From Murder under the Oaks
1887
It was August, so she had to bury him quick. Soon she would be able to smell him, a thing she didn’t know if she could endure — not the live, biting odor he brought in from a day in the fields but a mixture of turned earth and rot, an odor she associated with decaying possum and coon carcasses, the bowl of a turtle she’d overturned as a girl and then tumbled away from, vomiting at the soup of maggots pulsing inside.
It was late afternoon. He lay on his back on the porch, covered by a sheet stained across the torso with blood, the sheet mapped with flies and more coming, as many flies as she’d seen gathered in one place, a revival of them, death calling like the Holy Spirit. In her left hand she held his hat, which the two men had thrown to the ground after they’d rolled him off the wagon and left him in the dirt.
She hadn’t wailed at the sight. Hadn’t flung herself on the body or swiped her fingernails at their implacable faces as they watched, the two of them, one young, one old. She hadn’t even put her hand over her mouth.
They told her they’d kept his gun. Said they meant to give it to the sheriff. Said, Like father, like son.
“Leave,” is all she’d said.
And she herself had dragged him up the steps, holding him under his arms. She herself had draped him with their spare bed sheet and turned her rocking chair east to face him and sat rocking and gazing past him — past the corpse of him and its continents of flies — to the outreaching cotton so stark and white in the sun she could barely look at it, cotton she’d have to pick herself now that her son was dead.
Sheriff Waite came. He got down off his horse and left the reins hanging and stood in the yard. He studied the drag marks, the stained dirt. His green eyes followed the marks and paused at the blood on the plank steps and the gritty line of blood smeared across the porch. He watched the boy under the sheet for nearly a minute before he moved his eyes — it seemed such an effort for him to look at country folks — to her face. In the past she’d always had trouble meeting town men’s eyes, the lust there or the judgment (or both), but now she sat rocking and staring back at him as though she understood a secret about him not even his wife knew. His hand went toward his nose, an unconscious gesture, but he must’ve considered it disrespectful for he lowered the hand and cleared his throat.
“Missus Freemont.”
“It was that Glaine Bolton,” she said. “Him and Marcus Eady.”
Waite stepped closer to the porch. Behind him his tall handsome horse had sweat tracks down through the dust caked on its coat. It wiggled its long head and blinked and sighed at the heat, flicked the skin of its back and the saddle and the rifle in its scabbard.
“I know,” Waite said. “They already come talked to me. Caught me over at Coffeeville.” He moved his hand again, as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “How I was able to get here so quick.”
She folded her arms despite the heat, nestled her sweating breasts between them.
“They give me his pistol,” Waite said.
She waited, and his face became all lines as he got himself ready to say it out loud. That there would be no justice. Not the kind she wanted, anyway.
Since it was so easy to look at him now, she did it, reckoning him in his late forties. If she hadn’t been so brimming with hate, she’d have still considered him fine-looking, even all these years later. His shirt fit well at the shoulders, his pants snug at the hips. He was skinnier than before. One thing she noticed was that his fingers weren’t scarred from cotton, where nail met skin, the way hers and her son’s were. Had been.
“You see,” Waite began, “it’s pretty generally known where your boy was going.” He flapped a hand at her son. “When they stopped him.”
“ ‘Stopped him’? That’s what you call what they done?”
“Yes’m.”
She waited.
“He was going to shoot Glaine’s daddy.”
She waited. She realized she’d quit rocking and pushed at the porch boards with her bare feet until she was moving again, whisper of wind on the back of her neck, beneath her bun of brown hair. She heard her breath going in and out of her nose.
Waite suddenly took off his hat and began to examine the brim, the leather band sweated through, then turned it over and looked into the dark crown shaped by his head. “Way I hear it,” he said, “is your boy and Travis Bolton had some words at the Coffeeville Methodist last week. I wasn’t there, see. I’d been serving a warrant down in Jackson.” When Waite came forward she heard his holster creak. He set a foot on the bottom step, careful not to touch the blood, and bent at the waist and rested his elbows on his knee. “But I got me a long memory, Missus Freemont. And the thing I told you back then, well, it still stands.”
Bess had a long memory too.
She’d been sixteen years younger. Sixteen years younger and almost asleep when that other wagon, the first one, had rattled up outside. She rose from where she’d been kneeling before the hearth, half in prayer, half for warmth. Another cold December day had passed, she remembered, rain coming, or snow. It was dark out, windy at intervals, the rocking chair on the porch tapping against the front wall. A pair of sweet potatoes on the rocks before her all the food they had left.
A horse nickered. She pulled her shawl around her shoulders and held it at her throat. Clay, not two years old then, had been asleep under a quilt on the floor beside her. Now he got up.
