It Happened in Silence

by Jay, Karla M

  Hot anger rises in me like never before. Loyalty to God and family are the rules worth wrapping your life around, and Coburn’s words are pure blasphemy about my Poppy.

  He sets the bowls on the ground near my legs and leans in close enough so I can clearly see the cloth threads in the green and white buttons on his vest.

  “I was gonna untie you, but your eyes say you’re not half-broke yet.” He points a spoon my way, and a buzzard smile appears on his lips. “I’ll tame you, girl, you wait. I’ll ride you and tame you good.”

  My stomach heaves at his plans. I choke back sour stomach juice.

  He reaches for the bowl and brings a spoonful to my lips. I clamp my mouth shut and turn my head, not even daring to breathe in the scent.

  He shakes his head and picks up the other bowl.

  “I’m a patient man. You’ll get hungry.” He scoops the first bite into his mouth. It’s lumped high with mushroom chunks, and he slowly chews, smiling. Talking around the mouthful, he says, “Delicious. This will go to bad if we don’t eat it. Wasting food is a downright sin. Didn’t your ma ever teach you that?”

  If I could talk, I’d say my mama taught me plenty about sin, enough to know that long before nightfall, Mr. Coburn will stand in front of Our Maker trying to explain his sorry self.

  But of course, I can’t talk.

  Briar Stewart

  In two days, I ain’t seen neither hide nor hair of the boy from that shack. I hope he took his brother and went to town to get help. I’m heading off the mountain with Tuck, the fourth trustee on the work gang, a feller a couple years older than my twenty. The trip will take us into Cartersville for supplies and back. Taggert stays behind with Huxley and Clyde. Clyde, he never leaves the work gang. Any town with a whiff of alcohol and he’s done for. Prohibition is in force, but a man can find a bottle of hooch if he knows where to ask.

  We take the mule and wagon and two of the convicts. The Negro with the foot blisters is hobbling round worse than ever, and Taggert don’t seem inclined to see the prisoner piss on himself again. Besides, the convict’s messed up foot caught an infection that made it swell to double in size, so his boot won’t fit. Now I’m even more doubtful of Taggert’s healing wisdom. And we’re carrying in a white feller who took sick with the fits and has been spouting crazy talk ever since. Just shouted, “When the magpie comes back, give him three licks with the asparagus.” Both prisoners will be sent from the County Prison Camp to the State Penitentiary in Atlanta for medical attention.

  Taggert handed me some letters and a list of supplies. A sealed letter is for the warden at the prison camp. Another is to be mailed at the post office to Taggert’s wife. The last is a scribbled note to be dropped off at Miss Lily’s Threads & Things on Main Street. I took a quick gander at that note. Couldn’t help myself. Taggert threatens Miss Lily that if’n she don’t send three “Things” by the end of the next two weeks, he’ll get the sheriff interested in her side business.

  Tuck and me made this very same trip ’bout fourteen days ago. He’s good company, a country boy from Alabama told to leave home and earn his way two years earlier when the boll weevil killed off the family’s cotton revenue. He roamed a bit, living off church charity in each new town. They arrested him near Atlanta for cussing in public while standing outside a feedstore where he had hopes of working. Two sorry good-for-nothings picked on him for his grimy clothes and commenced to spitting on him. His cusses trailed after them, and to his misfortune, into the ears of a policeman.

  He’s serving nine months, five to go.

  We left at first light, moving through the heat and rising steam. The day was fixin’ to be a scorcher. We got four miles behind us—the first part of it is winding logging trails, crick crossings, and then scrawny back roads before we reach Cartersville. It’s faster going down but’ll take longer coming back, all uphill, loaded with supplies and four new convicts.

  Once out of Taggert’s sight, Tuck rides up front with me. This leaves the prisoners unguarded in the open wagon. But they ain’t going nowhere.

  I guide the mule down the path to the farmer’s place. “I got one stop couple miles from here,” I say. “You mind?”

  “Naw. Glad to be out of camp.” He chews on a thumbnail and spits something to the side. “It gets to me, you know.”

