by Robert Inman
After he was gone, Bright went to the front porch and sat on the top step for a long time, thinking about Mr. O’Marron. There was a kind of craziness in him. You could almost smell it, an odor of bile and malice that seeped around his small, closely guarded eyes, the smoke of some terrible poisonous fire that ate at his insides. She feared for the men who were in the woods with him this afternoon.
Hosanna too felt the dread. Trouble settled about her shoulders like a shawl and furrowed her brow. In the kitchen, as Bright watched her sloshing dishes in the sink, she talked in fits and starts, little snippets of conversation that rattled about and then trailed off into silence. Bright could fill in all the blank spaces, the unsaid, from years of listening to Hosanna. White folks’ trouble. The worst kind. Colored folks had their own troubles, but they kept it to themselves and dealt with it in the confines of their secretive world. White folks’ troubles had a way of washing over everyone, like the river when it jumped out of its banks, angry and red, sweeping things helplessly along whether they wanted to go or not. When white folks’ trouble came, no matter who won, colored folks lost.
As dusk came, Bright could stand it no longer. She slipped out the back door and started walking toward the lumberyard across town. She sneaked in by the back way, darting behind the stacks of drying wood, unseen, until she reached the office. Dorsey wasn’t there. The door was open, the swivel chair pushed back from the littered desk, a solitary irritated fly beating against the screen of the window. Out in the lumberyard, the planer was running, but there was something else here, an ominous rumble, a smell of something brewing. She walked out onto the stoop and stood there listening to it for a moment, then climbed into the elm tree, secreting herself high in the spreading green foliage, and settled in to wait.
It was after dark before the crews returned, and by then Dorsey was back, working at his desk, shoulders hunched. She heard them way off down the road that led from the River Bridge—two trucks, one of them running badly, its motor limping. It took them a long time to make the entrance to the lumberyard and they rumbled slowly through the gate and into the weak pool of light from the electric bulb on the front porch of the office, opposite the elm tree. She climbed down to a lower branch and she could see the trucks over the top of the small building and Dorsey getting up from the desk. She heard the screen door bang behind him as he stepped onto the porch. The drivers of the two trucks killed the engines—O’Marron in the lead truck, the one with the wounded engine, Mose Richardson in the second.
No one said a word. O’Marron climbed down from the cab and went around to the front of the truck and stood there, hands on hips, glaring at the men crowding the stacks of lumber on the backs of both vehicles. There was the strong, palpable smell of raw fear and anger here. You could touch it. Then O’Marron turned with a jerk and opened the hood of the lead truck and peered into its darkened innards. Mose sat in his own cab for a moment before he got out and closed the door behind him. None of the men on the trucks moved an inch until Mose did, and then they eased themselves down and stood back a bit in a group, waiting. Mose stood for a while next to his truck and then something powerful rippled through him. He took one slow step and then another, like a heron gathering wing for flight, and they all waited, holding their breath as he passed O’Marron’s truck and moved on toward the office building where Dorsey stood. That’s when Bright climbed down from her perch in the tree and stood next to the back window, just out of the light.
Dorsey closed the wooden door behind them and the two men stood facing each other in front of the desk, a bit apart, just looking at each other. It was then that Bright noticed the angry welt on Mose’s face, just under his right eye. After a moment, Mose said, “He struck me, Mr. Dorsey.”
A look of exquisite pain wrenched Dorsey’s face and he drew in his breath. “Why?”
“He wanted me to clear-cut. I tole him Mr. Dorsey don’t allow no clear-cutting. But he say we ain’t got time to study what Mr. Dorsey say, we got to get the logs out the woods. So I say, ‘Beggin’ yo’ pardon, we got to do it like Mr. Dorsey say do, or else he get somebody else.’ ” He paused, and then he looked away from Dorsey for the first time and his voice broke a little. “That’s when he struck me. Knock me down, call me a dumb nigger.”
“And what did you do?” Dorsey asked, his voice leaden.
“I cut down lots of trees, me and the boys. And then I fix the truck, the one Mr. O’Marron drivin’, so it take us a long time to git back to town and I have time to get my head clear ’fore we get here. Right now, I’m ’bout as clear as can be.”
