Place Called Estherville (21 page)

“Kathyanne, here’s your rent receipt for five months,” he said nervously, going close to her. He found himself breathing with difficulty, and he could not utter another word until he had stopped and gasped for breath. His chest felt constricted. His head felt a little dizzy, too. “It’s getting late now, and I’ve got to hurry along.” He paused, getting his breath painfully and slowly, and wondered what it was about Kathyanne that made him feel so strange in her presence. “I’m going to take care of the rent for you, Kathyanne. You won’t have to worry about it now.” He thrust the rent receipt at her clumsily and held it before her in trembling hand. “I’ll come back. A little later. After dark. And sign it. Here. Go on and take it, Kathyanne.” He tried to smile disarmingly, but all he could feel of the effort was a taut and unyielding constriction of the muscles of his mouth and cheeks.

Kathyanne leaned forward and looked at the scribbling on the yellow slip of paper, still not touching it. The apathetic chirping of the English sparrows on the fence was annoying and irritating. He wished somebody would come along with a shotgun and blast every last one of them to smithereens.

“Mr. Clyde, you’d better sign it now, if you ever mean to,” she told him, looking straight at him with unblinking eyes.

“What—what—do you mean, Kathyanne?” he asked, stumbling over the words. “What do you think I mean?”

“But couldn’t I—”

“Don’t you come back down here, Mr. Clyde,” she said harshly. “You stay away from me.”

He felt as if he were a misbehaving child being gently but firmly scolded by a loving mother.

“That’s the way it is,” she told him in a firm voice.

“But, Kathyanne—”

“No, Mr. Clyde,” she said, shaking her head.

The mocking chirp of the sparrows was maddening. He felt dazed and unsteady on his feet. He could see her head moving from side to side as if to remind him of what she had said, and then all at once, as though overcome by some unseen weight, his arm fell numbly at his side. He looked down and saw the slip of yellow paper clinging to his fingers.

Unable to face her after that, he found himself scrawling his signature on the rent receipt. His hand trembling, he laid the receipt on her lap and turned away to pick up his briefcase.

“Thank you, Mr. Clyde,” he heard her say distinctly as he walked away in the direction of the gate.

He turned the switch and started the engine. He thought he should be angry with her, and he was surprised to find that he was not. He was merely stunned by his failure. As soon as the automobile began to move down the alley, he saw Henry Beck standing beside the fence. Before he was out of sight, Henry leaped over the pickets and ran across the yard.

“I knew what that white trash was up to,” he said, loud and excited with anger. “I was watching all the time. I saw it with my own eyes. I know what I’m talking about now.”

“Saw what, Henry?” she asked, her large brown eyes sparkling in the low sun.

“Saw that white man give you something. After all that talking. That’s what. I saw as plain as day. White trash don’t come around handing out things for nothing. I know.”

She held up the rent receipt for him to see. “You mean this, Henry?”

“What’s it for?” he demanded. “Tell me that, gal.”

Smiling, she carefully tore the yellow paper into small pieces and let them fall to the ground between them.

“I don’t think we’ll need it, Henry,” she spoke to him in a gentle voice as she came closer and stood looking up admiringly at his troubled face.

C
ROSSING
I
NDIAN
C
REEK
a mile south of town, Ganus shifted the weight of the rabbit box from one shoulder to the other and, treading cautiously on the slippery cypress roots in the dank shadows of the overhanging Spanish moss, started up the ridge toward the blackjack thicket he had seen the day before. It was midmorning, and calm for a December day, although an ominous bank of yellowish-gray storm clouds was piling up over the western horizon, and here and there on the north slope of Pawpaw Ridge there still remained jagged gleaming patches of the past night’s frost sparkling in the winter sun.

Ganus was whistling in a carefree happy mood as he trudged up the ridge with the weight of the heavy wooden box first on one shoulder and then on the other, occasionally glancing ahead at a solitary sweet-gum tree near the crest of Pawpaw Ridge in order to keep his bearings. He had finished making the rabbit trap the night before and was anxious to set it, along with the nine other traps he had previously built and already set in thickets and rabbit runs on the west side of Indian Creek.

