Cicada

by Eric, Laing, J.

  He was referring to the unpaved beginnings of a logging road that cut through the swamp perpendicular to the one they were on. It’d been cleared and built up, but after three years it had yet to be paved and probably never would be. Or so the old boys often said.

  “I ain’t doin’ no such,” Casey pushed back. When he looked around him the faces weren’t what he expected. In anger he shrugged off all the more and turned away.

  “Well, somebody’s gotta go,” Mr. Clem said. “Can’t be me, neither. I can’t be leavin’ these lil’ youngins here alone.” The truth was that he was too tired and hung-over from his morning drink to be so bothered.

  “Fine,” Buckshot huffed.

  “Thatta boy,” Mr. Clem said and patted him on his shoulder. “We got us a man,” he added with a sneer to Casey.

  “Go to hell,” Casey said, turning away.

  “What?” the bus driver yelled. And now guff from children, he thought.

  The boy had a feral look about him that the other children would talk about for many days to follow. They agreed Casey was troubled. There was other talk of his father’s odd take on the Scripture. Luckily for Casey’s sake, their attention would soon be diverted.

  “Go to hell, all ya,” he added and went to the road side to be on his own.

  One or two giggled, but Casey’s hurt had a thickness in it that left the rest quiet. The boys returned to their game of marbles while the girls went to the shadowed side of the bus to braid one another’s hair and sing songs to keep the little ones calm.

  Mr. Clem was the only one revived by the turn. “Don’t ya dawdle now. Less fartin’ more departin’!” he shouted. “And put a little hustle in it, okay?” he added before returning to stare at the engine that now was just as useless as he was.

  “Thanks fer nothin’, pal,” Buckshot shot to Casey as he leaned in close on passing.

  The other boy just shrugged.

  Buckshot walked ten feet and stood hesitating waiting for Casey to change his mind. When it was clear that wasn’t happening, Buckshot angrily readjusted his bundle of textbooks and lunch pail, huffing off a bit dramatically to start his trek.

  The cypress elephants still stood around him, although their number had diminished and their mirrored brethren had given way to patches of caked and cracked earth, low-lying brush and the occasional palmetto. Buckshot had gone perhaps three miles, having turned off the blacktop and making his way down the unfinished grade some three quarters of a mile gone by now. The swamp, dried up by the heat and the thunderstorms that threatened almost daily but never made good, seemed a place of death. Still as an old photo with all the color and life drained away, the surreal landscape made the boy uneasy to be alone. Every fifth or sixth step he looked back over his shoulder. Nothing. The road behind remained empty and seemed to go on forever, just as the road ahead. And, as loud as he’d ever heard them, the cicadas kept with drowning out all other sound—if there even were any other thing to be heard—their ceaseless thrum doing nothing to help the boy’s already jangled nerves.

  Timothy Sayre smelled the body before he saw it, which made sense, since it’d been hanging in a tree some four or five feet off the ground for several days. Buckshot wrinkled his face at the stench just as the flapping wings of the attending buzzards drew his eyes to their feast.

  In life, the corpse had been Raymond Stout. He’d loved his wife and two children and found great pleasure in rising early to see the sun start each new day. His voice once was a hardy bass that sounded up from the depths of his girth with an amazing color that all too often made those around him smile. He never liked to dance—he thought it made him look silly—but he was quick to dimple his cheeks and keep time on his thigh whenever others took to the floor. His favorite meal had been cornbread with red beans and dirty rice and he didn’t mind making it himself although he confessed that his wife was a better cook. He was soft-spoken, even-tempered, and he’d rather folks not swear in his company. He loved to tell jokes and sometimes kept his children up too late with the stories he’d learned from his grandmother. As a boy, he’d raised a mockingbird chick that he had found strayed from the nest. He had held a special place in his heart for those gray beguilers ever since.

  In his last hours, he’d been beaten, kicked, urinated on, and then strung up by a noose for no reason other than the pigment of his skin.