Dorsey stood frozen for a moment and Bright could almost feel the heat of his gathering fury. Then he said softly, “Goddamn him.”
When Dorsey reached for the door, Bright eased around the side of the building, keeping to the shadows, and watched as her father crossed the narrow space between the stoop and the truck, the tall leather boots making enormous strides until he reached O’Marron. The man looked up, his small eyes fierce even in the dim light, and he stepped back from the truck, but not far enough. Dorsey’s long arm lashed out and his fist caught O’Marron dead on the mouth and there was a loud sickening crack, and then a ripple of sound from the crowd of men, a rumbling affirmation. O’Marron’s head snapped back and small white things sprayed from his mouth and he dropped like a shot and lay motionless on the ground, arms and legs splayed. He has killed him, Bright thought. But no, after a moment O’Marron raised up a bit, shaking his head and spitting a wad of blood and teeth; then he crawled to his knees. Dorsey reached down and grabbed him by the front of his shirt and jerked him to his feet and hit him again, this time in the stomach. O’Marron flew backward and crashed into the door of the truck and then stood there, reeling. Still he hadn’t uttered a sound and Bright marveled at the raw angry stubbornness that kept him on his feet. He peered at Dorsey, his eyes narrow hate-slits, and then he staggered forward, raising his fists. Dorsey let him get within a couple of feet and lashed out, striking him this time on the side of the head, wincing with the force of his own blow. O’Marron went to his knees and Dorsey reached for him again and that was when Mose Richardson cried, “No, Mr. Dorsey!” He grabbed Dorsey quickly by the arm and Dorsey turned with a jerk and stared at him and Bright could see the crazed look in her father’s eyes. “You gone kill him, Mr. Dorsey!” O’Marron looked up at them, his face blasted and bloody, and he toppled onto the ground, out cold. Mose held Dorsey’s arm for a little longer and then let it go gently and stepped back. Dorsey stood over O’Marron like a beast over conquered prey, his body bent slightly at the waist, shaking visibly. And then he looked over at the knot of men standing back by the other truck. Shadowy figures appeared at the edge of the group—the crew from the planer mill. Here, well after dark, they had not left yet. They had been waiting.
Dorsey stared at them and his voice lashed out at them like a fist. “What the hell are you looking at? You satisfied? I’ve whipped a white sonofabitch in front of you. Is that enough?”
No one spoke or moved for a long time. Finally, Dorsey straightened, and from the shadows, Bright could see the great effort it took to get control of himself, calm the rage. When he finally spoke, his voice was low and strangled and his words hung like acrid smoke in the still, soft night air. “From now on, Mose Richardson is the foreman in the woods. You do what Mose tells you. And Jester is the foreman here at the yard.” Dorsey looked beyond them, at the sprawling lumberyard out there in the blackness. “We don’t need any help.”
He looked down at O’Marron again, then at Mose. “Get him out of here,” he ordered, his voice flat and hard.
Mose hesitated, afraid to touch the crumpled white heap at his feet.
“Pick him up,” Dorsey said harshly. “Tote him over there by the gate and dump him. Outside the property. By God, do it!”
Mose bent and hauled O’Marron up from the ground like a rag doll and slung him over his broad shoulders. O’Marron’s head lolled loosely, blood and spittle fro
m his ruined mouth drooling down the back of Mose’s shirt, mingling with the dark blotch of sweat stain that ran from his collar to his pants. The knot of men standing by the truck made a wide path for him as he moved through them and disappeared into the dark, toward the lumberyard gate. After a moment, they heard the thump of O’Marron’s body up by the road, then the soft crunch of Mose’s boots as he returned. Then the men closed in around Mose protectively and they stood a way back from Dorsey, and Bright could see how the distance separated them, the lone white man and the crowd of blacks.
Bright wished deeply to step from the shadows of the building, to go to her father and take him by the hand, have him lift her up and hold her tightly while she rubbed the deep lines from his face. But she knew it would not do. She understood again his grievous error, his great private shame, and that the brutal thing she had just witnessed was both admission of guilt and administration of grisly justice. It was no place for her to be, no thing for her to have seen, and she must never tell him that she had been there. So she turned and stole away in the fevered dark toward home.
