by Lisa Belmont
Joss had his arm around Alma and said, “Give me some sugar, honey.”
She had pretty dark hair that swept her shoulders and her skin was the color of a lightly baked biscuit. Joss was always hugging on her.
“Supper’s ready,” Momma said, putting on a big smile and motioning us inside.
Our rough-hewn table was where Pa and Momma, Joss and Alma sat. The rest of us kids sat on the floor around the fireplace. I didn’t really care, though. Once I bit into that cornbread and got to eating that barbecued pork, I felt happier than a bee in a hive.
Caleb and Henry started comparing who had more chest hair. Neither one had a lick, but they stuck out their chests like they were covered in fur.
“I bet Emma Kate’d like to see your bare chest,” Henry said.
Emma Kate was Hickory Wilcox’s elder daughter. He owned Uncle Hickory’s General Store and always kept Emma Kate in them real nice patent leather shoes and cashmere sweaters. Course, it was her strawberry blond hair that most folks admired. She kept it long and often pulled it into a ponytail tied with a silk ribbon.
Caleb gave Henry a shove and blushed real bright. I started thinking maybe he was sweet on her.
“Caleb don’t like Emma Kate,” I said, hoping that’d settle the matter.
“Sure, he don’t,” Henry said, jabbing him in the ribs.
Caleb smiled real big, pushing Henry away.
Lord, the last thing I wanted was for my brother to be in love. He’d never spend any time with me if that was the case.
Chester took his plate and put his face down real low to it, like a pig rooting around in the dirt. “Guess who I am?”
“You’re Uncle Hickory’s pig, Winnie,” Henry said.
“Nope.”
Caleb took a big bite of pork and said, “Excuse me, Winnie. I’m about to eat your cousin’s backside.”
Henry and Caleb started laughing, and I looked over at the grown-up table, wishing for once Pa would let me sit with them.
Chester kept rooting around until his grunts became more annoying than a worm in a ripe apple. Finally, I just flat out asked him. “Who are you, Chester?”
He looked up from his plate. “Aw, you guys ain’t no fun. Can’t you guess? I’m Big Jim.”
The mention of his name drew stunned silence.
Caleb blinked at me, probably thinking of the other night when he took a shot at him. I didn’t know what to say. I was still recovering from the fact that he’d saved me from the gator.
Caleb nodded to Chester. “You snort just like him.”
“If you’d shot him the other day,” Chester asked, “you think it would’ve counted for hog huntin’?”
“No,” Caleb said, taking a bite of beans. “Coon.”
“Ugliest coon I’ve ever seen,” Henry said, pushing up his nose with one hand and pulling down the skin under his eyes with the other.
I watched the boys eat, laughing about Big Jim and carrying on that he’d scare the ghost of Foxhole Swamp right out of its hiding place. They stuffed themselves with baked beans and cornbread, snorting and grunting the whole time.
I got up and sat on the porch, listening to them katydids go at it while I rocked in Pa’s chair. I sure welcomed their chirping over Chester’s meanness. Of course, Caleb got the bright idea to follow me outside. Naturally, Henry and Chester came tagging along.
They milled around, talking about deer rifles and Davy Crockett. Apparently, Henry had a rifle just like his.
Never one to go too long without talking about his favorite baseball player, Caleb asked, “Either of you got any Babe Ruth baseball cards?”
“No, Uncle Hickory’s got a Yogi Berra down at the store,” Henry said.
“You let me know if you see any Babe Ruth, you hear?”
Once I’d asked Caleb why he’s so fired up about George Herman Ruth, Jr. or, The Bambino, as Caleb sometimes called him.
“He’s a great man, Chloe,” Caleb said. “He’s won pennants and the World Series. He’s ‘bout the best baseball player that ever lived.”
Some folks said he was a womanizer who drank too much, but Caleb didn’t see it that way. Maybe that’s when I realized that everybody needs someone to look up to. Some kind of hero that’s larger than life. For Caleb, it was Babe Ruth.
I got to rocking real slow and easy, wishing Momma’d call us in for cake. Chester sat down in the rocking chair beside me. He always had a smirk on his face like he’d just put a tack on Miss Lilly’s chair.