“Stay here, boy,” she told him, resting a hand on top of his head. He wore a tattered shirt and pants given by church women from the last county they’d lived in, just over a week before. Barefooted, he stood shivering with his back to the fire, hands behind him, the way his father liked to stand.
On the porch, she pulled the latch closed behind her and peered into the weakly starred night. Movement. Then a lantern raised and a man in a duster coat and derby hat seemed to form out of the fabric of darkness. He wore a beard and spectacles that reflected the light he held above him.
“Would you tell me your name, miss?” he asked her.
She said it, her knuckles cold at her throat. She heard the door open behind her and stepped in front of it to shield Clay.
“This is my land you’re on,” the man said, “and that’s one of my tenant houses y’all are camped out in.”
Bess felt relief. He’s only here about the property.
“My husband,” she said. “He ain’t home.”
“Miss,” the man said, “I believe I know that.”
Fear again. She came forward on the porch, boards loose beneath her feet, and stopped on the first step. The horse shook its head and stamped against the cold. “Easy,” the man whispered. He set the brake and stepped from the seat into the back of the wagon, holding the lantern aloft. He bent and began pushing something heavy. Bess came down the first step. Behind her, Clay slipped out the door.
The man climbed from the tailgate of the wagon and took a few steps toward her. He was shorter than she was, even with his hat and in his boots. Now she could see his eyes.
“My name is Mister Bolton,” he said. “Could you walk over here, miss?”
She seemed unable to move. The dirt was cold, her toes numb. He waited a moment, gazing past her at Clay. Then he looked down, shaking his head. He came toward her and she recoiled as if he might hit her, but he only placed a gloved hand on her back and pushed her forward, not roughly but firmly. They went that way to the wagon, where she looked in and, in the light of his lantern, saw her husband.
E. J. was dead. He was dead. His jacket opened and his shirtfront red with blood. His fingers were squeezed into fists and his head thrown back, mouth open. His hair covered his eyes.
“He was stealing from me,” Bolton said. “I seen somebody down in my smokehouse and thought it was a nigger. I yelled at him to stop but he took off running.”
“Stealing what?” she whispered.
“A ham,” Bolton said.
Bess’s knees began to give way; she grasped the wagon edge. Her shawl fell off and she stood in her thin dress. Bolton steadied her, his arm going around her shoulders. He set the lantern on the floor of the wagon, by E. J.’s boot.
“I am sorry, miss,” Bolton said, a hand now at each of her shoulders. “I wish...”
Clay had appeared behind her, hugging himself, his toes curling in the dirt.
“Go on in, boy,” she told him. “Now.”
He didn’t move.
“Do like your momma says,” Bolton ordered, and Clay turned and ran up the stairs and went inside, pulling the door to.
Bolton led Bess back to the porch and she slumped on the steps. He retrieved her shawl and hung it across her shoulders.
“My own blame fault,” he said. “I knew y’all was out here. Just ain’t had time to come see you. Run you off.”
No longer able to hold back, Bess was sobbing into her hands, which smelled of smoke. Some fraction of her, she knew, was glad E. J. was gone, glad he’d no longer pull them from place to place, only to be threatened off at gunpoint by some landowner again and again. No more of the sudden rages or the beatings he gave her or Clay or some bystander. But, she thought, for all his violence, there were the nights he got only half drunk and they slept enmeshed in one another’s limbs, her gown up high where she’d pulled it and his long johns around one ankle. His quiet snoring. The marvelous lightness between her legs and the mattress wet beneath them. There were those nights. And there was the boy, her darling son, who needed a stern hand, a father, even if what he got was one like E. J., prone to temper and meanness when he drank too much whiskey. Where would they go now, she asked herself, the two of them?
“Miss?” Bolton tugged at his beard.
She looked up. It had begun to rain, cold drops on her face, in her eyes.
“You want me to leave him here?” Bolton asked her. “I don’t know what else to do with him. I’ll go fetch the sheriff directly. He’ll ride out tomorrow, I expect.”
“Yeah,” Bess said. She blinked. “Would you wait...?” She looked toward the window where Clay’s face ducked out of sight.
“Go on ahead,” he said.
Inside, she told the boy to take his quilt into the next room and wait for her.
When she came out, Bolton was wrestling E. J. to the edge of the wagon. Bess helped him and together they dragged him up the steps.
“You want to leave him on the porch?” Bolton huffed. “He’ll keep better.”
“No,” she said. “Inside.”
