The Spyglass Tree

by Albert Murray

  As I had already found out in the library during the week before I graduated from Mobile County Training School, what the earliest settlers had originally established back during the days even before Alabama became a colony was a French trading post on an old Creek Indian trail. Then the post had become an English crossroads settlement and after that a federal garrison during the time of the Andrew Jackson anti-Indian campaign that ended with the Battle of Horseshoe Bend. It had become a cotton market town and the county seat during the flush times before the Civil War, none of which ever gave it any claim to fame even in Alabama. But since the turn of the century, it had been known all over the country as a college town.

  What you saw as the bus pulled in were the mud-caked, dust-powdered jalopies and trucks and also a few horse-drawn buckboard wagons parked diagonally into the curb around the square, and there were the late summer shade trees and the concrete park benches along the gravel walks, and the gray stone Civil War monument to honor the brave.

  It was the statue of a Confederate army infantryman facing North Main, and around the pedestal there was a spiked wrought-iron fence enclosing a flower bed in which, as I found out later on, there were always flowers in bloom, even in the dead of winter when they had to be grown in terra-cotta pots in a greenhouse and transferred pot by pot and embedded in straw and pine needles.

  So I knew that I would also find out that you-know-which townspeople would have, if not one thousand plus one or more tall tales, riddles, rhymes, catches, and jokes to retell about Old Man Johnny Reb, as they called the rifleman, they would have at least two or three dozen. All you had to do was listen. You didn’t even have to be alert. All you had to do was be in the right place at the right time.

  And to be sure, there was one that you could always count on hearing repeated or, indeed, replayed every year when the first really hard cold snap hit town. All you had to do was be someplace, say like the old Greyhound bus station when the lie swapping used to get started in the semicircle of hand and rump warmers huddled around the radiator in the waiting room, as if it were an old potbelly stove.

  Man, talking about a cold day. Man, Old man Johnny Reb up yonder on the courthouse square feel this weather this morning. Man, I bet you anything old stuff got his boney butt ass down off that goddamn thing last night.

  Man, I don’t blame him a bit.

  Got rid of that old musket and brought his frostbitten peckerwood ass on down off from up there in a hurry, pardner.

  Man, when old hawk hit that sapsucker, he said time to unass this area, colonel sir.

  Man, so that’s who that was I seen all snuggled up over yonder on the sidewalk by the drugstore last night.

  Man, doing what?

  Man, what you reckon? Asking somebody where he can get him a long pull on a fifth of sour mash, white lightning, rotgut, or anything with some kick to it.

  Now, man, you know Old Man Johnny Reb know better than that. So what did you tell him?

  Man, I told him that even a short snort been against the law in this county ever since they passed that Eighteenth Amendment back in nineteen-nineteen.

  Man, you told him right. Been right up there with the county jail less than a block off to his right elbow all this time now.

  But shoot, y’all. Maybe that’s exactly how come he know good and well you can get all the bootleg liquor you can pay for right here in the city limits, Prohibition or no Prohibition. All you got to do is make the right contact, and you look just like a drinking man to me.

  Yeah, man, but Old Man Johnny Reb suppose to be up there watching out for the Yankees.

  Yeah, but, man, maybe the Yankees Old Man Johnny really on the lookout for is them revenue agents. Man, I wouldn’t put it pass Cat Rogers. Man, peckerwoods hate them folks.

  Man, I don’t care what Old Man Johnny Reb supposed to be doing up there, his gray ass liked to froze blue and dropped off last night.

  There were also mud-caked and dust-powdered jalopies and trucks and more buckboards all along the side streets where the markets, the grocery stores, and the hardware and repair shops were in those days. But most of the larger trucks and flatbed trailers were always pulled up on the back streets and in the alleys off the back streets where the loading ramps of the seed, feed, and fertilizer warehouses were.