“You know about the Garden of Eden?” he asked.
“Course, I do.”
“Oh, yeah? How come Eve got in trouble?” he said, as a chorus of frogs started croaking alongside them katydids.
I glared at Chester, mad as all get-out that I had to be polite when I heard Caleb rustling in the bushes. I told Chester he oughta put some vinegar on them warts, but he just started laughing and pointing at Caleb.
“It was cuz of that snake,” he said, as Caleb stepped onto the porch with a long, green snake writhing in his hands.
I jumped out of Pa’s rocking chair and told Caleb to get away from me.
“Give it a kiss, Chloe,” Caleb said, chasing me down the steps. “You know you want to.”
I was afraid to run into them dark trees and yet, more afraid of Caleb’s snake.
“Get away from me!” I hollered, as Pa came out on the front porch.
“What’s going on out here?” he said, smoking his pipe.
Caleb carried the snake onto the porch. “It’s just a li’l ol’ grass snake, Pa.”
“Don’t be scarin’ my little Buttercup, boy,” he said, beckoning me inside. “And get rid of that snake. You know your momma’s gonna want to keep it.”
Pa put his arm around me and took me inside. I was all bent out of shape as Momma handed me the cake server. I got to slicing that hummingbird cake, not knowing which was better – getting away from Caleb or eating the frosting. I took one bite after another, closing my eyes to savor the taste.
Everyone, even Pa, got real quiet while eating Momma’s cake. That meant it was real good. I gave Caleb a few good glares, sorry I couldn’t think of nothing worse to do.
I hadn’t noticed Joss had brought his fiddle, but he removed it from its case and held it up so Pa would get his. Pa had an old fiddle that had so many nicks and dents in it that it was a wonder it still played.
“Col. Briscoe Mason gave this to my father,” Pa said, taking the spruce fiddle from its case. “The Christmas before The War Between the States.”
Caleb and I knew about the fiddle, but Pa liked to make it seem like we’d never heard the story before.
“Yessir,” Pa went on. “This fiddle here played the night that Lincoln was shot.”
Chester looked like the deer mounted over the fireplace, utterly dumbfounded. “Abraham Lincoln?”
“The one and only,” Pa said. “Only thing about it was that nobody was actually playing it.”
“Nobody was playing the fiddle?” Henry asked.
“Nope,” Pa said. “It just played on its own.”
He took a smoke from his pipe and went on. “On April 14, 1865, at 10:15 at night, the exact moment when Lincoln was shot, this here fiddle started playing I Wish I Was in Dixie. The bow just got up and moved over them strings something fierce.”
Joss nodded to his two boys. “Don’t think it ain’t true, neither.”
Everything got real quiet, and Joss got to stomping his toe.
There were a few songs that Joss and Pa liked to play when they got to drinking. One of them was I’m a Good Old Rebel, but I hoped it wasn’t going to be that one. Pa’d get all riled up when he’d sing the lyrics.
Course, I knew when Joss got that look in his eyes that he was gonna play it. Everyone got to clapping and singing while Pa and Joss fiddled.
Oh, I’m a good old rebel, now that’s just what I am,
And for this Yankee nation, I do no give a damn.
I’m glad I fought a gann
er, I only wish we won.
I ain’t asked any pardon for anything I’ve done.
I hates the Yankee nation and everything they do.
I hates the declaration of independence, too.
I hates the glorious union, t’is dripping with our blood.
I hates the striped banner, and fitted all I could.
I rode with Robert E. Lee, for three years, thereabout.
Got wounded in four places, and I starved at point lookout.
I caught the rheumatism, campin’ in the snow.
But I killed a chance of Yankees, and I’d like to kill some more.
Pa got all riled up, all right. He darn near broke his fiddle in half when he jumped over Rufus. He grabbed his jug of moonshine, or “white lightning” as he called it, and raised it high in the air. “Here’s to you, Blackie Sullivan.”
Blackie Sullivan was the man who gave Pa his scar. All I knew about him was that he was big and black and liked to carve up Pa’s leg real good. Sometimes, when the weather turned bad, Pa’s leg would get to acting up and he’d have to hobble around for days. He’d wince something awful and sit in his rocking chair. Momma and I’d bring him warm towels, and he’d wrap them around his leg, trying to make the pain go away.
