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.