“How’s that?”
“He was in the shop. He came in to get Cecil to cut his hair. He used to come in now and then for me to do it, but after that little event over in Pearl Creek, he only has Cecil do it. I guess my pride got to me, him thinkin’ I didn’t know what I was doin’, and Cecil gettin’ the bulk of the customers, so I shot my mouth off like I was talkin’ to Cecil.”
“But you was talkin’ to Doc Stephenson?”
“Afraid so. And it come back to haunt me at Mrs. Canerton’s.”
We took the water inside, poured it up in the pitchers and one of the washtubs where Mama kept extra water throughout the day, then started back.
We came to the well and Daddy rested his bucket on the curbing for a moment. He turned to me and said, “You know why I haven’t seen any of the folks of these women got murdered?”
I shook my head.
“ ’Cause one’s colored, Harry, and the other is a prostitute. I don’t really know no colored people, ’cept Mose. I talk to a bunch of ’em, and like ’em okay, and I think a bunch like me okay, but I don’t know ’em, and they don’t really know me. Hell, I don’t really know Mose. All me and him ever talked about was fishing and the river and now and then tobacco. I guess I don’t want to know no prostitute’s mother or Daddy. Down deep, I think I may be just like everyone else. And you know what, Harry?”
“No sir.”
“That bothers me.”
Daddy dropped the bucket into the well. When it splashed, he began cranking it up.
“You ain’t like everybody else, Daddy. You don’t hate colored.”
“Down deep, like I said, I ain’t so sure. I have my feelings.”
“But you and Mama, you’re different than the others.”
“There’s lots of folks feel like we do. It’s just the ones feel the other way got bigger mouths and they’re meaner. Let me tell you somethin’, son. When I was a boy every word out of my mouth about the coloreds was nigger this and nigger that. I fished on the river as a boy a lot, and there was this colored boy down there, and he was catching big ole catfish. I was jealous of him. The idea of a colored catchin’ those big ole fish, and me not able to catch anything. I’m ashamed to tell it, but I was gonna beat him up one day. I was down there, and there he was near my spot, pullin’ them fish out like they was trained to jump on his line.
“He looked over at me, and said, ‘Sir, I got some good bait I done made myself, you want some?’
“I took some, and I still didn’t have any luck. But we sat there on the bank and we talked, and by the end of the day I knew somethin’ I’d never known before.”
“What was that?”
“He was just like me. He had a mean old Daddy too. Old man had killed half a dozen folks, all colored, so not a damn thing had been done to him, and the boy was afraid of him. I was afraid of my old man. He taught me how to make the bait, how to take blood and cornmeal and a little flour dough, and knead it all together in little balls and let them harden, then fasten them to the hook just right.
“Me and him didn’t become best friends, but I quit thinking about what color he was. It got so I looked forward to goin’ down there and fishin’, just so me and him could talk.
“Well now, a white girl come up dead and naked in the river, and somehow, and I don’t remember how, it was decided this boy, name was Donald, was the one did it. I didn’t hear nothin’ about it happenin’ at the time, but one afternoon I was comin’ home from squirrel huntin’, and I hit over there on what some folks are callin’ Preacher’s Road, and there was this big crowd, and when I worked my way in there, they had Donald in a wagon bed, and they had nailed his hands and feet to that bed and they had castrated him.
“He saw me, son. Looking out of that crowd at him. I still remember his eyes. They looked to me as big as saucers. He looked at me, and he said, ‘Mister Jacob. Can’t you help me?’ I stepped back into the crowd, son. I was thirteen years old and I didn’t know what to do, and here was a boy my age dying and calling me Mister and beggin’ me to help.
“They set the wagon on fire and finished him. And it wasn’t two days later they found a trail of that little girl’s clothes, and they was followed to a little camp where they found some more of the girl’s belongin’s, and a dead colored man. But there was the girl’s goods, her little purse and such. Now, I don’t know that fella did it, but I can be pretty sure Donald didn’t. I figured the crowd was mad, and the cry went up a nigger did it, and they found them one. Poor Donald. I ’spect it was that man they found that actually done it.”
“How’d he die, Daddy?”
“Just died, I suppose. Another thing. They took that man’s body and dragged it through the woods, dragged it down Preacher’s Road and all over and finally cut it loose and set fire to it. The damn corpse, mostly bones, laid beside the road for a month before animals or someone dragged it off.
“Donald’s old man. The mean sonofabitch. He was finally killed trying to rob a house in Mission Creek. He come through the window and was shot. I remember thinkin’, good riddance. Donald, he was a good kid. He wasn’t no worse than any kid that age, and he was killed like that. Burned a memory, Harry, that’s what I’m tryin’ to tell you, and it ain’t a memory I like worth a damn.
“Bottom line is, I ain’t so pure, Harry. I didn’t do a thing to help Donald.”
“Daddy, wasn’t nothing you could do.”
“I like to think that’s the truth. But I ain’t never been the same since. I don’t hate no one because of their color if I can help myself. Sometimes bad things wash back on me, but I try, Harry. I try.
“As for your Mama. Well, she’s always been that way. Some people can just see a thing is true right off. Your Grandma is like that too, and she passed it on to your Mama, and your Mama helps me understand it when I ain’t always willin’ to. It’s easy to hate, Harry. It’s easy to say this and that happens because the colored do or don’t do one thing or another, but life isn’t that easy, son. Constablin’, I’ve seen some of the worst human beings there is, both white and colored. Color don’t have a thing to do with meanness. Or goodness. You remember that.”
“Yes sir, I will.”
“You see, Harry, there ain’t no future in the way things been. A change has got to happen if people are gonna live together in this country. Civil War’s been over seventy years or so, and there’s still people hatin’ folks ’cause they’re born in the Northern or Southern part of these United States.
“And the only difference for colored now is the masters can’t sell ’em. Mose just missed being a slave, but he ain’t never had nothing but white folks on his butt. That’s why he went off to live in the woods like he done. To get away from white folks. And you know what, he trusts me. Or seems to. I go over to check on him, he’s glad to see me. He thinks I’m protectin’ him.”
“Ain’t you?”
“He’d been more protected had I left him alone. I think I partly arrested him ’cause he’s colored and had that white woman’s purse.
“Part of me, not a good part, was bothered by that. Him havin’ that white woman’s purse and him bein’ colored. Even if he did find it. I was a boy, he taught me how to put bait on a hook so it wouldn’t come off. How to skin catfish with a pair of pliers. How to tell directions in the woods and where all the good fishin’ holes are, and how to look for new ones. He ain’t never showed me no signs of being a killer, and I arrested him right away.”
“You was just goin’ on evidence, Daddy.”
Daddy smiled like his lips might run off the side of his face, poured the well bucket’s water into the tote bucket.