He looked doubtful but helped her pull him into the house. They rolled him over on a torn sheet on the floor by the hearth. In the soft flickering firelight, her husband seemed somehow even more dead, a ghost, the way the shadows moved on his still features, his flat nose, the dark hollows under his eyes that Clay would likely have as well. She pushed his hair back. She touched his lower jaw and closed his mouth. Tried to remember the last thing he’d said to her when he left that afternoon. His mouth had slowly fallen back open, and she put one of the sweet potatoes under his chin as a prop.
Bolton was gazing around the room, still wearing his gloves, hands on his hips. Abruptly he walked across the floor and went outside, closing the door behind him. When he came back in, she jumped up and stared at him.
In one arm he held a bundle.
“This is the ham,” he said, casting about for somewhere to set it. When nowhere seemed right, he knelt and laid it beside the door. “Reckon it’s paid for.”
He waited a few moments, his breath misting, then went outside, shutting the door. She heard it latch. Heard the wagon’s brake released and the creak of hinges and the horse whinny and stamp and the wheels click as Mr. Bolton rolled off into the night. She went to the window and outside was only darkness. She turned.
Her fingers trembling, Bess unwrapped the cloth sack from around the ham, a good ten-pounder, the bone still in it. A pang of guilt turned in her chest when her mouth watered. Already its smoked smell filled the tiny room. She touched the cold, hard surface, saw four strange pockmarks in its red skin. Horrified, she used a fingernail to dig out a pellet of buckshot. It dropped and rolled over the floor. She looked at her husband’s bloody shirt.
“Oh, E. J.,” she whispered.
The next morning, as Bolton predicted, Waite arrived. She left Clay in the back, eating ham with his fingers.
“I’m the sheriff,” he said, walking past her into the cold front room. He didn’t take off his hat. His cheeks were clean-shaven and red from wind and he wore a red mustache with the ends twisted into tiny waxed tips. The silver star pinned to his shirt was askew, its topmost point aimed at his left shoulder.
Moving through the room, he seemed angry. When he saw E. J.’s old single-barrel shotgun he took it up from the corner where it stood and unbreeched it and removed the shell and dropped it in his pocket. He snapped the gun closed and replaced it. The door to the back room was shut, and glancing her way, he pushed aside his coat to reveal the white wood handle of a sidearm on his gun belt. Pistol in hand, he eased open the door and peered in. The little boy he saw must not have seemed threatening, because he closed the door and holstered his pistol. He brushed past Bess where she stood by the window and clopped in his boots to the hearth and squatted by E. J. and studied him. He patted the dead man’s pockets, withdrew a plug of tobacco, and set it on the hearthstones. Watching, she felt a sting of anger at E. J., buying tobacco when the boy needed feeding. In E. J.’s right boot the sheriff found the knife her husband always carried. He glanced at her and laid it on the rocks beside the plug but found nothing else.
Waite squatted a moment longer, as if considering the height and weight of the dead man, then rose and stepped past the body to be closer to her. He cleared his throat and asked where they’d come from. She told him Tennessee. He asked how long they’d been here illegally on Mr. Bolton’s property and she told him that too. Then he asked what she planned to do now.
She said, “I don’t know.”
Then she said, “I want my husband’s pistol back. And that shotgun shell too.”
“That’s a bold request,” he said. “For someone in your position.”
“My ‘position.’ ”
“Trespasser. Mr. Bolton shot a thief. There are those would argue that sidearm belongs to him now.”
Unable to meet his eyes, she glared at his boots. Muddied at the tips, along the heels.
“I’ll leave the shell when I go,” he said, “but I won’t have a loaded gun while I’m here.”
“You think I’d shoot you?”
“No, I don’t. But you won’t get the chance. The undertaker will be here directly. I passed him back yonder at the bridge.”
“I can’t afford no undertaker.”
“Mr. Bolton’s already paid him.”
Bess felt her cheeks redden. “I don’t understand.”
“Miss,” he said, folding his arms, “the fact is, some of us has too little conscience, and some has too much.” He raised his chin to indicate E. J. “I expect your husband yonder chose the right man to try and rob.”
She refused to cry. She folded her arms over her chest and wished the shawl could swallow her whole.
“I have but one piece of advice for you,” the sheriff said, lowering his voice, “and you should take it. Travis Bolton is a damn good man. I’ve known him for over ten years. If I was you I would get the hell out of this county. And wherever it is you end up, I wouldn’t tell that young one of yours who pulled the trigger on his daddy. ’Cause if this thing goes any farther, even if it’s ten years from now, fifteen, twenty years, I’ll be the one that ends it.” He looked at E. J. as he might look at a slop jar, then turned to go.
From the window, she had watched him toss the shotgun shell onto the frozen dirt and swing into his saddle and spur his horse to a trot, as if he couldn’t get away from such business fast enough. From such people.
