The Bottoms Read online

  “Just let him ride over. Won’t hurt him none to know what you do.”

  Mama was standing behind Daddy, a hand on his shoulder. She looked at me and gave a slow wink.

  Daddy didn’t say any more on the matter right then, and neither did Mama, and I had learned when he was at a bar ditch of decision it was best to just wait it out. It meant his mind wasn’t stone solid on a matter, but that things were being considered. It could go either way. If it went the way I didn’t want, I might beg, plead, or whine, but once his mind was truly made up, I could forget it. There’d be no jumping that bar ditch.

  Daddy finished a second cup of coffee, then had Mama pour him a third he could take with him. He looked at me, pursed his lips, said, “You can go. But you got to stay out of the way. You ain’t doin’ nothing but riding over and ridin’ back, so get that in your head.”

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  Mama buttered me up a large biscuit, wrapped it in a cloth we used for a cup towel, poured me up another glass of buttermilk, gave them to me to eat on the way. We went out to the Ford, Daddy started it, and we were off.

  It was exciting to ride in the car. We didn’t always use it. Saved gas that way, and according to Daddy saved on the engine. Besides, lots of places we wanted to go roads wouldn’t take us there. You had to go on foot or by mule or wagon rut. But this day was a special day. ’Cause not only would the road carry us to Pearl Creek, but I was with Daddy and going on a trip of discovery.

  The sun was starting to shine bright by the time we rolled out of the yard, and while Daddy drove and tried to drink his coffee, I ate my buttered biscuit, and for the first time began to feel that I had stepped over the line of being a child, and into being a man.

  It was a muddy trip, with the wet roads almost bogging us down a few times, but finally we came to Pearl Creek.

  Pearl Creek was a real creek, and the name source for the town. The creek was broad in spots and fast running, and the bed of it was rich with white sand and a kind of pearl-colored gravel, hence the name. It was bordered by ancient and magnificent hickory trees and oaks, twisty, droopy willows with wrist-sized roots that worked out of the ground, wound around on the banks, looked like snakes and provided cover for the real thing.

  On one side of the creek was the little town that was its namesake. To get there from our side, you had to cross a narrow, wood slat bridge, and when you did, the slats rattled beneath car tires, horse hooves, or wagon wheels like it was breaking apart beneath you.

  Pearl Creek was all colored, except for old Pappy Treesome, who did not own but operated the sawmill by method of his sons, and ran the post office drop and the commissary with the aid of his wife.

  Pappy had married a Negress and was scorned by the white community, accepted by the colored. In years past the Klan had waited on him as he rode his horse into town and they had taken him out, stripped and whipped him, cut off his hair, tarred and feathered him, shot his horse, run him into town on a rail held between the windows of two cars, and dropped him off in front of the commissary.

  Rumor was Pappy had probably not been lynched because he had a relative in the Klan. Whatever the reason, the Klan decided a whipping, tar and feathers were enough. Pappy went back to living with the colored woman and from then on the Klan left him alone.

  Pappy had children near as white as he was. It was rumored a daughter had gone up North to pass. The others, though light-skinned, weren’t white enough or didn’t care to be, and they were boys: James, Jeremiah, and Root. Two named from the Bible, and one, real name William, rumored to be nicknamed for the size of his equipment. He was also addled in the head, and known to expose himself from time to time. There really wasn’t any malice in this, and he didn’t expose himself with the intent to show anyone. He just liked fondling his own equipment, and he didn’t have the brains to know it was against convention. For this reason, Root was kept pretty much to the black community. It was feared he might go about his hobby in front of white folks, and even if he didn’t know better, the end result might be a lynching.

  Pearl Creek was all about lumber. It was a sawmill community and the sawmill and the commissary were the world for most. The sawmill paid in money, but it mostly paid in tokens that could only be cashed at the commissary. It was a form of indentured servitude.

  The land that was Pearl Creek had once been bottom land, and though it had been cleared of timber and built into a serviceable town, it was still soggy and mosquitoes loved the place. My Daddy used to say there were skeeters over there big enough to carry off a man and eat him and wear his shoes.

