“Since it was a colored killin’ a colored, white law didn’t go after him none, and all the colored ’round here wasn’t in no place to do nothin’, so Dandy, he get off on the other side of the bottoms, and he start at it.”
“At what?”
“Travelin’. He kind of like a bum, you see. He go from house to house, tryin’ to beg him a little somethin’ to eat and such, and people hear about this fella travelin’ around with a fiddle, playin’ a tune or two for his dinner, but he ain’t no good on the fiddle. No good at all. So folks that hear this, they don’t figure on it being Dandy, ’cause Dandy, he can play good as a pig can eat. But it’s Dandy.”
“How come he can’t play?”
“Comin’ to that. You jumpin’ ahead.”
“Sorry, Miss Maggie.”
“Where this Travelin’ Man and his fiddle go, they’s womens start turnin’ up dead. You see, he got a bitter thing in him now. He always did want the womens to like him, but now he ain’t got that goin’ for him ’cause he ain’t got no fiddlin’ to draw them in, and it’s boilin’ him inside. Or, that’s how I figure on it. Ain’t no one really knows. But this is certain, for three years he wandered all over East Texas killin’ colored womens and girls, and to the white law it don’t mean a thing.
“But he finally gets him a little white girl, mistreats and kills her. Kluxers get on his tail, ’cause it ain’t just about niggers killin’ niggers anymore, you see. And he gettin’ bolder and bolder, and he kills a white woman over near them honky-tonks in Gladewater, and the Klan run him down and cut him where a man don’t want to be cut, tar and feather him, hang ’im and light him on fire. And that’s the end of Dandy on this here earth, and it one of the few times the Klan do us all a favor.”
I thought about that for a while. I said, “But why couldn’t he play the fiddle no more? If the devil gave him the power, wouldn’t he be able to play?”
“I done some thinkin’ on that. What I figure is that ole pumpkin head give him that fiddle and say you can play good on this here fiddle, that’s exactly what he meant. That fiddle. When he smashed it up, and took a dead man’s fiddle, a man learned to play it by hard work and not no pee in a bottle and a trip to the crossroads, he couldn’t play no mo’. You see?”
I did. But I still had questions. “If you didn’t see the devil, or the devil’s man, how do you know he had a pumpkin head?”
“I knowed how he looked ’cause there’s folks I know, includin’ cousins, seen the debil and know what he and all his men look like. They can look different ways too. Might not have a head like a pumpkin all the time. Might have horns. Might look like a banker or one of them polatickans, but I’m just figure’n on how he might have looked that night. I’m colorin’ the story some, but that don’t mean it ain’t true.”
“And this woman me and Tom found, you think it’s someone sold his soul to the devil done that to her? A Travelin’ Man?”
“If’n you ain’t sold your soul to the debil you wouldn’t do such a thing, Little Man. It could be the debil himself. Sometime he like to do his own work.”
“What about the Goat Man?”
“Little Man, I think the Goat Man might be the debil. I said he can look anyway he wants, and ain’t them goat horns and hoofs jes like the debil? If’n I was the debil, them bottoms is where I’d be a runnin’ ’cause they dark and wet and got all manner of thing in ’em. Let me gives you a word of smarts. You stay away from anything to do with what the debil likes, ’cause you get in with him he’ll trick on you. You hear?”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Now you need to run on. I got me some washboard’n to do.”
“Yes ma’am. Thanks for the food.”
“You welcome. Now you draw some water out of the well and water that ole hog of mine. And you come back and see me.”
I went out, letting the screen door loose, not so that it would slam, but enough it would jar the flies that were on it.
I went out to the well, dropped the bucket and cranked it up, poured from it into the totin’ bucket. I made several trips with the bucket to fill the hog’s tub with water.
As I went away I remembered another time Miss Maggie told me about how flies are the devil’s eyes and ears, and that got me to thinking.
When I turned my head to look back at her house, the flies had already filled the screen again, and a big fat one was buzzing around my sweaty head.
I swatted at it, but it got away.
5
That night, back at the house, lying in bed, my ear against the wall, Tom asleep across the way in her own little bed made of crude lumber and nailed tight together by Daddy, I listened. The walls were thin. When it was good and quiet, and Mama and Daddy were talking, I could hear them.
“Doc Stephenson, the old pill roller, wouldn’t even look at her,” Daddy said. “Said if folks found out he’d had a colored in his office wouldn’t nobody use him no more.”
“That’s terrible. What about Doc Taylor?”
“Well, I figure he’s at least had some actual medical school. I guess they got medical schools in Arkansas or Oklahoma, wherever it is he’s from.”
“Missouri,” Mama said.
“Anyway, he’d have come looked at her. He wanted to real bad, like it was some kind of adventure, you know. But I didn’t want to take the chance on him gettin’ in trouble with Stephenson to do me a favor. Might go bad for him in the long run, mess up his doctorin’ career. He’s set up to take over Stephenson’s practice when he retires in a year or so, he seems like a nice enough fella. I drove the body over to Pearl Creek to see a doctor there.”
Pearl Creek was an all-colored town.
“She was in our car? I mean, didn’t it foul the car?”
“It didn’t hurt anything. After Harry showed me where she was, I came back, drove over to Billy Gold’s house. He and his brother went down there with me, helped me wrap her in a tarp, carry her out, and put her in the car. We wrapped her up good. No leakage. I drove her over to Pearl Creek and they packed her in ice in the icehouse.”
“I wouldn’t be wanting any of that ice.”
“Body was in pretty bad shape to begin with. Some pieces come off her. We had to throw the tarp away.”
“And she was in our car? Dear me.”
“I blew the odor out driving it home.”
“Oh, my goodness.”
“Doc Tinn, the colored doctor, he was out of town. Won’t be back till tomorrow. He was out country deliver’n a baby. I’m gonna drive over there in the morning, see if I can learn somethin’. I don’t know nothin’ about this kind of murder.”
“You’re sure it’s murder?”
“Well, honey, think about it. I don’t suppose she cut herself up like that and ended up tied to a tree with wire.”
“You’re awful impatient, Jacob… Wire? She was tied with wire?”
“She was bound with a couple strands of barbed wire and a bunch of vines. Someone sure had enjoyed that wire part. They’d taken a piece of wood and fastened it to the wire and used it as a kind of crank so they could wrap it around the tree, loop it, and tighten it by twistin’ that wood like a handle. Then I ’spect he messed with her.”
“Surely not.”
“I don’t know much about these things, but I know she didn’t fix herself to that tree. And as for people doin’ these kind of things, well, two things come to mind. I had a fella tell me once about this Jack the Ripper guy in London. He cut women’s bodies up. For fun. He cut pieces out of them. He messed with their womanly parts.”
“That’s got to be just some kind of story.”
“That’s history. They never caught him. He killed they don’t know how many, but they never caught him or had no idea who it was. Then Cecil, at the shop, and bear in mind he’d rather hear himself talk about most anything than to let a room go quiet, told me when he was in the war in France, there was a fella that at night would roam the battlefield looking for someone alive, you know, hangin’ on from wounds. Germans. And he’d do things with the bodies. Like a man would with a woman. Only in a different place.”