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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
June 1922
Red Dedge picked the next-to-last row of tomatoes and eased them into the sack slung over his shoulder. He dragged a wrist across his brow, raining sweat on the already damp soil. The sun roared silently overhead, the screaming cicadas deafening without being noticed. The white heron he’d seen on the shed roof early that morning had sailed off towards the creek, seeking lunch.
As the sun rose, he’d picked the okra, each about the size of a fat finger, just big enough to be profitable without going hard and woody. The weedy bushes were taller than he was, with scant leaves and pretty white-and-purple flowers.
He noticed things like that, pretty flowers and good smells, like how the tomatoes smelled all acid and green, and the beauty of a tall white bird at dawn, and he wondered if other men did. He knew they never mentioned any such things, so neither would he. He would be just as bark-skinned and hard-assed as any of them. If they didn’t care much, he wouldn’t care at all. No man would ever have any cause to mock him, for sentimentality or anything else. That was important to him.
He was a might peeved that Guy wasn’t there to help. Tomatoes in particular were a touchy and difficult product to get to market. There was a time, a matter of a few days, and if you didn’t get them to market within that time you lost them all. Then again, a week, ten days later. Like clockwork.
Guy had been gone a lot lately |
Their split of the money Skeeter Willis had paid them had lasted a good while, but his was gone, and he was the one with a head for money; if his was gone, Guy’s had to be, too. When he’d asked, Guy had said something vague about winning at gambling. That was a crock of shit. Guy never did gamble, and when he did, he lost.
Sure as shit, he was ’shinin’. Right here in St Lucie County, what the Ashleys considered their back yard, and looking fair to getting their asses shot.
He wanted to get the vegetables ready for the next day, Saturday, because that was market day in Vero. Then later on, there was a social out at Herman Zeuch’s townhouse, west of the village. Red hadn’t even been to one before, but he was hoping to get an invite from War tomorrow at the market. Heard tell they were good parties, with lots of food, beer and dancing.
More important, he’d heard Lola Bostick was a regular. Nearly as tall as he was, she was a beauty, strong-bodied and strong-minded, and he had serious hopes and dreams as to how Miss Lola might be spending her life. Tomorrow was June 17. Red had been eighteen all of four days, and as a man, he now had to think about his future.
He wouldn’t abide being made fun of |
Red adjusted the canvas strap on the sack of tomatoes, trying in vain to get it to where it didn’t bite so damn deep into his sweaty shoulder. He wiped at his brow again. Time to get back to it. Them tomatoes wasn’t a’goin’ to pick themselves.
Before dawn the next morning, Red steered the cab-top out the front fence of the farm. He had to get out and open the gate, drive through, then get out and close it again. Guy was there and should have done it, only he lolled, out cold, near ’bout to fall out of the seat.
Guy was wearin’ a new coat, fancy boots, and a Stetson hat, and he reeked of liquor. His black, stringy hair was all over, the sides short like most men but longer on top, and the hair grease he was sportin’ wasn’t doin’ the job. Stunk like a French whore house too, as their daddy would have said. Red had no factual idea what a French whore house smelled like, but if it was anything like Miss Lottie’s down by the river, it must have been pretty bad.
The train station bell was ringing as they pulled into the square, marking six o’clock and the beginning of the market. Red pulled nose-in to the spot he had rented, marked with a red sign and the number 27. He got his matching red marker, with the number 27 in bold white letters on a wooden stake, and drove it into the hard, packed soil.
He dropped the tailgate and slid some wood-slat baskets out, displaying the perfect okra and the tomatoes, a day or two on the early side, so they wouldn’t rot too soon. He spied War T. to the east across the square towards the railroad tracks and waved. War waved back.
Floyd Kimball was hefting a basket of oranges into a customer’s car, and he saw Red too. He didn’t wave, just glared. That boy, Red thought, was gonna bust a gusset-plate one day out’a sheer meanness.
The heavier produce like citrus were sold or auctioned as near the tracks as possible, as that was where the majority of it was headed: north, on the train. The afternoon regional run, a mix of passengers and freight, would be in from the south around 2 pm.
It was the kind of train that stopped in all kinds of out-of-the-way places. Before they left, Red Dedge would have an arrangement with the engineers and the company men that would add an extra stop to that schedule, right where his pile of cypress logs lay hidden in the woods.
