The Bottoms Page 4

  When Daddy did the job, parted my hair, put on the oil, and let me out of the chair (he never spun me for a look like he did his adult customers), I was still just a kid. With a haircut.

  Since on this day I’m talking about, Daddy was out, I asked Cecil if he would cut my hair, and he did, finishing with hand-whipped shaving cream and a razor around my ears to get those bits of hair too contrary for scissors. Cecil used his hands to work oil into my scalp, and he massaged the back of my neck with his thumb and fingers. It felt warm and tingly in the heat and made me sleepy.

  No sooner had I climbed down from the chair than Old Man Nation drove up in his mule-drawn wagon and he and his two grown boys came in. Mr. Ethan Nation was a big man in overalls with tufts of hair in his ears and crawling out of his nose. His boys were redheaded, jug-eared versions of him. They all chewed tobacco, probably since birth, and their teeth that weren’t green from lack of cleaning were brown with chaw. They carried cans with them and spat in them between words. Most of their conversation being tied to or worked around cuss words not often spoken in polite company in that day and time.

  They never came in to get a haircut. They cut their own hair with a bowl and scissors, and it looked like it. They sat in the waiting chairs and read what words they could out of the magazines before their lips got tired, or they complained about how bad times were.

  Daddy said they had bad times mostly because they were so lazy they wouldn’t scratch bird mess out of a chair before they sat in it. Customers came in for a haircut, they wouldn’t move and give them the chairs, even though they didn’t have any interest in a trim. They had, as Daddy said, the manners of a billy goat. I once heard him say to Cecil, when he thought I was out of earshot, that if you took the Nation family’s brains and wadded them up together and stuck them up a gnat’s butt and shook the gnat, it’d sound like a ball bearing in a boxcar.

  Cecil, though no friend of the Nations, always managed to be polite, and, as Daddy often said, he was a man liked to talk, even if he was talking to the devil about how much fire was going to be set between his toes.

  No sooner had Old Man Nation taken a seat than Cecil said, “Harry says there’s been a murder.”

  I wondered what Daddy would think of my big mouth. Daddy was a man liked to talk himself, but it was usually about something. When it wasn’t any of your business, you didn’t hear it from him.

  Once the word was out, there was nothing for me to do but tell it all. Well, almost all. For some reason I left the Goat Man out of it. I hadn’t even told Cecil that part.

  When I was finished, Mr. Nation was quiet for a moment, then he said, “Well, one less nigger wench ain’t gonna hurt the world none.” Then to me: “Your Pa’s lookin’ in on this?”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  “Well, he’s probably upset about it. He was always one to worry about the niggers. He ought to leave it alone, let them niggers keep on killin’ each other, then the rest of us won’t have ’em to worry with it.”

  I had never really thought about my father’s personal beliefs, but suddenly it occurred to me his were opposite of those of Mr. Nation, and Mr. Nation, though he liked our barbershop for wasting time, didn’t really like my Daddy. The fact he didn’t, that Daddy had an opposite point of view to his, made me feel good, and at that moment, measuring the contrast between the two, I think my views and my Daddy’s, at least on the race issue, became forever welded.

  In time, Doc Taylor came in. He wasn’t the main doctor in Marvel Creek, he was working with Doc Stephenson, a grumpy old man that had tended to me and my family a few times. Stephenson, with his sour puss and white hair, reminded me of how I thought Scrooge in that story about the Christmas ghosts should look.

  Doc Taylor was a tall, blond man with a quick smile. The ladies liked him even better than Cecil. He always had a good word for everyone, and was fond of children. He always treated Tom like a princess. Once, out at the house, stopping by to check on her when she had a bad cold, he brought her a small bag of candy. I remember it well. She didn’t share a one of them with me. Next time I saw Doc Taylor I said something to him about it, and he laughed, said, “Well now. Women, they got their ways. You got to admit that.”

  He didn’t offer to explain that comment in depth or to fix me up with a bag of candy of my own, so I bore him the smallest of resentments.