  We didn’t pass another car that day, as there weren’t that many around in that part of the country then, but we did pass a few men on horseback, a boy walking, and three wagons drawn by mules.

  Our car was like a rolling black beetle cooking in the sun, and by the time we crossed that little rickety bridge and arrived at boggy Pearl Creek, our clothes were stuck to us and we were red-faced and water poor.

  We stopped in front of the commissary. It was a long tin-roofed building of weathered lumber with sheds out back. We got out and went over to the community water pump. This was the only place you could get running water in town, outside of the creek, and the sawmill ran dust off in that, and no telling what else. There were also a number of outhouses along the edge of the creek, and though there were many who believed long as water moved the mess along it was all right to drink, Daddy was suspicious of such and warned me to not drink out of the creek.

  He said, “That ole stuff’s got somethin’ in it called microbes, Harry. They cling along the bank and on the bottom, in the moss, on rocks and such, and they get in the water and in you, and you get sick. I ain’t never seen a microbe. But I don’t doubt they’re there, smaller even than seed ticks and chiggers.”

  The idea they could be microscopic was not something I think Daddy could entirely comprehend. He could imagine them small, but that small, probably not.

  Daddy worked the pump for me. I ducked my head under and rubbed water over my hands and arms. Then Daddy took his turn while I pumped. Finished, he took out a pocket comb, carefully raked water from his short black hair, parted it, and gave me the comb. I made a few licks and gave it back to him and we went inside the commissary.

  Daddy said, “Might as well grab a soda pop.”

  That was exactly what I wanted to hear.

  The commissary was the center of Pearl Creek, like it was in most sawmill towns, especially colored. East Texas was always slow to get a thing everyone else had. It wasn’t until the forties that I remember there being electricity outside of towns, and then not all towns. Marvel Creek, as I’ve said, had some electricity, but that didn’t expand or become common throughout the town and countryside until some years later.

  The Rural Electrification Administration strung the wires from house to house, except for colored houses. Some coloreds got electricity a year or two behind everyone else, and some never did get it. If East Texas was last on the list to get the things everyone else already had, then the colored of East Texas got whatever it was long after the whites, and then usually an inferior version. Lincoln may have long freed the slaves, but the colored of that time were not far off living as they had lived before the Civil War.

  Pappy ran a pretty good store. There was most everything you needed from food items to soda pops to furniture to cloth for clothes and curtains, hardware items, candles, soaps, hair oils, coal oil, and gasoline. I loved going in there to look and smell the smells.

  Pappy Treesome was behind the counter drinking a Co’-Cola and eating on a rough-cut slab of bologna when we came in. When he saw Daddy he grinned. Minus teeth and with a mouthful of bologna, it wasn’t a pretty picture. I’d seen better-looking mouths with hooks in them.

  Daddy had known Pappy all his life, even before he married the Negress. Camilla was her name. She was a big plump woman who did wash work for a white family not far from Pearl Creek. She also did midwifing and once whipped tw
o colored men with her fists on account of they had been picking on Root, talking him into exposing himself. It was said they only wanted to see the amazing instrument after which he was named, but it made no difference, Camilla didn’t take kindly to it.

  Pappy scared me a little. He was scarecrow lean with a shock of white hair that stood up like porcupine quills. Once in a while he wore store-bought teeth, but they clicked and clacked and slid around when he talked, as if they might have some place to go and were anxious to get there. Therefore, he mostly went toothless.

  Another thing was the way he moved. He lunged and jerked about, as if invisible strings were tied to him and he were being pulled at random in two or three directions. Looking back, I suppose he had some kind of neurological or muscle ailment, but at the time he was said to have the jitters.

  There were a few cane chairs thrown around a potbelly stove made from an oil drum, and after Daddy bought us Co’-Colas and popped the bottle tops with an opener, we sat there, drank, and relaxed a moment. The stove wasn’t lit that time of year, but the log door was open and I could see ashes and bits of paper and peanut hulls customers had tossed inside. The commissary, even without the lit stove, was hot and oppressive with the tin roof gathering in and holding the heat like an oven.

