The Bottoms Read online

  Its winds can carry men and cars and buildings away as easily as a woman might tote a handkerchief. It can rip huge trees out by the roots and toss them about, knock a train off its tracks and tear it up like so much cardboard. It can pull worms from the ground, toss pine straw through tree trunks, fling gravel like bullets.

  This twister I’m telling you about tore through the bottoms and laid trees flat all along the riverbank for about two miles, ripped a swath through the woods that killed wildlife, demolished shacks, sucked ponds dry, toted off the fish and frogs and rained them on houses three miles away.

  Old Man Chandler, gray-bearded with a nose that lay slightly on his left cheek, it having got that way by him being butted by a goat when he was a child, lived about ten miles from us, directly in the path of the twister.

  The twister came down and got him, carried him away, and he lived to tell the tale.

  Later, down at the barbershop, he was quite a celebrity. For three or four days he sat and told his story all day long to the men that came in for a haircut or a shave, or to just sit and bull. We did considerable hair-cutting business during that time, and I made several pennies sweeping up, and Tom made two nickel tips just for being cute and sitting there sucking on a peppermint stick.

  Way Mr. Chandler told it, he was in his outhouse taking his morning constitutional when he felt a popping in his ears, a sensation like his head being packed tight in sawdust, and a sound like a train roaring across his property, but since he wasn’t within miles of a track, he knew that couldn’t be.

  Without rising from his business, he lifted a leg and kicked the outhouse door open just in time to see his shack go to pieces and leap skyward amidst a black tangled wind already filled with debris.

  Before he could get a page torn from the Sears and Roebuck and apply it to that part of his body he’d just dirtied, the twister took the outhouse, peeled it apart around him, and away Mr. Chandler went, Sears and Roebuck catalogue in hand, his butt hanging out. On those rare occasions when women dropped by to hear the story, Mr. Chandler conveniently forgot to mention he was in the outhouse when the twister struck. The tale was slightly abbreviated then, with the storm tearing up the shack and the next minute he was up and in it.

  He said he had no idea how long he was in the storm before he developed a sort of calm, realized he had lost the Sears and Roebuck catalogue as well as his pants. He said it was strange going around and around, like being in a suck hole. And he could see things in the funnel, spinning about. A cow, a goat head, fish, tree limbs, and lumber. And a naked colored woman. Her mouth wide open, screaming.

  It was here in his story that he often got stopped, having stretched the credibility of some of the listeners. Key words that disturbed them were woman, colored, and naked. It wasn’t that a woman couldn’t be sucked up in a storm, or that she couldn’t be colored and naked, but it seemed to some this was putting the lace on the panties.

  I suppose the reason for this was simple. Nudity wasn’t as common as it is now. These days, pick up a magazine, watch the TV, go to a picture show, and someone’s always shucking or nearly shucking their drawers. Back then a woman’s exposed ankle got men excited.

  In my case, the cards like Richard and Abraham had talked about having, the covers of some pulp magazines, Tom bathing in the tin tub, and me likewise, were as close as I had ever gotten to nudity. And I’d only heard about the cards, never actually seen them.

  Daddy was often chastised by certain church-minded folks for keeping pulps handy at the barbershop. But as my Dad always explained about the racy covers, it’s just a little paint, folks. Nobody’s naked.

  But since nudity wasn’t something thought of outside of the privacy of the home, the idea that Mr. Chandler had gotten a peek at a naked woman, and a colored woman at that, her being forbidden fruit, and it all coming together so conveniently with him having lost his pants, there was doubt among some that this ever happened, and that buried within this story was some sort of wish fulfillment.

  You see, colored women weren’t supposed to be something a white man would bother about, which of course everyone knew was a lie, but it was one of those polite lies back then. Like women only had sex to have children and everyone was a virgin when they married.

  So the idea of a cow going round and round didn’t throw them, but a naked colored woman, that was different. Then again, there were a few jokes about the pants-less Mr. Chandler and the cow, but modesty forbids I discuss such a thing.

