Old Mother Curridge (The Dutch Curridge Series Book 4)

by Tim Bryant

  Well, I don't care if the sun don't shine.

  I get my lovin' in the evening time

  When I'm with my baby.

  Well, it ain't no fun with the sun around.

  I get going when the sun goes down

  And I'm with my baby.

  Well, that's when we're gonna kiss and kiss

  and kiss and kiss,

  And we're gonna kiss some more.

  Who cares how many times we kiss,

  'Cause at a time like this, who keeps score?

  Well, I don't care if the sun don't shine

  I get my loving in the evening time

  When I meet my baby.

  It wasn’t Starletta I was crying over. It wasn’t Donnatella. It wasn’t Alvis Sr. or Momma, Alice Muncey or Maime Guzman. Right then and there, I got Elvis Presley ringing loud and clear in both ears, good and bad, and I mean I truly got it. But I was crying to beat the band for Ruthie Nell Parker— her and that love you know is love— and nobody but me and the man in the moon had a damn clue.

  27

  I may drink more than Ruthie Nell likes, but I also read a lot to make up for it. I’ve had a Fort Worth Public Library card for twenty years, and I’ve never lost a single book. I read mostly stuff like David Goodis, Lionel White, Ross MacDonald’s Lew Archer books and Jim Thompson, who got his start in Fort Worth. But I read a lot of history too. Civil War stuff, French Revolution. I remember reading about the chemist Lavoisier who was guillotined during the French Revolution. According to this book, Lavoisier made a deal with his best friend to watch his face after the blade came down. His plan was to try to keep blinking for as long as he could. Of course, the book didn’t say how it all worked out. As far as I know, Lavoisier’s best friend was beheaded right behind him and took whatever information he got to the grave with him.

  After I read that, I presented the story with Slant Face. It seemed like a cause worth taking up. Ever since then, I had used that excuse as reason for Slant Face to accompany me in any circumstance in which it was remotely possible I could wind up decapitated. It happened more often than you might think.

  “It’s part of the perks of being a best friend,” I said.

  I took Slant Face with me when I returned to Cuneytown. Not because I thought I might lose my head, but because I didn’t have the nerve to meet my colored half-sister Starletta by my lonesome.

  Slant Face is from Salford, England, so I don’t know how the hell he knew so much about Cuneytown, but he proceeded to hold a lecture on the history of the town on our way out there. Actually, it was pretty good stuff.

  He said Cuneytown was named after Robert John Cuney, a black soldier in the Union army who put together a battalion of one hundred men and fought battles from East Texas up into Arkansas and Missouri. Cuney insisted that the battalion be limited to exactly one hundred. Some were Indians, some were from up north, a few like him were ex-slaves. But he’d had some kind of vision that if he put together one hundred men, they would fight to victory and help free the south from the scourge of slavery.

  He often attacked the Confederates from a southern vantage point, when they least expected it, and he annihilated forces in town after town, moving ahead of any news that might prepare the Confederates. Finally, after Cuney fought his way to hell and back, he joined another battalion and went to Laredo. They were supposed to capture a boatload of cotton and burn it to keep the Confederates from selling it or trading for more weapons. They accomplished the mission, put the match to 5,000 bales of cotton. It was said you could see the glow in the sky all the way to Monterrey, Mexico. I wasn’t there so I don’t know about that. I do know, if the story is true, that the fire lit things up enough for a couple of stray Confederate sympathizers to sit out in the shadows and picked off half a dozen of them. Robert John Cuney was the first to go down.

  They brought him home, somewhere down around Stephenville, but they don’t know shit from shinola down there. All they saw was another dead nigger. So a group of people came up here and founded Cuneytown, named for Robert John Cuney, Union Soldier. Rumor was, there were even hidden underground tunnels they used to smuggle runaway slaves up into Oklahoma, where some Indian tribes helped hide them. And Cuney was buried in the church graveyard.

  Goddamn, I’m a sucker for stories like that.