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A great storm boiled up from the south during the night, a fury of wind and lightning and driving rain. Bright woke, frightened and disoriented, at its height. She lay there and listened to it and tried to calm herself and after a while she began to think, for the first time in a very long time, about music. There was a terrible dissonant beauty to this. It came all at once, the smashing peals of thunder chasing each other, a tortured howling of wind, a ceaseless drumroll of rain against the window and the side of the house. She imagined God the conductor clutching the podium with rain streaming down His face and wind lashing His long hair and flowing beard, the orchestra of archangels gone mad at His feet. It’s Mr. O’Marron, she thought suddenly. She thought about the crumpled body, lying beside the gate to the lumberyard, with God and His insane orchestra pealing out judgment from a sky rent by chaos. If O’Marron were not already dead, he would surely not survive the storm. And then she thought about the river nearby, how it could rise so quickly and angrily from its banks and send its red rushing octopus arms out in all directions, gathering the land and all that was on it to its raging belly. The house shook with the great explosions of thunder and lashing of the wind and she imagined it breaking loose from its foundation, being swept along downstream, passing the lumberyard and heading toward New Orleans. The house and Mr. O’Marron’s body swept along together, the lifeless eyes at her window, clutching hands rising from the blood-red water. Something broke deep down inside Bright and the tiniest sound flew small and frightened toward her throat, a dread sound. She sat up in bed and her arms flew out involuntarily. She heard footsteps in the hall, her father coming to save her. And then she heard her mother cry out, a high, pitiful wail. Storms always frightened her terribly. The footsteps stopped and Bright could imagine him there in the dark hallway, tall and stooped from the weight of it all, torn between silent child and beseeching wife. Then he took two more steps and before he could open the door, she dived beneath the covers and huddled there, trembling with fear, wretched in her aloneness. Go on! Go to her! She did not know whether Dorsey opened her door or not. The house shuddered beneath her and then a bolt of lightning struck very close by, so close she could feel the tingle through her body and smell the bitter copper-stench of blasted air. Elise screamed like a banshee down the hall and Bright heard a muffled crashing of limbs outside in the yard. Then suddenly, it was over—nothing left but the distant rumbling of aftershock and the smell of spent air, all the life washed out of it. When she finally peeked out from under the covers, the room was still, the door closed—the only sound in the house her mother’s soft whimpering down the hall. Bright listened to it for a long time before she finally slept.
Dorsey was out at daybreak, and by seven o’clock he had rounded up crews from the lumberyard and started the cleanup, clearing a tangle of fallen limbs from streets and yards.
The biggest mess was right next door, where the lightning bolt had splintered a maple and toppled a huge limb onto O. P. Putnam’s house, smashing through the roof into Buster’s bedroom. A big crowd gathered in the puddled yard as Mose Richardson and three of his men shinnied up the trunk and began cutting away the limb with their long saws and double-bitted axes and pulling it back through the gaping hole in the roof. Buster stood in the middle of the crowd and everybody kept looking at him as if he had been raised from the dead, especially the kids—all the big kids who generally ignored Buster because he was the youngest in the neighborhood except for the Gibbonses’ baby. As Bright squeezed through the crowd, Buster was telling again how he had escaped certain death. “I got up to go to the bafroom,” he said, “and when I came back, I couldn’t get in the bed because there was a tree in it. It’da kilt me, shore as shootin’.”
“Was you scared?” one of the big kids asked.
“Naw, but Mama came runnin’ in and started screamin’ and she didn’t quit ’til Dr. Finus come and knocked her out. She’s in yonder sleeping now.”
Elsewhere, the town was littered with debris from the storm, two of the streets blocked by fallen trees, every yard filled with branches and leaves. Bright rode with Dorsey as he hurried from place to place, supervising the work. When he was finally satisfied that things were in hand, they drove out of town along the river road, and Bright realized after a moment that they were headed toward the camp house.
It was the first time Bright had been there since the past November. Her father kept glancing over at her as he drove, but she sat quietly, wondering as they bounced through the deep puddles under the canopy of still-dripping trees if the house were still there, if perhaps the river had carried it away in the night, and if it had, whether it carried with it the ghosts of the frigid, terror-stricken night that took her voice. But there it was, sitting squat and eyeless with its windows boarded up, unscathed.
