by Jay, Karla M
I make a clicking sound. The horse comes to the fence and eats long grass from my hand. When he’s done chawing, I put my hand under his chin. The bristles are prickly, like an old broom sweeping on my skin. I lean near his head, breathing in his smell.
“You ready to be outta here?” I slip his saddle and bridle on, glad he doesn’t try to bite as he’s wont to do. Probably just as happy as me to be getting away. The last items I add are two empty burlap pokes fixed across the saddle with a rope.
Turning the horse down the rutted trail, I raise my hand and Taggert does the same. The path cuts across a small area full of high grass and wildflowers, then enters a pine forest thinned years ago for its logs. The jays are screaming curses to the squirrels, and a red-tailed hawk circles overhead in the trees’ openings. The forest noises, right down to the whispering at night, make me the happiest. Sounds that sit peaceful-like in my mountain soul.
Farther on, the trail winds through a rocky landscape where a big ol’ twisted rhododendron casts a crisscross of shadows on the path. Ferns unfold, framed by big rocks covered in green moss and silvery lichen.
A dirt road shoots off to the left. In the distance sits a barn. I turn Bayou in that direction. In a small gully, we pass the rubbish pile. Next comes a scraggly apple orchard. Split-rail fencing lines the road, leading to a corn crib, a well with a hanging pail, storage shed, chicken coop, and outhouse. Not as pretty as Stewart Mountain but laid out ’bout the same as our homestead.
Except for the house.
We got ourselves a fine cabin. Sturdy. Waterproof and windproof. This here house ain’t no more than old boards and rotting wood shingles covered with moss under a pecan tree.
A weathered man in overalls is pitching hay into a pen next to his barn.
“Howdy!” I call.
He straightens and shades his eyes with his hand. “Howdy.”
I continue forward, stop near his fence, and dismount.
“Come from down the work camp. Hoping to buy some milk off you.” I reach in my pocket and pull out the money. “And biscuits and syrup if’n you got some to spare.”
“Aya. I figgered that’s where you from.” He points to my britches and shirt. “The blues is a dead giveaway.” He studies the money. “Glad to see you’re willing to plow straight. Had another work crew come through a year back. Stole a couple of my chickens. That was a fine howdy-do.”
He spits a stream of brown chaw to the side and raises his eyes. One’s gone white and the other’s milky brown. Poor man can hardly see.
“You safe enough living way out here?” Folks with bad intentions could surely take advantage of him.
“Safe enough. Got a wife and son helping me.”
Was his son the boy I spotted in the woods?
“How old’s your boy?”
“Thirty-two. Third generation working the farm. Grandad got the lands by the lottery after Indians swapped out for Oklahoma. Last century.” He swipes at a trickle of sweat running down his cheek from under his hat. “’Course Grandad was looking for gold like most folks during the big gold rush in these parts. Found none of that. The Cherokee he took the land over from had a right good layout here. Already had the orchard, some cane fields. Wasn’t too hard to turn to farming.”
The man leans on his pitchfork, seeming tuckered out from the telling.
“Ah.” Not one to argue, I know the Cherokee didn’t volunteer to swap these lands to head out West. Ma had us children study about the local Creek and Cherokee’s forced march west under President Jackson. The Trail of Tears the Indians called it because thousands of them died along the way with their own Negro slaves in tow. But some Cherokee hid out in these hills and refused to leave. Pa trades with two local Indians up on Indian Grave Gap Road, not too far from our homestead. They’re good folks. I smile and add, “Read where the Indians in Oklahoma discovered heaps of oil under their new homestead. Guess they’re richer than all the gold rushes put together.”
“Hunh.” His face knots into a bed of deep wrinkles. “Don’t have time for reading, boy. ’Sides, newspapers will say anything to squeeze a nickel a month outta you.”
Bayou is stomping the ground. He’s a kicker and not a horse to keep standing round.
“’Bout what I come for. Could we buy them supplies off you?”
He reaches for the money, folds the bills without looking at the amount, and stuffs it in the front pocket of his overalls.
“Back in a jiffy.”
A light breeze blows the sweetness of honeysuckle my way, and I breathe deeply. It smells like freedom. I picture taking the farmer’s offering then heading on down the road, riding into town and disappearing. I’d have pert near an hour’s head start on Taggert realizing I wasn’t back yet. Another half hour for the coon dogs to reach this farm. Time enough for me to hop a train and head west.
Except for the threat of harming my family.
I sent them money early on from harvesting wheat in Montana and later from picking apples in eastern Washington State. California, Utah, Missouri. I should’ve stayed out West. They must think I gave up. Last letter I sent from Rome, a town not far from here, was the stop I made before I got arrested in Euharlee.
The farmer comes back with a burlap poke and sets it on the ground at my feet.
“This what we got extra.” He pulls out two one-quart glass bottles of milk held shut with a metal doohickey over the glass stopper. A small jug of molasses, five large turnips with the greens, and a tin of biscuits.
“I thank you.” Taggert’s mood should lighten. I load the two burlap sacks so they’re hanging off Bayou on separate sides and the bottles won’t bang together. “I’ll get the bottles back to you in a piece. Might come by here again in a few days when we head off the mountain for supplies.”