  “Me too.” I ain’t sure what “it” is. The smell of dirty convicts, the cussedness, the bad food, being a prisoner? Could be one or all.

  We come out onto a clearing with a view to the left. The unrolling of the forest below looks like a quilt, many shades of green closer up and deep blues in the distance. I picture my home on Stewart Mountain, scrubbing away the vision and my old man’s parting words. “Jesus might love you but that’s about it.” Couldn’t never please Poppy. Knew I was mostly a failure in his eyes, but that, that was the final cut.

  “Do you know what’s gonna end these chain gangs?” Tuck has a far-off look on his face.

  “New laws?” I learned whilst traveling that the South is about the only part of the country still holding the idea that punishment means working a man to death.

  “They already changed the laws. In 1908. Georgia legislators passed the Prison Reform Act. Got rid of convict leasing. But they still needed all us poor fellers to do their free labor, so they created chain gangs.”

  I cut my eyes to him. He’s a mite smarter than I first figured.

  “You a lawyer?”

  He shook his head. “Naw. I got a year into the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, studying law. Then the KKK torched the church that sponsored me. They don’t take a shine to Catholics, you know.”

  “They got a whole fistful of hates, I read.” I shake my head. “You peel a person’s skin, and everyone looks the same inside. I was raised to believe a black heart is evil. Not black skin.”

  The path leads down through more pine. It’s an old trail where the needles settled over the years, making a spongy cushion in the ruts. A pleasing wind swings ’cross the treetops, swaying them in unison. Ward Creek gurgles off to the side, showing up and disappearing as it makes its own means down the mountain. Squirrels skedaddle before us, then curiosity takes hold and they hang onto the side of trees, upside down and staring with shiny black eyes.

  “Yup, we all bleed alike.” He pulls his hat lower to shade his face. “But you watch. No one working convicts like this has a drop of decency. It’s all about bending the rules to make money. And if you surround yourself with others who like twisting them rules, nothing’s going to change.”

  “It ain’t fittin’ the way it works round here.” We pass a rusty wire fence and thickets of blackberries ahead. Then I spot the path to the farmer’s house. “That’s our stop, up yonder.”

  I turn the mule down the dirt track. Not that far ahead, the old man is standing next to a fence post, chawing a long blade of grass.

  “Howdy,” I say. “What you doing way out here on the loose end of your property?”

  “Pshaw!” He slaps some dirt off his britches leg. “Heard you coming for days. You fellers squawking loud as a bunch of magpies.”

  I laugh. “S’pose we were.” I like the old coot. I hop off the wagon seat and reach in behind and pull out his milk bottle, now full of tar. “Here ya go.”

  He reaches for it and holds it close to his good eye.

  “Gave you two bottles.”

  In front of Tuck, I can’t tell him how I left one with the lost souls in the woods. If Taggert ever got wind of it, he’d add a few more months to my sentence. My time with the boy will be a secret between the kid, the forest, and me.

  “Still got one at camp. Tar is worth more than milk.”

  He harrumphs. “Costs me good money to feed my darn cow. You get them pines that God gave you for free.”

  I nod at the truth. “I’ll be by again and bring the other.”

  “Be waitin’ on you.”

 
Back up on the seat, I slowly turn the wagon round in his dirt yard. A woman is sweeping the porch and stops to look our way. Tuck and me raise a hand in greeting. She nods and returns to her chore.

  The farmer is halfway ’cross a fallow field, moving toward a small shed. He must know every inch of his land, ’cause he don’t walk like no blind man.

  “You drink that other bottle of milk?” Tuck says, stretching a grin.

  “Naw.” Not sure why, but I don’t want him to know about the boy and his brother. “Broke the damn thing on the way back. Should’ve toted them bottles in separate pouches, but they banged together. Couldn’t let Taggert know.”

  “That’s the truth.”

  Ward Creek runs north and dumps into the Etowah River. Dozens of streams pour out of the hills to meet the big river, which we’ll chance upon in no time at all. Critter trails stretch away to nothing in the thick woods. We come to an area that’s second growth and thinned where fire licked through it some time ago. Many trunks still blackened. An eerie sight.