  Even with the ribbing and the doubt, Mr. Chandler stuck to his story. It was here he added in yet another fact. As he went round and round, he determined the woman was not screaming, but was dead, her mouth wide open as if to scream. Her feet were crossed behind her and her arms were crossed over her breasts, and no matter how the storm turned her, she stayed in that position.

  Round and round Mr. Chandler and all that stuff went. Then he saw a mattress and a little brown dog, still alive, spin past him. He thought if he could grab hold of that mattress, then everything would be all right. Why he thought this he was uncertain, but it was some kind of plan.

  He tried to swim on air toward the mattress, but couldn’t. He and it tumbled around and around and finally it came within his grasp and he got hold of it and wrapped his legs around it.

  He lost sight of the woman. Things got blacker, then abruptly there was light. Mr. Chandler felt as if he were gliding, hanging on to that mattress like some kind of Arab magician riding a magic carpet, and out into that brightening light he went.

  But as Mr. Chandler said, “Soon as it got light, I went back into the dark.”

  He lost consciousness. When he came to he was clutching the mattress and was stripped of every stitch of clothes, except for his right sock and shoe. He was lying in a field of clover without a drop of rain or wind going on, and when he looked up there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The cow that had gone around and around with him lay in a crumpled mass some distance away, having hit the ground so hard it had been compressed to half its size. There were fish and some lumber and tree limbs sprinkled about. The little brown dog wasn’t brown anymore. Most of its fur was gone. It looked like a large balding rat. It was wandering about barking wildly, not able to decide if it was scared to death or mad about being plucked. The colored woman was nowhere to be seen.

  Mr. Chandler tore the cover off the mattress, wrapped his privates, started in the direction he figured would be town. He arrived some hours later, his rear end poking out the back of the mattress cover, his hair gone, and his beard plucked, wearing one sock, one shoe, and an amazed expression. He was followed by a stunned bald dog in an extreme nervous condition that barked at anything that moved.

  After Doc Stephenson treated him for shock with his favorite cure—a snort of whiskey—and gave him some spare clothes, Mr. Chandler nested free at Cal Fields’s house that night and for a week or so after. It was thought by members of the town that Cal did this not only out of love for his fellow man, but—being the entire staff of the newspaper—for the reason of getting the first real lowdown on Mr. Chandler’s adventures, which appeared sanitized in the paper’s next issue, two days early of its usual weekly appearance. It was a much sought after item, second only to Mr. Chandler himself, who as I said, made daily residence at our barbershop, along with the plucked dog that had become his constant companion.

  My father listened attentively to the story, but like everyone else he was most interested in the nude colored woman Mr. Chandler had seen in the midst of the tornado.

  “I just seen her a little bit,” he said, “then she disappeared. I can’t tell you much other’n she was a naked nigger, her mouth wide open. But she looked like a comely nigger to me.”

  At home the night after we first heard the story, I asked Daddy if he thought the tale was true. We were out on the screen porch, and Daddy was oiling the shotgun down. He studied the distance through the screen a moment, said: “Reckon so. I’ve known Chandler all my life. He’s an honest man.
And he tells the story pretty much the same every time he tells it. It don’t read as good, but it comes across the same in the paper. I’m pretty certain that’s what happened, or what he thinks happened.”

  “What about that colored woman?” I asked.

  “That’s what makes me believe him.”

  “It’s like that woman I found, ain’t it, Daddy?”

  “ ’Spect so, son. She was most likely put down somewhere by her murderer. Probably in the river. And that ole storm picked her up and carried her off to who knows where. Maybe she was hid good, and God, he wanted her found, so he sent a storm to pull her out and show her to us.”

  “But she isn’t found,” I said.

  “Yeah, well, you’re right. Is this upsetting you, son?”

  “No sir. He’s still out there … ain’t he, Daddy?”

  “Depends on a lot of things that can’t be figured right now. Depends on how long ago the body was put down. Depends on if the killer moved on after the killing.”

