The Bottoms

3

It wasn’t an altogether happy homecoming. The sky had grown cloudy and the moon was no longer bright. You could hear the cicadas chirping and frogs bleating off somewhere in the bottoms. When we entered into the yard carrying Toby, Daddy spoke from the shadows, and an owl, startled, flew up and was temporarily outlined against the faintly brighter sky.

“I ought to whup y’all’s butts,” Daddy said.

“Yes sir,” I said.

Daddy was sitting in a chair under an oak in the yard. It was sort of our gathering tree, where we sat and talked and shelled peas in the summer. He was smoking a pipe, a habit that would kill him later in life. I could see its glow as he puffed flames from a match into the tobacco. The smell from the pipe was woody and sour to me.

We went over and stood beneath the oak, near his chair.

“Your mother’s been worried sick,” he said. “Harry, you know better than to stay out like that, and with your sister. You’re supposed to take care of her.”

“Yes sir.”

“I see you still have Toby.”

“Yes sir. I think he’s doing better.”

“You don’t do better with a broken back.”

“He treed six squirrels,” I said. I took my pocketknife out and cut the string around my waist and presented him with the squirrels. He looked at them in the darkness, laid them beside his chair.

“You have an excuse,” he said.

“Yes sir,” I said.

“All right, then,” he said. “Tom, you go up to the house, get the tub and start filling it with water. It’s warm enough you won’t need to heat it. Not tonight. You get after them bugs with the kerosene and such, then bathe and hit the bed.”

“Yes sir,” she said. “But Daddy…”

“Go to the house, Tom,” Daddy said.

Tom looked at me, laid the shotgun on the ground, and went on toward the house.

Daddy puffed his pipe. “You said you had an excuse.”

“Yes sir. I got to runnin’ squirrels, but there’s something else. There’s a body down by the river.”

He leaned forward in his chair. “What?”

I told him everything that had happened. About being followed, the brambles, the body, the Goat Man. When I was finished, he sat silent for a time, then said, “There isn’t any Goat Man, Harry. But the person you saw, it’s possible he was the killer. You being out like that, it could have been you or Tom that he got.”

“Yes sir.”

“Suppose I’ll have to take a look early morning. You think you can find her again?”

“Yes sir, but I don’t want to.”

“I know, but I’m gonna need your help.”

Daddy took his pipe and knocked out the ash on the bottom of his shoe and put the pipe in his pocket. “You go up to the house now, and when Tom gets through, you get the bugs off of you and wash up. I know you’re covered. Hand me the shotgun and I’ll take care of Toby.”

I started to say something, but I didn’t know what to say. Daddy got up, cradled Toby in his arms, and I put the shotgun in his hand.

“Damn rotten thing to happen to a good dog,” he said.

Daddy started walking off toward the little barn we had out back of the house by the field.

“Daddy,” I said. “I couldn’t do it. Not Toby.”

“That’s all right, son,” he said, and went on out to the barn.

When I got up to the house, Tom was on the back screened porch, what we called a sleeping porch. It wasn’t real big, but it was comfortable in the summer. There was a swinging seat held by chains to the beams, and there were two pallet beds and a tin tub that hung on the wall till it was needed.

Like right then. Tom was in the tin tub and Mama was scrubbing her hard and fast by the light of a lantern hanging on a porch beam directly above them.

When I came up, Mama, who was in an old green dress, barefoot, her sleeves rolled up, was on her knees. As I came through the screen from the outside, she looked over her shoulder at me. Her raven black hair was gathered up in a fat bun and a tendril of it had come loose and was hanging across her forehead and eye. She pushed it aside with a soapy hand, looked at me.

I didn’t understand it then, her being my mother and all, but any time I looked at her I found myself staring. There was something about her that made you want to keep your eyes on her face. I had just begun to have a hint of what it was. Mother was pretty. Years later I was to learn that many thought her the most beautiful woman in the county, and looking back on the handful of photos I have of her then, and even into her sixties, I would have to say that such an evaluation was most likely true.

“You ought to know better than to stay out this late. And scaring Tom with stories about seeing a body.”

“I wasn’t all that scared,” Tom said.

“Hush, Tom,” Mama said.

“I wasn’t.”

“I said hush.”

“It ain’t a story, Mama,” I said.

I told her about it, making it brief.

When I finished, she asked, “Where’s your Daddy?”

“He took Toby out to the barn. Toby’s back is broken.”

“I heard. I’m real sorry.”