  I didn’t stop at Hoot’s house, although I did point it out to Slant Face. I knew I didn’t need any distractions on this trip. Starletta Francis had a house much like every other house and outhouse in town. Clapboard siding, tin roof, front porch running all the way across. Some of the houses were painted blue, some were green. A few, like Starletta’s, weren’t painted at all.

  I wasn’t sure if Starletta had been warned at all about my pending arrival. Driving up into the front yard, shaded by a large oak with a tire swing that swung like a giant pendulum, I still wasn’t sure how I was going to broach the subject.

  “You can’t very well beat around this bush, Dutch,” Slant said. “I think you’ve gotta just pop right out and say it.”

  The only real popping out I did was when I opened the door and popped out into the yard.

  “Alvis Jr. I knew that had to be you!”

  Starletta was coming down the steps two by two with both arms outstretched. Until that moment, she had been an idea I had mulled over. Now that I could see what a flesh and bone half-sister looked like, I didn’t know how to react. She was a colored woman, sure enough, and just about as pretty as they come.

  “It’s me,” I said.

  Talk about your perfect introduction. She gave me a hug that pretty much picked me up off the ground, then turned on Slant Face and gave him one too.

  “I’m Star Francis,” she said, more to Slant than to me. As if I hadn’t thought to tell him where we were going. Slant Face responded in kind.

  “I’m Virgil Sanders,” he said. “It’s completely fine if you call me Slant Face.”

  Slant Face took that moment to breathe out his given name. I was pretty sure I had heard it before, on a drunken night at the Crystal Springs Dance Pavilion, but it had gone in one ear and out the other, and I knew it might do so again, but this time, I was only meeting-your-half-sister-for-the-first-time drunk and not Crystal-Springs-Dance-Pavilion-pay-once-and-drink-all-night drunk.

  “Virgil,” I said.

  It wasn’t to anyone but myself, but I thought maybe if I said it, I would remember it this time. Might even call him by it sometime if the situation was right, just to show him that I could.

  As for Starletta, she was everything a colored half-sister could possibly be and more. She invited us in and warmed up some black-eyed peas and cornbread, and we all sat around her kitchen table. There, the two of us traded every thought and memory we could think of.

  Even if neither of us could recall squat about Lonnie Boy, our common link, she knew a side of Alvis Sr. that I had never known. And a whole lot more.

  “I’ve been knowing Alvis at least half of my life,” she said. “Sometimes we wouldn’t see him for a long time, but just about when we was all thinking he was dead, he would pop up. I’m pretty sure he used to ride the trains.”

  “What was it that kept him coming back?” I said.

  What I really wanted to know was, what was it that kept him from ever coming back to the house on Clear Fork.

  “My lands, your momma would have skinned him alive if he come back over there,” Star said. “She ran into him in town one time way back, maybe during the war, and she told him if she ever seen him again, he would be a dead man.”

  Far as I knew, that made momma something of a prophesier. I had never heard word of her running into Alvis Sr, so I can’t swear it’s true. That was only part of the story I heard that day.

  “I grew up knowing that Lonnie Boy was my daddy,” Star said. “A lady named Bessie Daniels was my momma. She raised me up here in Cuney, and Alvis, as I said, well, he looked in on us, I guess you could say. It was a long time before I even knew Alvis was Lonnie’s son.
I don’t know. Maybe I was sixteen, seventeen. Not long before I met Alsaiah Francis. Alsaiah was a farmer. We lived on a farm just this side of Weatherford. Lived there for ten years. Done good too. We had corn, cotton, butterbeans, what have you. We had a couple of guys who lived close by, they helped us. Then things got bad. We let them go. Running the farm was tough. Sometimes the crops wouldn’t come in, or they would come in, but they wouldn’t pay off. Alsaiah worked his fool self to death trying to make it work. He got sick in his lungs. Too much dust. I sure couldn’t work it. We let it go.”

  There was lots of farmland around Weatherford. Our farm was on the other side.

  “What happened to your land?” I said.

  Star seemed more like she was telling a story than remembering a past. Maybe that was more the way I felt hearing about it. It’s hard to tell.

