The Spyglass Tree

by Albert Murray

  We were sitting with our legs dangling out of the tailgate of the truck en route to Whistler and as you went on talking there were also the voices of the other members of the team joking and laughing at the same time, and I can also remember the corridor of overhanging trees and also the power lines along that part of Telegraph Road and how the exhaust fumes used to smell in those days that always become so vivid again no matter where I am when I hear a band playing the channel to “Precious Little Thing Called Love” again. Any time I hear that I also remember how the loose macadamized gravel used to look bouncing along in the red-clay dust the tires kicked back as you rolled on away toward the billboards in the open fields on the outskirts of Chickasaw.

  But before we got there we turned off and came on across Kraft Highway which was the only concrete-paved strip to stretch that far beyond the city limits in those days. Then somebody said we were on the Citronelle road and the next turn I remember was the one that brought us into the sandy rut that I always remember when something reminds me of the scrub oaks along the way to the playing field and picnic grounds up to the cypress slope from the Eight Mile Creek swimming place.

  That was that June, and we had already played home games against the Box Factory, and the Kelly Hill Nine, and Pine Chapel and had made one trip to Cedar Grove and had also played Chickasaw Terrace in Chickasaw Terrace and also back home. Then on the Fourth of July we played the matinee game in Plateau and as the summer rolled on we also traveled up to Saraland, Chastang, and Mount Vernon and out to Maysville and Oak Grove and also down the coast to Bayou La Batre and Pascagoula.

  I don’t remember how many games we won and lost that summer, but then there was no pennant to be won anyway because there was no organized league. Your team was tough or maybe about average or a pushover, and that was about it. You sent out letters of challenge which were either accepted or rejected for one reason or another, and most of the games took place on open playing fields to which admission was free and which were kept in regulation playing condition by the players themselves under the supervision of the manager and team captain and usually with the help of a number of faithful fans and sometimes also a few local commercial sponsors.

  The main thing about the trip down to Pascagoula was not that we won the seven-inning matinee preliminary and that the adult team lost the big game, but the big dance band from New Orleans playing on a low platform under a wide moss-draped oak near the refreshment stand. They were there for the home team and the number they kept striking up every time their side scored again was “Cake Walking Babies from Home,” which I already knew from Miss Blue Eula’s record of old Clarence Williams’s Blue Five with Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Charlie Irvis, Buddy Christian, and Eva Taylor.

  We spent so much of the rest of the afternoon just hanging around the bandstand that we didn’t really try to keep up with what was happening out on the diamond. From where we stood looking and listening, you could read the titles on the music stands and that was the first time I ever saw the score sheets for “Sugar Foot Stomp” and “Royal Garden Blues” which Papa Gladstone’s Syncopators had been playing in the Boom Men’s Union Hall Ballroom for years.

  We didn’t get to hear the band from New Orleans play for the big dance that night because as soon as the third man was put out in the top of the ninth inning we had to pile back into the trucks and head back for Mobile and Gasoline Point. But I could hear “Cake Walking Babies” all the way home and it stuck with me all that next week.

  But the band tune that Little Buddy Marshall and I always used to hum and whistle because it went with baseball and Gator Gus and also with the Old Luzana Cholly’s sporty limp-walk was “Kansas City Stomp” by old sharp dressing, loud woofing Jelly Roll Morton and the Red Hot Peppers. You would also do Old Luzana’s sporty limp to Duke Ellington’s “Birmingham Breakdown” and years later I was to make his “Cotton Tail” my very own best of all soundtracks for the briar patch. But at that time “Kansas City Stomp” was our theme song. So much so that even to this day, every time I put it on the phonograph I feel the way I used to feel when he was the one and only Little Buddy Marshall he used to be back before he decided that we had come to the parting of the ways.

  One day in the middle of that July he said, Man, you don’t really believe me when I’m trying to tell you these my last goddamn weeks around these parts, do you Scooter? But you just wait and see if I don’t skip on out of here. And I guess I really didn’t believe it, or maybe I was just hoping he wouldn’t. But I didn’t want to talk about it because I didn’t even want to think about it anymore.

  The last game he and I played together was the one against Oak Grove in Oak Grove. So that was the last time I ever saw him do that old walk-away limp we used to practice to do when you had to slide into home plate. When you got the jump and beat the throw going into second or third, the thing was to hit the dirt and be standing on the bag dusting your hips and hitching up your pants with your forearms while the infielder was still shifting the ball from the glove to his throwing hand. But when you slid into home plate, you always took your time getting up and then you limped a few steps and then you trotted on into the dugout brushing your pants as if it were all just another little detail in a day’s work. I had all of that down as well as he did, but he got to do it more often in a real game because he was so much better as a hitter than I ever was to be.

  Then sometime during the week before the Labor Day picnic game against Chickasaw Terrace up on the bluffs, he left town one night without saying goodbye, and that was really the end of me and Little Buddy Marshall as running buddies, because when he came back to town that next year just before the end of the school term, he had already been home for almost a week before I found out he was there, and I didn’t actually see him until I just happened to meet him coming along the sidewalk from Miss Algenia Nettleton’s cookshop.