  “When you get out, you gonna try to get back to college?” I say. We hit a good-sized rut and the wagon jumps. I look over my shoulder. Both convicts are still lying down, sleeping.

  “Hope so. Railroad is always hiring. I might work there a year, save money, then go back.”

  “Good to have a plan. I tried my hand at woodworking in Saint Louis. Feller that hired me said I had a good eye for design. Might try to be a furniture maker.” I’d never said this out loud before. “Rich folks’ll pay pert near fifty dollars for a handmade supper table and eight dollars for a chair.”

  “Darn good money.” He scratches skeeter bites on his arm. “You rode the trains. Which job you think is best?”

  We’re dropping down a twisty road into a holler, and I hear the crick before we reach it.

  “I spent a night with a tower operator looking over a big switching yard near Kansas City. That feller’s hands was busier than a lint picker in a cotton mill. He was shifting a long lever to switch trains from track to track. Had to change signal lights to tell train crews the route was safe or there was a wreck. Nothing boring there. And I gamble he makes good wages.”

  “Huh. Might not be boring but sounds like he’s stuck in one place. Like prison.” He snorts. “Had enough of that.”

  I laugh. “Hear ya.” I slow the wagon as we draw nigh to a wide rushing crick. “Porters in the sleeping car set up the berths at night and turn them back into sitting rooms at first light. They travel for weeks at a time, making darn good tip money.”

  I stop the wagon at the edge of the Etowah River. It’s wide but shallow at this crossing.

  “Water break.”

  Tuck helps the lame Negro out of the wagon. The man hops away to do his business behind a wide oak. The white young’un is mumbling ’bout snakes and badgers as I get him to his feet. He walks away and leans against a tree.

  “Ten minutes,” I call then turn to the stream and step out onto the rock beds, where the water burbles over the stones and falls from one ledge into a pool on the next lower one. I squat on my heels and drink from the stream, lifting the cold water in my cupped hand. It’s sweet with a thin taste of iron and so cold it pains my front teeth.

  What’s stopping me from driving in another direction right now? We just crossed the Old Alabama Road. Say I turn back and decide to head west instead of north? I can drop Tuck and the two convicts off on the outskirts of Euharlee just west of Cartersville. Let them disappear into the four winds. Otherwise, once we reach Cartersville, the shackles go back on the inmates’ ankles. They’ll be chained together on the way to the hospital. The feeling of freedom they tasted while working the pines will soon be scrubbed from their senses.

  And as always, the choice not to cut and run often circles back to shame. I don’t want my folks to know I’ve amounted to no good. Vowed to myself when I left home to do right by my family name—and did for near a half a year. Made sure to send money to prove myself responsible, too, ’cause I had failed so miserably in Poppy’s view.

  Bugs buzz in the heat. My mind wanders. When I let my protective shell crack open, I confess I miss my kin.

  This time of year, we’d fill most evenings on our old wraparound porch, shaking off the last recollections of winter’s yoke. I picture Mama knitting in her favorite rocking chair or shucking early peas. Billy Leo might be studying a jar of lightning bugs, trying to figure a way to sneak them into the house. Many a night a few have escaped from under our bedsheet, bouncing round inside the log walls while I hunt down his tiny lanterns and set them to freedom out the window. Willow, almost sixteen now and mute, is always reading. Each night she keeps right at it until the pages are near impossible to cipher in the heavy gloom of twilight. Poppy is forever tinkering, fixing something, or whittling, while humming a tune. If he’s up to it, he’ll get out the old fiddle and we all set to foot-tapping. But mostly he’s wore out.

  My oldest sister, Ruthy, has a voice clear as a spring morning. She’s a good shape-note singer like most folks who never learned to read music. Just before I left home, she’d barely caught herself a boyfriend at a local pie day, where the hillfolk gather at the old Methodist church to swap six months of gossip and helpful fixings to each other’s problems. That night, Mama pushed her to the front of the dance floor when the fiddles came out. Ruthy sang “Barbry Allen” so mournful, it’d make a buzzard cry, and then she switched to “Wreck of the Number Nine.”

