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| Saint Sebastian River Bridge [Click image to call up all published instalments] |
Monday,
August 28, 1922
Guy was halfway his normal self when Red had come to visit Monday morning early. He was getting stronger every day, and at night Jenny and Senegal took him out the back into the river bush and helped him walk with crutches and eventually a toilet plunger Senegal had turned upside down and hooked onto some old suspenders to go over Guy’s shoulder and hold it on.
The attic room was entered through a half-door hidden behind a stack of old mattresses, leaned together against the wall like slices of bread. Nasty old mattresses. To get in you tilted them back and they came to rest against the bricks of a chimney extending through the attic, leaning the other way. To disguise it again required only someone to tilt them back.
The outer attic room was kept scrupulously clean, to avoid an obvious trail in the normal dust that accumulates in attics. The room held an ironing board, an iron and a pile of wrinkled laundry in a hamper on one side.
On the other a Singer treadle sewing machine sat beside a cabinet with an assortment of cloth and sewing supplies, a dressmaker’s table and a dress form. The form, in the shape of a woman’s body, held the outline of a dress top made from the pattern flimsies cut on the table. Jenny, one of the girls who had been down in Fort Pierce when he had first left Guy, did the establishment’s ironing and sewing there. Much of the ironing was the washed white shirts of customers which had gotten beer, blood, puke, or some other embarrassing stain on them in the course of a night of drink, gambling and fucking.
A selection of replacement shirts for men expected to be home before dawn was available, at a steep discount, from those never reclaimed.
A covey of fat black washerwomen did a burgeoning business under the river oaks out back of the Palace, stirring soiled sheets and clothing in huge boiling pots using long wooden paddles. Jenny did a lot of ironing.
“They treat me real good” |
They shared a middling flask of rum between them. Guy was set up in an old iron-railed bed, with his back against the tin headboard. The headboard was a dull greenish tan of crackled paint, with lines of tiny, faded blue flowers on stems the cloudy green of old pond scum marching at an angle across it, as rigid as soldiers in their ranks.
Guy’s color was good. “They feed me tol’able well, and some of the girls, hey…that Jenny, she does it with her mouth! You ain’t gonna believe what that feels like…”
Red put up a hand. “Save it for when I have time or money. How’re you getting’ along with, with one leg?” There, he’d said it. That kind of made it more real.
“I don’t like it none, Red, but ain’t nothin’ I c’n do about it. Lot of fellas lost a leg’r two in the Great War, got to be where it ain’t that big a deal. Sooner’r later I c’n git one a’ them factory-made strap-ons. Til then reckon this’ll do.”
Red allowed as how that was so, but he’d still play hell working a farm.
Guy was shaking his head, his lank black hair swinging, long on top and nearly shaved on the sides. It was the style since the War. “Naw, you’re right about that shit. No more farmin’ for me. Been cogitating on what to do. All I got so far is to take to ’shinin’ full time, an’ that’s what done got us in this fix in the first place.”
Don’t I know it, Red thought, but he kept it to himself.
Senegal Johnson was in the saloon when Red came downstairs. “Yo’ brother Mr. Guy lookin’ real good last few days,” he said to Red in the bar mirror, sipping from a tiny mug of coffee that looked ridiculous in his enormous hand.
He reached over the bar and pulled out a normal-sized cup for Red and poured from the pot that sat on a cast iron trivet on the wooden bar top. The Palace’s bar was light pecky cypress with a thick clear finish, while the rail was dark oak. Both were regularly polished and shone like the hood of a new Ford.
Red took it black |
The big man looked down. “I shore do love my coffee of a mornin’, but I cain’t drink too much. Turns my stomach and makes me piss like a damn circus elephant.”
Red, who drank a pot of coffee for breakfast, another for lunch and a third after dinner, recoiled in horror.
Johnson glowered. “All right, wise ass, don’t rub it in.” Not a trace of country in that statement.
Red didn’t rub.
It was near dark when Red approached the farm from the back way, through Zook’s groves heading east, which would bring him past Ezra’s place before he got to his and Guy’s patch.
The southeast winds blew a good nine months of the year, March through November, what Floridians called summer. And that wind was carrying smoke. A lot of smoke, from the area near his farm.
Long before he got to Reverend Stone’s cane field, he knew what he would find. Still, when he rolled up to the drive, it was a shock to see the house a mass of flame, the shed and the barn already in ashes.
Ezra pulled his car out from his drive and approached.
Red’s eyes filled with tears as he saw that the corn, tomatoes, peppers and cukes, things too green to burn, had been run over by cars or trucks, squashed, destroyed. Everything he and Guy had built in the last two years.
The Royal pulled alongside him in the road. They were face to face, the Reverend Stone’s eyes stricken with pity and sorrow.
“Come to the house and we’ll talk” |
They pulled up in Ezra’s chicken yard and the Reverend went inside. By the time Red had dropped into the wicker rocking chair on his right, Stone came back with a brown bottle. When he handed it over the young white man looked surprised.
Only the twitch of an eyebrow telegraphed irritation. “The Grace Baptist Chapel is not affiliated with the Baptist Church in any way, other than we both believe in baptism for the remission of sins. Anyone who forswears alcohol on Biblical grounds forswears Jesus’ first miracle.”
The water and the wine, Red thought. He took the bottle and tipped it up. He noticed a distinct, somehow familiar flavor. He let out an appreciative breath. “Probably comes from them damn Ashleys.” He swung a regretful gaze at the remains of his farm.
Stone’s head went back and forth a good sixteenth of an inch. The look in his eyes was for a backward child who likely would never measure up. “It’s Guy’s ’shine. I’d never deal with no damn Ashleys. Although now,” and he regarded the destruction as well, “now, I believe I have to.”
Ezra had talked to a deacon of the Chapel who had a motorboat, and they had carried Bobby Frankenfield over to the islands his family called home. “We hailed them from the dock and made them come get their retarded little brother. I gave them the righteous Word about their shabby treatment of that tortured soul. And I told them I now legally owned the Dedge property, and if they came back with intent to do harm, a lot of very angry black men would be coming for them and theirs.”
They both contemplated the smoldering remnant of a working farm for a few silent minutes. The smoke drifted to them, stinging their eyes and rubbing sandpaper on their lungs.
Red stirred. “So, what are we gonna do?” He could have sworn it was a minute before the black face turned, slowly, so slowly Red thought he could hear it creaking like a rusty hinge.
“We will bring the vengeance of God upon them” |
Red was leaned forward, hands clasped between his knees, staring at the porch floorboards between his boots. Nodding his head.
“I’m going.” It wasn’t a request.
The Reverend tucked his chin a fraction in assent. “I expected you would.”
| Copyright © 2022 by Roger Owens |
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