  Buckshot would have run if he hadn’t been so terrified. The rancid smell pushed the contents of his stomach up into his throat, and his ears suddenly felt afire with the screams of the cicadas. The buzzards—the very ones he and Casey had watched from the playground earlier—paid him no mind. One perched on Raymond’s shoulder and leaned in as though to whisper something in the dead man’s ear as it took its fill of him, while the other two danced on the ground beneath his gently swaying corpse, wrangling with one another for the more choice portions of his bare feet.

  Chapter Five

  The dog day cicada was the given name to the particular insect that the residents of Melby considered to be just another nuisance to which they were helpless. The swarm was suffered upon them during the warmer months of the year. That specific brood of cicada earned its alliterative canine moniker because they arrived during the summer months, emerging from the earth fewer in number and more spread out over the calendar than their periodical brethren that would befall, plague-like upon Melby, but once each thirteen years. In regions to the north, for reasons little understood by man, there were cicadas that further delayed their appearance by an additional four years, arriving instead in seventeen year cycles.

  The dog day cicada primarily came to adulthood in late May around Melby, only to be preyed upon by creatures both great and small, of the sky, earth, and waters. From the solitary wasp that lined its nest with cicada nymphs to feed its young, to man, who poisoned them to preserve his agricultural labors from their blight, the cicada knew many enemies.

  There even existed a fungus, Massospora cicadina, which thinned their numbers by infecting the young insects as they emerged from the soil following their nymph gestation. After years spent buried in the earth siphoning nourishment from the roots of trees in their parasitic struggle towards maturity, the nymphs would sense en masse when the time had come to wean themselves from the roots. In a great migration to the surface, some unfortunates burrowed through the awaiting fungus. Such defiled cicada might reach the surface, but they would never reach adulthood. Ravaged by inevitable consumption, their decomposing remains would go on to spread even more spores back into the earth. In places where Massospora had gained a foothold, the womb of Mother Earth would be completely inhospitable over time to any subsequent generations of cicada.

  “No single creature has dominion over God’s good Earth, Frances,” Joshua Lee Scott intoned in his practiced sing-song voice. His pitch was slightly lilted as if he spoke to a child. “Not the birds in the air, neither the fish in the sea, nor even man...even in all his glory. None save God have dominion.”

  Minister Scott had been in the Sayre kitchen for nearly half an hour. He’d worn out his welcome some twenty-five minutes long gone by.

  “That is so true. So true. Well,” Frances said, wiping her palms on her pleats in a gesture of finality and shifting in her chair as if to rise, “it has certainly been a break in my routine to have you stop by, Minister Scott.”

  “Frances, Frances, Frances,” the young, patently obtuse man went on before pausing with the grave look of concern he’d cultivated for so long in front of his dressing mirror that it had become overly-rehearsed and lost all its gravity, “we’ve known each other a good time.”

  It was hardly the truth, but something a fool such as Joshua Scott could be expected to say, nonetheless. They’d known of one another for most of the years of Joshua’s life, but up until the past year they had hardly spoken to one another.

  Frances would have nodded or murmured some acknowledgement to his point, except that to do so would only encourage the man. Encouragement was the la
st thing she wanted to offer. He lifted a forefinger to the tip of his nose and drew in an audible breath.

  “So...I trust we can be frank,” he said.

  Another pause elicited a raised eyebrow from Frances. Who was this man and what was he trying to get at?

  “I fear I sense a faltering in your family’s faith, Mrs. Sayre.”

  With that, the camel’s knees buckled as Joshua Lee Scott had loaded his final straw.

  “Joshua, how old are you?”

  “Pardon?”

  “Twenty-three...four?”

  “I will turn twenty-six come this Decem—”

  “Twenty-six years is an awful long time to be an ignorant bore, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Here now, Frances. I don’t think....”