  “Bank got that land. Asaiah died right about that same time. Bank didn’t care about that. That’s when Alvis brought me back here. He owned this land, Hoot Castrie built this house and then I was given the deed to it. It’s all mine now.”

  She glanced into the back of the house and shook her head.

  “Alvis, he also give me Victoria,” she said. “Victoria needed me, and, I guess, I come to need her before long. We might have saved each other.”

  Victoria Curridge was Alvis’ daughter with a lady from Wichita Falls. Starletta didn’t know the lady’s name. All she had to go on were old stories of the lady moving to California to be in the movie shows. Best Star could recall, there were promises that she would bring them all out to the coast when things got good. As far as she knew, the promises fell by the wayside.

  Whatever happened with the movie actress, Alvis couldn’t keep Victoria, who bounced from one home to another until she landed with Starletta Francis.

  Thirty-year old Victoria Curridge was the newest model Curridge on the lot, and one I had never known existed. It was a lot to take in. Victoria being a replacement for my sister Lizabeth. That made me angry in ways I still can’t explain. I tried not to show it in front of Starletta. It didn’t matter.

  “This is too much to deal with, Mr. Curridge?”

  I felt a great love for this woman in front of me, but it was boxing with an equal hatred for Alvis Sr. I couldn’t deny that.

  “Please,” I said. “I won’t ask you to call me Alvis, but you can’t call me Mr. Curridge.”

  She grabbed my hand in hers, and I could feel the kindness, knew the kind of mother she had been to Victoria. It’s funny how this woman had raised up a young white girl with more of a motherly instinct than my own momma had ever exhibited.

  “All right, Dutch,” she said. “That’s alright with me.”

  28

  There were more stories to tell. More questions to ask and things to ponder. To my disappointment as well as relief, Victoria wasn’t there in the house in Cuneytown, wasn’t in Cuneytown at all.

  “Victoria’s a beautiful white girl,” Starletta said. “She can go anywhere she wants to go. She’ll come back here when she’s good and ready.”

  I wanted to know more about this Curridge girl wandering around out there in the world. It reminded me of the first day Ruthie Nell stepped off the bus into Fort Worth. I hoped there was someone there for Victoria. Someone unlike myself.

  “So Hoot Castrie says you’re some kind of private detective man,” Starletta said after pouring coffee for Slant and me. I take my coffee straight black. Slant Face likes his, like his Scotch, with a splash or two of milk. She was ready to satisfy both tastes.

  “I have a license,” I said. “I do a little work here and there.”

  I was being a little humble. I stayed pretty busy doing whatever it was I did. Cases seemed to find me. Sometimes they came from Sheriff Wiley King. Things he didn’t have the time, resources or interest for. More often, they came directly to me. Lawyers and bankers who thought partners were skimming profits, wives who thought husbands were living double lives, people who had been done some terrible injustice, sometimes by Sheriff King himself, and needed someone to fight for them. And every once in a long while, I got to shoot an outlaw and make the newspaper.

  “I’ve been wanting to hire me somebody for years,” Starletta said. “I got a regular old mystery I want figuring out, and you might be just the man to do it.”

  My first thought was that she wanted me to track down Victoria. Or maybe even the actress who took off for Hollywood. While both might have piqued my interest, they also would require me leaving the state. Cool, Texas was about as far as I was wanting to go.

  “Everybody in the family has always told the story of Lonnie Boy Curridge holding up the Bank & Trust in Mineral Wells. You probably heard it yourself plenty,” Starletta said. “Now, the way they tell it, and it was in the papers, is that Lonnie held up that bank sometime in the summer of 1909 and got away with a haul. The papers all said he got away with $50,000, but it’s been whispered around for years that it was a bunch more than that. Maybe twice as much.”

  That was certainly something I hadn’t heard.

  “So they say, the papers didn’t want to let on how much money it really was,” Starletta said. “So what we have always wondered is, what in the world happened with all that money?”

  Slant Face had been listening carefully and finally spoke up.

  “Is there a chance he gave at least a chunk of it to the lady who went to Hollywood?”

  Maybe not carefully enough.

