The Bottoms Read online

  “Abraham.”

  “Yep, Abraham. And the other one is Mr. Dale’s boy. Mr. Dale is a pretty fair farmer. He wrestles at fairs for money. I hear he’s good at that too. His boy’s name is … let me see …”

  “Richard.”

  “Yep, Richard. They ain’t a bad couple to play with. And let me tell you something sad. Abraham, another few years, he and Richard won’t play together. They won’t even be together.”

  “Why, Daddy?”

  Daddy looked over at Uncle Pharaoh, as if to make sure he was out of earshot. “ ’Cause the world ain’t the way it’s supposed to be. You figure on that, and I think the answer will come to you.”

  It already had. I said, “Daddy? Did you figure out who done that to that colored woman?”

  “No. I don’t really know more than I did, ’cept it was horrible. I don’t know I’ll ever know any more than I know right now.”

  “Why did Doc Stephenson come?”

  “I don’t rightly know, but I figure he wanted to be in on something like that, and not have it hurt his business none.”

  “He didn’t sound like he knew much.”

  “I don’t think he cared one way or another. He just wanted to be the one making the statements, not a colored doctor. I’d come to Doc Tinn anytime before I’d go to that pill-pushin’ quack. Listen here. Whites and colored ain’t neither one better or worse than another. There’s just men and women of whatever color, and some of them are worse than others, and some are better. That’s the way to look at that matter. I’m an ignorant man, son, but I know that.”

  “Daddy. Miss Maggie says it’s probably the Goat Man done it.”

  “How’d she know anything was done?”

  I blushed. “I guess I told her.”

  “Well, I figure it’s no big secret by now, but you want to keep talk like that to yourself when you can.”

  “Yes sir. She says the Goat Man might be the devil. Or one of the devil’s servants. Like Beezlebubba.”

  “She means Beelzebub. But no. I done told you I don’t believe there’s no Goat Man,” Daddy said. “I’ve heard tell of such all my life, but ain’t never seen it. As for this fella done this being the devil’s servant, well, she might have somethin’ there. But I figure he’s flesh and blood all right.”

  “Daddy, the one done that to that colored woman?”

  “Miss Sykes, son. She had a name. We know it now.”

  “Yes sir. One did that … He still around?”

  Daddy had the bologna in his hand, and was cutting it with the pocketknife.

  “I don’t know, son … I doubt it.”

  It was then, for the first time, I thought my Daddy might have lied to me.

  It was hotter on the way home than when we’d left, and a lot of the water had dried up or at least caked into mud. It was thick in the road and it caused us to go slow.

  We hadn’t got more than a couple miles outside of Pearl Creek when a black Ford with dents all over it, sitting in the shade of a hickory nut tree, pulled onto the road and right up beside us, going fast enough to toss mud on us.

  A red-faced man was sitting on the passenger side wearing a big white hat. He waved his arm out the open window at Daddy and pointed to the side of the road.

  Daddy pulled over, said, “It’s all right, son. It’s the law over here. I know ’em. Wait on me, hear?”

  As Daddy got out of the car, I slid over behind the steering wheel. Daddy went to the rear of our car, and the man on the passenger side of the dented Ford wearing the big white hat got out. He was big and solid. He was dressed in gray khakis and wore his sleeves rolled down and buttoned, as if it were the dead of winter. A badge was pinned on his shirt.

  The driver, a fellow with a yellowish coloring to his features, wearing a tan hat with a near flat crown that made it look like the top to a butter churn, stayed behind the wheel chewing tobacco.

  The man in the big hat shook hands with Daddy. I could hear them real good. The red-faced man said, “Good to see you, Jacob. I heard tell you was constable over there in your county.”

  “I don’t expect you’re all that proud to see me, Woodrow,” Daddy said, “so don’t act like it.”

  The man laughed a little. He took off his hat and pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped sweat from the inside of it. His hair was even redder than his face.

  “That Ralph Purdue with you?” Daddy asked.

