The Last Hellfighter

by Thomas S. Flowers

"Billie Holiday," Harker said, nearly whispering. "On the Sentimental Side...Mina always loved that track."

  Thumbing through, Clyde found a record, worn around the edges with a dark skinned woman dressed in a dress with a white flowers in her hair. The name scrawled across the label said "Billie Holiday." He pulled the black disc from its sleeve and placed it down in the player. Positioning he needle, he once again cranked the Victrola until a light glowed and the record began to play through the phonograph horn built into the box.

  The Saddest Land

  1932

  "And the LORD said unto Moses: 'Stretch out thy hand toward heaven, that there may be darkness over the land of Egypt, even darkness which may be felt,'"

  —Exodus 10:21.

  "I saw not a solitary thing... There was not a tree or a blade of grass, or a dog or a cow or a human being—nothing whatsoever, nothing at all but gray raw earth and a few farmhouses and barns, sticking up from the dark gray sea like white cattle skeletons on the desert,"

  —News reporter Ernie Pyle, 1933.

  "Cross the mountains to the sea,

  Come the wife and kids and me.

  It's a hot old dusty highway

  For a dust bowl refugee.

  Hard, it's always been that way,

  Here today and on our way

  Down that mountain, 'cross the desert,

  Just a dust bowl refugee"

  — Dust Bowl Refugee [excerpt], Woody Guthrie.

  Chapter 18

  Looking out across the plains, one could see forever. Nothing stood between here and the end of the world but short crops of green buffalo grass and the endless whisper of the wind singing to him as none had before, not even the likes of Jim Europe. And to the south on the cusp of what the locals call No Man's Land, a parody he always thought of the horror of the other land that bore the name, stood a newly constructed farm house. Not large by any means, but it had good bones and sections could always be added as the Harker family grew. Or at least, that was his dream.

  "Are you going to stand there all day?" she called.

  Ben turned and smiled at his wife. Mina was already by the truck, a fairly new model for these parts—a Chevrolet pickup, boxed and brightly painted blue. The truck could seat three if you squeezed in. The back was boarded like a large crate, mostly for hauling seed and plow blades. She looked beautiful standing there with sun's early rays shinning on her like gold around her flower-print dress and the curls of her dark hair.

  "I'm coming, Mrs. Harker." Ben gave one last look at the endless nothing, of what would in the coming months be but endless wheat. He dusted his jean overalls with a flayed cowboy hat and started toward her.

  She said nothing as he helped her up into the truck. She waited until he climbed in the driver's seat before saying, "Honestly, Ben, he's your brother."

  Ben glanced at her and then fired up the engine.

  The bright blue Chevrolet pickup grumbled and shook.

  "I know," was all he could manage as he shifted into gear and started down the dirt road of the Harker farm to the paved main stretch that led into town. That road had been completed while Ben finished nailing down the last plank to the second bedroom of the house. And as he swung the hammer and stood to stretch his back, drinking a tall glass of lemonade and feeling very satisfied with himself and for once in his thirty some years of life with the world, a messenger arrived on horseback from Champagne with an urgent telegram from New York City.

  The telegram had read:

  Pa died in his sleep, stop.

  Stroke, the doctors think, stop.

  Thought you'd want to know, stop.

  Your brother, James Harker, stop.

  After dinner that night and after some heated discussion, Ben and Mina drove into town and sent a telegram back to the city urging James to come out west and stay with them—at least until this Depression ended, which according to President Hoover, would be fizzling out soon enough.

  The drive was bumpy but manageable. There was not a soul yet on the road at this hour and Ben took advantage, sneaking peeks at his bride, wondering how he got so lucky. If only Renfield could have forgiven him. It really ought to be him they were picking up from the train station; not James. James had always been a stooge of their father, a parrot who had little imagination. Not once as kids did he ever stick up for Ben, not once. And here he was, the younger brother playing keeper.

  "I know what you're thinking, Ben," Mina said loud enough to be heard over the rattling of the shocks on the road.

  "Do you now?" Ben smirked.