He scratches his jawline, making a sandpapery sound.
“Wouldn’t mind if they were full of turpentine tar when you do come. Roof’s riddled with holes.”
I laugh. “Seems fair. You get yourn and we get ours.” I swing up onto Bayou. “You take care.”
He nods and spits to the side.
“Hey.” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a flat bottle with a clear liquid. “You want some spark to get you back up that hill?”
“No, thank you. Not allowed to drink.”
He chuckles. “Me neither. The wife rears so much sand about drinkin’ I do it in secret.” He tilts the bottle, and I watch the gristle in his throat jump up and down as he chugs the fire water. “Ah.” His eyes water as he wipes his hand ’cross his mouth. “That’s finer than snuff and not half as dusty.”
It’s been fifteen months since I’ve tipped a bottle, but I can almost taste the corn liquor at the back of my throat.
“Sure is.” I touch my fingers to my hat brim. “Got to get on now.”
Bayou remembers the way up the trail, so I don’t have to do much directing. I think back to my days as a traveling worker. Saw lots of broken men in the hobo jungles who couldn’t go a day with no spirits. One freezing night, riding the blind outside Kansas City, a drunk feller forgot to hang on and toppled off the blind platform at the front of the baggage car. Cut in half under the wheels.
My last drink was the day my brother Luther Junior died. Truth be told, most good things in my life died that day.
The recollections fly off as something at the edge of the woods catches my eye. I squint. It’s that dang boy again. He’s standing by an old rotten house that’s struggling to stay erect, held up by thick vines twisting ’cross its walls. The chimney done gave up and is halfway crumbled. There’s a pile of stones at the base.
Haints are known to haunt folks with a guilty past, and I wonder if this is what I’m seeing. But the ghost raises his hand, waving me to him.
I keep riding. Got no time for another stop. Can’t afford to get busted back down to convict
stripes, and Taggert would gladly do it.
I go another hundred feet then take a gander back at the shack. The boy’s still looking my way, his arms hanging loose at his side.
Dagnabbit. I can’t go ahead ’til I see why in tarnation this boy is way out here in nowhere and beyond. Kid looks as young as Billy Leo, who ain’t no more than twelve.
I turn Bayou ’cross the grass and tree stump field ’til I reach the hut. The shack looks worse up close. Part of the roof is caved in and the windows ain’t nothing but two black holes.
“What you doing out thisaway, son?”
“Ve don’t have place to go.”
He’s fair-skinned, has messy blond hair, and his clothes are all dirty and torn. I think he’s a mite older than I first figured, maybe fourteen. And the way he talks ain’t nothing like I ever laid ears on.
“Who’s ‘we?’” I look around but don’t see no one else.
“My brother inside, he sick.” He crosses his arms hugging himself. “I can work in woods camp for food.” He points up the hill in the direction of our gang.
Good Lord. He’d be deader than a swatted skeeter in just one day.
“You don’t wanna do that. How old might you be?”
The boy seems beat down by my question.
“Fifteen. Just little for age.” He makes a muscle by cocking his arm. “But strong.”
“Your accent. Where you hail from?”
He pauses, then speaks. “Boston.”
If’n he’s from Boston then I once rode Noah’s Ark.
“Just some verk for to buy medicine.” His chin jitters, and I try to still my heart.
I slide off the horse and open one poke and hand him a bottle of milk. His eyes light up.
“Hold the bottom of your shirt out.”
He sets the bottle carefully at his poorly shod feet and makes a bowl holder with his shirt. I place half the biscuits from the tin there, leaving four for Taggert.
“Get on into a town. Emerson’s ’bout seven miles due east but it don’t have much in the way of offerings.” I point to the north. “Cartersville is ’bout eight miles thataway. Got a good doctor there.” I shake a finger at him. “Son, listen to me. You do not wanna work for my outfit. It pays in bad vittles and nightly whippings.”
He flinches at those words. Hopefully, I’ve scared him away from here.
“Zank you.” He smiles. The thankfulness in his eyes is strong and tries to grip me.
Bricking up my soul, I climb onto Bayou again. I can’t help this boy and his brother. My goal is to get out of Georgia. Away from the dark times I been living through here.
“You do what you gotta do,” I say. “That’s the way I always done.”
I ride off without looking back.
Four months, fourteen days. Not that long now.
Ardith Dobbs
“This is delicious, Ardith.” William smiles from the head of the table, sitting tall in the pale green velour-covered chair as he cuts another bite of pork chop. The new chandelier above our dining room table reflects golden patches on the cherrywood and adds a spark to his eyes.
He’s grown more handsome in the six years since we married. Those gray eyes, straight nose, and the characteristic Dobbs male chin cleft. His brother and cousins all have that deep groove set in their strong chins.
“I asked Josephine to make it.” William and I finally have a quiet moment together. We’ve both been busy with our social activities, and it feels as if we never talk anymore. Oliver is eating in the kitchen with Josephine, which they both seem to enjoy. “I know it’s one of your favorites. Something to cheer you up after your hard week.”
He shakes his head and snorts. A sound that marks his frustration.