  “That was Alvis’ girl,” I said. “Lonnie’s girl was either Starletta’s momma, Bessie Daniels, or my momma. I think I can safely say that none of it went to momma.”

  “Well, it went somewhere,” Starletta said, “and I’ve been aiming to find out where for more years than I can count. And I will either pay you to help me run it down, or I will cut you in for half of whatever we find. You can take your pick. But, if it’s out there, I think me and you can find it. I don’t mind putting my back into it and digging a little bit.”

  $50,000 was more than enough to get my interest. I asked if Star still had a copy of the newspaper article, and she admitted she didn’t but said she had seen it with her own two eyes. She thought Hoot Castrie might have it somewhere. He had just about everything, she said.

  “Is it true he fought against Pancho Villa?” I asked.

  It seemed like as good a time to ask as any.

  “Oh lands, yes, he surely did,” Starletta said. “That man has been around. Hoot fought the Indians, he fought the Mexicans, he even went down to some place, I don’t remember where. Pacific Islands?”

  “Philippines,” I said.

  “That’s the ones,” she said.

  “And his wife?”

  Starletta hung her head and whispered.

  “We don’t really talk about that.”

  We walked down to the end of her road, ducked through a barbed wire fence and headed across a field of high grass, where Starletta promised to show me something that would interest me. We were halfway across the clearing before she returned to the subject of Hoot.

  “You know, Hoot was indicted on murder with his wife Myra. Nobody here believed it for a minute. We tried to tell them lawyers, the police people. They weren’t interested in a bunch of niggers. I told ‘em I had a white daddy. I had a smart mouth back then. Anyway, they like to have strung him up, so we was all just happy he lived to tell. But he done his time in the joint. Come back here and never really spoke of it. We, of course, welcomed him back.”

  I knew very well how the system worked. I knew how it didn’t work for colored folks. It didn’t even work very well for poor white folks.

  “So what really happened to Myra Castrie then?” Slant Face said.

  “Well, that’s a kettle of fish right there,” she said. “Myra got in a car wreck coming home from Fort Worth. Somebody over there knew who she was and tried to take her to the hospital. Myra, I don’t think, knew how bad a shape she was in. She told them just to bring her on over here to her place. They end
ed up dropping her up the road at the general store. Somebody up there come down here and got me and Harold Mitchell’s wife, Dorothy, to go up and bring her home. She was pretty banged up all right, but Hoot Castrie never even saw her ‘til we had her bedded down, right over there where he still lives today. And I ain’t never really had the salt to ask him my own self, but what I heard was, he went to bed with her that night, and she said ‘goodnight, I love you too,’ and, when he woke up the next morning, she was dead in the bed.”

  It’s a curious thing why a Sheriff’s Department would take someone like Hoot Castrie away and lock him up for killing his wife, when they wouldn’t have given two shits about her the day before. But as I would learn, Hoot did himself no favors. Grief-stricken over his wife’s death and fearing he wouldn’t even be allowed to attend her funeral, he had tried to fight his way out of trouble, and a colored man just can’t do that. Instead, he fought his way into more of it. Hoot missed his wife’s funeral and the next eight years too.

  What Starletta wanted to show me looked to me like an old cave or maybe even some kind of animal hole. To the contrary, she said.

  “This is one of the only remains of the old tunnels here,” she said. “They used to have two or three tunnels here. Some of ‘em come out north of the creek. They had signs up through yonder that would lead runaway slaves to their freedom.”

  It didn’t look like much to me. I couldn’t see that it ever would have been much more than it was right there. A big hole in the ground.

  “Some of the boys around here have gone down in there, but they never have been able to go far enough. It’s all fallen in.”

  Slant Face looked down into the blackness and then looked at Starletta.

  “You saying what I think you’re saying?”

  I knew she was. She was convinced that Lonnie Boy’s $50,000 was somewhere in the old tunnels. I wasn’t convinced the tunnels were anything more than stories. I knew plenty of places around Fort Worth that did have tunnels. The Top o’ The Pines was an illegal gambling house with escape hatches and secret rooms all over the place. These tunnels didn’t look like those tunnels. I decided to stay mum on the subject.