Bailey decided that’s just where he wanted his two feet by March. The Mississippi had grown as dangerous as any sea. The barge, even when loaded to its maximum weight, was sometimes tossed amidst her currents like a matchbox in a whirlpool. Twice they lost mules that dragged the barge upstream from shore when the earth sank beneath their feet. The pilot cut their harness quick enough and watched them drown. The river cracked and groaned day and night; its clamor could drive a man mad. Bailey had some savings out of his miserable salary since he never spent ready money except on drink. Rather than wire his mama for bank notes from the strongbox he kept hidden in her smokehouse, he decided to put his spare coin to use. He quit the barge and disembarked at Vicksburg. He bought himself a suit of clothes and a good pair of boots. He shaved his beard, got his hair trimmed, and hopped a train to Birmingham, where he tried his hand at some of the old games. They might have worked had he not been dissolute. While he was there, the world he knew drowned wholesale. Every newspaper reported a disaster a day as the Mississippi had her way with the puny defenses of men, flooding the homes of a million before she was done. By the time the flood rushed toward Memphis, Magnus Bailey woke from dissipation and worried about folk back home. He packed up and went to Tulips End to see his mama and know how she had done.
When he arrived, he found Tulips End was gone. Tulips End and all her people. Gone. Vanished underwater a day or two before he arrived. He got there so close on the heels of disaster, bodies had not yet drifted up from underneath the rubble of homes and fences, trapping them on the floor of floodwater high enough to obscure chimney tops. White men from across the hollow told him that was because of the dynamite.
Oh yes, there’d been dynamite, they said. Just a few sticks put around Tulips End by those rascals on t’other side of the river. Them folk wanted to make sure when the floodwaters went lookin’ for a levee to break through, they’d find the colored town’s and not their own. It was a matter of survival, don’t you know. If the coloreds had got holda dynamite, it woulda been the other way around, no doubt about it. It’d be white men, women, and children trapped beneath their homes to pop up in weeks to come, bloated so much you don’t know who’s who. Just the luck of the draw it was. Every one of us will pray for their immortal souls, they said.
Magnus Bailey was uncertain if they meant to intercede for those souls of Tulips End who’d been sacrificed for the welfare of their neighbors across the river or those who lit the fuse and gave the river permission to slaughter them all.
Escaping the hell that claimed his mama and all his childhood people was enough to make Magnus Bailey grateful to God and the river that he had been spared. He grieved awhile, but the fact that his life savings lay at the bottom of the river along with his dead caused him no bitterness. What was money compared to a life? He’d have given it all to get his mama back. In his sorrow, he considered going home to Memphis, as that town was the only place he’d found on earth where he felt himself and halfway whole. He thought to look up the Fishbeins to see how they’d made out, but he didn’t. Instead, he went looking for a job on the Yellow Dog Railroad. The man hiring liked the mellow tone of his deep voice, claimed it made him sound as close to a gent as a colored could get, and took him on as a porter straightaway. It went alright for a while. After the barge, rail work was nothing much. He kept to himself and out of trouble. Come that summer, when Vice President Dawes and Secretary Herbert Hoover toured the flood zone to plan the relief effort, they took his train. The conductor appointed him as their personal porter on account of his no-nonsense manner. Seeing the devastation around him, the army of conscripted Negro men working at the reconstruction, sleeping in mud under the gun, perishing of starvation and disease while white men ate their fill, Magnus Bailey could only be grateful again that he was not one of them.
Once, when he carried a silver tray of coffee and sweet rolls to the presidential car, he thought, If only my Minnie could see me now at the right hand of princes. Like a thunderbolt from God sent to smite him for his pride, out of nowhere there came a pandemonium of noise such as he’d never heard before. A rumble, a crash, a screech of metal rolled over his ears like the fists of brutes. He lost his footing. The tray bobbled in his hands. There followed a small, stinging stretch of silence that made him wonder if the indefinable mayhem had deafened him. And then the crash, screech, rumble returned, only louder this time. He was hurled to the floor by a power unseen. The tea tray flew through the air and slammed against a wall. A bomb, he thought. An anarchist looking to murder the vice president and Secretary Hoover. He sat with his hands braced against the floor, dry-mouthed, trembling, waiting for what would come next.