  The man Daddy called Woodrow didn’t answer that question. He said, “Jacob, I got to talk to you. This here nigger murder. We heard about it.”

  “Who hasn’t.”

  “Well, now, I could beat around the bush, but I ain’t gonna do that. What I got to say is simple. Over here ain’t your jurisdiction.”

  “If I was solvin’ a crime, and it led me over here, you’d help me out, wouldn’t you, Woodrow?”

  “Oh, you know it. But, a nigger? Listen, Jacob, let me give you some advice—”

  “I’ve heard it before.”

  “You heed it from me, okay?”

  Daddy didn’t answer.

  “There’s nigger murders, then there’s white murders, and then there’s nigger and white and white and nigger murders.”

  “Murder’s murder.”

  “Let me put it like this. Niggers over here don’t want nobody meddlin’ in their business. Not you. Not me.”

  “We’re the law.”

  “Yeah, but a nigger woman gets killed down in the bottoms, that’s one thing. It ain’t like it’s a good nigger. And it ain’t like it matters much to us. One’s gone, and that’s all there is to it. It was probably one of her boyfriends. She didn’t put out, or put out to someone else. It’s always something like that.

  “Jacob, you got some Christian ideas, and that’s good. But niggers take care of their own. They like it that way, and we like it that way. They get in white business, then we take care of them. White man kills a nigger, that’s our responsibility. A nigger kills a white man, that’s sure our responsibility. But this …”

  “Person’s dead, they’re dead,” Daddy said. “Isn’t that our responsibility?”

  “There’s some things been a certain way for a long time, and they ought to stay that way.”

  “I thought the Yankees whupped us,” Daddy said. “And Lincoln freed the slaves.”

  “The Yankees didn’t whup me. Jacob, what happened here seems obvious. Somebody got off the train, a nigger hobo ridin’ the rails most likely, and he decided he needed some comfort. And he got with this nigger woman and didn’t have the money. She probably tried to cut him. He ended up doin’ her in and caught the next train out. Doc Stephenson, he sees it that way.”

  “That’s funny,” Daddy said. “He told me he thought a panther did it. Or a wild boar. Or maybe a wild boar held her while the panther did it. I forget. When the two got through they tied her to a tree with some barbed wire.”

  “Jacob—”

  “Since when is Doc Stephenson able to look at a body and know a hobo did it? Did the hobo leave him a note?”

  “Goddamn you, Jacob! It’s known far and wide all over this country you’re a nigger lover, and you ain’t careful you’re gonna bring up another generation of them nigger lovers, and some folks around here have all the nigger lovin’ they want. Over here, we take care of our niggers our way.”

  “I want to tell you something, Woodrow. When we were boys you fell off a barge and damn near drowned—”

  “Don’t hold that over my head.”

  “Got in that sinkhole and was almost sucked down. But you wasn’t.”

  “And I’ve thanked you.”

  “You have. Thought you was real grateful about it. And even though you and I have our differences, I’ve always thought, when push come to shove, you was a fair man. But sometimes, I wish I’d have just gone on and let you go under. And if I could rightly figure for sure what you said about another generation of nigger lovers was some kind of threat on my family, I’d break your goddamn ne
ck.”

  Woodrow turned red and put his hat on.

  “It wasn’t no threat. But you just keep in mind what I’ve said.”

  “Whatever it is you said, you keep in mind what I just said. Take it to heart, Woodrow. I’m goin’ home now.”

  “I ain’t finished, Jacob.”

  “Yeah you are,” Daddy said.

  As Daddy walked away, Woodrow said, “You tell May Lynn I said howdy.”

  Daddy paused momentarily. I saw the arteries stand out in his neck, and for a moment I thought he might turn around, but he didn’t. He kept coming.

  I slid away from the driver’s side and waited for Daddy to get in. When he was behind the wheel, I said, “Everything all right, Daddy?”

  “Everything’s fine, son. Fine.”

  I looked back and saw the banged-up black car was turned around and heading in the other direction, the man called Woodrow had his sleeve-covered arm hanging from the window.

