It Happened in Silence

by Jay, Karla M

  Mr. Finch turns to Poppy. “How’s Della Rae doing, Luther?”

  Poppy is the first Luther in our family. My older brother Luther Junior died in a mining accident on Pigeon Mountain fifteen months ago. He was barely twenty. The explosion happened only six months after Poppy returned from France, sick and dog-tired. Those days after Luther Junior was killed were a blur. All-day crying, no one able to believe Luther Junior was really gone. Poppy fighting with Briar over what had happened. The sharpest image I hold from that day are the shiny nailheads in the wood, where someone overdone the hammering to shut the wood-slat crate they sent my brother home in. A note came attached, stiff with condolences from Mr. Mercer, the Estelle Mining owner. Other scrawled words said the company believed they’d recovered most of my brother from the explosion but warned us not to open the lid and check.

  After he was buried in the family cemetery on a high knob, the neighbor men left their handmade leather boots outside the cabin, covered with fresh earth from Luther Junior’s grave. I studied that dark dirt, stuck on the notion that it unfairly exchanged places with my brother. The black soil was free to watch the sunshine poke daggers of light through the morning fog while my brother was destined to darkness. I was only fourteen but learned an oak-size life lesson that day. In order to pack down the pain of losing a loved one, adults turn their talk to everyday concerns, such as how months of foggy mornings could rot through a birch outhouse faster than one bad winter.

  Now our new Baby Luther isn’t with us anymore. Appears as if God wants only one Luther in this family.

  “Willow will be back tonight.” Poppy squeezes my arm and his eyes squint, a move I know dams back tears. “God hasn’t called Della Rae home yet, and she’s a strong woman. In all her years of healing everyone else, she’s taught Ruthy how to help her now.”

  He swipes the back of his hand across his eyes where it comes away wet. His next words are nothing more than choked sounds, and I hardly recognize his voice.

  “Better she’s here if she passes.”

  Hearing Poppy admit Mama may be dying sets me to crying big silent sobs. Snot running down the back of my throat threatens to suffocate me. Not only am I mute, but the airway parts in my throat don’t work like they do for other people. I have room for either phlegm or air but not both at the same time. “Narrow tubes,” the visiting doctor told Mama when I was four.

  Poppy gently pounds my back and my breath returns.

  Before Mama weakened and stopped talking, she asked me to be strong. I can do that.

  “Let’s get you going, Willow. Do you have your whistle?”

  I pat my dress pocket and nod.

  He picks up my burlap sack with the food Ruthy packed. Before he takes a step, he says, “I have something for you.” Secretive-like, Poppy reaches into his pocket and pulls out a square wrapped in cloth.

  I feel my eyes go wide at seeing the peanuts through the cloth. Mama’s skillet-made peanut brittle.

  Poppy must see the surprise on my face.

  “Ruthy insisted you have a special treat for the ride.” He tucks them inside my burlap sack and tightens the drawstring. “You enjoy this during your travels.”

  I swallow hard. Poppy always says, “If you light a lamp for somebody, it will also brighten your path.” This treat cheers me for the moment and puts a tiny rip into the uncertain veil of death hanging over the day.

  Poppy’s face is full of emotion as he lays a hand across my back and plays with my braid. “Jacca looks ready.”

  We walk across the yard toward the corral, so filled with dandelions the ground might as well be a soft buttery blanket. It begs me to lie down on top to let its velvet yellow petals tickle my arms. I’d pour out my pain into their simple cheery stamina. That’s the thing I like about dandelions. They’re strong, all busting out from cold earth the moment the spring sun chases off winter’s icy fingers. And then overnight, the dandelion turns to a white puffball, and the first time a holler wind reaches up the mountainside, it blows the puff to pieces, sending the bits traveling to places far afield never to return.

  Today I’m like that puffball, except I’ll be back to my home in no time.

  Poppy is no hand-holder, but our arms touch on purpose as we cross the yard. Everywhere I look reminds me of Mama. The yellow roses she’s trained to climb a fence. The newly planted vegetable garden. Her favorite chair on the porch, with its slightly crooked rocker and pleasant creak creak on the old boards early in the mornings when she’s shucking something or knitting. Her hands always busy. Sassy, the goat Mama bottle-fed when Poppy told her to let it die, stands below the clothesline looking lost and confused. Where’s her morning scratch behind the ears? Mama’s blue gingham dress, the last one she wore before giving birth, hangs empty over the poor critter’s head.