“That Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children,” he says. “Of all the nerve! They should stick to solving the problems in their immigrant-infested cities up north and leave us alone down here.”
“Nosy northerners. They need to hear about all the good we are doing in the South.”
The SPCC organization wrote a scathing story in the Atlanta Constitution about Dobbs Advertising and Insurance, William’s company. It claimed Prudential Life Insurance, the national company that provides life insurance policies for William’s customers and his agents, is insuring babies and young children with the sole purpose of making morticians rich. And unfortunately, it’s partly true. A few local undertakers have adjusted their bills higher to match the burial benefits an insured customer receives. But that wasn’t William’s doing. The undertakers are to blame.
The SPCC reported that baby mortality rates have risen since insurance companies started offering life insurance. Ridiculous. Babies die just as often as they always have. The Beck Infantorium crosses my mind. The large statue of an angel beside the large columned house. The cemetery out behind. I shake the memory away. That was seven years ago. It’s most likely out of business by now.
“Did Pastor Dalton refute the article?” I ask. He’s our Methodist pastor and belongs to many of the same men’s groups William joined.
“He wrote a sterling rebuttal.” William sets his fork down and wipes his mouth on a cloth napkin monogrammed with a D. “It comes out this week. He emphasizes how child life insurance has saved cities, churches, and taxpayers money by cutting in half the number of pauper burials. I had him go through the books and get some facts. Even at the usual mass grave rate of nine dollars a child, several cities near Atlanta have saved tens of thousands of dollars because children are now insured.”
I reach for his hand and squeeze it. “You just need to show people that there’s a huge demand.”
When he’s too busy, I often help William collect the weekly insurance payments of ten cents per child. In certain areas of town, I take Josephine since she’s comfortable talking to everyone. When given permission, that girl is a chatterbox. I’m surprised her tongue hasn’t worn down to a thin flap of pink skin. But she helps by being so verbose. I get distressed when I see a struggling family, with five skinny children and a baby on the way, count out their fifty cents for the insurance premium. I have to remind myself this is a good thing. If one of those children dies, the twenty-eight dollars they receive will go a long way to invest in the remaining children. The mother will never feel the shame of letting the poor lost soul be hauled away to a pauper’s grave. Still, I can’t look the pitiful mother in the eye, so I make Josephine do it.
This reminds me. I set my utensils down. “We’re out of promotional pamphlets.”
“I’ll get Betty to print off another fifty.” William’s advertising agency has expanded to three employees in the last year. Companies are making more products than ever before, and people are willing to buy them. He settles back in his chair and loosens his tie. “Just be careful who you’re giving the brochures to. That newspaper article called us baby baiters. Maybe avoid following leads from the obituaries for a time and meet new women outside of the social welfare offices.”
“It’s so unfair.” I slump, feeling chastised. “The parents are more than grateful for the life insurance money. Especially since they never paid any premiums on that particular child who passed. Pastor Dalton needs to say we’re informing the uneducated on how their family can be comforted if another child should die.” What’s wrong with people? We give them the money for one free funeral and show them how to insure the rest of their sorry brood.
“I’ll talk to him about it. But we don’t need the courts involved.”
I’m never sure why William worries about the courts. Most of his friends are in legal fields and have each other’s backs.
Josephine comes into the room and clears away the plates and takes cups from the sixty-inch buffet that came with our dining set. It’s filled with William’s family china and silverware, passed down three generations. When he asked about my family inheritances before we marri
ed, I said everything was lost on that ill-fated Titanic along with my parents.
“That was a very good meal, Josephine.” William sends her one of his winning smiles. “Thank you.”
“You are welcome, Mr. Dobbs.” She waddles around the table pouring coffee. She seems to get bigger by the day. I squint. What if she’s carrying twins? That would ruin my plans for her nursing Baby Katherine when she arrives.
“Josephine, do you mind getting Oliver ready for bed after you’ve cleaned up?” I smile her way. William is always overly polite with her, so I try to mimic his manners when he’s listening. Sometimes I want to scream, “Girl, are you paying attention?”
“My pleasure, ma’am.”
After she leaves the room, William frowns. “Did I mention that I have to go out tonight?”
“Yes.” He’s told me twice. I’m sure with everything spinning through his mind he forgets if he said it or just thought it. I do that so often. “Where are you meeting?”
“At York’s.” He drinks the last of his coffee. “He’s called in the mayor and most of the city council so we can address the quarry’s and brick factory’s production rates. With the new road going in and the new city hall being built, we can’t let them run out of workers.”
The mayor’s brother owns the enormous Bellwood Quarry nearby and a smaller one in Cartersville, forty miles north of Marietta. The quarries provide granite and limestone for other buildings, but lately workers have been harder to find with so many Negroes moving up north.
“What does York have in mind?” We’re good friends with Sheriff York Withington and his wife, Nancy. I have no idea how Nancy manages four little ones while spreading her time among the Women’s Christian Association, the League of Women Voters, and anything to do with prohibition. She coined the famous slogan “It’s a Man’s World Unless Women Vote.” Every woman wore a button or pin promoting that saying during the suffragette protests last year.