After the dust settled, he learned that when the engineer attempted to cross a bridge against the river’s wishes, the bridge collapsed. The train derailed. The engine car dangled over a cliff and the engineer was dead. Dawes and Hoover and Magnus Bailey were banged up some but survived. Soon as a new train arrived to whisk them away, Dawes and Hoover went on with the work of the relief tour. That train was fully staffed. Bailey was replaced.
Now he was truly lost. He had nowhere to go. He had no plan. His ready money was gone. He had no work. He felt cursed, driven out, an Ishmael in the wilderness. Thoughts of Minnie and his poor sainted mama haunted him. He felt that those he loved had paid for his sins, but that he himself was not nearly done doing so. He waited for the Hand of God to deliver the final blow and crush him. While he waited, he wandered. He crossed the river and wandered to Little Rock, to Dallas, to Wichita, to Des Moines. He avoided the flood zone, often traveling by night, hiding in the bush by day that he might not be kidnapped and traded to a work camp, where he would surely die. In every city, he hired himself out pushing a broom, washing windows, or hauling garbage, whatever dirty work might be had. In Des Moines, he revived his youthful skill as a street-corner bootblack for a time. He crossed the river again and went to Chicago and Indianapolis. From there he headed to where he was going all along, to St. Louis, or rather just south of there, to the home of Aurora Mae and Horace Stanton, where he hoped to find Mags Preacher McCallum and hear news of his Minnie, who had not once through all his trials and travels left that secret place in his heart where he’d stuck her like a splinter through soft and tender flesh.
Before he got to the Stanton farm, he bathed in the river and brushed the dust of the road from his one good suit of clothes. He planned how he’d speak to the Stantons so that he’d not too quickly betray the purpose of his visit. He remembered how magnificent Aurora Mae was, how he’d thought to bed her one day, and was wistful toward the man he used to be before Minerva Fishbein taught him regret. He strolled up the grassy hill that led to the Stanton front door with a swagger that belied the anxious pounding of his heart. He walked up the steps, past a pack of stretched-out, lazy dogs who barely lifted an eyelid to him, and knocked on the door with his new marble-knobbed walking stick bought especially as a prop for this occasion. Then he summoned his young rake’s smile and froze it on his face. O Lord, O Lord, O Lord, he prayed, let Mags still be around here so I can find out what I come to know.
When the door opened, there she was, an answered prayer, Mags Preacher McCallum, looking exactly the same as she did ten years before when he’d left her at that very doorstep with the funeral car and her baby girl, little Sara Kate. Twin boys, maybe five years old, clung to her skirts, one on each leg. A girl child with small bright eyes and cheeks as sharp as two arrowheads stood just behind her. She peered around one of the boys, chewing her lower lip and looking like the pint-sized ghost of George McCallum himself.
Sweet Jesus, it’s you, Magnus Bailey, ain’t it? Mags said. She opened the door wider to give him a swift, chaste embrace before waving him in. Babies, she said, this is a man I knew years ago, a man who was kind to me when I was just a green country gal gone to the big city to make my fortune.
She invited him to sit down at the kitchen table and sent the boys to find their fa
ther in the fields and bring him back to meet their very special visitor. She put Sara Kate to heating up the stew pot and fixing some chicory brew that Magnus Bailey might refresh himself.
She’s just like her daddy, Magnus said. Right down to the way she walks.
Mags sighed. She felt an uncommon need to express herself, the way people often do when the past comes up by surprise and smacks them across the face, when all the old feelings sleeping inside revive intact and strong. She spoke to Magnus Bailey as if they’d been the very best of friends and confidants those years ago when all they’d ever been was passing friendly, their sole communalities in life Miss Emily’s rooming house and the Fishbeins. But time gone can burnish old acquaintances with sentiment, and Bailey was the reason, indirectly anyway, that Mags met George McCallum to begin with, which is why she leaned forward with her elbows on the table and let go.