Everyone got real quiet when Pa mentioned Blackie Sullivan. Some things ain’t supposed to happen to a kid, and Pa was just a boy when he got knifed real bad. Course, his pa had the doctor stitch him up the best he could, but he was an old country doctor and used a thread and needle. Pa said he ain’t never felt such pain.
“Woulda gone to the Point,” Pa liked to say, “if it weren’t for this injury.”
Pa thought he would have followed in Briscoe Mason’s footsteps and made it to West Point if his leg wasn’t all torn up. Maybe that was true. All I knew was that Pa’s hopes and dreams had been crushed because of some black man with a Bowie knife.
Pa still had nightmares of that silver blade hovering over him. Sometimes he’d wake up screaming, “Don’t cut me!”
I was afraid that scar would always be a part of him, deep and palpable, reaching way down to his heart and etching things across it.
“Mason,” Momma said, putting on her sweet nightingale voice. I could tell when she was trying to persuade him cuz she’d get real doe-eyed and touch his collar. “Why don’t you play Boil Them Cabbage Down? The children like that song.”
“Why sure, honey,” Pa said, giving Momma a squeeze.
Boil Them Cabbage Down was an old Southern folk song that Pa and Joss could’ve played blindfolded. Pa took his bow and arched his wrist, playing those strings like he was a regular mountain fiddler.
Caleb found his banjo, and I grabbed my tambourine. Momma and Alma sang along.
Went up on a mountain
To give my horn a blow,
Thought I heard my true love say,
“Yonder comes my beau.”
Boil them cabbage down, down.
Turn them hoecakes ‘round, ‘round.
The only song that I can sing is
Boil them cabbage down.
Possum in a ‘simmon tree,
Raccoon on the ground.
Raccoon says, you son-of-a-gun,
Shake some ‘simmons down.
Someone stole my old coon dog.
Wish they’d bring him back.
He chased the big hogs through the fence,
And the little ones through the crack.
Met a possum in the road,
Blind as he could be.
Jumped the fence and whipped my dog
And bristled up at me.
Butter-fly, he has wings of gold.
Fire-fly, wings of flame.
Bed-bug, he got no wings at all,
But he gets there just the same.
Pa and Joss were sweating as they played. I’d never seen them fiddle up such a storm. They knocked over chairs and stood on tables like they were a couple of hillbillies straight out of the woods. Everyone got to clapping and dancing so that I forgot all about Big Jim and them lynching posters. I swirled to the music and fell down laughing.
Pa collapsed in his chair and Joss beside him. They each took a swig of moonshine right from the jug and belched to high heaven.
I’d never had such a good time. Even though it was hotter than heck, I felt like I could finally let my mind be at peace about what happened earlier at the swamp.
I got to thinking that maybe I’d just been seeing things. Maybe it wasn’t Big Jim at all. Maybe it was just a case of heat exhaustion. I had gotten awful hot walking back from Widow Jones’. I’d heard about folks in the desert, how they’d see lagoons and pools that weren’t even there. Maybe I imagined the whole thing. Gator and all. Or maybe it was Hattie Mae’s banana pudding. Folks always said her pudding could make you see the Pearly Gates. That would explain it, all right.
As Pa and Joss got to fiddling again, I realized I was tied to Pa and his old fiddle, to Momma and her hummingbird cake. To this little shotgun house with a ten-point buck over the fireplace. I was Chloe. Pa’s little Buttercup. The apple of his eye.
And nobody, not even someone who saved me from a gator, was ever gonna change that.
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Chapter Seven
The next morning we had a thunderstorm that made you think Noah hadn’t seen nothing on that ark of his, but Momma didn’t seem to care we were all gonna float away. She sent me out to the garden to pick vegetables, telling me to save some carrots for the possums.
I put on my raincoat and a pair of rubber boots and went sloshing out to the garden. I picked a near basketful of turnips when a few crows came by and stole them right out of Momma’s wicker basket. They flew off toward the swamp, and I chased after them. How was Momma gonna make her famous turnip green soup without no turnips?