  When we got home, Daddy let me out, turned the Ford around, and headed off. He didn’t say where he was going. Just told me to tell Mother not to worry.

  He didn’t come back until nightfall, and he was quiet all night. After supper, he and Mama sat and read awhile, her from the Bible and him from a seed catalogue and then the Farmer’s Almanac. But he seemed to be just going through the motions. I noticed that he had been on the same page for a long time. Once he looked over at Mother, sighed, then went back to glaring at the page, as if he wished to be absorbed by it, like a stain.

  Me and Tom played checkers, and Tom, after me beating her four times in a row, got mad, turned over the checker board, and went out on the sleeping porch. There were a couple of cots out there, and when it was real hot, sometimes that’s where me and Tom slept.

  Normally, I wasn’t of a mind to care a lot about how she felt, but maybe seeing that body had softened me. I went out on the porch. Tom was on one of the cots, her hands behind her head, looking up at the ceiling.

  “It’s just an ole game,” I said, realizing I probably should have let her win one.

  “That’s all right,” she said.

  I sat on the other cot. We sat there in silence, listening to the crickets, some bugs banging up against the screen.

  “That woman we found,” Tom asked, “you think the Goat Man did that to her?”

  “Doc Stephenson said he thought some kind of animal did it. Doc Tinn said he thought a man did it. Constable over there thought it was a hobo.”

  “How you know all that?” she said.

  “I heard ’em talkin’.”

  “Is a hobo a monster?”

  “It’s a fella rides the trains by sneaking on.”

  “Well, that’s a man, ain’t it? You said an animal, a man, or a hobo.”

  “I suppose.”

  “But could it have been the Goat Man?”

  “Daddy says it ain’t. But if you put together what everyone says, it adds up to the Goat Man. Miss Maggie thinks it was the Goat Man.”

  Tom considered on that for a while, said, “Miss Maggie knows all kinds of things. Makes sense to me it was the Goat Man. We seen it, didn’t we?”

  “We did.”

  “I didn’t see it real good. It was too dark. It looked pretty horrible though, didn’t it?”

  I agreed it did.

  “I think about it sometimes,” Tom said.

  “I know.” I thought about Daddy telling me I didn’t need to talk about the body, but then again, hadn’t Tom already seen it?

  Heck, I was turning out to be a real blabbermouth.

  I told Tom what I had done, about climbing on the icehouse and looking through the hole. I told her what was said, and I embellished it a little, making myself the leader of the boys that climbed the chinaberry.

  I also left out the part about being caught in the act of spying. That seemed to me to take the edge off the story and made me seem less clever than I wanted to be.

  I also added, “Don’t say nothin’ about what I told you, or I’ll be in a heap of trouble.”

  Me and Tom talked awhile, speculating on the Goat Man, and pretty soon we were starting to hear him creeping around at the back of the house, and maybe even calling to us in a kind of soft voice that mocked the wind. I got up and locked the screen door, but that didn’t keep us from being scared. Pretty soon every time a bug smacked up against the screen, I was sure it was the Goat Man scratching to get in.

  Having scared ourselves to death, we gladly went inside to bed.

  That night, as I lay in bed, Jelda May Sykes came to me, all cut up. Not just the way I found her, but the way Doc Tinn had cut her, from breastbone to private parts. There was a big empty gap in her stomach except for one long intestine Doc Tinn hadn’t pulled out. It hung out of the rip in her belly and dragged across the floor. She moved slowly, and finally stood by my bed, looking down at me. Her pubic hair and her cut-up womanhood was near my head. I had my eyes open and I could see her, but I couldn’t move. Very carefully, very slowly, she laid her hand on my forehead, as if checking for fever.

  I woke up in a sweat, and lay panting. I looked to see if I had awakened Tom, but she was still sleeping sound by the window that connected to the sleeping porch. She might have been frightened when she went to bed, but she sure seemed content enough now. She had even opened the window, which was a good thing, hot as it was.