It’s true what you say. I swear she’s so much like George it sometimes makes me sad just to look at her. I married again, mostly because her father made me so happy, I couldn’t live alone anymore. I kept wantin’ company, especially with this one sproutin’ up around me, remindin’ me how nice life is when you got somebody. Now, the boys’ father. He’s a good man alright. I wouldn’t dishonor George by marryin’ anybody but a good man. Still, when I look at my Sara Kate, I think of her daddy, and Lord help me, I miss him more’n a bit.
The child in question brought Magnus Bailey a hot bowl of squirrel stew with onions, yams, and collards, and he found it wasn’t half bad. Mags went on while he ate, reminiscing about George’s way with a needle and how much he comforted the bereaved just by standing there, looking dignified. It must have been a good twenty minutes before she mentioned the Fishbeins. For Bailey, it felt like hours.
Mr. Fishbein was good to us, very good. He’d learned some hard lessons from life in the old country, so I was told, but they never turned him cruel. Always respectful, he was, and not once did he cheat us of a dime we had comin’. And what a generous soul! Remember that big old bus he gave me? I sold it pretty fast. Know what I did with it? I put half in the bank for Sara Kate’s welfare. There’s enough there for all my children’s future, I’m bettin’. How many of us can say that? Then I bought me some beauty supplies to add to the dead man’s paints Mr. Fishbein let me have, and a great big old hair dryer, tough as a gun. It wasn’t much more than a couple of trash-can lids wired to hold a bundle of lightbulbs. Why, I woulda got more heat on a lady’s head if I set her down in front of an open oven door. We didn’t have the electricity up here yet. I had to buy a dynamo for an old shed out back. That dynamo cost me a whopper but it made me a shop out of those four walls. It was drafty and plain. The country cousins, they flocked to me from all over anyways just to get a look at it. I did everything for ’em I told you I would in times gone. I made beauties out of good-lookin’ gals and lookers out of plain ones. More than a few owe the catchin’ of their husbands’ eye to me. Then the chemicals got to me. I started to cough too much. I had to give it up. I never did make my fortune from that business. I guess that means you were right to deny me my hundred dollars, Mr. Magnus Don’t-Turn-Nobody-Down-No-How-No-Way Bailey!
She laughed heartily. Bailey joined her, laughing with just the right measure of nostalgia, nothing too loud or harsh in his tone, although his heart raced and his mind burned for the next moment when he could bring up Minerva. Casual, he thought, it’s got to be casual. He arranged his features in a simple, curious expression and opened his mouth.
I wonder how he and his daughter are these days, he began, when Mags Preacher McCallum’s second husband came in the door, a good-natured smile on his broad, happy face, his big farmer’s hand extended for Magnus Bailey to shake.
Joe Dunlap, he said, pleased to meet you.
Magnus Bailey, the other replied with a false smile. All hope of conversation about the Fishbeins was about to turn to dust. Desperate, he tried to steer talk back to the old days.
How is it, he asked, that you’ve taken over the Stanton house? I’ll never forget the night we delivered you here and the hospitality we enjoyed. Come to think of it, where are Aurora Mae and Horace? Why, I can see us all dancin’ at your weddin’ and sittin’ together at this very table as time went by. You were over there and Horace up the head and Aurora Mae facin’ him. Then me here, where I am now, with Miss Minnie beside me …
All his machinations brought him was an excited spill of words from Mags about the curious fates of her cousins. Half of it made no sense to him, but he nodded and oohed and ahhed while she rattled on anyway.
Oh, there has been so much, so much gone on, I don’t know where to start tellin’ you, she said. Poor Aurora Mae. How she suffered, you know, just for bein’ what she was. So big, so beautiful. No woman like that can live in peace. Not in this world. The night riders come up some year ago, while she was all alone, killed her dogs, and took her away. Why, when poor Horace got back here, she was gone without a trace, and no matter how hard he tried, he could not find her.
Bailey thought of Minnie then, of her violation on the road to Tulips End, and how her father, like Horace, searched and could not find her. His eyes stung.
They were reunited by the flood, Mags continued. Somewhere, somehow, they found each other, got a hold of money, too—piles of it. They came home awhile, and then, without warnin’, they left, each their separate ways. I took the house over. Aurora Mae wound up in Memphis. I know, as we write from time to time. I don’t know where Horace went off to.