“Travis Bolton’s a good man,” Waite repeated now, these years later, putting his hat back on. “And it ain’t that he’s my wife’s brother. Which I reckon you know. And it ain’t that he’s turned into a preacher, neither. If he needed hanging, I’d do it. Hanged a preacher in Dickinson one time — least he said he was a preacher. Didn’t stop him from stealing horses. Hanged my second cousin’s oldest boy once too. A murderer, that one. Duty’s a thing I ain’t never shied from, is what I’m saying. And what I said back then, in case you’ve forgot, is that you better not tell that boy who killed his daddy. ’Cause if you do, he’ll be bound to avengement.”
“Wasn’t me told him,” she said. So quietly he had to lean in and ask her to repeat herself, which she did.
“Who told him, then?”
“The preacher’s son hisself did.”
Waite straightened, his arms dangling. Fingers flexing. He looked at her dead boy. He looked back at her. “Well, Glaine ain’t the man his daddy is. I’m first to admit that. Preacher’s sons,” he said, but didn’t finish.
“Told him at school, sheriff. Walked up to my boy in the schoolyard and said, ‘My daddy kilt your daddy, what’ll you say about that, trash.’ It was five years ago it happened. When my boy wasn’t but thirteen years old. Five years he had to live with that knowing and do nothing. Five years I was able to keep him from doing something. And all the time that Glaine Bolton looking at him like he was a coward. Him and that whole bunch of boys from town.”
Waite took off his hat again. Flies had drifted over and he swatted at them. He rubbed a finger under his nose, along his mustache, which was going gray. “Thing is, Missus Freemont, that there ain’t against the law. Young fellows being mean. It ain’t fair, it ain’t right, but it ain’t illegal, either. What is illegal is your boy taking up that Colt that I never should’ve give you back and waving it around at the church like I heard he done last Sunday. Threatening everbody. Saying he was gone kill the man killed his daddy, even if he is a preacher.”
Last Sunday, yes. Clay’d gone out before dawn without telling her. Soon as she’d awakened to such an empty house, soon as she opened the drawer where they kept the pistol and saw nothing but her needle and thread there, the box of cartridges gone too, she’d known. Known. But then he’d come home, come home and said no, he didn’t kill nobody, you have to be a man to kill somebody, and he reckoned all he was was a coward, like everybody said.
Thank God, she’d whispered, hugging him.
Waite dug a handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped his forehead. “Only thing I wish,” he said, “is that somebody’d come told me. If somebody did, I’d have rode out and got him myself. Put him in jail a spell, try to talk some sense into him. Told him all killing Bolton’d do is get him hanged. Or shot one. But nobody warned me. You yourself didn’t come tell me. Travis neither. And I’m just a fellow by hisself with a lot of county to mind. One river to the other. Why I count on folks to help me. Tell me things.”
He looked again at her son, shook his head. “If he’d had a daddy, might’ve been a different end. You don’t know. But when a fellow says — in hearing of a lot of witnesses, mind you — that he’s gone walk to a man’s house and shoot him, well, that’s enough cause for Glaine Bolton and Marcus Eady to take up a post in the bushes and wait. I’d have done the same thing myself, you want the truth. And if your boy come along, toting that pistol, heading up toward my house, well, miss, I’d a shot him too.”
A fly landed on her arm, tickle of its air-light feet over her skin. Waite said other things but she never again looked up at him and didn’t answer him further or take notice when he sighed one last time and turned and gathered the reins of his mount and climbed on the animal’s back and sat a spell longer and then finally prodded the horse with his spurs and walked it away.
She sat watching her hands. There was dried blood on her knuckles, beneath her nails, that she wouldn’t ever wash off. Blood on her dress front. She’d have to bury her boy now, and this time there’d be no undertaker to summon the preacher so it could be a Christian funeral. She’d have to find the preacher herself. This time there was only her.
She walked two miles along unfenced cotton fields wearing Clay’s hat, which had been E. J.’s before Clay took it up. She didn’t see a person the whole time. She saw a tree full of crows, spiteful loud things that didn’t fly as she passed, and a long black snake that whispered across the road in front of her. She carried her family Bible. For no reason she could name she remembered a school spelling bee she’d almost won, except the word Bible had caused her to lose. She’d not said, “Capital B” to begin the word, had just recited its letters, so her teacher had disqualified her. Someone else got the ribbon.
Her Bible was sweaty from her hand so she switched it to the other hand, then carried it under her arm for a while. Later she read in it as she walked, to pass the time, from her favorite book, Judges.