Senegal Johnson was his best customer |
Big as a house, black as the Ace of Spades, wearing a Seminole print shirt and white cotton Cuban pants, Senegal rode up on the spring seat of his mule wagon, towering over every man, even those riding horses. He wore shell necklaces, a massive gold medallion on a leather thong, and a knife the size of Georgia on a strap over his shoulder. His nappy, peppercorn hair was covered by a bandana tied at the back of his neck Gypsy style, and a round hat with narrow, colorful ribbons on the band stood off to the side of his head, as if afraid to get too close to his snarling visage. A long stem of razor grass stuck out from his protruding, shining teeth and purple lips, rotating about his trim mustache as he halted the enormous mule pulling the wagon.
If Senegal was a big man, then his mule was simply gigantic. Titian was a Hinny, a mule born out of a female donkey mated with a stallion, and according to Senegal, some stallion it was. She stood damn near fifteen hands high and was as thick across the ass and withers as a knob-headed mule could get. She pulled that eighteen-foot wagon, full or empty, anywhere, anytime. Senegal adored her; he had sworn, as long as Titian lived, he would never buy no motor car, no suh. But the day she went, he would give up and get a truck, because the chances of such a mule as Titian coming along again in one man’s lifetime was, in his opinion, truly impossible to cogitate upon.
“Senegal,” Red said, nodding.
“A.W.,” Senegal nodded back. He’d picked that up from the white boys in town, the somebodies like War T. and Floyd Kimball. Senegal, big as he was, wasn’t but a year or two older than any of them.
When the young men your age began calling each other by their initials like their daddies did, why then, by God you did too, black or white, it occurred to Red.
It was called Senegal’s Sumptuous Palace of Delights |
Red had readily told him his secrets: “It’s the duck shit what does it, but you gotta let it stew first or it’s too hot…” Senegal Johnson didn’t care what did it.
Amion William Dedge would never have said so, but in fact Senegal Johnson was a good friend. Somebody you could count on, he thought, if things got rough. Red juggled his innate dislike of the black race in general with his specific feelings about Senegal, using the popular expressions from the taverns, the porches where men sat rocking, and at socials. There were black people, and there were niggers.
The majority of the black race occupied the latter category, unfortunately, but there were those with something, never quite defined, that allowed even the worst nigger-haters to tolerate them. Senegal Johnson had whatever that was. Just then the scowling black man let out a baritone laugh that echoed around the square.
“I see you gots my tomatoes! And de gumbos, I pay you good for dem, yours be the first of de season!”
It was true, Red had brought in his first okra on this twelfth of June 1922, a good two weeks ahead of the rest of the local farmers. “I’ll take five baskets of tomatoes, and de gumbos.” Senegal always used the African term.
Red looked up at him. “How much of the okra, d’you say?”
“All of it, boy, all of it!” |
Red took his chin in his hand.
Senegal’s eyes narrowed. “You got dat look on yo’ face, A.W. Dedge, why I don’t like dat look?”
Red had to chuckle. “Hell, take the whole load for another ten dollars why don’tcha? Save you money and me a lot of work.”
Senegal’s laugh boomed out again, turning heads, and Red laughed right with him. “Ok, boys, load ’em up! Now what my price?”
Red rousted Guy and they hustled the tomatoes and okra onto the wagon.
Senegal talked while they loaded. “Heard tell you’s a’goin to that sociable over to Zooks later, that right?”
Red couldn’t figure where he’d heard that, but he nodded anyway.
Guy butted in with his two cents, of course. “He’s all-fired ready, got his eye on that Bostick girl, ain’tcha Red? Gawd Senegal, you art’a see her, fresh as peaches an’ tits out to here,” which was right when Red’s palm smacked into the back of his head so hard he dropped the sack of okra he was lugging.
“Hey!” Johnson laughed his great big laugh. “Looking for somethin’ warm to come home to, huh? Cain’t say’s I blame ya, one of these days I mean to settle down too, have some chillun’s, but not yet!”
Senegal Johnson had a gaggle of the prettiest whores, black, white and in between, that any prospective client might wish to enjoy, a sight better than the slatterns at Miss Lotties’, and it was well known he sampled his own wares right regular.
Titian stepped nervously, rocking the bed, until Senegal said, “Whoa,” in a deep, soothing tone. She shook her head, the blinders on her rig flapping with her ears. Senegal kept blinders on her because two things spooked the huge Hinny: dogs and cars. The enormous black man had told Red she had bolted once, after a dog had run around her barking, and he and his wagon and load had ended up in the St. Sebastian River. It didn’t do, he said gravely, to let a mule the size of Titian get scared.
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
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