The mention of Memphis gave Magnus Bailey the opportunity he needed.
I’m very sorry to hear all that, he began. We all vulnerable, ain’t we? In the good times and the bad. Poor George, Aurora Mae, even I been hurt, although to a lesser degree.
He studied his hands which were rough and raw from his life on the barge and the hard labor he’d been put to after. He waved them about for her to see. Mags shrugged and shook her head.
Aurora Mae’s in Memphis? She doin’ alright?
Mags shrugged again.
Money heals all kinds of wounds, she said.
Yes, it does, Miss Mags. It certainly does. I wonder if she’s in touch with our old boss. I haven’t seen him in years.
Well, I don’t know about him, Mags said. But that Minerva, that l’il redheaded devil Minerva …
She broke off. Bailey sucked in a great breath of air, then let it out slowly, waiting. Mags dropped her head and sighed. Her mouth twisted as she pondered how much to tell Bailey, how much to leave out. She glanced at her husband, who’d remained quiet throughout their talk. He nodded encouragement for her to continue with a seriousness that frightened their guest. He could not imagine what all this hesitation was about. Dead, he thought. A hot, hard lump throbbed in his throat. My Minnie must be dead. What he next heard made the grieving of her look good.
Aurora Mae had a terrible time with those night riders. You can imagine how they used her. When they was done with her, they took her over to Minerva Fishbein’s bawdy house. L’il Red might have turned into the stone dead weight of her daddy’s heart and the biggest whore in all of Tennessee, but she saved Aurora Mae from that life. Took her in, then got her out of there. I believe she got her off to be a cook somewhere. No matter what, I got to thank her for that.
At last, the coward Magnus Bailey’s wait was over. His soul received its just deserts. Standing in for the Hand of God, Mags Preacher McCallum Dunlap’s words bound him to the racks of hell. He spent the night at the old Stanton place, on their best feather bed, as befit an honored guest. It might have been a bed of hot coals for all the rest it gave him. He writhed the night long in a fresh agony of guilt. In the morning, he quit the hospitality of the Stanton farm for the rigors of the road to Memphis, where he resolved to journey and put things right.
X
During the long walk to Memphis, Magnus Bailey resurrected everything he’d forgotten about artifice and t
he exploitation of human weakness. This was not the halfhearted attempt at restoration he’d made in the days after he’d left the barge or even the hasty effort he made as he approached the Stanton farm. He was dry now, and his purpose that of the zealot reborn. He recalled first the simple things, those basic skills in how to convince others to do what they least wanted. He practiced the various ways he could turn his head or hunch his shoulders to provoke the desired response to a leading question posed in just the right tone of voice. While he walked down dusty roads, thrusting his walking stick forward, pulling up his thoughtful self behind, he muttered stock phrases he’d not used in years, practiced the laughter of collusion, the sigh of feigned surprise. His lips and eyes danced along the rhythm of his murmurs. With fluid grace, his body made sudden pivots and his arms grand, bold gestures either to the left or the right, depending on which side he carried his suitcase that was packed with canned goods, a bit of dried meat courtesy of Mags Preacher McCallum Dunlap, and everything else he needed to keep his suit brushed, his shoes shined, and his hair tamed. Walking down the road, he looked like nothing so much as a well-groomed, hyperkinetic lunatic. A handful of automobiles and wagons passed. None offered him a ride.
It was half a year since the flood. The flood water had long drained from the streets of Memphis, but the damage was everywhere. Homes abandoned and rotting out dotted even affluent districts. Businesses owned by families established before the Chickasaws left were gone without a trace. Downtown corners were piled high with planks of wood placed when needed across the thoroughfares to facilitate travel on roads where the mud was still thick. The air was cold but the hard frost, always a random visitor in that town, had not yet come. Everywhere Magnus stopped to pass the time of day and catch the pulse of life, folk voiced a longing for freezing temperatures that the mud might get rock hard and ease their burdens. Oh yes, he’d respond solemnly, the hard frost will come. But to himself, he said: Lordy! Hard mud on the streets of Memphis? Crunchy, maybe, long about dawn in January. But hard? And then his heart cheered thinking if folk were that desperate, his pickings might be considerable.
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