded all the way over to Mr. Nation’s house, but Daddy never said a word. When he pulled up in Nation’s yard, Mr. Nation’s wife was outside hoeing at a pathetic little garden, and Mr. Nation and his two boys were sitting in rickety chairs under a tree.

  Daddy got out of the car with his ax handle and started walking toward Mr. Nation. Mama was hanging on his arm, but he pulled free. He walked right past Mrs. Nation, who paused and looked up in surprise.

  Mr. Nation and his boys spotted Daddy coming, and Mr. Nation slowly rose from his chair. “What the hell you doin’ with that ax handle?” he asked.

  Daddy didn’t answer, but the next moment what he was doing with that ax handle became clear. It whistled through the hot morning air like a flaming arrow and caught Mr. Nation alongside the head about where the jaw meets the ear, and the sound it made was, to put it mildly, akin to a rifle shot.

  Mr. Nation went down like a windblown scarecrow, and Daddy stood over him swinging the ax handle, and Mr. Nation was yelling and putting up his arms in a pathetic way, and the two boys came at Daddy, and Daddy turned and swatted one of them down, and the other tackled him. Instinctively, I started kicking at that boy, and he came off Daddy and climbed me, but Daddy was up now, and the ax handle whistled, and that ole boy went out like a light and the other one, who was still conscious, started scuttling along the ground on all fours with a motion like a crippled centipede. He finally got upright and ran for the house.

  Mr. Nation tried to get up several times, but every time he did that ax handle would cut the air, and down he’d go. Daddy whapped on Mr. Nation’s sides and back and legs until he was worn out, had to back off and lean on the somewhat splintered handle.

  Nation, battered, ribs surely broken, lip busted, spitting teeth, looked at Daddy, but he didn’t try to get up. Daddy, when he got his wind back, said, “They found Maria Canerton down by the river. Dead. Cut the same way. You and your boys and that lynch mob didn’t do nothin’ but hang an innocent man.”

  “You’re supposed to be the law?” Nation said.

  “If’n I was any kind of law, I’d have had you arrested for what you did to Mose, but that wouldn’t have done any good. No one around here would convict you, Nation. They’re scared of you. But I ain’t. I ain’t. And if you ever cross my path again, I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”

  Daddy tossed the ax handle aside, said “Come on,” and we all started back to the car. As we passed Mrs. Nation, she looked up and leaned on her hoe. She had a black eye and a swollen lip and some old bruises on her cheek. She smiled at us.

  We all went to Mrs. Canerton’s funeral. Me and my family stood in the front row. Cecil was there. Just about everyone in town and around about, except the Nations and some of the people who had been in the lynch mob that killed Mose.

  Within a week Daddy’s customers at the barbershop returned, among them members of the lynch party, and the majority of them wanted him to cut their hair. He had to go back to work regularly. I don’t know how he felt about that, cutting the hair of those who had beaten me and him that day, that had killed Mose, but he cut their hair and took their money. Maybe Daddy saw it as a kind of revenge. And maybe we just needed the money.

  Mama took a job in town at the courthouse. With school out, that left me to take care of Tom, and though we were supposed to stay out of the woods that summer, especially knowing there was a murderer on the loose, we were kids and adventurous and bored.

  One morning me and Tom and Toby went down to the river and walked along the bank, looking for a place to ford near the swinging bridge. Neither of us wanted to cross the bridge, and we used the excuse that Toby couldn’t cross it, but that was just an excuse.

  We wanted to look at the briar tunnel we had been lost in that night, but we didn’t want to cross the bridge to get there. We walked a long ways and finally came to the shack where Mose had lived, and we just stood there looking at it. It had never been much, just a hovel made of wood and tin and tarpaper. Mose mostly set outside of it in an old chair under a willow tree that overlooked the river.

  The door was wide open, and when we looked in there, we could see animals had been prowling about. A tin of flour had been knocked over and was littered with bugs. Other foodstuff was not recognizable. They were just glaze matted into the hard dirt floor. A few pathetic possessions were lying here and there. A wooden child’s toy was on a shelf and next to it a very faded photograph of a dark black woman that might have been Mose’s wife.