He had not yet looked at his traps that morning and he intended making the rounds as soon as he had set the new box and baited it with the fresh cabbage leaves from his sweater pocket. For the past several weeks, after giving up the attempt to sell ice from door to door in winter weather, he had been trapping from two to five cottontails almost every night and selling them for twenty-five cents each at a grocery store in Gwinnet Alley. Every day he took one of the rabbits home for Kathyanne to cook, and, besides, he could always sell the fur skin for ten cents, sometimes getting fifteen or twenty cents if the cottontail happened to be an exceptionally large buck.

After climbing the steep bank of one of the gullies in the ridge, which had never been contoured and terraced, and which, consequently, had been washed and deeply eroded by the heavy autumn rains for many years, he found that he was only about fifty yards from one of the tenant houses belonging to Glover Grimball, who owned most of the farm land between Indian Creek and the county line. Stooping forward, he lowered the heavy oakboard box to the ground and then sat down on it to rest a while. At first he did not pay particular attention to the tenant house, because it appeared to be unoccupied and abandoned, and he was more interested in getting to the blackjack thicket which he could see a quarter of a mile away near the crest of the ridge.

It was only a few minutes, however, before he found himself looking curiously at the desolate house on the sloping hillside. Like most of the dwellings Glover Grimball provided for his tenants—wage-hands, renters, and share-croppers alike—it was old and dilapidated and in want of paint and repairs. It had a flapping rusty tin roof, sagging joists, and a ridgepole that reminded Ganus of an old sway-back gray horse he had once seen turned out to pasture near the end of his days. The house consisted of two rooms and a lean-to kitchen. The bleak, weather-dark structure perched high off the ground on four time-bleached posts that looked as if they would surely collapse the next time the wind blew hard. A bare, windswept, sandy yard surrounded the building. A stunted lone Chinaberry tree, on the limbs of which were hanging a rotted mule collar and several rusting plowshares with broken points, stood beside the dug-well and windlass in the rear. The house, appearing to be anything but inhabited when Ganus first saw it, suddenly ceased to look deserted when a puff of pale wood-smoke drifted lazily from the flue.

He got up right away and shouldered the rabbit box and started walking toward the blackjacks. As he was crossing the corner of the yard, the flimsy front door swung open on squeaking hinges and Burgess Tarver’s wife, Mozelle, strolled pertly across the narrow sagging porch and leaned against the railing. Burgess Tarver, who was about twenty-five years old and blustery and burly, was one of Glover Grimball’s rent-farmers who raised cotton in summer and chopped wood in winter. Early in life he had become obsessed with a nagging, quarrelsome hatred for Negroes and it was generally said that the only means a Negro had of avoiding trouble with Burgess was to keep out of his sight at all times. Burgess liked to go to town on Saturday afternoons when the streets were crowded with Negroes from the country and try to pick a quarrel with some Negro by bumping him off the sidewalk and then daring him to do anything about it. If the Negro even said anything at all, it gave Burgess the opportunity to hit him with his fist or slash him with his pocketknife and warn him never to come back to Estherville again. No Negro, since all were fearful of the consequences, had ever been known to hit back at Burgess since he stabbed the first one who protested against being shoved off the sidewalk. Clearly remembering all that, and in dread of Burgess Tarver’s willful cruelty, Ganus, keeping his eyes straight ahead, began walking faster.

“Hello, Ganus,” Mozelle called from the porch as she sat down on the railing and watched him.

He recognized the dangerously insinuating tone of her voice at once and he walked faster than ever.

“Ganus! Hello!” she called again.

“Howdy, Miss Mozelle,” he replied politely, barely glancing at her as he hurried away from Burgess Tarver’s house.