Her pastor, Brother Hill, lived with his wife and eight daughters in a four-room house at a bend in the road. Like everyone else, they grew cotton. With eight sets of extra hands, they did well at it, and the blond stepping-stone girls, less than a year apart and all blue-eyed like their father, were marvels of efficiency in the field, tough and uncomplaining children. For Bess it was a constant struggle not to covet the preacher and his family. She liked his wife too, a tiny woman named Elda, and more than once had had to ask God’s forgiveness for picturing herself in Elda’s frilly blue town dress and bonnet with a pair of blond girls, the youngest two, holding each of her hands as the group of them crossed the street in Coffeeville on a Saturday. And once — more than once — she’d imagined herself to be Elda in the sanctity of the marriage bed. Then rolling into her own stale pillow, which took her tears and her repentance. How understanding God was said to be, and yet how little understanding she had witnessed. Even he, even God, had only sacrificed once.
Girls. Everyone thought them the lesser result. The lesser sex. But to Bess a girl was something that didn’t have to pick up his daddy’s pistol out of the sideboard and ignore his mother’s crying and push her away and leave her on the floor as he opened the door, checking the pistol’s loads. Looking back, looking just like his daddy in his daddy’s hat. A girl was something that didn’t run down the road and leap sideways into the tall cotton and disappear like a deer in order to get away and leave you alone in the yard, trying to pull your fingers out of their sockets.
She stopped in the heat atop a hill in the road. She looked behind her and saw no one. Just cotton. In front of her the same. Grasshoppers springing through the air and for noise only bird whistles and the distant razz of cicadas. She looked at her Bible and raised it to throw it into the field. For a long time she stood in this pose, but it was only a pose, which God saw or didn’t, and after a time she lowered her arm and walked on.
At Brother Hill’s some of his girls were shelling peas on the porch. Others were shucking corn, saving the husks in a basket. Things a family did in the weeks the cotton was laid by. When they saw her coming along the fence, one hopped up and went inside and returned with her mother. Bess stopped, tried in a half panic to remember each girl’s name but could only recall four or five. Elda stood on the steps with her hand leveled over her eyes like the brim of a hat, squinting to see. When Bess didn’t move, Elda came down the steps toward her, stopping at the well for a tin cup of water, leaving the shadow of her house to meet Bess so the girls wouldn’t hear what they were going to say.
“Dear, I’m so sorry,” Elda whispered when Bess had finished. She reached to trace a finger down her face. She offered the tin.
“I thank you,” Bess said, and drank.
Elda touched her shoulder. “Will you stay supper with us? Let us go over and help you prepare him? I can sit up with you. Me and Darla.”
Bess shook her head. “I can get him ready myself. I only come to see if Brother Hill would read the service.”
The watchful girls resumed work, like a picture suddenly alive, when their mother looked back toward them.
“Oh, dear,” Elda said. “He’s away. His first cousin died in Grove Hill and he’s there doing that service. He won’t be back until day after tomorrow, in time for picking. Can you wait, dear?”
She said she couldn’t, the heat was too much. She’d find someone else, another preacher. Even if he wasn’t a Baptist.
It was after dark when she arrived at the next place, a dogtrot house with a mule standing in the trot. There was a barn off in the shadows down the sloping land and the chatter of chickens everywhere. This man was a Methodist from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, but he was prone to fits and was in the midst of one then, his wife said, offering Bess a cup of water and a biscuit, which she took but didn’t eat. Though Bess couldn’t recall her name, she knew that here was a good woman who’d married the minister after her sister, his first wife, had died of malaria. Been a mother to the children.
In a whisper, casting a glance at the house, the woman told Bess that her husband hadn’t been himself for nearly a week and showed no sign of returning to his natural, caring state. She’d sent the young ones to a neighbor’s.
As Bess walked away, she heard him moaning from inside and calling out profane words. A hand seemed to clamp her neck and she felt suddenly cold, though her dress was soaked with sweat. God above was nothing if not a giver of tests. When she thought to look for it, the biscuit was gone; she’d dropped it somewhere.
The last place to go was to the nigger preacher, but she didn’t do that. She walked toward home instead. She thought she smelled Clay on the wind on her face before she came in sight of their house. For a long time she sat on the porch holding his cold hand in hers, held it for so long it grew warm from her warmth, and for a spell she imagined he was alive. The flies had gone wherever flies go after dark and she fell asleep, praying.
She woke against the wall with a pain in her neck like an iron through it. The flies were back. She gasped at their number and fell off the porch batting them away. In the yard was a pair of wild dogs, which she chased down the road with a hoe. There were buzzards smudged against the white sky, mocking things that may have been from God or the devil, she had no idea which. One seemed the same as the other to her now as she got to her knees.
