The Bottoms (14 page)

Daddy wasn’t as much fun to talk to because he always led his conversation around to telling me how I was supposed to live life and giving me lectures on this and that. I figured I knew all that and he could save his breath. I had learned the
best thing to do was to just sort of look interested until he ran out of steam.

Although the murder wasn’t on my mind much anymore, one day at home something came up about it and the talk Daddy had with Red Woodrow. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but Daddy said something about him, as if he were baiting some kind of hook, and Mama said he shouldn’t be so hard on Red, and though Daddy didn’t say anything to that, I could tell he didn’t like any kind of defense of Mr. Woodrow. I could also tell my mother regretted she had said anything.

Daddy began working at home a lot, going into the barbershop now and then. He had left the key to Cecil, who he had come to rely on heavily.

On this day, he had me and Tom go out and set Sally Redback to harness and plow. After a bit he came and ran the middles, had me and Tom walk behind him and pick up chunks of grass that didn’t get rolled good, turn them over, mash them with our feet so the roots would be exposed to the sun and die out.

He brooded for an hour or so over the thing with Red Woodrow, then gradually he ceased to mope and began to whistle. Lunchtime he told me to go to the house and bring back something to eat, as he was going to continue plowing.

Back at the house Mama packed a lard bucket with some cornbread and fried chicken, filled a fruit jar with pinto beans and put the lid on it. She put a couple bowls and some spoons with it all, jammed it in the bucket, had me go out to the well and draw up the buttermilk.

When I brought it back she poured the buttermilk into a couple of fruit jars and screwed rings and rubber toppers on them. Out of the clear blue, I said, “Daddy don’t like Red Woodrow, does he?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mama said. “They used to be best friends.”

I felt like I’d been poleaxed. “Best friends. You don’t mean that, do you, Mama?”

“I do.”

“They didn’t sound like best friends when they was talking that day over at Pearl Creek.”

“Daddy told me they talked. I think Red felt Daddy was horning in on his business.”

“Was he?”

“Not really.” She dried her hands and put the two jars of buttermilk into another lard bucket. “Daddy saved Red from drowning once.”

“They talked about that,” I said. “Daddy said how he had saved him from a suck hole.”

“Yes. I was there. We were on a barge. I wasn’t supposed to be there. Girls weren’t supposed to do that sort of thing. Be out late swimming with boys. I shouldn’t have been there.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing really. Red jumped off in the water, got in a suck hole, your Daddy jumped in and pulled him out, was nearly drowned himself. He was a strong swimmer back then.”

“How come they don’t like one another?”

“Me, I guess.”

“What about you?”

“Red was my beau, then I met your Daddy, and he became my beau. It happened on that barge trip. That was long ago. We were very young then.”

“So he didn’t like that you liked Daddy better?”

“That’s pretty much it. But I’ve felt bad about it some.”

“Because you didn’t go with him?”

“Oh, heavens no. But I hear tell all the time about how I broke his heart and it hardened him. About how he don’t like women no more. Won’t have anything to do with them. I don’t mean he’s funny or anything.”

“Funny?”

Mama suddenly realized what she had said and that it wasn’t something she wanted to discuss with me. Back then such matters were hardly mentioned, let alone discussed. Least not within family or polite company.

“Oh, nothing, honey. I just mean he got kind of mean-spirited about women and quit having anything to do with any of the decent ones.”

“What about the not decent ones?”

I knew what I was doing, but I tried to present it in an innocent way.

“Well, I don’t know about that,” Mama said, and I noticed her face had gone red. “Now you run on. Take this on out to your Daddy before the food gets cold and the buttermilk gets warm. Tom don’t like buttermilk, so let me get her some cold water.”

I knew Tom didn’t like buttermilk. Why was she telling me that?

Mama went out to the well with a fruit jar. I followed carrying the two lard buckets filled with food and drink. Mama dropped the bucket in the well, started winching it up.

I said, “So Mr. Woodrow liked you, but you liked Daddy, and Daddy don’t like that you liked Mr. Woodrow, and Mr. Woodrow don’t like you didn’t like him, and now he don’t like other women?”

“Something like that,” Mama said. “I liked Red. I just, well, it just didn’t work out between me and him.”

“I’m glad,” I said.

She pulled the bucket up on the well curb, poured from it into the jar, and put a lid on it. “Me too,” she said. “Now you run on.”

“Mama?”

“Yeah.”

“Why does Mr. Woodrow wear long sleeves rolled down all the time?”

“I’m sure I don’t know. Now go on.”

I put the water jar with the buttermilk jars, went on back to the field. Daddy and Tom had parked Sally Redback at the far end near the woods under a sweet gum tree. We sat under the sweet gum and ate. I stole side glances at Daddy from time to time and tried to think of him young and pulling Red Woodrow out of the water.

Actually, he was young when all this occurred, most likely in his thirties, but at my age he seemed ancient.

I wondered if that day he said he wished he hadn’t saved Red Woodrow was on account of the murder and what Red Woodrow had said, or on account of Mama.

I had never really thought much about my parents having a life before me, or having to choose each other at some point. I just took for granted they had been together forever. The fact Daddy might be jealous of Red Woodrow was strange to me. It was a side of my father I had never seen or even suspected. I began to realize why he had never really taken a shine to Cecil. Cecil flirted with Mama, and Mama kind of liked it, and Daddy didn’t.

When the air had turned cool and the nights were crisp as a starched shirt and the moon was like a pumpkin in the sky, Tom and me played late, chasing lightning bugs and each other. Daddy had gone off on a constable duty, and Mama was in the house sewing.