  We stood where we were and talked for about twenty minutes and all he said when I said, Where you been, man, where you been, and what you been up to, was just, Knocking about here and there doing the best I can, man. But I didn’t press him because as soon as I saw him I could tell that he was embarrassed and also that he had not yet fully recovered from some illness, which we never came to discuss or even mention.

  But when I heard some ten or twelve days later that he had hit the road again, I was not really surprised at all, and the next time I saw him he could hardly wait to tell me about some of the things he had seen and done in such major league baseball cities as Cincinnati and Chicago and St. Louis and Cleveland and Detroit and Pittsburgh, and I said Hey man, eight down and eight to go, because in those days there were eight teams in the National League and eight in the American League. So there were only four more cities to go because St. Louis and Chicago had one in each league and so did Boston and Philadelphia, and New York had the Yankees in the American League and the Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers in the National League, and Washington had the Senators in the National League. Which, of course, also meant that once you got to any two-league city, say like Chicago with the White Sox and the Cubs, you were where every team in both leagues came to play.

  It was almost like old times for a few days during the first part of that summer, and then he said what he said about what had been on his mind about Creola Calloway for all those years and I didn’t see him or even hear anything about him for a while and I took it for granted that he had cut out once more. But then a few weeks later there he was again, coming along through Tin Top Alley from Shelby Hill and as soon as he saw me he made his old you-mighty-goddamn-right-I-did gesture and then broke into a few steps of our old sporty-limp strut.

  Then not long afterward I found out that he had skipped the city again without saying goodbye, and I guessed that he had headed north by east to Philadelphia and New York and maybe also Boston, and my guess turned out to be true. It also turned out that the day we stopped to talk for a few minutes in Tin Top Alley was the last time I was to see him alive.

 
The

  Briarpatch

  XIII

  1.

  At first I couldn’t believe that what was happening to Will Spradley was happening to me, too. After all, when I woke up that morning, I had never heard anything at all about Will Spradley and would not have recognized him as anybody I had ever seen anywhere before. But by sunrise the next day, he had told me about his trouble with Dudley Philpot so many times over and in such personal detail that forever thereafter I was to feel that I had not only been an eyewitness but had also been a party to it step by step, breath by breath:

  he (Will Spradley) came plunging headlong and lickety-split through the narrow alley leading from the back of the store, his ears ringing, the pain in his side almost bending him double. Ain’t none of it nothing and here I is, all messed up in the middle of it. All tangled and mangled up in it like this and it ain’t nothing and ain’t about nothing.

  he was aching all over, and he was breathing blood bubbles and spitting blood, too, but he was running now, and he had to keep on running. All of this now. All of this and it ain’t nothing, plain flat-out nothing. He was wet and sticky with blood and sweat, and his legs were stiff, and he could hardly bear to swing his arms. I ain’t done nothing. I ain’t said nothing and ain’t done nothing. I ain’t done nothing to nobody. I ain’t never bothered nobody in my life. Everybody know that. You know me, you got to know that.

  he needed to do something about the bleeding and he needed something to hold his side, too, but he couldn’t stop for that. Not yet. He couldn’t even think about stopping. He had to keep on running and he had to keep on being out of sight, too. Because at least he was this lucky and this far away from that part of it for at least this long. He had to keep on trying. He had to get to Giles Cunningham now. He had to keep on trying and pulling and get there and be there and be gone.

  but he had to get there first and let Giles know. I got to get there so I can tell Gile. I got to let him know. I got to get there and be the one to tell him and clear myself with him because I ain’t said nothing about him. I just said what I said because it was true and that’s all I meant. I wasn’t trying to get him in trouble with nobody. That’s what I got to do now. I got to tell him and tell him I didn’t want them to get him, too. Because he the one now. He the main one. Because all this ain’t nothing to what they going to try to do to him. Because I ain’t the one, because I ain’t done nothing. He ain’t done nothing neither, but he the one. He musta said something. He musta said something terrible.

  he was sucking and spitting blood and the lump around the gash on his cheek had almost closed his eye already. The raw place behind his ear burned all the way to the base of his neck. But he was pulling and pumping with all his might. Not even looking back. Not even daring to look back yet. There wasn’t any time to spare to do that yet. Not now. Not yet. Not even with it this dark. He wasn’t far enough for that yet. Not even almost.

  not even listening back. Not daring to do that either. Because if you looked back, they would be there, and if you listened back, they would be coming, and he had to be getting away from there now, and that was doing this, which was running, which was going, which was leaving, because your second chance was out in front of you now.

  because although he couldn’t really know what was going to happen next, he knew what he knew about what had already happened, because that part had happened to him, and he knew that even if it had been worse than it had been, which was bad enough, it was still just the beginning. No telling what was going to happen next. Anything could happen now.

  he had to get to Giles Cunningham before they got there. I got to make time. I got to get in and out of there before any of them get there. I got to be somewhere else when they come there. I got to hold out and do this and then I got to find somewheres else to be.