  I used to stay away from these blocks, especially on Saturdays, because I didn’t want to have to see all of the crap games so many of the farmhands always used to seem to make the weekly trip into town to get into with the local hustlers. Not that I was against gambling as such on any principle. Certainly not on any principle based on the conventional morality underlying the disapproval of the church folks of Gasoline Point.

  Not me. Not the self-elected godson of the likes of old Luzana Cholly and Stagolee Dupas (fils) plus Gus the Gator all rolled in one. Not the longtime scoot buddy of Little Buddy Marshall. Not the one to whom the sight of sailors and longshoremen rolling dice in the cargo sheds along the piers off Commerce Street and elsewhere on the waterfront was as much a part of the storybook world of the seven seas as the dry-dock elevators and the foghorns and the acres of naval stores out at Taylor Lowenstein’s maritime supply yards.

  But I felt the way I felt about the back street crapshooters because it was as if they were still stuck in the same rut as the slaves of a hundred years ago, who used to be brought into town by the plantation master or overseer to reload the cotton wagons with supplies and provisions, and then used to spend their free time gambling away whatever slaves had to bet and fight each other about while the master or overseer finished his transactions and no doubt also found amusement elsewhere.

  Not all slaves spent their precious free time in town on Saturday, shooting craps and indulging in frivolity, to be sure. According to many of the most often repeated storybook as well as fireside yarns, there were also those would-be and soon-to-be north-bound fugitives who deliberately gave off an air of frivolity not to spend such precious free time to pay court to in-town house servants if not sweethearts brought in on wagons from other plantations, but to make contact with whoever (sometimes male, sometimes female) could pass on the latest news and practical operational grapevine information concerning the signs, signals, passwords, and timetables of the local trunk line of the Underground Railroad.

  Surely some instances of runaway slaves using the dice game as a cover have been recorded as historical fact. But in the stories I grew up hearing, the very notion of an invisible network of black and white people working together to help slaves steal away to freedom was no less farfetched to the overwhelming majority of back alley bone-rollers as all of the preaching and praying and singing about chariots taking you to heaven somewhere in the sky, and they almost always poked fun at it one way or another. Some said and may actually have convinced themselves that the so-called Underground Railroad was either a trick that Old Master and the overseer played to find out who they could trust, or it was a trap set up by rogue peckerwoods who stole slaves from one plantation and sold them to another in another place.

  Anyway I was scandalized, outraged, and all but exasperated as soon as I turned the corner and saw them and realized what they were doing that bright blue second Saturday afternoon of that first October. There they were and I was already that close and there was nothing you could do about it except try to get on along past it as if I didn’t even see them. But one of them had already spotted me the minute I came in sight.

  Well, goddamn, if here ain’t another one of them.

  What they doing coming all around back up in here? Ain’t nobody sent for none of them as I knows of.

  Me neither. Maybe he lost or something.

  I wouldn’t be a bit surprised once you get their head out of all them books.

  Hey, you lost Mister Collegeboy? Hey, you, yeah, you. I’m talking to you. Yeah you. I axed you a question. You want something around here, Mister Collegeboy? What you looking for around here? What you looking at? Ain’t you never seen nobody rolling no bones before?
Ain’t you never seen nobody drinking no whiskey before? Well, now you can tell them you seen some low-down niggers galloping the shit out of them old affikan dominoes all over the place back in here and looka here, you can also tell them you seen me drinking myself some good old corn whiskey and then tell them I say win, lose, or draw I’m still going to have enough left to buy me some good old cookshop grub and then I going to buy me some good old city girl pussy. You goddamn right, I’m going buy me some county seat whorehouse pussy.

  Aw, man, a not so loudmouthed one said, them college boys don’t even know what you talking about. Them college boys studying about bookkeeping and joggerfy and all them kind of things. Them college boys ain’t got no time to be fooling around with what you talking about.

  Now wait a minute, another one said. That ain’t the way I heard it. Now the way I heard it, them books ain’t the only thing them college boys like to stick their nose up in, if you get my latter clause.