He had reached the open field when he heard her calling him once more. At the same moment he felt a griping pain in the depths of his stomach. He went several steps farther before the acuteness of the pain forced him to stop and drop the rabbit box on the ground. It was agonizing to find himself in the presence of Burgess Tarver’s wife even though it was broad daylight and he was at that relatively safe distance from her, and he wished he had been able to get past the house without being seen. Mozelle, emaciated and sickly in appearance as the result of many years of malarial fever, was a tall pale-faced girl, still only fifteen years old, with colorless long hair usually tied with a strip of red muslin at the back of her neck. She was wearing a pair of mud-caked black oxfords and a single, shift-like, flannelette garment, garish-green in color, that drooped baggily from her shoulders and reached just short of her skinny bare knees. She had been married to Burgess Tarver for a little more than a year, and during that time she had twice run away from home. The first time she ran away, she went to Augusta with a Carolina fruit-tree salesman who saw her waving as he drove down the paved highway, which was a mile south, and stayed with him in a rooming house on Greene Street for five days. She came home after he left her and told Burgess a long involved tale about having been kidnapped and taken to a cave by three Holy Roller evangelists with long red beards. She was gone for three weeks the second time she ran away, finally coming home after having been taken to Orlando by the driver of an orange truck, then north to Baltimore in another orange truck, and, in the end, riding with one truck driver after another as far as Mobile. On this latter occasion, believing her actual experiences had been exciting enough to impress anybody, and that they could not be improved upon by exaggeration, she told Burgess truthfully what had happened to her during the three weeks she was gone, but he was sure she was making up such a fantastic tale and he never believed a word of it. The only other time she had given Burgess serious trouble was when he took her to a camp meeting near Lucyville one Sunday morning in July and she disappeared in the woods with three older boys and stayed the remainder of that day and all that night and did not come back to the church grounds until noon the following day. Her story that time was that she fell into the creek and was swept downstream by flood waters until she was rescued by a mud-cat fisherman just as she was about to be drowned in the Savannah River. Burgess, skeptical as usual, had threatened to chain her to the iron bed in the house unless she promised never to run away again, and, after he had beaten her, she tearfully promised not to give him any more trouble. However, lately she had been doing one thing after another to attract Reeves Houck’s attention. Reeves, another tenant farmer on Glover Grimball’s place who frequently worked with Burgess and shared labor, was afraid of what Burgess might do if he listened to Mozelle’s suggestions, and he tried to avoid her. Just the same she continued to egg on Reeves whenever she could find an opportunity.

Mozelle, squirming around on the railing all that time to attract Ganus’ attention, finally got up and walked to the end of the porch.

“What’s that funny-looking box for?” she asked Ganus in her drawling, whiny voice.

“It’s just an ordinary rabbit trap, Miss Mozelle.”

“Where’re you taking it to?”

“Just over yonder to the thicket,” he told her with a serious nod of his head toward the brownish clump of blackjacks on the other side of the cotton field. “I’ve got to hurry, Miss Mozelle. It’s getting mighty late in the morning.”

“Why you taking it over there?”

“To try to catch me some rabbits.”

“Why you want to catch rabbits?”

“I sell them, Miss Mozelle.”

“Why?”

He looked at her wonderingly, thoroughly distracted by the sight of her squirming body.

“Why, Ganus?”

“To make me some money, that’s why,” he said shortly.

Mozelle giggled.

“What you going to do with the money when you get it?”

“Buy me things with it.”

“What kind of things?”

“Just things.”

She giggled again. Ganus frowned worriedly.

“Will you buy me something, Ganus?”

“What—what’s that you say, Miss Mozelle?” he asked, wondering if she had actually said what he thought he had heard her say. “I didn’t hear you, exactly.”

“I want you to buy me something, Ganus.”

He was distressed by the proposal. The griping pain darted deep into his stomach, making him double up and squeeze his stomach with his arms for relief. He hastily looked behind him to see if Burgess Tarver had come over Pawpaw Ridge and had heard what Mozelle was suggesting.

“Will you, Ganus?” she said, giggling some more in her thin childish voice. “You’ll do it for me, won’t you now, Ganus? Huh, Ganus?”

He did not answer her.

“Please do it,” she insisted enticingly.

“You don’t mean—buy something to give you, do you, Miss Mozelle?”

She nodded eagerly. “Won’t you, Ganus?”

“Buy you what?” He held his breath after that until she had answered.

“Something pretty.”

He was deeply worried now. He shook his head determinedly.

“Please do it, Ganus.” She giggled, and then said, “Don’t you want to?”

“I couldn’t, Miss Mozelle.”