Toby had actually begun to walk again. His back wasn’t broken, but the fallen limb had caused some kind of nerve damage. He never quite got back to normal, but he could get around with a bit of stiffness, and from time to time, for no reason we could discern, his hips would go dead and he’d end up dragging his rear end. Most of the time he was all right, ran with
a kind of limp, and not very fast. He was still the best squirrel dog in the county.

On this night he was in the house, something he wasn’t supposed to be allowed to do, but when Daddy was gone Mama sometimes let him in and he would lie at her feet while she sewed.

So it was just me and Tom, and when we were good and played out, we sat under the oak talking about this and that, and in the back of my mind I was imagining the oak to be the Great Oak where Robin and his Merry Men met in Sherwood Forest. I had read of it in one of Mrs. Canerton’s books, and it had made quite an impression.

As we sat under the oak, talking, I had that same feeling Daddy had spoken of when he was down in the bottoms, in the deep woods, the feeling of being watched.

I stopped listening to Tom, who was chattering on about something or another, slowly turned my head toward the woods, and there, between two trees, in the shadows, but clearly framed by the moonlight, was a horned figure, watching us.

Tom, noticing I wasn’t listening to her, said, “Hey.”

“Tom,” I said. “Be quiet a moment and look where I’m lookin’.”

“I don’t see any—” Then she went quiet, and after a moment, whispered: “It’s him … It’s the Goat Man.”

The shape abruptly turned, crunched a stick, rustled some leaves, and was gone.

It scared me to think the Goat Man could come as far as our house, knew where we lived, but our land was connected directly to the bottoms and we were a long way from the Preacher’s Road.

“He must have followed us home that night,” Tom said.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t like him knowing where we live.”

“Neither do I.”

We didn’t tell Daddy or Mama what we saw. I don’t exactly know why, but we didn’t. It was between me and Tom, and the next day we hardly mentioned it. I think mentioning it made it too real. It was one thing to have seen the Goat Man in the bottoms, but up next to our house, that was another matter.

Besides, what would have been the point of telling Daddy? He didn’t believe in the Goat Man. You couldn’t believe in some things till you seen it or done it. Which made me think of that business about a woman’s clitoris. Was that real? Or was Doc Tinn just yarning?

For a few days I slept with one eye open, then the urgency of it passed. That’s one of the joys of being a kid. You can build up enthusiasm fast, and you can get over something just as fast.

A week after we saw the Goat Man the great rains came. Lightning danced along the skyline for two days, crackled and sparkled inside the cloud cover like lightning bugs caught up in a cheesecloth sack. Rain pounded the earth like Thor’s hammer, stirred the river and turned it muddy. Fishing ceased. Plowing ceased. Daddy didn’t bother trying to go into town to the barbershop at all. The roads turned to mud. The world turned wet and gray and all progress stopped.

With the rain came the wind, and on the third day of the great rain and the tree-bending bluster came a Texas twister.

A twister is a horrible, fascinating thing. One moment there’s a huge dark cloud, then the cloud grows a tail. The tail stretches toward the ground, and when it touches it begins to cry and howl and tear up the earth.

Its winds can carry men and cars and buildings away as easily as a woman might tote a handkerchief. It can rip huge trees out by the roots and toss them about, knock a train off its tracks and tear it up like so much cardboard. It can pull worms from the ground, toss pine straw through tree trunks, fling gravel like bullets.

This twister I’m telling you about tore through the bottoms and laid trees flat all along the riverbank for about two miles, ripped a swath through the woods that killed wildlife, demolished shacks, sucked ponds dry, toted off the fish and frogs and rained them on houses three miles away.

Old Man Chandler, gray-bearded with a nose that lay slightly on his left cheek, it having got that way by him being butted by a goat when he was a child, lived about ten miles from us, directly in the path of the twister.

The twister came down and got him, carried him away, and he lived to tell the tale.

Later, down at the barbershop, he was quite a celebrity. For three or four days he sat and told his story all day long to the men that came in for a haircut or a shave, or to just sit and bull. We did considerable hair-cutting business during that time, and I made several pennies sweeping up, and Tom made two nickel tips just for being cute and sitting there sucking on a peppermint stick.

Way Mr. Chandler told it, he was in his outhouse taking his morning constitutional when he felt a popping in his ears, a sensation like his head being packed tight in sawdust, and a sound like a train roaring across his property, but since he wasn’t within miles of a track, he knew that couldn’t be.

Without rising from his business, he lifted a leg and kicked the outhouse door open just in time to see his shack go to pieces and leap skyward amidst a black tangled wind already filled with debris.

Before he could get a page torn from the Sears and Roebuck and apply it to that part of his body he’d just dirtied, the twister took the outhouse, peeled it apart around him, and away Mr. Chandler went, Sears and Roebuck catalogue in hand, his butt hanging out. On those rare occasions when women dropped by to hear the story, Mr. Chandler conveniently forgot to mention he was in the outhouse when the twister struck. The tale
was slightly abbreviated then, with the storm tearing up the shack and the next minute he was up and in it.

He said he had no idea how long he was in the storm before he developed a sort of calm, realized he had lost the Sears and Roebuck catalogue as well as his pants. He said it was strange going around and around, like being in a suck hole. And he could see things in the funnel, spinning about. A cow, a goat head, fish, tree limbs, and lumber. And a naked colored woman. Her mouth wide open, screaming.

It was here in his story that he often got stopped, having stretched the credibility of some of the listeners. Key words that disturbed them were
woman, colored
, and
naked
. It wasn’t that a woman couldn’t be sucked up in a storm, or that she couldn’t be colored and naked, but it seemed to some this was putting the lace on the panties.

I suppose the reason for this was simple. Nudity wasn’t as common as it is now. These days, pick up a magazine, watch the TV, go to a picture show, and someone’s always shucking or nearly shucking their drawers. Back then a woman’s exposed ankle got men excited.