  "I want you to promise me, Ben. Give him a chance, okay? The world had the rug pulled out from under it, and even worse for your brother—as I recall, he and your father were inseparable. I know ya'll didn't get along. I know your Pa said nothing much when you got back from the War, but he was all your brother had. James is not as strong as you are." Mina gazed at him from the passenger side, her warm brown eyes becoming more motherlike by the day.

  Ben opened his mouth to protest but changed his mind. He closed his mouth and nodded. Reaching out, he rubbed the pooch on her ballooned stomach.

  Mina held his hand as he did. She giggled. "Did you feel?"

  Ben could help but laugh, giddy as he was. "Was that?"

  "Our baby, she kicked!"

  "She?"

  "I have a feeling."

  "Hmm. Well, so much for having help on the farm."

  "You'll have James to help you."

  At this, Ben put both hands back on the steering wheel. "Right," he said. "I'll have James."

  Chapter 19

  It is amazing how fast a town can grow—given the proper attention and economic motivation. The problem with those kinds of towns is what could happen when those same economic motivations dry up. Luckily for the residents of Champagne, Texas, the year had brought only rumors of Depression and plenty of heavy rain clouds to saturate the soil, promising a rewarding harvest yet to come. The streets were paved with recent tracks of road leading from north to south and east to west. GMs and Fords dominated the roads, but spacious enough for the coots who preferred horseback, a strange sort of mixture between modernity and the old west. Stores and shops and taverns lined each side of the streets. Through open doors it wasn't uncommon to hear the ripping horn blasts of Louis Armstrong playing "Tiger Rag." Shop windows filled with the latest of women's fashion. There was a local paper, The Champagne Herald, that printed every week of the latest of townie news, weather reports, and gossip. The paper shared building space with Champagne's very own radio station ran by lifelong bachelor Todd Oliver. He played, much to Ben's delight, the latest of jazz compositions, and much to the horror of the Pentecostal church ladies, Ollie, as some called him, would even play the scandalous "Honeysuckle Rose" by Fat Waller, and all things Billie Holiday, a favorite singer of Mina Harker. On Fridays, the airwaves would fill with Cab Calloway's "Man from Harlem" and "I'm Getting Sentimental Over You" by Tommy Dorsett, among many more. Truly amazing, Ben had commented more than once since first dialling in on the radio station, how far Harlem's Cotton and Clef Club's reach was.

  Down the road, next to the train platform, there was also one of the largest General Stores within two hundred miles where locals could buy items from Dapper Dan to new plow blades—not that Ben was ever allowed to shop there. The train platform was newly built to accommodate the flex in Champagne's population. Americans and recent immigrants from all over came to the mid-west in the hopes of tapping into the rush of agricultural gold. Some though, came just as Ben had, to find a quiet peace. But these were few and far between.

  Mina and Ben stood side by side, watching the steady flow of new arrivals as they disembarked a triangle-faced Streamliner.

  Mina was on her tippy-toes, scanning face to face. "Do you see him?" she asked.

  Ben grunted quietly, he was scanning the crowd too, though not for his brother James. Walking past them from every side, white passengers and passerthroughs gawked and muttered at the sight of t
he two negro pedestrians. Mina didn't seem to notice; he couldn't help but notice. After everything he'd been through, the promises that service to their country would change the tide on race relations in America was the biggest and most disappointing lie he'd ever had to swallow. In moments such as this, he couldn't help but remember his old friend, James Reese Europe—how they had believed they could prove that they were no different and deserved no less than any other American. Jim Crow dominated the south, but that didn't stop it from spreading west. The hatred, the inequality wasn't something that could be codified in some law to be accepted nor rejected. Those kinds of codes were written on the hearts of men, prejudices as thick as molasses—flavorful to some, bitter for others, poisonous for all.