  “But you don’t think so, do you, Daddy?”

  “No, son, I don’t.”

  “What you gonna do?”

  “Nothing I can do unless the body turns up. I’m gonna drive out to where Mr. Chandler says he landed, where the cow was, and look around there tomorrow.”

  And he did. But he didn’t find anything other than the cow and some junk. At the barbershop Mr. Chandler continued to tell the story for a full work week and half the next. The young doctor-to-be, whose full name we found out was Scott Taylor, told how Mr. Chandler had looked when he was treated, and that story got another week’s worth of interest.

  Then business dropped off and folks quit coming in for a repeat telling. Mr. Chandler returned to his property, and with the help of neighbors started rebuilding, beginning with the outhouse and a new Sears and Roebuck catalogue. He rounded out the work with a small shack made of crude lumber on the exact spot where the old house had been taken. It was Mr. Chandler’s logic that since that spot had been hit once, it was unlikely to get hit again. He felt he’d paid his dues.

  The dog went to live with him, and in time grew its hair back, which, according to local legend, came in snow white, just the way Mr. Chandler’s did. I can’t vouch for that. I don’t remember ever seeing the dog again.

  Shortly after Mr. Chandler abandoned the barbershop to rebuild his place and regrow hair, the body of the colored woman was found. It was discovered in a hickory nut tree next to a farmhouse. A child, hearing crows, looked up to see a mass of black birds nesting on a black body.

  It was determined the body had been there for several days, and it was considered somewhat amusing that the family had walked about and under that tree all that time without so much as looking up, and might not have then, had there not been the cawing of crows.

  Cecil pointed out that without the crows they might never have realized it was there until the body got so rotten it started raining meat in the yard. The image of raining meat seemed to please him, and he mentioned it several times.

  As it turned out, the woman in the tree, her legs pulled up behind her and bound, her arms pulled across her chest, her hands over her shoulders, wrists tied to her ankles by rope, was named Janice Jane Willman.

  She had landed in my Daddy’s jurisdiction. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was later discovered that a piece of paper had been rolled up and shoved deep in her ear.

  Part Two

  9

  The year turned cool and crisp and the colored leaves were starting to drop. I remember that in the fall, me and Tom used to go down to the Sabine, find big leaves shaped like a boat, put them in the water, and watch the river take them away.

  As I lie here now in my rest home bed, I think of those boats sailing smoothly and beautifully, the river bordered by great and bountiful trees, casting their shadows on the surface of the water, and I long to be there, or to be small enough to lie in one of those leaf boats and glide away.

  But the beautiful woods are all gone now, cut down, cemented over with car lots and filling stations, homes and satellite dishes.

  The river is there, but the swamps it made have been drained. Alligators have gone away or been killed off. The birds are not as plentiful, and there is something sad about seeing them glide over concrete surfaces, casting their tiny shadows.

  All the wildlife you see is desperate. Possums and coons in garbage cans. Squirrels being fed from feeders. Befuddled deer standing next to the highway or eating corn put out by hunters.

  What was once the bottoms is hot sunlight on cement and no mystery. Seasons are not as defined. One month, save for the temperature or the weather, is not too unlike the next.

  Back then it was different. And that time of year, fall, was my favorite. Warm days, cool nights. Dark woods and a churning river. Leaves of many colors. The moon bright and gold.

  Every Halloween there was a little party in town for the kids and whoever wanted to come. It was sponsored by Mrs. Canerton, the widow who operated the unofficial library. It was held at her house.

  The women brought covered dishes. Fried chicken, beans, and sausage. Cornbread and rolls. Squirrel and dumplings. Gravy and mashed potatoes. Pumpkin, mince, and sweet potato pies.

  The men brought a little bit of hooch to slip into their drinks. The kids sometimes made ghost costumes from sheets and pillowcases. Some of the older kids slipped off, went down on West Street to mark up windows with soap.

  Daddy drove us to the party. When we arrived and stepped out into the main room of the house where the tables were prepared, Mrs. Canerton, who was surrounded by men, both single and married, came to me straight away, walking in a bouncing manner I’d never seen before.