  Around his neck Doc Taylor wore a French coin on a little chain. It had been struck by a bullet and dented. The coin had been in his shirt pocket, and he credited it with saving his life. One night when Mama mentioned it, talking about how lucky Doc Taylor had been, Daddy said, “Yeah, well, I figure he banged it with a hammer and made up that cock-’n’-bull story. It gives him somethin’ to tell the ladies.”

  Anyway, I was glad to see him come in. It took some of the edge out of the air, and he and Cecil went to talking about this and that while Cecil snipped at Doc Taylor’s hair.

  Reverend Johnson, a Methodist preacher, came in next, and Mr. Nation, feeling the pressure, packed himself and his two boys in their wagon and went on down the road to annoy someone else. Cecil told Reverend Johnson about the murder, and the Reverend clucked over it and changed the subject.

  Late in the day, Daddy arrived. When Cecil asked him about the murder, Daddy looked at me, and I knew I should have kept my mouth shut.

  Daddy didn’t add any new information however. “I just soon I didn’t see nothing like it again, and I sure hate Harry and Tom seen it.”

  “I seen some stuff in the war, all right,” Cecil said. “But it was war, not murder. I was fifteen. Lied about my age, and I was big, so I got away with it. I had to do over, wouldn’t have done it.”

  Cecil, without saying a word, took a comb from the shelf, walked over to me, reparted and arranged my hair.

  4

  I hung around for a while, but Daddy didn’t get but one customer, and no one was talking about anything that interested me. There weren’t any new magazines I wanted to read, so after I had swept up the cut hair, Daddy gave me a couple pennies and sent me on my way.

  I went over to the general store, spent a long time looking at bolts of colored cloth, mule harnesses, and all manner of dry and soft goods, geegaws and the like. It came down to a Dr Pepper out of the ice barrel, or peppermint sticks.

  I finally zeroed in on the peppermint sticks. My two cents bought four. The storekeeper, Mr. Groon, bald, pink-faced, and generous, winked, gave me six sticks, wrapped them and put them in a sack. I took them back to the barbershop, left them for picking up later, then, with no hair to sweep, and nothing to do, I went roaming.

  From time to time I liked to visit Miss Maggie. That’s how she was known to most. Not as Maggie or Auntie, as many elderly colored women were called, but simply Miss Maggie.

  Miss Maggie was rumored to be a hundred years old. She worked every day and somehow managed to plow a little crop with a mule named Matt. Matt was as tame a mule as ever drew a plow down a corn row, even more than Sally Redback. Maggie said hardest part to plowing Matt was hitching up the rig. After that, it was Matt done the work. Considering the couple of acres she plowed were deep sand and Miss Maggie had legs about the size of hoe handles, and wasn’t overall bigger than a large child, some credit had to go to her.

  She was black as midnight, wrinkled like eroded land, and the twisted hair on her head had gone sparse. She dressed in faded cotton shifts made of potato or feed sacks, wore men’s socks and cheap black shoes she ordered out of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. Outside, she wore a big black hat with the brim left flat and the crown of the hat uncreased. Story was the hat had belonged to her husband, who was prone to beat her and had run off with a Tyler woman.

  The land she owned had once belonged to Old Man Flyer’s father. After the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves, he kept Miss Maggie on at the farm as a servant. Later, for her dedication, he willed her a parcel of land, twenty-five acres in size. She kept five acres of it for a house, a barn, a bit of a farm, and so
ld the rest to the town of Marvel Creek. It was rumored she kept money from the sell buried in her yard in a fruit jar. A number of would-be robbers had dug spots in her yard, but after a few shotgun blasts over their heads, the investigation stopped, and it came to be said that her money had been all spent up.

  Outside her house was Matt’s pen. It consisted of a rope tied tight to posts to form a square. Matt had a shed inside the rope and inside the shed there was always plenty of fresh water, grain, corn husks, and the like. Matt worked on the honor system, stayed inside that rope. He had a pretty good deal and knew it.

  There was also a hog pen with a little shoat roaming about in ankle-deep stinky mud, nosing an empty number ten tub.