Rufus chased after me until we found the crows pecking real good at Momma’s turnips in the branches of a cypress. They just looked at us, so high and mighty, that I picked up a rock and threw it at them.
“Dang crows,” I hollered.
They flew away, cawing into the woods. Rufus came over and licked my hand. I swatted him away and told him he should be going after all them crows.
I hardly noticed that the rain had stopped, and the sky had cleared. The sun peered down in a misty ray, shining on Big Jim by the cattails. He rolled up his britches and waded into the water so that all you could see was his white cotton shirt and his big round face.
I’d never seen anything like it. Pa and Caleb wouldn’t get within twenty feet of the water, not unless they were in Caleb’s canoe. Big Jim didn’t look scared, though. He just stood there, listening real serious like before he reached down and caught a mudfish. It wriggled in his hands, and he tossed it on shore. If that didn’t beat all. Caleb couldn’t catch a fish by hand to save his life.
Big Jim crouched down low, the water up to his thighs as he caught a second fish. He tossed it on the bank, and those two fish flopped side by side for a spell until they gave up and lay flatter than a pair of flapjacks.
“Come on, fish,” Big Jim whispered, standing on his legs like they were a pair of tree trunks. “Come on to the frying pan.”
I stood behind a buttonwood tree, remembering what Widow Jones said. He may be slow, but Big Jim’s a good boy.
He didn’t seem to mind that Rufus splashed in the water. That dumb ol’ dog went right up to him and sniffed him like he was a basket of Momma’s cornbread.
Ol’ Rufus paddled around a minute and then swam back. He came onto shore, shaking all that wetness off him as Big Jim went underwater.
I saw bubbles on the surface, little tiny ones that scattered everywhere. I wondered if a gator had gotten him, but in no time, he came up with a handful of fish. He carried them to the edge of the swamp and set them on the grass, just watching them flop.
I’d never felt more scared in my life. Not a fearful kind of scared, but more l
ike an awkward kind of scared. I’d never said two words to Big Jim before. Caleb had made him out to be something of a myth. At night we’d hear the distant cry of a hound and Caleb would tell me that Big Jim was out there, howling at the moon. Or when someone’s cat went missing, he’d say that Big Jim had eaten it, tail and all. Mainly though, Caleb would say that Big Jim’s ancestor was the slave who drowned in Foxhole Swamp and that Big Jim wandered around at night, looking for revenge.
“He wants somebody to drown,” Caleb told me not two weeks ago. “Preferably a thirteen-year-old girl with long brown hair who lives in a shotgun house.”
Tall tales could’ve been Caleb’s middle name, and yet, something about all them stories made me real fearful. I reckon that’s how I met Big Jim first, through Caleb’s stories.
I watched Big Jim sitting in the murky swamp water as all them stories came to the surface. He was big and black, that’s for sure, but I’d never seen him do anything at Whitehall except build Widow Jones’ storage shed and paint her footbridge. He got up real close to all them rails and painted every last one white.
I wondered if folk knew he’d saved me if they’d let him into the white church on Mulberry. A sort of honorary hero. I tried to picture him singing hymns beside Caleb. It was a fuzzy picture at best. Course, I didn’t think on it too long cuz I knew Caleb would tan my hide if he knew I was trying to conjure him sitting with Big Jim.
But Big Jim looked about as serene as a mint julep, just sitting there minding himself. Probably catching them fish for Hattie Mae to fry up later.
I don’t know what came over me, but I felt like I should say it. It’d be real quick, like one of them dragonflies zipping across the water, and then it’d be through. And then, I wouldn’t have to say nothing again.
I went down to the water’s edge where the cattails grew in thick clusters. They stood straight up like cinnamon sticks, and I broke one off. Big Jim heard the snap and looked over at me.
I must’ve been a sight. A girl, as pale as a lily, holding a cattail. It wasn’t uncommon for people to go down to the mud and pull a stalk to eat, but I think Big Jim knew I wasn’t collecting them for Pa. Pa would take the fuzzy ends and mix them with tallow so he could chew them like gum.