  Leeman Castlelaw, a hard-working onion seller from the Castlelaw clan of Bear Trap Holler, heard her sing and fell for her. Willow thinks he smells like chopped onions and uses her hand signs to say her eyes water when he’s nearby. But that’s our Willow. She picks up on smells and sounds like no one else can.

  Maybe Ruthy has found a better-smelling feller by now.

  What I miss most ’bout home is the quiet that comes with the dark skies. Out here I’m surrounded by more than twenty snoring, moaning men. I got a few peaceful nights like back home while riding atop a train. There the skies come to life, filled with so many living sparks, shifting in a swirl of streaks from one side to the other as the train takes bends on the track. The lights pull me. A million bright flickering bits, touching my face, my arms, almost drawing me off the Earth.

  A cowbird cries over my head. I splash water on my face and close my heart. All this recollecting is wasted thoughts. Time to skedaddle.

  We’re back on the trail minutes later. I steer the wagon down Old Goode Road to Cartersville.

  The convicts go back to sleep, and Tuck tries to play a tune on a cockamamie whistle he made from a pine knot. Sounds like a crow with a nut stuck in its throat, but I let him entertain himself.

  The pine trees peter out and give way to wild fields. Then dry dirt roads show up, splitting the cotton from the wheat. Every mile or so, set back aways from the dusty lane, there’s a hardscrabble house and old outbuildings circled by large shade trees.

  It’s now late morning and the heat’s rising from the fields, from the road, wrinkling the view ahead. In a clean-swept dirt yard, two old women sit on rickety steps fanning themselves, while the young’uns play near their feet. Older children run around, chasing without seeming to notice the sun bearing down on their curly dark heads.

  A low rumbling sound comes out of nowhere and I slow the mule.

  A dog barks at the shack as a single-engine airplane rises from over the tree line and swoops down low over the fields. It sprays the crops, the women, and their children with clouds of white dust. They wave it away from their eyes, but their faces remain turned upward in delight toward the retreating airplane.

  It’s not a sight many folks will ever behold. In all my travels, this is only the third time I’ve seen one.

  “That beats all!” Tuck says, a wide smile on his face. He leans closer. “Maybe we can catch a ride out of here.”

  “That would
confound Taggert, wouldn’t it?” I chuckle. “Empty wagon seat, everything else in place.”

  We continue on past the road that leads to the Tumlin Indian Mounds and to the outer parts of Cartersville. The road gets wider and the houses are closer together. We round a street corner, pass the flour mill, and spot the airplane again. It’s parked in an open field like a small bird, nose up and sitting on its haunches. Dozens of people—no womenfolk—stand around talking to a man in riding britches and boots, leather flying jacket, and leather head protector.

  “Let’s stop and hear what he has to say.” Tuck is on his knees on the wagon seat, looking off to the side as we pass the field. The convicts are awake and sitting up as well.

  “We’ll be late,” I say.

  “Ten minutes don’t matter. When we ever gonna be up close like this again, Briar?”

  I can’t hardly argue. “I reckon we can take a gander.”

  I steer the mule to the edge of the field and hop down. Tuck follows.

  “What about them?” Tuck hooks his thumb toward the convicts.

  I address the two. “You run now, and you’ll catch a back full of bullets. I don’t want to see that. You understand that, right?”

  The Negro nods while the other guy mumbles something ’bout going to a circus.

  “Enjoy the show from here.” It’s then that I notice the line of black-and-white-striped uniforms in a field in the opposing direction. The Negroes are chained together so’s to work as a unit, chopping at stumps in a cleared field. I point. “Don’t want you back in the chains.”

  “Yessir,” the colored man says.

  We cross through weeds, coming up short of the pilot and his plane. He’s answering questions from the crowd, made up of men and young boys.

  “I sleep in a hammock strung between the struts.”

  He’s clean-shaven with chiseled features and has a full-of-himself stance.

  “How much for a ride, sir?” A boy is breathless, perhaps having run here from wherever he first spotted the plane.