  Tied to the house, stretched out with the other end tied to a chinaberry tree (everyone I knew called them chinerberry trees) was a rope clothesline on which hung sheets and what the women I knew called unmentionables, meaning underwear.

  Miss Maggie’s house was a simple weathered shack with a loose tarpaper roof, a short narrow porch under which a number of chickens and the occasional stray dog liked to rest in the heat of the day. On the porch was a rocking chair made of warped cane. The house leaned slightly to the right. It had one door and a dusty screen. There were yellow oilskin shades she pulled down over her three patched screen windows when sunlight or privacy warranted it, and the glass itself was flyspecked. In the summer all the windows were raised to let air come in through the screens, which were essential to keep out the flies. If you kept stock, especially that close to the house, they were twice as bad.

  I went to the screen door and chased away all the flies that were lit on it. Miss Maggie was at her wood stove, taking biscuits out of the oven. I could smell them through the screen, and they made my mouth water. I called her name, and she turned and greeted me like she always did, her braided hair whiter than when I had seen her last. “Hey, boy. You git in here and sit down.”

  I shooed the flies again, went inside. I sat at her little table in a slightly tippy chair. She put some biscuits on a battered tin plate and poured me up some sorghum syrup from a can she heated on the stove, told me to eat. I did.

  Those biscuits were so soft they melted in the mouth, and the sorghum, which she had most likely traded some corn for, was as good as any ever ground by a mule-operated mill and cooked down sweet by human hands.

  As I ate, I looked at a double-barreled shotgun hung over two huge nails driven into the wall, and her black hat hung up next to it. She sat across from me and ate, then said, “I think I’m gonna fry me some salt pork. You want some?”

  “Yes’m.”

  She opened the oven’s warmer, took out some salt pork. It was smoked already and could have just been warmed, but she put a little lard in a pan and stoked up the wood in the stove and set to frying it. It wasn’t long before it was ready. We ate the pork and more biscuits. She said, “I can tell you’re just ’bout to burst, dyin’ to tell me somethin’.”

  “I don’t know I’m supposed to,” I said.

  “Well then you don’t need to tell it.”

  “But I ain’t exactly been told not to tell it.”

  She grinned at me. She had two good teeth in the top of her mouth and four on the bottom, and one of them didn’t look so good. Still, they managed to chew biscuits and tear salt pork.

  I figured whatever I told Miss Maggie didn’t matter. She wasn’t gonna get back to Daddy with it, so I told her about finding the colored woman down in the bottoms and about there being something in the woods following me and Tom.

  When I finished she shook her head. “That a shame. Ain’t no one gonna do nothin’ about it. It just another dead nigger.”

  “Daddy will,” I said.

  “Well, he only one might, but he probably ain’t neither. He just one man. They’ll ride him down, boy. Best thing can happen ’bout all this is be gone on and forgot.”

  “Don’t you want them to catch who done it?”

  “It ain’t gonna be. You can rest on that. My people, they like chaff, boy. They blow away in the breeze and ain’t no one cares. Whoever done this have to kill a white person if he gonna get the big law on him.”

  “That ain’t right,” I said.

  “You better not be sayin’ that too loud, or them Kluxers be comin’ to see you.”

  “My Daddy would run them off.”

  She cackled. “He might at that.” She studied me for a long moment. “You best stay out of them woods, boy. Man do something like that, he ain’t got nothin’ ’gainst hurtin’ chil’ren. You hear me?”

  “Why would someone do something like that, Miss Maggie?”

  “Ain’t no one but Gawd knows reason ’hind that. I think what we got there is a Travelin’ Man.”

  “Travelin’ Man?”

  “That’s what they calls a man like that, does them kind of things to womens. Anyways, what my Daddy called ’em.”

  “What’s a Traveling Man?”

  Miss Maggie eased out of her chair, walked over to the cabinet, took out a little green tin and brought it to the table. She opened the tin, removed a pinch of snuff and poked it between cheek and gum.