  The wind was soft and gentle, moving the curtains. It licked at Tom’s dark hair and waved it about. I was certain I could smell death and river water in the room. I checked about, to see if Jelda May had moved into the shadows, waiting for me to get comfortable again, but there was nothing there but the shapes of familiar things.

  I folded my pillow and stuffed it under my head and took deep breaths, tried not to think about Jelda May Sykes. While I was doing that, I heard Mom and Dad talking behind the wall, just a buzz of words.

  I slid over and put my ear against the wall and tried to pick up what they were saying. They were speaking soft, and for a moment I couldn’t make anything out, but pretty soon I adjusted, shut out the sound of the wind coming through the window by putting a hand over my ear and pressing my other one tight against the wall.

  “… you got to consider that except for stories I haven’t never heard of a panther killing anybody,” I heard Daddy say. “My belief is they probably have. Some say they don’t do that, but I think any kind of critter can do that under the right circumstances. Even a family dog. But Doc Stephenson didn’t have no reason to suspect that. He just wanted it to be that way.”

  “Why?” Mama asked.

  “He didn’t want no colored doctor making any kind of examination and maybe knowing something he didn’t know. Everyone that’s got the mind to admit it, knows Doc Tinn is a good doctor. Better’n most, white or black. That’s all I can figure. And Stephenson was drunk, so I don’t think that helped his judgment none. He may have been showin’ out for that intern, Taylor. Though I don’t think Taylor was much impressed.”

  “What did Doc Tinn say?”

  “He said she’d been raped and cut up. The cut-up part was obvious. He figured someone had come back after she was dead, probably the killer, and kind of played with the body.”

  “You don’t mean it?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Who would do such a thing?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t even an idea.”

  “Did the doctor know her?”

  “No, but the colored preacher over there, Reverend Bail, he knew her. Name was Jelda May Sykes. He said she was a local prostitute and a … he called her a juju woman.”

  “A what?”

  “Some kind of witchcraft they believe in. She sold charms and such. She worked in the juke joints along the river. Picked up a little white trade now and then.”

  “So no one has any ideas who could have done it?”

  “Nobody over there gives a damn, May Lynn. No one. The coloreds don’t have any high feelings for her, and the white law enforcement let me
know real quick I was out of my jurisdiction.”

  “If it’s out of your jurisdiction, you’ll have to leave it alone.”

  “Taking her to Pearl Creek was out of my jurisdiction, but where she was found isn’t out of my jurisdiction. Law over there figures some hobo ridin’ the rails had his fun with her, dumped her in a river, and caught the next train out. They’re probably right. But if that’s so, who bound her to the tree?”

  “It could have been someone else, couldn’t it?”

  “I suppose, but it worries me mightily to think that there’s that much cruelty out there in the world. I’d rather it just be one fella, not two, and if I had my real druthers, I’d rather it not be any. But as they say, wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which fills up first.”

  “Jacob!” Mama said in what sounded like a not entirely offended tone. And then she laughed a little. “Such language.” Then: “What do they care if you chase this? Why are they so against it?”

  “You know that much as I do,” Daddy said.

  “ ’Cause she’s colored? But what would it matter to them if you wanted to chase it?”

  “What if a white man done it?”

  “Then he ought to pay.”

  “Of course. But not everyone sees it that way. They figure a colored woman who was a prostitute … well, she had it coming. If it was a colored did it, one less colored woman for all they care, so why bother and upset the old apple cart. If it was a white man, then they want it left alone. They figure a white man can have his fun with a colored, no matter what kind of fun it is, and he ought not have to pay for it no kind of way.”

  “When you dropped Harry off. Where did you go?”

  “Into town to see Cal Fields.”

  When he said that, I felt knee high to a crippled June bug. My climbing on the icehouse had probably got me sent home early, and Daddy had been discontent enough with me to drive me all the way home and take the ride into town by himself.

  “He’s the newspaperman, isn’t he?” Mama asked. She was talking about our weekly newspaper, the Marvel Creek Guardian. “The older man with the younger wife,” she continued, “the hot patootie?”