  Hey, wait a minute there, the loud one said again, coming toward me for the first time as I moved on along the block. I had slowed down just because I knew they had expected me to speed up. Hey, hold on there boy when I’m talking to you.

  That’s when I stopped and turned and said what I said, which had exactly the effect I had wanted and expected it to have.

  I said, Sounds to me like somebody is just about to let his big loud snaggle mouth get his bony ass kicked raw, and he stopped where he was and then he said, Who you think you talking to and I said, Ain’t nothing to think about, old pardner. I’m talking to anybody too square to know that when the son-of-a-bitch he woofing at get through stomping his ass, he won’t even want to hear about no pussy for a month of Saturdays. I said, If you looking for somebody to cut you a new asshole, I’m just the son-of-a-bitch to oblige you.

  That was when he seemed to decide that moral outrage was the better part of valor. Hey, y’all hear this, y’all heard him, supposed to be some kind of high-class college boy and listen what kind of language he using—you ain’t no better than nobody else. But he had turned and was talking to them, not me.

  That was when he suddenly had to realize that he had no way of knowing anything at all about me, and my guess is that he didn’t really know anything about any other college boys either. So that’s when he said, See there, and then said, So that’s a Mister Collegeboy for you. Suppose to be up there getting all that high-class education and just listen at him. Y’all heard him. You can’t even make a little joke without here he coming talking all that old gutter language and still think somebody supposed to respect them.

  But he was talking about me. Not to me. To them. To everybody present except me. He didn’t even look in my direction again. Obviously he was somehow totally oblivious to the likes of Daddy Shakehouse Anderson, also known as the Nighthawk or Big Shit Pendleton from Galveston, Texas, or Speckle Red, also known as Florida Red, the Juice Head, or Sneaky Pete Davis, the First Lord of the Outlying Regions and a few other certified campus thugs that I had already met even then. Not to mention my own roommate.

  XII

  What finally happened to Little Buddy Marshall when I was in the eleventh grade was the end of something that had already been underway for some time even before he began to talk about it the way he kept on doing throughout the whole summer of the year before. Sooner or later he would bring everything we talked about back around to that, and when I said what I said about school I knew exactly what he was going to say again.

  He said, Man, like I been telling you all this time, man you welcome to Old Lady Metcalf and all that old hickory butt roll-call and blackboard do-do, and them dripping goddamn ink pens and them goddamn checker-back composition tablets. Man, every time I think about all them old stop and go examination periods, and man don’t mention them report cards, and you got to take them home and get them signed!

  He said, Man you all right with me, Scooter. You know that, but man, hey shit, I reckon I got to be hauling ass to hell on out of this old Mobile, Aladambama, and all this little old two-by-four stuff around these parts. Man, I got to go somewhere else. Man, I got to hit the goddamn road. Man, that’s all I can think about.

  He said, Man, you know good and well you always been all right with me, starting right off from the get-go at the pump shed. I know you know that, Scooter. Everybody around here know that. But, man, when it comes to them old henhouse teachers over there on the hill ringing them goddamn bells and flopping them shit-ass foot rulers and watching everybody like a goddamn hawk, I am sorry, man. You can put up with all that kind of stuff because you like books, Scooter, and all them other old games and stuff and that’s you. But me, man, I don’t give a goddamn shit about any of that old shit and that’s me. So that’s you and that’s me, and I’m just saying I got to get myself on out of here and see me some of the real sure enough world for my own damn self.

  Then he said, Any day now Scooter you just wait and see, and I knew better than to try to talk him out of anything once he had said what he had said the way he had said it, because what he had decided was that he was going to take a big risk on something come what may, and practical advice didn’t mean anything to him anymore. So I just said, Boy, which way you heading, man? And he said, Shoot, I’m just going, man (because he knew that I knew that his departure heading was going to be due north and then maybe northeast), and when I find me a place I like I might stay there for a while and then move on until I come to somewhere else.