  I knew she was about to tell me a story. The snuff, the comfortable position, it was her way. It was how she had first told me tales about the tar baby and the big snake of the bottoms that was killed in nineteen and ten. It was said to be a water moccasin forty-five feet long, and when it was split open a child was found inside. When I told my Daddy that one, he just snorted.

  Outside a cloud moved over the sun and darkened the greasy windows and the light through the screen door. I watched as the flies regrouped on the screen, lighting slowly, clustering together in a dusky wad, as if they too wanted to hear Miss Maggie’s story; their accumulation made a shadow on the floor and across the table, like a rain cloud.

  Off in the distance I heard a wagon clatter, followed by the sound of a car. It was a hot day and even warmer in the shack because of the stove and the tight space. I felt cozy and almost sleepy.

  “Dat ole Travelin’ Man, he someone you don’t want no truck with, boy. They’s folks wants to have anything at any ole price. Wants it so bad, they makes ’em a deal.”

  “What kind of deal?”

  “With the debil.”

  “Uh uh. No one would do that.”

  “Would too. They was this colored man named Dandy back in the time the numbers turned to nineteen and ought. It was the year that big ole hur’a’cun blowed Galveston away. I had a sister down there and she was drowned durin’ that.”

  “Really?”

  “Uh huh. They gathered up all them bodies and burned ’em, boy. I don’t know nothin’ other than she had to have drowned, and if her body got found, then she got burned up. That’s what they had to do, was so many dead’ns. Coloreds. Whites. Womens and chil’ren.”

  This was interesting, but I didn’t want her to stray too far away from her story about the Travelin’ Man and Dandy. I said, “What about Dandy?”

  “Dandy,” she said. “Well, he loved to play a fiddle, but he weren’t no good at it. He couldn’t make that fiddle talk. He wanted to be like them could, but ‘ceptin’ for a tune or two he could play to kinfolks, and them puttin’ up with it, he weren’t no good at all. So you know what he done, Little Man?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “He got him some whiskey, and he drank him a little of it, then made water in it. You know, pee-peed in it.”

  “In the whiskey?”

  “That’s what I done said. Just let it go in that bottle till it fill on back up. Put back what he drunk, guess you could say. He put the cap on it and shook it up. You know why he done that?”

  “No.”

  “ ’Cause they says that’s the way the Old Man likes it. He think a man’s water spices it up.”

  “The Old Man?”

  “Old Man got other names. Satan. Beezlebubba. The debil. Thing is, you don’t know you call him up you really talkin’ to him or one of dem soldiers he g
ot, but that don’t matter none. Dandy, you see, was tryin’ to become a Travelin’ Man.”

  Miss Maggie paused to spit. She had a big cracked cup she kept for the purpose, and now she reached it off the little shelf by the stove behind her and spat snuff juice into it. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, said, “You gonna do this right, thing Dandy wanted to do, you got to gets down in them bottoms where it’s the thickest, and there’s a crossroads.”

  “There’s crossroads everywhere, Miss Maggie.”

  “Uh huh. But the best place to meet the debil or one of his soldiers is down in the deepest part of them bottoms, on a walkin’ trail that crosses. And you got to be there right when it’s gonna turn both hands up.”

  “Both hands up?”

  “Hands on the clock, boy. Twelve midnight. You got to have you a good pocket watch keeps the right time. ’Cause you got to be on time. You got to be standin’ right there in the center where the crossroads cross, and you got to be havin’ you that peed-in whiskey with you.”

  “That what Dandy did?”

  “They say he did. Say he went down in them bottoms with his peed-in whiskey and his fiddle and bow, stood at them crossroads, and sure ’nuff, right when he’s checkin’ the face of his turnip watch with a match, there’s a tap on his shoulder.

  “Now he jerks ’round fast, and there’s the debil. He got a big ole pumpkin head and wear him a little black suit with shiny black shoes, and got a big ole smile, and he says to Dandy, noddin’ at that whiskey bottle, ‘ ’At for me?’ And Dandy, he says, ‘Yeah it is, if’n youse the debil.’ And this pumpkin head, he say, ‘I’m what you might call his lead man, Bubba.’ ”