It had been a close thing. The river was swift and red behind the cabin and they could see where it had gotten up during the night, almost to the top of the embankment. Debris clung to the underbrush and the lower branches of the trees, and the sandy ground underneath was scoured by the rushing water. They stood at the top of the embankment and looked at it for a while, and then they went back to the house and sat on the porch steps. The sky overhead was breaking now, the remaining clouds from the storm front scattering before a freshening breeze until there was mostly blue and the sun began to warm and dry the ground.
“It’s not a very good place for a camp house,” Dorsey said after a while. “One of these days, the river’s going to get it. Maybe we should think about moving it. Or just starting over someplace else.”
Bright looked up at him, studying his face. He looked bone-tired, the lines around his eyes etched deeply, as if someone had taken a sharp knife and scraped them out. Some of it, she thought, was disappointment. And she felt powerless to do anything about any of it.
They heard the truck then, turning off the main road and heading toward them down the rutted trail, whining in low gear, the engine growling as it bounced through the mud puddles. She recognized it immediately, the peculiar sound of one of Dorsey’s logging trucks. His head jerked up and he listened for a minute, and then he rose quickly, took two steps into the yard and stood listening, his body tense and alert. The truck rounded the last curve in the trail and roared into the clearing toward them. Sun glinted from the windshield and they couldn’t see who was inside. Not until the truck stopped with a lurch, the motor still running, and the door flew open. O’Marron had a shotgun.
Dorsey whirled to her. “BRIGHT, RUN!”
But she was frozen there on the steps where she sat—frozen by the wild, bloodshot craziness in O’Marron’s eyes, the raw stench of whiskey she could smell even from here, and most of all by the huge twin black holes in the end of the shotgun.
O’Marron lurched around the front of the truck, raising the gun as he came. “Bascombe, you sonofabitch!” he cried, the words strangled in the blo
ody pulp of his ruined mouth.
“O’Marron, put the gun away!” Bright leapt to her feet on the steps, driven finally by terror boiling up in her throat.
“I’m going to blow your ass to kingdom come!” O’Marron screamed. Then he looked up at Bright and she could see the raw hate in his eyes, the great craving madness.
The muzzle of the gun swung upward and she could see the sinew in his finger move, pulling the trigger. Then Dorsey took one long, swift step toward O’Marron just before the yard exploded, the sound louder than creation. The roar of the shotgun, screams—O’Marron’s, Dorsey’s, and somewhere deep in her own belly, a sound louder than any other, wrenched from the dark pit where her voice had been hiding.
The blast caught Dorsey in his left shoulder and spun him around, arms flailing the air, and smashed him against the steps next to her in an eruption of blood and flesh, everything suddenly covered in red. She sat there, dumb with horror, and then she saw O’Marron sitting on the ground in front of the truck, the shotgun next to him in the grass. He stared at her, eyes hollow, and as he reached for the gun she flung herself across Dorsey’s body and clutched him tightly, waiting. But then she heard the truck’s door slam, the clash and whine of gears as the truck backed and turned, roaring away from them, going very fast along the trail, faster and faster. And then a terrible crash, the splintering of metal and glass and a sharp crack of wood.
She forced herself, after a moment, to release her grip on Dorsey and she sat up slowly, seeing the terrible wound, the shirt and the flesh underneath shredded, the arm nearly torn away at the shoulder, a white sliver of bone glinting through the red. Blood spurted from the wound and ran in rivulets down the steps, dripping from one to another. So much blood. It covered the front of her dress, smeared her bare arms and hands. Bright opened her mouth, tried desperately to speak, couldn’t, even now. Dorsey’s face was ghastly white beneath the flecks of blood that spattered his face. He’s dead! And then one eyelid fluttered, just the tiniest movement. Bright began to tremble and then to shake violently, spasms racking her body. She stood, backing away from him, and then her legs collapsed under her and she stumbled and fell. Papa! Papa! she cried wordlessly, stretching out her arms. But he sprawled across the steps, and the blood dripped and dripped, reaching the ground now and soaking into the sand.