I listened for the blast of the shotgun, but after fifteen minutes it still hadn’t come. Then I heard Daddy coming down from the barn, and pretty soon he stepped out of the shadows, onto the porch and into the lantern light. He was carrying the shotgun, smoking his pipe.

“I don’t figure he needs killin’,” Daddy said. I felt my heart lighten, and I looked at Tom, who was peeking under Mama’s arm as Mama scrubbed her head with lye soap. “He could move his back legs a little, lift his tail. You might be right, Harry. He might be better. Besides, I wasn’t any better doin’ what ought to be done than you, son. He takes a turn for the worse, stays the same, well… In the meantime, he’s yours and Tom’s responsibility. Feed and water him, and you’ll need to manage him to do his business somehow.”

“Yes sir,” I said. “Thanks, Daddy.”

“I fixed him up a place in the barn.”

Daddy sat down on the porch swing with the shotgun cradled in his lap. “You say the woman was colored?”

“Yes sir.”

Daddy sighed. “That’s gonna make it some difficult,” he said.

Next morning just as it grew light, I led Daddy to the Swinging Bridge. I didn’t want to cross the bridge again. I pointed out from the bank the spot across and down the river where the body could be found.

“All right,” Daddy said. “I’ll manage from here. You go home. Better yet, get into town and open up the barbershop. Cecil will be wondering where I am.”

I went home by the slightly long way, not frightened of the Goat Man during the day, feeling, in fact, somewhat brave. Hadn’t I encountered him and lived?

I went by Old Mose’s shack, but I didn’t stop in to visit. He was sitting on the bank of the river in his dry-docked boat wearing a straw hat that was starting to unravel. He was whittling a stick. I called out, “Mr. Mose.” He turned his face toward me and waved.

I had no idea how old Mose was, but I knew he was ancient. His red-black skin was wrinkled like a raisin and most of his teeth were gone. His eyes were red-streaked from strain and cigarette smoke. He was always smoking cigarettes, mostly the kind he made from rolling paper and corn silk. They burned up fast and another had to be rolled almost as fast as the first was lit. Mose used to take me fishing, and Daddy said that when he was a boy Mose had taught him to fish.

I went along the bank of the river, stopping long enough to poke a dead possum with a stick so as to stir the ants on it, then I hurried on to our place.

I went out to the barn to check on Toby. He was crawling around on his belly, wiggling his back legs some. I gave him a pat, carried him to the house, and left Tom with the duty to look after him being fed and watered, then I got the barbershop key, saddled up Sally Redback, and rode her the five miles into town.

Marvel Creek wasn’t much of a town really, not that it’s anything now, but back then it was mostly two streets. Main and West. West had a row of houses. Main had the general store, courthouse, post office, doctor’s office, the barbershop my Daddy owned, a drugstore with a nice soda fountain, a newspaper office, and that was about it. There were potholes on Main Street, and there was limited electricity in the courthouse, doctor’s office, drugstore, and general store.

Another staple of Marvel Creek was a band of roving hogs that belonged to Old Man Crittendon.

The hogs were tolerated most of the time, but once a big one got after Mrs. Owens and chased her down West all the way into her house. Being how she was a little on the fat side, the general talk of the men around town – who didn’t care much for Mrs. Owens because she was a Yankee and apt to remind folks constantly that the North won the war – named this momentous event the Race of Two Hogs.

Anyway, Mrs. Owens’s husband, Jason, who wore a beard and dressed in stiff clothes, shot the hog on his front porch with a shotgun, but not before he blew off the porch steps, knocked down a support post, and dropped the roof on the hog and himself. The hog recovered, Mr. Owens didn’t.

Mr. Owens was missed, and Old Man Crittendon missed his hog, but Mrs. Owens, who moved back up North with the rest of the Yankees, was not. Mr. Crittendon made a special effort to keep the hogs home for a week or two, but soon they were loose again, roaming about, getting yelled at and chased off by rock-tossing pedestrians. The hogs accepted this, and had perfected a kind of sideways jump upon hearing anything that might be a missile whizzing in their direction.

Our barbershop was a little one-room white building built under a couple of oaks. It was big enough for one real barber chair, and a regular chair with a cushion on the seat and a cushion fastened to the back. Daddy cut hair out of the barber chair, and Cecil used the other.

During the summer the door was open, and there was just a screen door between you and the flies. The flies liked to gather on the screen, which was the only barrier between you and them. Daddy preferred the main door open. The reason for this was simple. It was hot and the wind came through and cooled you some. Though that time of year the wind was often hot. It’s the kind of weather where you learn to move as little as possible, seek shade, and stay low to the ground.