  If you didn’t move too fast, got down low in your chair, and sucked slowly at your pop, it was almost pleasant.

  Pappy came over. I said a polite hello, then tried not to look at him while I drank my Co’-Cola.

  “Dey zay ooo god u ded gul in duh eyezouse, cozdabull,” Pappy said, flapping his lips all over the place.

  “That’s right,” Daddy said. He amazed me with his ability to understand Pappy Treesome. “It wasn’t supposed to be common knowledge, but I guess that’s too much to expect.”

  “Ron ere dis,” Pappy said, and went over to wait on a fat colored woman in a dress made of hand-dyed flour sacks wearing a cardboard hat with colorful paper flowers on the crown.

  We drank our Co’-Colas, and Daddy walked around a bit, looking at the furniture we couldn’t afford, then he asked Pappy if we could buy some gas.

  Pappy took us out back to a pump in a shed, unlocked the pump with a key, worked the handle, and filled a large tin tote can. Daddy poured the gas in the car, told me to take the can back to Pappy.

  When I came back, Daddy was sitting behind the wheel, woolgathering. I realized then that he had been dragging his heels, looking at this and that in the store, getting gas when we may not have really needed it, just plain old stalling, not wanting to do what it was he was about to do.

  Daddy sighed, started up the Ford, drove on around the little mud-rutted square, dotted here and there by buildings on stilts, or piles as they were sometimes called. This was, of course, designed to keep out the water when the creek rose. Mostly the buildings were homes and had gardens or hog pens out beside them, but there was a office that said PEARL CREEK STANDARD on it, and a lawyer shingle and a sign that said DENTIST. There was also a barbershop with a red and white pole out front.

  Although the sawmill was full of working men, many of them with no more than three fingers, some missing hands, there were plenty didn’t have work, and they were milling about or sitting on porch steps or in chairs. Most were gathered at the colored barbershop, like crows on a fence. They dressed in overalls and straw or felt hats, worn-out work shoes with laughing soles.

  Old black women, some in dresses, some in overalls and hats like the men, were also visible. Kids ran about splashing mud, falling and sliding, screaming off toward the creek.

  We stopped at a whitewashed house with a well-tended flower bed on one side, a little patch of garden fenced in with chicken wire on the other. In the garden were a dozen or so staked tomatoes, a few stalks of corn, a row of beans, a couple rows of peas, and four big white pattie squash that deserved flouring and frying. Four banty hens and a rooster were scratching about in the dirt near the garden, and a yellow dog, that looked as if it had just completed some kind of race, lay on its side panting from the heat.

  As we got out of the car the dog moved its tail a few times, then stopped, lest it wear itself out with enthusiasm. The chickens scattered, and when we were on the porch, they converged again on the spot they had just abandoned, pecking away at nothing I could see, besides dirt.

  On a hill barren of trees I could see and hear the sawmill grinding away as the mules worked the saws and the saws gnawed logs into lumber. Sawdust flowed down the hill and into the creek. The dust closest to the mill was butternut-colored, the older stuff, black and sludgy with age; it slid into the creek where it heaped up and was washed slowly away by the water.

  Daddy took off his hat, knocked on the door and a moment later it opened. A plump colored lady in a tight-fitting blue dress stood looking out.

  “I’m Constable Collins. Your husband is expecting me.”

  “Yes suh, he is. Come on in.”

  Inside, the house smelled pleasantly of pinto beans cooking. It was neat with simple furniture, some of it store-bought, most of it handmade from rough lumber and apple crates. There was a shelf of books on the wall. The most books I had ever seen collected together at one time, and perhaps the most I had seen in my life. Some were fiction, but most were books on philosophy and psychology. I didn’t know that at the time, but many of the titles stayed with me, and years later I realized what they were.

  The wood slat floor looked to have been freshly scrubbed and smelled faintly of oil. There was a painting on the wall. It was of a blue vase of yellow flowers sitting on a table near a window that showed the moon hung in the sky next to a dark cloud.