Got to her knees and pushed him and pulled him inside and lay over him crying. With more strength than she knew she possessed, she lifted him onto the sideboard and stood bent and panting. He was so tall his ankles and feet stuck out in the air. She waved both hands at the flies, but most were outside; only a few had got in. She closed the door, the shutters, and moved back the sheet to look at his face. For a moment it was E. J. she saw. Then it wasn’t. She touched Clay’s chin, rasp of whisker. It was only a year he’d been shaving. She built a little fire in the stove, heated some water, found the straight razor, and soaped his cheeks. She scraped the razor over his skin, rubbing the stiff hairs onto the sheet that still covered his body, her hand on his neck, thumb caressing his Adam’s apple. She talked to him as she shaved him and talked to him as she peeled back the stiff sheet and unlaced his brogans and set them side by side on the floor. She had never prepared anyone for burial and wished Elda were here and told him this in a quiet voice, but then added that she’d not want anybody to see him in such a state, especially since she’d imagined that he and Elda’s oldest daughter would someday be wed. Or the second oldest. You could’ve had your pick of them, she said. We would’ve all spent Christmases together in their house and the sound of a baby laughing would be the sound of music to my ears. His clothes stank, so she unfastened his work pants and told him she’d launder them as she inched them over his hips, his knees, ankles. She removed his underpants, which were soiled, and covered his privates with the sheet from her bed. She unbuttoned his shirt and spread it and closed her eyes, then opened them to look at the wounds. Each near his heart. Two eye-socket holes — she could cover them with one hand and knew enough about shooting to note the skill of the marksman — the skin black around them. She flecked the hardened blood away with her fingernails and washed him with soap and water that turned pink on his skin. Then, with his middle covered, she washed him and combed his hair. She had been talking the entire time. Now she stopped.
She snatched off the sheet and beheld her boy, naked as the day he’d wriggled into the world of air and men. It was time for him to go home and she began to cry again. “Look what they did,” she said.
The Reverend Isaiah Hovington Walker’s place seemed deserted. The house was painted white, which had upset many of the white people in the area, that a nigger man would have the gall to doctor up his house so that it no longer had that hornet’s nest gray wood the rest of the places in these parts had. He’d even painted his outhouse, which had nearly got him lynched. So many of the white folks, Bess and Clay included, not having privies themselves. If Sheriff Waite hadn’t come out and made him scrape off the outhouse paint (at gunpoint, she’d heard), there’d have been one less preacher for her to consult today.
“Isaiah Walker,” she called. “Get on out here.”
Three short-haired yellow dogs kept her at the edge of the yard while she waited, her neck still throbbing from the crick in it. She watched the windows, curtains pulled, for a sign of movement. She looked over at the well, its bucket and rope, longing for a sup of water, but it wouldn’t do for her to drink here. “Isaiah Walker,” she called again, remembering how, on their first night in the area, E. J. had horse-whipped Walker for not getting his mule off the road fast enough. Though the preacher kicked and pulled the mule’s halter until his hands were bloody, E. J. muttered that a nigger’s mule ought to have as much respect for its betters as the nigger himself. He’d snatched the wagon’s brake and drawn from its slot the stiff whip. She’d hoped it was the mule he meant to hit, but it hadn’t been.
The dogs were inching toward her, hackles flashing over their backs, taking their courage from each other, smelling the blood on her hands, her dress. She wished she’d brought a stick with her. She’d even forgotten her Bible this time, saw it in her mind’s eye as it lay splayed open on the porch with the wind paging it. She hadn’t eaten since they’d brought Clay back, and for a moment she thought she might faint.
She stamped at the dogs and they stopped their approach but kept barking.
In all, it must have been half an hour before Walker’s door finally opened, the dogs never having quit. She lowered her hand from her neck. The reverend came out fastening his suspenders and put a toothpick in his mouth. He looked up at the sky as if seeking rain. A man entirely bald of hair but with a long white beard and white eyebrows and small rifle-barrel eyes. He whistled at the dogs, but they ignored him and ignored him when he called them by name.
She thought it proper for him to come down and meet her, but he never left the porch.
“This how you treat white folks?” she croaked at him.
“I know you,” he said. “Heard why you here too. And you might try tell me the Lord God, he expect me to forgive. But I been in there praying since you first step in my yard, Missus Freemont, since them dogs first start they racket, and I been intent on listen what God say. But he ain’t say nothing ’bout me saying no words over your boy soul. If he wanted me to, he’d a said so. Might be them dogs stop barking. That would tell me. The Lord, he ain’t never been shy ’bout telling me what to do and I ain’t never been shy for listening.”
But she had turned away before he finished, and by the time the dogs stopped their noise she had rounded a curve and another curve and gone up a hill and then sat in the road and then lay in it.