  The place depressed me. Toby went inside and sniffed about and prowled in the flour till we called him out. We walked around the house and out near the chair, and it was then, looking back at the house, I noted there was something hanging on a nail on the outside wall. It was a chain, and from the chain hung a number of fish skeletons, and one fresh fish.

  We went over and looked at it. The fresh fish was very fresh, and in fact, it was still damp. Someone had hung it there recently, and the other stack of fish bones indicated that someone had been hanging fish there on a regular basis, and for some time, like an offering to Mose. An offering he could no longer take.

  On another nail nearby, strings tied together, was a pair of old shoes that had most likely been fished from the river, and hung over them was a water-warped belt. On the ground, leaning against the side of the house below the nail with the shoes, was a tin plate and a bright blue river rock and a mason jar. All of it laid out like gifts.

  I don’t know why, but I took the dead fish down, all the old bones, and cast them into the river and put the chain back on the nail. I tossed the shoe and belt, the plate, rock and mason jar into the river. Not out of meanness, but so the gifts would seem to be taken.

  Mose’s old boat was still up by the house, laid up on rocks so it wouldn’t rot on the ground. A paddle lay in its bottom. We decided to take it and float it upriver to where the briar tunnels were. We loaded Toby in the boat, pushed it into the water and set out. We floated the long distance back to the swinging bridge and went under it, looking for the Goat Man under there, waiting like Billy Goat Gruff.

  In shadow, under the bridge, deep into the bank, was a dark indention, like a cave. I imagined that was where the Goat Man lived, waiting for prey.

  We paddled gently to the riverbank where we had found the woman bound to the tree by the river. She was long gone, of course, and the vines that had held her were no longer there.

  We pulled the boat onto the dirt and gravel bank and left it there as we went up the taller part of the bank, past the tree where the woman had been, and into the briars. The tunnel was the same, and it was clear in the daytime that the tunnel had, as we suspected, been cut into the briars. It was not as large or as long a tunnel as it had seemed that night, and it emptied out into a wider tunnel, and it too was shorter and smaller than we had thought. There were little bits of colored cloth hung on briars all about and there were pictures from Sears catalogs of women in underwear and there were a few of those playing cards like I had seen hung on briars. We hadn’t seen all that at night, but I figured it had been there all along.

  In the middle of the tunnel was a place where someone had built a fire, and above us the briars wrapped so thick and were so intertwined with low-hanging branches, you could imagine much of this place would stay almost dry during a rainstorm.

&n
bsp; Toby was sniffing and running about as best his poor old damaged back and legs would allow him.

  “It’s like some kind of nest,” Tom said. “The Goat Man’s nest.”

  A chill came over me then, and it occurred to me that if that was true, and if this was his den instead of the cave under the bridge, or one of his dens, he might come home at any time. I told Tom that, and we called up Toby and got out of there, tried to paddle the boat back upriver, but couldn’t.

  We finally got out and made to carry it along the bank, but it was too heavy. We gave up and left it by the river. We walked past the swinging bridge and for a long ways till we found a sandbar. We used that to cross, and went back home, finished the chores, cleaned ourselves and Toby up before Mama and Daddy came chugging home from work in our car.

  Next morning, when Mama and Daddy left for town and work, me and Tom and Toby went at it again. I had a hunch about Mose’s old shack, and I wanted to check it out. But my hunch was wrong. There was nothing new hung from the nails or leaned against the wall. But there was something curious. The boat we had left on the bank was back in its place atop the rocks with the paddle inside.

  It was that night, lying in bed, that I heard Mama and Daddy talking. After Daddy had beaten Mr. Nation and his boys with the ax handle, his spirit had been restored. I heard him tell Mama: “There’s this thing I been thinking, honey. What if the murderer wanted people to think it was Mose, so he made a big to-do about it to hide the fact he done it. Maybe he was gonna quit doin’ it, but he couldn’t. You know, like some of them diseases that come back on you when you think you’re over it.”

  “You mean Mr. Nation, don’t you?” Mama said.

  “Well, it’s a thought. And it come to me it might be one of them boys, Esau or Uriah. Uriah has had a few problems. There’s lots of talk about him torturin’ little animals and such, stomping the fish he caught on the bank, for no good reason other than he wanted to.”

  “That doesn’t mean he killed those women.”