  I’m feeling as hollowed out as that piece of clothing.

  The guests sit on their thin mattresses, spread out like horizontal headstones in the yard. Some folks are asleep. Others are smoking corncob pipes and trading stories. The woven scents of honeysuckle, fresh churned dirt, and cherry tobacco make me dizzy, and for a moment, the world blurs at the edges. I sense the guests’ eyes following me as I open the gate and coax out Jacca. They all know my purpose in leaving. To find a preacher to give Baby Luther a Christian send-off. But they don’t hear the prayer playing through my head.

  I pray that if I ride fast enough, using one of the skills God granted me, nothing will happen to Mama while I’m gone. Burrowed deep inside my heart, a tiny voice, one I don’t recognize, speaks in golden tones. It says Mama won’t pass with all of her children home and by her side. It’s why I’ve secretly vowed to find Briar, even though his parting words to Poppy were that he’d never set foot on our homestead again. Perhaps time has picked away his feeling of scorn.

  Slipping the sack’s long drawstring over my head and across one shoulder, I climb onto Jacca’s back. I touch my necklace, return Poppy’s wink, and head off Moss Lick Knob, or as our kinfolk call it, Stewart Mountain.

  Briar Stewart

  My heart thumps in time with the axes, V-cutting the pines in the woods at my back. If Daryl Brown, prisoner number 16, ain’t back in another thirty seconds, I’ll have to call over the dog handler and he’ll set the hounds loose. Then when them animals find him, Daryl will be a dead man ’cause the boss, Boyd Taggert, will shoot him. Taggert’s the work gang supervisor, and he loves nothing more than target shooting while perched on his horse. He’d shoot a Negro easy as a poorhouse rat and won’t never think twice about it. “One of you dies,” he often announces to the dog-tired convicts, “just phone up the warden and I get me another.”

  Since I moved up the convict ranks to a work gang trustee, the convict escape rate is zero, and I aim to keep it that way. Any prisoner on the run means I lose the few freedoms I earned before my sentence is over. It ain’t much, but sure beats swinging a pickaxe.

  We’re trying to finish up slashing the loblolly pine faces and setting the turpentine jars on a tract of ninety-eight acres south of Cartersville. Been at it for three days and should’ve finished up by now. The Pearson-Gysse Lumber Company didn’t care how we worked the trees as long as we met their quota. With twenty-four convicts, that amounted to cutting eleven thousand trees a day. We’re behind now due to a real frog wash of a storm that hit two days earlier and two dead convicts.

  “Daryl.” My voice ain’t none too pleasant as I push away the underbrush, following the direction he headed after he called out for permission for a squat break. Five minutes is all he’s allowed and that’s passed. “Back to it now.”

  The man was a steady chipper, and I’d hate to lose him. Good with the axe, he’d slash seven hundred sap trees a day without a whine. Chosen to work in the forest, it spared him from the terrible conditions in the coal mines or rock quarry. A big Negro, he was sentenced to the County Prison Camp for two years for speaking to a white girl. Taggert handpicked him from the camp stockade, always choosing the biggest feller
s with the longest sentences. Never one to be crossed or made to look the fool, Taggert will hunt Daryl all of the twelve miles back to the penal camp if’n that’s what it takes to kill him. Leave him half buried in the woods and never file a report to the warden.

  A mighty easy feast for the black bears and mountain lions.

  “Over here, Mr. Briar,” Daryl says, hardly loud enough for me to hear. If’n he thinks I’m gonna be part of his escape, he’s dead wrong. Four months and fifteen days. I done held onto denial ’bout the cruel conditions forced on the work gangs, kept my head down, and turned a blind eye to the beatings and deaths. Four months and a few sunrises until my nine-month sentence is served. And no one’s gonna drag me backwards.

  I push through a pocket of sweetshrub, the clover scent of the blooms trailing the brush of my hands. Off to my right, Daryl stands stock-still next to a pile of boulders. His face has gone as pale as my behind.

  “You’re not thinking on doing something foolish, are you?” I ask.