  Her hair, tied up and bound in the back, had slipped. A chestnut strand had fallen across her cheek, another across her long neck. Her white dress, dotted with blood-red flowers around the neck, fit her well, and in all the right places. I suppose now that dress would be considered modest. It showed very little, but suggested much.

  “How’s my favorite reader?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  On some level, I realized that night that Mrs. Canerton was more than just a widow lady and, like my mother, pretty. And when she floated across the room in that white, red-flowered dress, she seemed magnificent.

  Her breaking off from those men, including Cecil, and coming over to me right away, made me feel special. I could see they were all a little jealous, her having decided to give her time to me.

  She took me aside and sat me down in the corner in a red-velvet chair. She sat across from me on a wooden chair and reached into her bookcase. She said, “Have you read Washington Irving?”

  I said I had not. I found myself staring at her blue eyes, porcelain white skin, and full lips.

  After explaining to Mrs. Canerton that I had not only not read Washington Irving, but didn’t know who he was, she said, “Well, you ought to know who he is. And you will now. There’s one story in here you’ll especially like. About the headless horseman. With you not getting a lot of school, you and Tom need to keep up. At least with good books. I’ll come out in a few days and you have this one read. I’ll bring you some others.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Though I was glad to have the book, all my friends were outside playing, and that’s where I wanted to go. Not only to play, but to get away from Mrs. Canerton. She was making me feel funny, her face close to mine, her breath sweet as a hot peach pie. I had grown warm and itchy all over.

  Mrs. Canerton’s men friends were anxious for her to be back as well. Cecil came over, winked at me, said, “Are you trying to steal my girl?”

  He was wearing a stiff black suit with a shine to the knees and elbows. He had on a white shirt and a tired black tie.

  “No sir,” I said.

  “Oh, that’s silly,” Mrs. Canerton said. “I’m not your girl, Cecil.”

  “There,” Cecil said, giving me a falsely sour look. “You’ve done it. Stolen
my girl. I think we should duel with sabers at dawn. The prize, Louise.”

  That was the first time I realized she had a first name.

  “Quit being silly,” Mrs. Canerton said, but it was obvious she was loving it.

  Doc Taylor came over then, just sort of edged between me and Cecil and touched Mrs. Canerton’s arm.

  “I’ll tell you whose girl she is,” he said. “Mine.”

  The three of them laughed and floated back to the crowd of males that had gathered around the former Mrs. Canerton. I saw a number of other women on the far side of the room, dressed up and pretty, frowning in the direction of the pack, and I remember overhearing a little later at the general store one of those women say something about how shameful it had been, Mrs. Canerton with all those men around like that, and she ought to be ashamed, but I thought it sounded like sour grapes to me.

  I found Mama and gave the book to her. She was in the kitchen, sitting at the food-loaded table with the rest of the women, having what she called a hen party.

  As I went back into the living room I saw Doc Stephenson sitting in a chair across the way. He was slouched down, looking drunk. I hadn’t noticed him when I came in, but then again, I hadn’t been looking. Mrs. Canerton had distracted me right away.

  Doc Stephenson glanced at me briefly, his face turning even more sour. I figured he was still mad at my Daddy. Then Mrs. Canerton darted by with Cecil following like a puppy, the other men not far behind, Taylor being prominent, and Stephenson quit looking at me. He watched Mrs. Canerton meet some new guests as they came in. I couldn’t tell if the way he was looking at her was with interest or anger.

  I realized then every man in the room was watching her, like birds protecting a nest.

  I went outside to play.

  It was another fine cool night with no mosquitoes, lots of lightning bugs glowing and crickets chirping. Me and Tom got to playing hide-and-go-seek with the rest of the kids. While the boy who was it was counting, we went to hide. I crawled under Mrs. Canerton’s house, and elbowed and kneed my way beneath the front porch, hoping I wouldn’t get fussed at too much when Mama saw my clothes.