  There was a pause. Against the nearby window screen the coming weather heaved, seeming to give the thing life.

  “No, Joshua,” Frances sighed as well, “you obviously don’t.”

  “Here now…. There’s no call to insult me.”

  “But there is to insult me and mine?”

  When a patriarch dies unexpectedly it is understandable that his family might reel from the blow, some members losing their footing momentarily. When Joshua Lee Scott’s father—the revered founder of Melby’s First Baptist House of Worship—pitched forward into his mashed potatoes and peas, taken by an embolism and instantly struck as lifeless as the granite they’d soon bury him under, the resulting troubles became even more profound.

  Not only had the elder Joshua Scott been the cornerstone of his own flesh and blood, but his wisdom and guidance had served as a spiritual foundation to the few dozen families that bowed their heads to his words each Sunday morning. His passing was a devastation.

  So aggrieved was the community, that when his son took to the pulpit in his place, none had the heart to speak against it. This, even after the boy proved to be a shadow to the light his father had once cast. In the two years since the elder Scott had been snuffed, three families had suffered their fill of his boorish son and left the congregation, and, of late, to include the Sayres, at least three more were on the verge of following in those footsteps.

  Where the elder Scott had built a haven for the community to gather in fellowship, his son had unleashed a tempest to rent them apart. Even if Frances had followed her heart and better sense, and led her family from the fold as others had before her, she still could have little avoided the catastrophe that was just now being set in motion by Joshua Lee Scott.

  “Don’t be naïve, Frances,” Joshua Lee Scott said.

  “I beg your pardon?” Frances shot back, cheeks flushed with anger. This boy really knows how to endear himself, she thought. “Joshua,” she began by addressing him with his first name for the first time in longer than she could have recalled if pressed to do so. “I wish I could say I appreciate just what you’re trying to get at. I really do.”

  “It’s simple, Frances. I’m worried for your soul. I’m worried for all your souls,” he said, waving an arm around him as he referred to the Sayre household.

  Her chin lowered a bit and Frances gave him the look she normally reserved for Buckshot’s tall tales.

  “Frances, I know people. That is just the nature of my calling. I am a shepherd. A shepherd of men. The church is a family and its members are my children. And as such, I’ve come to suspect that you’re thinking of leaving the congregation.”

  Her eyebrows rose, expanding her reddening face as they moved away from her dropping jaw. Joshua thought her head looked on the verge of popping and misread this to mean that he finally had her attention.

  “Am I right? Yes, that’s just as I thought. I am.”

  As a young teen, Joshua had agreed on a dare from some other boys to hold a firecracker as it went off. When it proved to be a dud he’d allowed things to escalate until he found himself with a sizzling stalk clenched in his teeth. To this day he had his father to thank that he still had a pleasant smile. When the old minister had happened upon the boys behind the barn—where he’d suspected they were smoking—he smacked the side of Joshua’s head so hard that the firecracker flew out of his mouth—as luck would have it— just before going off. Joshua’s ears rang for three hours. He couldn’t be sure if it was from the little pyrotechnic explosion two inches in front of his nose, or his father’s palm to the back of his head. Perhaps both.

  “Joshua, my husband will be in later this afternoon. Why don’t you come back and we’ll discuss this then?”

  “You heard what happened over in Ternsville, didn’t you, Frances?”

  That was about the only thing Joshua could have said that would’ve kept her from shooing him out the door. She was just starting to get up from the kitchen table, but with Joshua Scott’s new tack she settled back down and looked him square in the eyes.

  “I’ve heard things. Yes,” she said.

  “Yes, I can imagine you have. Horrible business. Horrible business,” he elaborated.

  “Was it as bad as they say?”

  He sucked at his teeth momentarily. “I can’t be sure what you heard, but—”

  “I heard the Klan went in there like devils. I heard they killed women and children.” Her anger was threatening again.

  “Oh no, I don’t think those boys did anything that bad,” Minister Scott said.