  “No, sir.” He stretches his eyes wide and drops his gaze to a spot in front of his work shoes. The leather is ripped. His toes peek out of the right one.

  In the thick carpet of brown pine needles and dead leaves, a huge copperhead is barely visible, coiled, his head pointed at the convict. It’s fixin’ to strike, but I sure am relieved Daryl ain’t made a run for freedom. With the crooked judges in the south, there’s no such thing as freedom.

  “That’s a big son of a bitch,” I say. Daryl’s not carrying his hack, ’cause all convicts must leave their axes fixed in the last tree trunk when they call a break. Even as a trustee, I ain’t allowed any weapons. “You know he’s just as scared as you.”

  “No, sir. I don’t knows that.”

  Daryl’s black-and-white-striped pant legs are shaking. The snake can’t hear, but it sure can feel vibrations through the ground. I gotta do something quick.

  “I’m gonna distract it.” I reach for a long stick on the ground. “If’n you have any fast left in you, jump back behind that boulder when I yell. Can you do that?”

  “I jumps wherever I has to.”

  The snake’s four feet away. I raise the stick, and as I hit the ground behind it, I yell, “Now!”

  Daryl disappears like dust in a hurricane, and the snake spins toward the stick. If’n I had more fellers with me, we could circle it and beat it to death, darting in and out like dogs on a caught raccoon. But today don’t feel right for testing fate.

  I soft foot it backwards. Six feet, then eight. Old No-Shoulders unloops himself and slides away, creating a dry scraping sound of steely muscle, contracting and expanding through the dead underbelly of the forest.

  “C’mon, Daryl. Walk you back.” The Negro falls in step behind me. Even in this position, I smell his dirty clothes, drenched with a week’s worth of sweat. The convicts don’t get to change out prison garb except on Sundays.

  He and I come out into the work area. The thick odor of hot rosin rolling off the bubbling turpentine still hangs in the clearing.

  Taggert is on his Palomino, rifle laid across his lap. He squints hard our way.

  “Why the fuck is that blackie behind you, boy?”

  This was a trail position Taggert warned against. You want to get killed, put a convict with nothing to lose at your back. I have no such worries. These men are defeated, not dangerous.

  “Leading him away from a fat copperhead, sir.” I turn to Daryl and point to the tree with his hack in the wood. “Git back on over there and hit it hard.”

  “What you taking up with his side for?” Taggert’s scowl puckers his face like a dried-up apple, and he scratches his fat belly through a gap in his tight shirt.

  “Weren’t doing that, sir. I went hunting him and found him froze in place with a snake at his feet.” I nod the truth into my words, waiting to see if Taggert reaches for the bullwhip coiled on his saddle horn. My back healed, but the stinging pain that left the scarred welts will stay in my mind till my dying day.

  “Make sure that boy misses the next two water breaks.”

  The heat’s been rising all day. The workers in the distance are wavy images of black and white set against shimmering brown trunks. Two water breaks in the morning and twice in the afternoon ain’t hardly enough.

  Daryl, convict number 16, is surely gonna suffer. I didn’t sass back, but I wanted to remind him we can’t afford to lose another prisoner.

  Our work gang moves its convict cages to a new area of the woods in five days. We’re about twelve miles south of the County Prison Camp, cutting on a remote pine mountain. Every two weeks, a few of us pick up provisions and a couple more workers from there. A week and a half ago, we started with a crew of twenty-four convicts, but one dropped over dead the second day as we climbed the slash of red dirt high into the green hills of timber. One got mouthy and forgot his only answer to everything said to him was “Yessir.” Taggert shot him. No record’s ever made when they get killed. The accounting of laborers is barely kept for those who die while working. Escaping is a different path. With that, they hunt for you forever.

  Fellers have perished, but so far not a one’s escaped.

  Out in the woods, we’re a chain gang with no shackles but still slaves to the state.

  The Pearson-Gysse Lumber Company pays the prison system a cent a tree, which goes toward Taggert’s thirty-five-dollar-a-month salary. Taggert don’t pay us nothing.

  The rest of the day ain’t worth mentioning. I keep my eye on Daryl, hoping he don’t keel over. A body can endure most anything unless the mind gives up. But I don’t reckon that’ll happen. The convict told me he’s got a wife and baby boy near Savannah and plans to see them again.