  he had come out of the alley and across that street and cut through the vacant lot where the automobile hulls were. I got to tell Gile then I got to be getting further. All of this now. I swear to God, Lord, you never know. He was coming to the next street then. And then he was across that one, too, and he was crawling through the fence and into the pecan orchard and coming on through there.

  it had been raining off and on all day, and the ground was wet and the air was damp, and there was a thin mist among the trees and the night shapes again. It was going to be chilly again but the dampness was still warm now. It was hot to him. His breath was hot, his collar was hot, and his clothes were almost steaming.

  he made it to the next fence and got through the railing and was crawling on through there, too, his arms and legs numb now, his head splitting with pain. The whole left side of his face was swollen out of shape, and he could hardly see out of his left eye. He could hardly hear out of his left ear, and every time he stretched too far the pain in his side almost took his breath away.

  he was crawling along the garden furrow to get to the next fence, and then he would be at that road. Then he would be coming along there. If they didn’t cut him off and hem him in and catch him anywhere along there, he would have a chance to make it to that corner, which was where that part of town began. He was headed for the edge of town and the railroad, but he had to get through here first, and then Higgins Quarters and the lumberyard.

  he was running again then, and he had to keep on running until he was there. If I slow down, I’ll be tired. If I slow down, I won’t be able to run no more, and I can’t make it, and I got to, because I got to get there and tell Gile because I’m the cause of it, but it ain’t my fault. It ain’t my fault because it ain’t nothing no how, and God knows I ain’t done a thing.

  he came staving on along the footpath beside the wide, curving road, running in the open, exposed in all directions now, his whole being straining with alertness. He had to be ready to jump in a split second. I got to hear good now and hear them before I see them because if I don’t, they got me.

  the main thing was automobiles, especially coming from behind. If you didn’t hear the motor before the headlights came, the beams would hit you in the back and it would be like a charge of buckshot between the shoulder blades. If that happened, it would be too late. If that happened, they would have him again, and it wouldn’t be just one but all of them this time. He would have to be there and they would be there all around him, and anything could happen.

  that would be here; it would be happening right here. And ain’t none of them got nothing to do with it because it ain’t nothing no how. Ain’t got nothing to do with it and don’t even know nothing about what it’s all about, don’t know the first thing about none of it. All this time now, and now all of this. But they ain’t thinking about that. They don’t want to know about that, don’t need to know. They ain’t going to be asking no questions because they ain’t going to be needing no answers. Because I’m the only answer they want now, me and Gile, and its more Gile than me, because he’s really the one, but if they get me it’s me, too, and here I is ain’t done nothing to nobody.

  everything depended on how lucky he was now. That was all he had to go on now, because all he could do was try to keep on doing what he was doing right now, which was this, which was running, which was all numbness now and pulling, which was pumping, his chest tight, his breath raw, the dull cramp in his side getting sharper and sharper all the time. I got to outrun this now. This ketch in my side. If I keep on it’ll go away. I got to get rid of this and get my second wind. When I get my second wind, I’ll feel better and I can make better time. I got to make better time than this. A whole lot better.

  he came lunging on, and then he was there in that part of town which was the last part, and he had to slow down because he had to be ready to break from shadow to shadow now. This far now. And now I got to get through here. He was running narrow then. I got to make it on through here, and get to the lumberyard and get on through there and make it all the way. I can’t let them get me now. All of them now, and just me out here all by myself All over something like that, and it ain’t eve
n nothing. He came darting on, running not on strength but on necessity now, because although it had all started about something which was really nothing in the first place, it was about everything and everybody now. And all he knew about what was going to happen next was that anything could happen, and once it got started there was no telling where it was going to stop.

  he came grinding on and the main thing was the numbness. It wasn’t the pain anymore. It was the dull bumping numbness and the way his stomach was. If I can just make it on past there and make it on to that sweet gum I can make it. I got to make it that far now. I got to make it that far and I’ll have me a good head start then, and I can make it on through there.

  I shoulda knowed better and I did. Ain’t no use in them saying that, because I did, and I was doing everything in my power to do and I sure God did everything he said and he know it, and then he started all of that about something like that and I couldn’t do nothing after that.

  because it was happening too fast from then on. Everything had been going along all that time and then all of a sudden it had changed to that and there he was right in the middle of it, all hemmed up in the very middle of it. He couldn’t do anything right because he couldn’t even believe it that quick. He saw it happening and he knew it was happening but he couldn’t believe it because he was too stunned to believe it. Because he was dumbfounded, flabbergasted. Because there he was and there it was happening before he could even get started on what he was going to say, before he could even get set to start thinking about all of the things he knew he had to try to say, and then it was too late.

  he had known good and well that it could happen, but somehow he just couldn’t believe that it was going to happen that fast, and all of a sudden it was like a steel trap springing shut on you. That was enough to shock anybody. That was enough to paralyze you. Because there you were and it was like a bear trap or something and you knew it and you knew you had to unbait it, and you were trying and there you were being as careful as anybody could be and all of a sudden it had sprung before you could even touch it.