  “Men were killed...homes burned down. I know that much for certain.”

  The minister leaned back in his chair. “Yes, yes, maybe there was a bit of provoked violence. A few houses did catch fire, but those were just shacks really, from what I understand. Unfortunate business, that.”

  “Minister Scott, forgive me if I’m wrong, but you sound almost as if you approve of this. I mean, provoked? Unfortunate business?”

  “Now, Frances, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I approve. But, well, you have to understand the delicate nature of things like what they had for themselves over in Ternsville.” He paused, suspecting she’d have an interjection. When she didn’t, he stood and crossed to the window, unable to bear her scrutiny. It made him more comfortable to stand over people when he talked down to them.

  “Most people can’t appreciate the way things’ve been and should be. It’s beyond their ken,” he began. “Years ‘round here abouts, the coloreds and the whites always enjoyed an understanding. Everyone knew and appreciated their place; each kept to his own.”

  He began sucking at his teeth once more while he watched a tractor far off in the field clamoring over the rugged earth, shuddering like a slow but persistent beetle methodically bent to its toil.

  He went on. “But you know they went and got themselves that new bottling plant out that way and sure enough it wasn’t the blessing the good folks of Ternsville counted on. With that plant came some Yankee management who thought they could start mixing things up. Can you believe there was talk of making some colored boy a shift foreman?”

  Frances got up from the table and emptied her half-filled coffee mug into the kitchen sink. Her demeanor made it clear to Minister Scott that he wasn’t winning a convert to his cause.

  She hadn’t had a hard life, but a life of hard work nonetheless. Keeping a farming household together and running smoothly had creased more than a few worry lines into her face over the years, and when those practiced lines scowled, as they did now, they left no doubt as to the concern on her mind and in her heart.

  “Don’t you think it would be the Christian thing to do to welcome those folks who’re just trying to get out of harm’s way? If a few colored families want to come here, you aren’t going to turn your back on them? You don’t expect them to stay and live amongst those bigots out in Ternsville, do you?” she asked, trying to reason with him.

  “See here now, we’re not talking about bigots. Those folks are not bigots,” Joshua said, getting a bit too excited suddenly.

  Frances held her ground but leaned away with her head drifting even further back than her retreating shoulders as if to survey the whole of Joshua Scot
t’s abrupt defiance.

  “Like I said, John’ll be home directly. I think if you got anymore to say it’d be best you come back then.”

  “I’m sorry, Frances, I can’t come back for supper.”

  She shook her head. “And I wasn’t offering a supper invite, Joshua.”

  Frances didn’t wait to watch the minister as he huffed and sputtered for a moment before following her lead to the screen door she held open. He was just turning to offer his goodbye as he climbed into his pickup, when Buckshot’s voice shook them from the awkward moment.

  “Mama! Mama!”

  Frances had no idea why her son was barreling through the field, shortcutting from the dirt road that bent past their home, but it was immediately clear that something was gravely amiss.

  “Mama!” he managed to shout once more as he flipped himself over the fence, stumbling face first into the dry lawn.

  Rusty the cat, who’d been asleep under the back porch, twitched his tail in irritation at all the commotion and trotted off to find peace and quiet amongst the oak trees further out in the backyard.

  “Timothy David Sayre! What in the wide world?” Frances cried, rushing to his side.

  As his mother helped him up, Buckshot held out his palm to show her and Minister Scott—who’d ran over as well—the awful gash he’d just given himself on the barbed wire. He was so excited, however, that he acknowledged the fast-gushing wound in no other way.

  “Mama, there’s a…there’s a dead man,” was all he could get out between heaving breaths. The last few words came as a whisper.

  “A dead man?”

  “Has there been a car accident, son?” the minister pressed.

  “No...no, sir. No accident.”

  “Timmy, settle down now,” Frances said as she produced a handkerchief from her apron and pushed it into his bloodied palm.