  He lowered the brim of his cowboy hat and guided Mina by the small of her back toward the side of the platform, away from the crowd. It was one thing to be black in America, it was another to be a black land owner in America, and a prosperous one at that, and Ben did not wish to press their luck. Champagne was not unlike most places in the States, but the town was measurably less worse than some, especially places like Denton, Texas, of which he had heard all the stories. One including of two young black men traveling by train, looking for work. Following a cold bitter night, the sheriff found them taking refuge in a janitor closest of the train platform. The sheriff hauled them before the judge and the judge demanded they dance before the court. After a good laugh, the two men were sentenced to three months hard labor in Denton's neighboring prison camp. The saying in these towns often followed, "Don't let the sun set on your backside."

  Mina started to turn to say something, but then they both heard the booming voice calling over the crowd of passengers disembarking the train. They looked, though hunched due to decades of grueling work of loading ships and upload at the New York dock, James Harker stood a head and shoulder above those around him. He smiled with a large mouth full of large squared teeth. He looked happy, despite everything—the Depression, pa passing. Visible even from where they stood, great sagging bags under each eye. More signs of the kind of life he lived since he was old enough to join Pa out at the docks. His dark skin somewhat grey in the morning light. He waved a mitten sized hand and then immediately reached into his coat pocket and retrieved a pearl-colored rag and began coughing into it.

  Ben looked at Mina and Mina looked up at him, and for a moment he realized how right she had been. Despite the past, James was family. And in hard times such as it was, James needed to be here with them.

  With his coughing fit passed, James made his way to them. He set his luggage by his large shoes, a ragged looking pair of leather loafers, and smiled sheepishly, not making eye contact for more than a second or two.

  "Hey, Benjamin. Good to see you," he said.

  "Its good to see you too, James," Ben replied.

  There was a moment of silence filled with only the sounds around them. Most of the passengers and passersby had stopped gawking and went about their business. The train was loading back up with folks leaving. A well-tailored man blew a whistle and shortly the train began to smoke, and the gears began to screech as it slowly started to roll away.

  "Was the trip comfortable?" Mina interjected.

  James exhaled. "Oh, yes. It was a comfortable trip. Kept to myself, though. The farther from the city we got the less folks wanted to do with me. But that's all right. Pa told me enough about how white folks was outside of Harlem."

  Mina smiled but without much humor. "Doesn't get much better out here, I'm afraid. We mostly keep to ourselves and thus far folks have left us alone."

  "Well...let's take this conversation back to the farm, shall we?" Ben reached to pick up James's luggage.

  James shooed his hand away and hosted the hefting looking suitcase. "Much appreciated, but I'll carry my own bags, thank you."

  Ben shrugged. "Truck's this way." He guided Mina again by the small curve on her lower back and led them toward the stairs where they had parked the Chevrolet pickup. Taking the steps, he noticed a small group of men across the street standing in front of the General Store. He knew these men, one went by Herbert, another Martin, Sam, and the last most everyone in town called Roy.

  He first came across them when he started on the house, just after claiming the land. They were curious, at first, wondering if Ben was some sharecropper or one of those traveling farmers who plant the crop and then return to the city until harvest. When they realized he wasn't that, they began razzing. Small stuff. Glares. Hard looks and whispered name calling. Laughter when the Harkers passed certain establishments in town. In fact, some of those establishments had posted "Whites Only" above their doors. The General Store being one of those such places. No bother, Sears and Roebuck catalog had better equipment and better seed. Let them shut their doors, they were only hurting themselves.

  Oh yes, Ben knew them. They dressed as most men in these parts, dirtied slacks and dusted boots, a loose button-down. Some wore vests, others not. Some looked hungry. Others, lost. He tried not to look at them directly, but he could see them staring at him all the same, feel them glaring, spewing whatever anger or resentment they harbored, as if in their small universe a black man shouldn't be able to carve out a piece of his own in this world.

  At the truck, James tossed his luggage into the back of the pickup.

  Ben helped Mina into the cab.

  She scooted to the middle as James climbed in.

  Daring a look, Ben glanced across the street. The men were still there, still watching. All four. All farmers of some such, not that he cared but he'd heard they mustered a living selling vegetables at the local market. Not as much as they could get selling wheat, but wheat could never grow on their lot. One of the men, Roy by the looks of him, snarled and spat black liquid over the porch of the General Store.