  I said, Sheeoot man. I said, Goddamn. I said, I already miss you too much as it is, Lebo. Because ever since I had become an Early Bird I was also almost always busy doing special extracurricular projects not only for Miss Lexine Metcalf but also Miss Edna Teale Wilcox, who is the one I always remember whenever I hear “High Society” because that was one of the piano numbers she used to play as march-in music after the flag-raising ceremony, and who was also Mister B. Franklin Fisher’s assembly program coordinator and was also going to be my advanced French teacher and also my college preparatory counselor when I reached the twelfth grade.

  There was also the fact that as soon as you achieved the status of a top-perching Early Bird, your name was added to the principal’s senior high school campus duty roster, which rotated weekly assignments to such daily details as raising and lowering the flag, checking playground equipment out and back in, and supervising elementary and junior high school playground activities, policing the grounds and overseeing litter removal, providing campus information and escort service to visitors, and so on and on to cover everything the faculty had decided would provide promising pupils an opportunity to develop a sense of responsibility, dependability, imagination, initiative—by all means initiative—and leadership potential.

  None of that had ever been any part of anything that Little Buddy Marshall had ever looked forward to. After all, he didn’t even like football, basketball, track and field, and tennis, precisely because to him they, unlike baseball and boxing and fishing and hunting and horse-racing and even golf, were schoolboy games and he didn’t even want to hear about them.

  So naturally you couldn’t say anything at all about how you were finding out that the more you knew about geography and history, the better you could read maps and mileage charts and timetables. Not that I was not also the one who had once told him the story I had read about the three princes of Serendip who had set out for no place in particular and had learned to take things as they came. But you couldn’t remind him of anything like that either because he may not have actually said, Man, you and them books, Scooter, boy you and them books, but that is what he would have been thinking. So I just let all of that pass but schoolboy (perhaps not beyond but certainly preparatory to anything else) that I had long since become, by that time I couldn’t help thinking how much better able to cope with the adventures he was heading for if he already knew as much about the country at large as I did. I could draw a map of the continental boundaries and fill in all the states and capitals and all of the major lakes, rivers, mou
ntains, plains, and deserts, and I could also name and visualize the largest cities and list the principal products and industries.

  I said, Goddamn man, and as if he could read my concern, he said, Hey man, remember the good old days you and me used to have. Man, we sure used to have us some times, didn’t we, Scooter? And I said, Man, you know it too, and he said, Man, I sure do wish the hell you’d come on and go with me, and I said, Man, you know how bad I want to but, I got to stay here and try to finish up all this stuff first. Because I promised. I promised Mama, man, and I promised Miss Tee and I also promised Old Luze.

  I said, You remember that time. But he said, Man, I know what you talking about but that was then. I’m talking about this is now. I’m talking about I don’t care what nobody said back then. I talking about I’m going this time, don’t care what no goddamnbody says.

  I didn’t say anything else because I knew that you were not going to get anywhere arguing with him. But I didn’t really want to try to keep him from saying what he wanted to say, so I just wagged my head with my brows knitted and waited for him to go on, and that’s when he said, Man, I didn’t really promise Old Luze nothing because I didn’t really swear to all that old stuff he was talking about. I just promised him that I wouldn’t try to follow him no more like that, and I ain’t. I just said that because he caught us and he had our ass in a sling and what else could we do? I would’ve said anything under that bridge that time.

  I let that go by also. All I said next was, Aw, man, can’t nobody squat back there and call me in there like you, especially with a man on base. And he said, Sheet man, I bet you anything by this next year you going to be ready to get in there and smoke that pill on in there to Old Big Earl himself. Shoot man, you could be on your way to breaking that color line in the goddamn big leagues if it wasn’t for them taking up so much of your time with all them old other things over on that old hill.