  The house looked a lot nicer than our place. I guessed doctoring, even for a colored doctor, wasn’t such a bad way to make a living.

  “Jes ’scuse me for a moment so I can see I can find him,” the lady said, and went away.

  Daddy was looking the place over too, and I saw something move in his throat, a sadness cross over his face, then the lady came back and said: “Doctor Tinn’s out back. He’s waitin’ on you, Constable. This yo boy?”

  Daddy said I was.

  “Ain’t he just the best-lookin’ little snapper. How’re you, Little Man?”

  That was the same thing Miss Maggie called me, Little Man. “Fine, ma’am.”

  “Oh, and he’s got such good manners. Come on back, will y’all?”

  She led us through the back door and down some steps. There was a clean white building out back of the house, and we went inside. We stood in a stark white room with a large desk and smelled some kind of pine oil disinfectant. There was a maple wood chair behind it with a suit coat draped over it. There were some wooden file cabinets, another shelf of books, this one half the size of the one in the house, and a row of sturdy chairs. There was a painting similar to the one in the house on the wall. It was of a riverbank, rich with dark soil and shadowed by trees, and between the trees a long thin shadow over the river.

  The lady called out, “Doctor Tinn.”

  A door opened and out came a large colored man, older than Daddy, wiping his hands on a towel. He wore black suit pants, a white shirt, and a black tie. “Mister Constable,” he said. But he didn’t offer to shake hands. You didn’t see that much, a colored man and a white man shaking hands.

  Daddy stuck out his hand, and Dr. Tinn, surprised, slung the towel over his shoulder, and they shook.

  “I suppose you know why I’m here?” Daddy said.

  “I do,” Dr. Tinn said.

  Standing next to him, I realized just how large Dr. Tinn was. He must have been six four, and very wide-shouldered. He had his hair cut short and had a mustache faint as the edge of a straight razor. You had to really pay attention to see he had it.

  “I see y’all met my wife,” Dr. Tinn said.

  “Well, not formally,” Daddy said.

  “This here’s Mrs. Tinn,” Dr. Tinn said.

  Mrs. Tinn smiled and went away.

  Daddy and Mama called each other by their first
names, but it wasn’t unusual then for husband and wife to use formal address to one another, at least in front of folks. Still, since it wasn’t something I was accustomed to, it seemed odd to me.

  “Have you looked at the body?” Daddy asked.

  “No. I was waitin’ on you. I thought instead of totin’ her, we’d go on over to the icehouse for a look. Do what we gonna do there. I got some things I need, then we’ll go. And I’ll need you to tell me where the body was found. Give me some of the background.”

  “All right,” Daddy said.

  Dr. Tinn paused. “What about the boy?”

  “He’s gonna be on his own for a while,” Daddy said.

  My heart sunk.

  “Well then,” Doc Tinn said, taking his dark suit coat off the back of the chair. “Let’s go.”

  6

  The icehouse was a big worn-out-looking barn of a place with peeling paint that had once been white but was now gray. It had a narrow front porch of new lumber, the only new lumber on the building.

  I knew that inside the icehouse would be lined with sawdust. Big blocks of ice would be stacked about. There would be a table for cutting up slabs of ice with a saw, and a scale to weigh it, and a chute to send it down into wagon or truck beds. The ice would be so cold if you put your hand on it, it would burn you, and cause the flesh to stick.

  And there was the body. The body I’d found.

  As we came to the icehouse, Daddy said, “I’ll be damned.”

  Sitting on the porch, dressed in a dusty white suit with mud splashed on his shoes and pants legs, fanning himself with his straw hat, was Doc Stephenson.

  There was a flat bottle of dark liquid on the porch beside him, and when he saw Daddy he took a swig of it and put it down. Doc Stephenson had a mouth that looked as if it did not want to open wide, lest tacks and nails fall out. His eyes made you uncomfortable, like they were looking for a place to stick a knife.

  “What’s he doin’ here?” Daddy asked Dr. Tinn.

  “Can’t say as I know, suh,” Dr. Tinn said.