  "What you looking at, nigger?" the man barked, loud enough for Ben to hear across the way.

  Ben ignored him and climbed up into the driver's seat. He fired up the engine and shifted into gear, not caring very much for the concerned look on Mina's face or the judgmental smirk on James's—the very same look Pa had worn in times of lecture, when he talked of the "outside world," as he called any place not Harlem. It was an insufferable know-it-all kind of look, smug in the knowledge that he was never wrong, and no one was ever right.

  Shifting, Ben pushed down hard on the clutch and accelerated past the General Store, giving his own kind of smirk as he gazed in the truck's side mirror at the white men coughing and fanning away a cloud of dust behind them.

  Chapter 20

  They stood in front of the house. Mina had gone inside to whip something up for lunch, though James had started to protest, claiming he wasn't hungry, not to bother or some such. She shooed away the comment. "Don't be silly," she said. And there was no more argument. Now the brothers stood in the buffalo grass with nothing but the wind doing the talking. Ben placed his hands on his hips, rocking on his feet, searching for the words that wouldn't come.

  "You have a beautiful house, Benjamin, truly remarkable," James said, finding words for them both.

  "Thanks." Ben kicked at patch of dirt. He padded his front overall pocket and retrieved his corncob pipe. Stuffing it with some of his pouch tobacco, he struck a match and puffed. Waving the flame away, he looked over at his brother, realizing this was James's first time away from the big city, the first time outside of Harlem. And Harlem, even with all its charm—especially the music and the community, well, its splendor only went so far.

  "You want to see something?" Ben gestured with a nod for James to follow. They walked along the edge of the farmhouse and stood where he had stood that morning, and every morning since coming to this place.

  "My God," James whistled, gazing out across the endless expanse.

  Ben giggled, puffing on his pipe. He gently placed his hand on his brother's shoulder, reaching high, and squeezed. "Welcome home, James."

  Without taking his gaze away from the fathomless land, James croaked, wh
ispering, "I don't know what to say. You and Mina, you both have been so kind to me. More kind than I ever was to you, Benjamin. I'm sorry. I should have stuck up for you with Pa. I suppose I was too scared. I was never very brave. Not like you, going off to fight a war. You're...I don't think I deserve such kindness."

  Ben squeezed harder on James's shoulder. "Pa was...complicated. As for everything else, we want you here, Mina and I. I want you here. To be honest, I wasn't so sure at first. But when you stepped off that train I got this feeling everything is going to turn out okay. We're family and we've got a real shot at planting roots somewhere we could flourish."

  James wiped his eyes. "You looking at getting rich, brother?" He smirked.

  Ben shook his head. "I'm just looking at making a life."

  Both smiled and nodded in silence. They turned back to stare out at the horizon of green buffalo grass as it swayed in the wind. They stood there until Mina called them for lunch, and even then, they wouldn't budge.

  So, they picnicked, sharing sandwiches and laugher and tall glasses of freshly bucketed well water.

  Chapter 21

  Weeks passed without much change. The sun rose in the east and set on the west. From either direction, from sun rise to sunset, it was a glorious sight to witness. Golden yawning to purplish red exhales, wisps of thin clouds, and the almost constant wind, warming and gently stirring the soul during those wonderful times. Ben and James plowed the land—refusing the fashionable tech modernity could offer and instead preferred plow blades pulled by Tess and Fred, two Draft Horses Ben that had purchased soon after acquiring the land to help prepare the seedbed for wheat in the coming fall harvest. James also for his part helped keep the horses fed. Given his years working for the harbor, his strength was something of a marvel. Tall and gangly, he didn't look it, but he could hoist seed bag and feed as if it were straw. And his heath certainly improved as. Those fits of coughing he seemed prone to, faded more and more with each day. Each day with less of that city pollution, and not just the smog, but the noise as well, the crowdedness. Out here, one could hear themselves think.