Lay in it thinking of her past life, of her farmer father, widowed and quick to punish, overburdened with his failing tobacco farm and seven children, she the second oldest and a dreamer of daydreams, possessed he said by the demon Sloth. Thinking of the narrow-shouldered, handsome man coming on horseback seemingly from between the round mountains she’d seen and not seen all her life, galloping she thought right down out of the broad purple sky onto her father’s property. The young man taking one look at her and campaigning and working and coercing and at last trading her father that fine black mare for a battered wagon, a pair of mules, and a thin eighteen-year-old wife glad to see someplace new. Of crossing steaming green Tennessee in the wagon, of clear cool rainless nights with the canvas top drawn aside, lying shoulder to shoulder with her husband, the sky huge and intense overhead, stars winking past on their distant, pretold trajectories, the mules braying down by the creek where they were staked and she falling asleep smelling their dying fire, his arms around her.
E. J. Ezekiel Jeremiah. No living person knows what them letters stands for but you, he’d said.
Ezekiel, she’d repeated. Jeremiah.
Out of the wagon to jump across the state line (which he’d drawn in the dirt with his shoe), laughing, holding hands, and going south through so much Alabama she thought it must spread all the way from Heaven to Hell. Slate mountains gave way to flatland and swamp to red clay hills, and they ferried a wide river dead as glass, then bumped over dry stony roads atop the buckboard pulled by the two thinning mules. Then the oldest mule died: within two months of their wedding.
E. J. not saying anything for a long time, staring at the carcass where it lay in the field, hands on his hips, his back to her; and then saying why the hell didn’t she tell him her daddy was trading a bum mule.
For days and mostly in silence they paralleled a lonely railroad until it just stopped and there were nigger men hammering alongside white ones and the ring of metal on metal and tents speckling the horizon and octoroon whores hanging their stockings on what looked to be a traveling gallows.
For two months he laid crossties and flirted (and more) with the whores. Then they departed on a Sunday at dawn when he was still drunk from the night. She had a high fever and from inside her hot lolling head it seemed they were slipping off the land, ever south into an ooze of mud.
Then clabbertrap railroad or river towns on the landscape, she expecting a baby and sick each afternoon, staying with the wagon and reading in her Bible while he walked to town or rode aback the remaining mule to find a game of blackjack or stud and coming out more often than not with less money than he’d gone in with, her little dowry smaller and smaller and then things traded, the iron skillet from her grandmother for cornmeal and her uncle’s fiddle — which she could play a little — for cartridges. E. J. had begun to sleep with the pistol by his head and his arms around his coat, the wagon always covered at night now, as if he’d deny her the stars. Waking one morning to a world shelled in bright snow and that evening giving birth to the squalling boy they called Clay, after her father, who, despite herself, she missed.
Where we going? she’d asked E. J., and he’d said, To a place I know of.
Which, eventually, was here. The cabin that belonged to Travis Bolton. Who lived in a large house four miles away and who killed E. J. for a ham and then said she and Clay could stay on in the cabin if they wanted to, and not pay rent, and pick cotton for him when harvest time came.
Some thoughtful part of her knew it was killing E. J. that had let Travis Bolton hear God’s call. That made him do whatever a man did, within his heart and without — papers, vows — to become a preacher of the gospel. She imagined him a man of extravagant gestures, who when he gave himself to Christ gave fully and so not only allowed her and her boy to work and live on his land, in his house, but did more. On the coldest days she might find a gutted doe laid across the fence at the edge of the property. Or a plucked turkey at Christmas. Not a week after E. J. had been committed to the earth by Brother Hill, a milk cow had shown up with the Bolton brand on it. She’d waited for Mr. Bolton or his hand Marcus Eady to come claim it, but after a day and a night no one had and so she’d sheltered it in the lean-to back of the house. Aware she could be called a thief, she’d wrapped Clay in E. J.’s coat (buckshot holes still in it) and carried him to the Bolton place. Instinct sent her to the back door, where a nigger woman eyed her down a broad nose and fetched Mrs. Bolton, who told her Mr. Bolton meant for her to use the cow so that the boy might have milk. Then she shut the door. Bess understood that Mrs. Bolton disapproved of her husband’s decision to let them live in the cabin. To let them pick cotton alongside the other hired hands and tenant farmers, to pay them for the work of two people even though she was a sorry picker at first and Clay did little work at all in his early years. Nights in the cabin’s bed with Clay asleep against her body, Bess imagined arguments between the Boltons, imagined them in such detail that she herself could hardly believe Mr. Bolton would let those people stay in their house, bleed them of milk and meat and money. Bess’s own father would never have let squatters settle in one of his tenant houses, had in fact run off families in worse shape than Bess’s. If you could call her and Clay a family.
