4
I hung around for a while, but Daddy didn’t get but one customer, and no one was talking about anything that interested me. There weren’t any new magazines I wanted to read, so after I had swept up the cut hair, Daddy gave me a couple pennies and sent me on my way.
I went over to the general store, spent a long time looking at bolts of colored cloth, mule harnesses, and all manner of dry and soft goods, geegaws and the like. It came down to a Dr Pepper out of the ice barrel, or peppermint sticks.
I finally zeroed in on the peppermint sticks. My two cents bought four. The storekeeper, Mr. Groon, bald, pink-faced, and generous, winked, gave me six sticks, wrapped them and put them in a sack. I took them back to the barbershop, left them for picking up later, then, with no hair to sweep, and nothing to do, I went roaming.
From time to time I liked to visit Miss Maggie. That’s how she was known to most. Not as Maggie or Auntie, as many elderly colored women were called, but simply Miss Maggie.
Miss Maggie was rumored to be a hundred years old. She worked every day and somehow managed to plow a little crop with a mule named Matt. Matt was as tame a mule as ever drew a plow down a corn row, even more than Sally Redback. Maggie said hardest part to plowing Matt was hitching up the rig. After that, it was Matt done the work. Considering the couple of acres she plowed were deep sand and Miss Maggie had legs about the size of hoe handles, and wasn’t overall bigger than a large child, some credit had to go to her.
She was black as midnight, wrinkled like eroded land, and the twisted hair on her head had gone sparse. She dressed in faded cotton shifts made of potato or feed sacks, wore men’s socks and cheap black shoes she ordered out of the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. Outside, she wore a big black hat with the brim left flat and the crown of the hat uncreased. Story was the hat had belonged to her husband, who was prone to beat her and had run off with a Tyler woman.
The land she owned had once belonged to Old Man Flyer’s father. After the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves, he kept Miss Maggie on at the farm as a servant. Later, for her dedication, he willed her a parcel of land, twenty-five acres in size. She kept five acres of it for a house, a barn, a bit of a farm, and sold the rest to the town of Marvel Creek. It was rumored she kept money from the sell buried in her yard in a fruit jar. A number of would-be robbers had dug spots in her yard, but after a few shotgun blasts over their heads, the investigation stopped, and it came to be said that her money had been all spent up.
Outside her house was Matt’s pen. It consisted of a rope tied tight to posts to form a square. Matt had a shed inside the rope and inside the shed there was always plenty of fresh water, grain, corn husks, and the like. Matt worked on the honor system, stayed inside that rope. He had a pretty good deal and knew it.
There was also a hog pen with a little shoat roaming about in ankle-deep stinky mud, nosing an empty number ten tub.
Tied to the house, stretched out with the other end tied to a chinaberry tree (everyone I knew called them chinerberry trees) was a rope clothesline on which hung sheets and what the women I knew called unmentionables, meaning underwear.
Miss Maggie’s house was a simple weathered shack with a loose tarpaper roof, a short narrow porch under which a number of chickens and the occasional stray dog liked to rest in the heat of the day. On the porch was a rocking chair made of warped cane. The house leaned slightly to the right. It had one door and a dusty screen. There were yellow oilskin shades she pulled down over her three patched screen windows when sunlight or privacy warranted it, and the glass itself was flyspecked. In the summer all the windows were raised to let air come in through the screens, which were essential to keep out the flies. If you kept stock, especially that close to the house, they were twice as bad.
I went to the screen door and chased away all the flies that were lit on it. Miss Maggie was at her wood stove, taking biscuits out of the oven. I could smell them through the screen, and they made my mouth water. I called her name, and she turned and greeted me like she always did, her braided hair whiter than when I had seen her last. “Hey, boy. You git in here and sit down.”
I shooed the flies again, went inside. I sat at her little table in a slightly tippy chair. She put some biscuits on a battered tin plate and poured me up some sorghum syrup from a can she heated on the stove, told me to eat. I did.
Those biscuits were so soft they melted in the mouth, and the sorghum, which she had most likely traded some corn for, was as good as any ever ground by a mule-operated mill and cooked down sweet by human hands.
As I ate, I looked at a double-barreled shotgun hung over two huge nails driven into the wall, and her black hat hung up next to it. She sat across from me and ate, then said, “I think I’m gonna fry me some salt pork. You want some?”
“Yes’m.”
She opened the oven’s warmer, took out some salt pork. It was smoked already and could have just been warmed, but she put a little lard in a pan and stoked up the wood in the stove and set to frying it. It wasn’t long before it was ready. We ate the pork and more biscuits. She said, “I can tell you’re just ’bout to burst, dyin’ to tell me somethin’.”
“I don’t know I’m supposed to,” I said.
“Well then you don’t need to tell it.”
“But I ain’t exactly been told not to tell it.”
She grinned at me. She had two good teeth in the top of her mouth and four on the bottom, and one of them didn’t look so good. Still, they managed to chew biscuits and tear salt pork.
I figured whatever I told Miss Maggie didn’t matter. She wasn’t gonna get back to Daddy with it, so I told her about finding the colored woman down in the bottoms and about there being something in the woods following me and Tom.
When I finished she shook her head. “That a shame. Ain’t no one gonna do nothin’ about it. It just another dead nigger.”
“Daddy will,” I said.
“Well, he only one might, but he probably ain’t neither. He just one man. They’ll ride him down, boy. Best thing can happen ’bout all this is be gone on and forgot.”
“Don’t you want them to catch who done it?”
“It ain’t gonna be. You can rest on that. My people, they like chaff, boy. They blow away in the breeze and ain’t no one cares. Whoever done this have to kill a white person if he gonna get the big law on him.”
“That ain’t right,” I said.
“You better not be sayin’ that too loud, or them Kluxers be comin’ to see you.”
“My Daddy would run them off.”
She cackled. “He might at that.” She studied me for a long moment. “You best stay out of them woods, boy. Man do something like that, he ain’t got nothin’ ’gainst hurtin’ chil’ren. You hear me?”
“Why would someone do something like that, Miss Maggie?”
“Ain’t no one but Gawd knows reason ’hind that. I think what we got there is a Travelin’ Man.”
“Travelin’ Man?”
“That’s what they calls a man like that, does them kind of things to womens. Anyways, what my Daddy called ’em.”
“What’s a Traveling Man?”
Miss Maggie eased out of her chair, walked over to the cabinet, took out a little green tin and brought it to the table. She opened the tin, removed a pinch of snuff and poked it between cheek and gum.
I knew she was about to tell me a story. The snuff, the comfortable position, it was her way. It was how she had first told me tales about the tar baby and the big snake of the bottoms that was killed in nineteen and ten. It was said to be a water moccasin forty-five feet long, and when it was split open a child was found inside. When I told my Daddy that one, he just snorted.
Outside a cloud moved over the sun and darkened the greasy windows and the light through the screen door. I watched as the flies regrouped on the screen, lighting slowly, clustering together in a dusky wad, as if they too wanted to hear Miss Maggie’s story; their accumulation made a shadow on the floor and across the table, like a rain cloud.