Cecil was sitting on the steps reading the weekly newspaper when I arrived. There wasn’t any set time for opening the barbershop, but usually Daddy opened it around nine. It was most likely later than that when I showed up.

Cecil looked up, said, “Where’s your Daddy?”

I tied Sally to one of the oaks, went over to unlock the door, and as I did, I gave Cecil a bit of a rundown, letting him know what Daddy was doing.

Cecil listened, shook his head, made a clucking noise with his tongue, then we were inside.

I loved the aroma of the shop. It smelled of alcohol, disinfectants, and hair oils. The bottles were in a row on a shelf behind the barber chair, and the liquid in them was in different colors. Red and yellow and a blue one that smelled faintly of coconut. When the sunlight shone through and hit the bottles, it lit them up like the jewels from King Solomon’s mines.

There was a long bench along the wall near the door and a table with a stack of magazines with bright covers. Most of the magazines were detective stories. I read them whenever I got a chance, and sometimes Daddy brought the worn ones home.

When there weren’t any customers, Cecil read them too, sitting on the bench with a hand-rolled cigarette in his mouth, looking like one of the characters out of the magazines. Hardboiled, careless, fearless.

Cecil was a big man, and from what I heard around town and indirectly from Daddy, ladies found him good-looking. He had a well-tended shock of reddish hair, bright eyes, and a nice face with slightly hooded eyes. He had come to Marvel Creek not too long ago, a barber looking for work. Daddy, realizing he might have competition, put him in the extra chair and gave him a percentage.

Daddy had since halfway regretted it. It wasn’t that Cecil wasn’t a good worker, nor was it Daddy didn’t like him. It was the fact Cecil was too good. Daddy had learned his barbering by hit or miss, but Cecil had actually had training and had some kind of certificate that said so. Daddy let him pin it to the wall next to the mirror.

Cecil could really cut hair, and pretty soon, more and more of Daddy’s customers were waiting for Cecil to take their turn. More mothers came with their sons and waited while Cecil cut their boy’s hair and chatted with them as he pinched their kid’s cheeks and made them laugh. Cecil was like that. He could chum up to anyone in a big-city minute. Especially women.

As for the men, he loved to talk to them about fishing. He’d strap his rowboat on top of his car and drive off to the river every chance he got. He enjoyed dropping off work for a couple days to camp. He always brought back a lot of fish and sometimes squirrels, which he loved to give away. He always gave the biggest ones to us.

Though Daddy never admitted it, I could see it got his goat, way Cecil was so popular. There was also the fact that when Mama came to the shop she wilted under Cecil’s gaze, turned red. She laughed when he said things that weren’t that funny.

Cecil had cut my hair a few times, when Daddy was busy, and the truth was, it was an experience. Cecil loved to talk, and he told great stories about places he’d been. All over the United States, all over the world. He had fought in World War One, seen some of the dirtiest fighting. Beyond admitting that, he didn’t say much about it. It seemed to pain him.

If Cecil was fairly quiet on the war, on everything else he was a regular blabbermouth. He kidded me about girls, and sometimes the kidding was a little too far to one side for Daddy, and he’d flash a look at Cecil. I could see them in the mirror behind the reading bench, the one designed for the customer to look in while the barber snipped away. Cecil would take the look, wink at Daddy, and change the subject. But Cecil always seemed to come back around to it, taking a real interest in any girlfriend I might have, even if I didn’t really have any. Doing that, he made me feel as if I were growing up, taking part in the rituals and thoughts of men.

Tom liked him too, and in fact had a girlish crush on him, and sometimes she came down to the barbershop just to hang around him, and if he was in the mood he’d flatter her a bit and now and then give her a nickel. Which was good. It meant I’d probably get one too.

What was most amazing about Cecil was the way he could cut hair. His scissors were like a part of his hand. They flashed and turned and snipped with little more than a flex of his wrist. When I was in his chair, pruned hair haloed around me in the sunlight and my head became a piece of sculpture, transformed from a mass of unruly locks to a work of art. Cecil never missed a beat, never poked you with the scissor tips – which Daddy couldn’t say. When Cecil rubbed spiced oil into your scalp, parted and combed your hair, spun you around to look in the closer mirror behind the chairs, you weren’t the same guy anymore. I thought I looked older, more manly, when he was finished.

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.