When she woke, she knew God had spoken to her through Jesus Christ. In a dream, he had appeared before her in the road with a new wagon and team of strong yellow oxen behind him, not moving, and he had knelt and pushed back the hair from her eyes and lifted her chin in his fingers. She couldn’t see his face for the sun was too bright, but she could look on his boots and did, fine dark leather stitched with gold thread and no dust to mar them. She heard him say, Walk, witness what man can do if I live in his heart.
She rose, brushing away sand from her cheek, shaking sand from her dress, and started toward Coffeeville.
She had walked for two hours talking softly to herself when she heard the wagon behind her and stepped from the road into the grass to give way to its berth. The driver, a tall man dressed in a suit, tie, and derby hat, whoaed the mules pulling it and touched the brim of the hat and looked at her with his head tilted. He glanced behind him in the wagon. Then he seemed to arrive at a kind of peace and smiled, said she looked give out, asked her would she like a ride to town. She thanked him and climbed in the back amid children, who frowned at one another at her presence, the haze of flies she’d grown used to. A young one asked was she going to the doctor.
“No,” she said, “to church.”
She slept despite the wagon’s bumpy ride and woke only when one of the children wiggled her toe.
“We here,” the child said.
Her neck felt better, but still she moved it cautiously when she turned toward the Coffeeville Methodist Church, a simple sturdy building painted white and with a row of tall windows along its side, the glasses raised, people sitting in them, their backs to the world, attention focused inside. In front of the building, buggies, horses, and mules stood shaded by pecan branches. Women in hats were unrolling blankets on the brown grass that sloped down to the graveyard, itself shaded by magnolias. From out of the windows she heard singing:
Are you weak and heavy laden?
Cumbered with a load of care?
Precious Savior still our refuge,
Take it to the Lord in prayer.
The children parted around her and spilled from the wagon, as if glad to be freed of her. The man stood and set the brake, then climbed down. He had a cloth-covered dish in his hand. “Here we are,” he said, and put down his plate, which she could smell — fried chicken — and offered his hand. She took it, warm in hers, and the earth felt firm beneath her feet.
Tipping his hat, he began to make his way through the maze of wagons and buggies and up the steps and inside. She stood waiting. The song ended and more women — too busy to see her — hurried out a side door carrying cakes, and several children ran laughing down the hill, some rolling in the grass, and from somewhere a dog barked.
Two familiar men stepped out the front door, both dressed in dark suits and string ties. They began rolling cigarettes. When the young one noticed her he pointed with a match in his hand and the other looked and saw her too. They glanced at one another and began to talk, then Glaine Bolton hurried back inside. Marcus Eady stayed, watching her. His long gray hair swept back beneath his hat, his goatee combed to a point, and his cheeks shaved clean. He lit his cigarette, and trailing a hand along the wall, he moved slowly down the steps and off the side of the porch and along the building. When he got to his horse he stroked its mane and spoke softly to it, all the while watching her.
The front door opened and the man who stepped out putting on his hat was Sheriff Waite, wearing a white shirt and thin black suspenders. He stood on the porch with his hands on his hips. She was holding on to the side of the wagon to keep from falling, and for a moment Waite seemed to stand beside his own twin, and then they blurred and she blinked them back into a single sheriff.
He had seen her. He glanced over at Marcus Eady and patted the air with his hand to stay the man as he, Waite, came down the steps and through the wagons and buggies and horses and mules, laying his hands across the necks and rumps of the skittish animals nearest her to calm them. When he stood over her, bent as she was, she came only to his badge.
“Missus Freemont,” he said. “What are you doing?”
“My boy needs burying,” she said. “The Lord led me here.”
For a moment, as he watched her, Waite held in his eyes a look that doubted that such a Lord existed anymore. What did he see in her face that made his own face both dreadful and aggrieved? What a sight she must be, bloodied, rank, listing up from the camp of the dead to here, the sunlit world of the living, framed in God’s view from the sky in startling white cotton. She clung to the wagon’s sideboard and felt her heart beat against it, confused for a moment which of her men it held. More people had come onto the porch in their black and white clothes and were watching, stepping down into the churchyard. A woman put her hand over her mouth. Another hid a child’s face. Marcus Eady had drawn his rifle and levered a round into its chamber. Glaine Bolton emerged red-faced from the church, pushing people aside, and pointed toward Bess and Waite, the sheriff reaching to steady her. The man last out was the preacher, Travis Bolton, and now she remembered why she had come. It was for her boy. It was for Clay. At the church Bolton raised his Bible above his eyes to shade them so he might see. Then he pushed aside the arm of his son trying to hold him back and left the boy frowning and came through the people, toward her.