  In the hillside glades, the shadows bleed together. Taggert blows his whistle. Three long blasts. End of another workday.

  The weary men weave their way out of the trees to the clearing with the prison wagons, which look an awful lot like circus cages. There’s two of them, parked side by side, waiting to be moved to the next cutting area by the mules. Each car is ’bout the size of half a boxcar placed on wheels, with wooden sides that hinge and drop down to let air flow through the iron bars. A little mobile jail for twelve men per, with a bunk for each man and one slop bucket.

  The convicts wash up at two pails of water, sharing the same rag and cake of soap.

  The cook’s been at it for an hour. The iron cauldron hung above the fire pushes out an inviting scent that claws at my hungry insides. The whole camp setup reminds me of my short time hoboing across the country, nighttime in the camps called Jungles, partaking in a cautious brotherhood.

  “Washing up,” I call out to the three other trustees. Calling out our every intention is a part of our confinement. ’Bout the only thing we don’t ask permission for is the right to breathe.

  “Wash up,” one calls back.

  I head to the rain barrel behind the trustees’ tent. The other three will each get a turn when I’m done. As a trusted convict, I advanced from the filthy stained prison stripes to two sets of blue work britches and shirt.

  Stripped to my drawers, I wash the sweat and red dust off. The cold water is a healing power all its own. Grew up playing and fishing in streams. It’s a comfort to me despite the cold.

  A stick snaps behind me in the woods, and I slowly turn expecting to see a deer. A white boy stands in the forest looking my way. He then takes off running. Who could be way up here? Nothing but tall trees for miles with Timberline Mountain running up against other smaller forests speckled with towns.

  The boy might’ve been in his teens but carried that starved build, runty and spindly. I pushed the forlorn look I saw on his face out of my mind. When I set out on my own over fifteen months ago, I wrapped my heart in iron so no hurtful sights or words could get to me. The boy is hunting trouble if’n Taggert spots him. The supervisor would slap on a false crime, like spying, on the feller and induct him into our work gang. Just like that, he’d be lost to the world. Another nameles
s fool.

  I get dressed in my clothes and that cloak of denial that’s kept me sane. The boy might be out hunting with his pa for all my cares.

  Back in the supper area, four long tables made of planking over sawhorses serve as eating space. We’re all seated outside when the weather is nice. Rainy days force the convicts into their jail cells under lock and key and the rest of us into our tents.

  I scratch one of the coon dog’s ears when his handler ain’t looking. Convicts and the two dogs are supposed to stay wary of each other in case one gets to running, the other to chasing.

  When everyone’s washed, we fill the table benches, sitting one trustee to every six convicts. Taggert eats alone, off to the side at a small table he had me make. Fancier than the man deserves, if’n you ask me.

  The tall dark pines grow blacker as dusk moves in. Hoot owls start up deep in the woods while the flit of bat wings move overhead. A night of insect feasting has begun.

  The cook drops two squares of cornpone, a pile of lima beans with pork chunks, and a big spoon of sorghum onto everyone’s tin plates. Soon the scraping of forks on metal echoes through the woods, a respectful time as darkness wins over the day. Unlike suppertime on the other chain gangs working the cotton fields or rock quarries, our food’s passed around for second helpings till they run out. And we often get meat, slim pickings for other gangs.

  The image of that boy in the woods comes back to me, the look of hunger hanging on him. Thousands of fellers are off on their own. Many took to the rails. Told to leave home ’cause there ain’t enough vittles, or left orphaned when the Spanish Flu passed through a mite more than two years earlier. Then they were made to leave the orphanages after reaching the legal work age of fifteen.

  Hundreds of stories being told, all filtered down from days that won’t never get much better, but in the long run can’t get no worse.

  The reverse of that is my tale. Things that can’t get no worse are about to get a whole lot better.

  The convicts have forty minutes till they’re locked in the cages. Once inside, they head to their bunks, since there’s little room to stand in the narrow aisle down the center. Huxley, a bearded trustee from over Savannah way, picks a soft banjo tune. The moon pulls itself up behind the trees, heading for the deep gray of the night sky. Flecks of stars sink lower to the Earth, pressing down.