The Bottoms (29 page)

“Red’s Daddy thought he put three children in Miss Maggie’s belly,” Doc Tinn said. “Two girls and a boy. All three of them children turned out white-lookin’. Red’s two sisters was raised in the black community until they was four or so. Miss Maggie seen they could pass for white, and she had relatives help them girls. They went up North somewhere. Story is, and it might not be true, is them girls was adopted by white folks wantin’ babies, and they don’t even know them girls are colored.

“Red, bein’ a boy, well, old man Woodrow wanted him at first. He was raised as his son, and his wife had to claim she gave birth to him. They kept it hid somehow.”

“Red know he’s got colored in him?” Grandma asked.

“No. And I don’t know it for sure. I’m tellin’ things I’ve heard. But I believe ’em. Red, he loves Miss Maggie ’cause she darn near raised him. He just come up thinkin’ he was white and she was his nanny and wet nurse.”

“Wait a minute,” Grandma said. “You said Mr. Woodrow thought he put three children in Miss Maggie’s belly. Thought?”

“You’re a good listener and a smart lady,” Doc Tinn said. “The third child, the youngest, that was Red. But in this case, it wasn’t old man Woodrow who put him there. It was Mose.”

At that moment, it was as if the roof had fallen in on us.

“Mose was part white,” Grandma said.

“Yes,” Doc Tinn said.

“And Red was a kickback to that part of Mose.”

Doc Tinn nodded.

“You look real close, ’cept for the size, Red and Mose were
the spittin’ image of each other. Red hair, freckles, and them leaf-green eyes. And there’s another thing she told me. Mose, his Daddy was the old man Woodrow’s Daddy.”

“Any way Red could have known?” Grandma asked.

“Not unless Miss Maggie told him. I don’t think she’d have told me had she not been half delirious. She’s proud of him. He made somethin’ of himself. Then again, he don’t know he’s colored, don’t know Miss Maggie’s his mother. She ain’t totally happy about all that.”

“Why doesn’t she tell him?” I asked.

“She thinks way things are is best, I figure. He gets treated a lot better as a white man than a black.”

I knew then why Miss Maggie had not wanted to talk about Red the other day. Why she had become so upset.

“Once again, I mention this only because Red Woodrow is puttin’ the pressure on folks here in the community to keep what they know in the community. He don’t want colored business flowin’ into white business. But it ain’t all hatred on his part. He may not know he’s colored, but in spite of what he says, he’s got a good streak. He’s thinkin’ it gets out more, whites are gonna get upset more, and it’s the coloreds gonna suffer. Things ain’t always how they look.”

“And the killer?”

Doc Tinn shrugged. “I don’t know any more than I told you. But if it’s like some other murders, like the Jack the Ripper murders in England, he’s gonna grow bolder, and more violent. Right now he’s takin’ women he don’t think matter. But he may not stay doin’ that. He might decide any woman is fair game. Man like that, he’s playin’ games with the law and everyone else. He don’t think he can be caught. He don’t think he’s doin’ anything wrong.”

By the time Grandma said her goodbyes and her and Camilla poked and laughed at each other a bit, the rain was coming down hard, slamming on the tin roof like someone was beating it with a chain. The air was heavy but cool with the rain. Outside the store’s open door you could see it splattering in the mud street, running ruts across the road. It was growing darker by the moment.

“Y’all ought to wait it quits rainin’,” Camilla said.

“I don’t want my daughter to worry about us,” Grandma said. “Besides, we’ll take it easy.”

We rushed out to the car, and by the time we were inside we were soaking wet, and chilly. Grandma started off. I said, “Did we learn anything, Grandma?”

“I don’t know, Harry. In the detective books they just keep askin’ questions of people, and finally someone tells someone somethin’ that matters. We did hear some interestin’ stuff, but I don’t know it helps any. Time will tell.”

Just outside of town, something stumbled through the rain, out into the road and stopped.

It was a naked black man. He was holding his privates, shaking them at the car, as if it were something he might use to flail the hood. He had his mouth open and seemed to be making some kind of sound, but over the motor and the rain, it was impossible to hear him.

Although I had never seen him before, I knew immediately who it was by reputation.

“Root,” I said.

“What?” Grandma said.

“That’s his name. He’s harmless.”

“You mean Camilla’s boy William?”

“They call him Root now,” I said. “He ain’t right in the head.”

Root stumbled out of the road, releasing himself, throwing
his hands to sky, talking to the heavens. He wandered into the woods with his hands up and disappeared.

“Well, my goodness,” Grandma said. “He’s certainly … large.”

I
n the dark rolling wetness of the rain, Grandma lost sight of the road and we found ourselves driving toward the woods. Trees seemed to leap at us.

By the time Grandma realized her mistake, we were sliding on grass and mud. The car turned sideways, slid in slow motion, as if on greased glass, and came to a stop with the rear end gently bumping against a sycamore tree.

“Goddamnit!” Grandma said.

She tried to drive the car out, but the more she tried, the more the tires churned the grass into mud, and the deeper they buried.

“We’re stuck, Harry. We got to walk.”

“I can walk, Grandma. I’ll get Daddy to come back and get us.”

“I got us into this, I can walk out and get wet with you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I know, but it’s what I want. The idea of sittin’ and waitin’ don’t appeal to me. Look under that seat there.”

I reached under me. There was a pretty good-sized wooden box with a latch.

“Open it up,” Grandma said. “Let’s see what all I still got in it.”

There was a flashlight, small pistol, some first-aid stuff, matches, a box of .32 shells, and a road flare.

“You tote that for me,” Grandma said.

I locked the box, we got out and started walking. The rain was very hard, and soon it turned to ice. Hail in the middle of the summer, and it was pounding us so violently, we took a trail off the road and wandered into the woods, hoping the trees would give us some respite against it.

It was dark and the air was blurred by rain and hail, but it didn’t take long before I realized the trail we were on led to the Swinging Bridge.

I told Grandma as much.

“That means we aren’t far from Mose’s shack,” Grandma said. “We can hole up there.”

I thought about that. I remembered the shack being surrounded by townfolks. Not far from the shack, Mose had been strung up. I didn’t want to go down that trail to the shack, but the hail didn’t leave us much choice.

As we broke out of the trees into the clearing that led down to the river and to Mose’s shack, the hail hammered us as if trying to drive us into the ground. It was knocking knots on my head and the rain was chilling me to the bone. It was dark as night now, and Grandma took the flashlight out of the box and we used that as we hurried down the hill that led to the shack. We burst in through the half-open door. A raccoon, startled at our presence, jumped back and hissed at us.

Grandma pushed me along the wall and left the door open, the startled coon didn’t want to leave. Grandma took a chair and poked it and it ran out the open door, disappeared into the rain and hail. I almost felt sorry for it.

After Grandma closed and bolted the door with the wood bar, she poked the flashlight around. The place had been turned inside out. Mose’s few clothes were strewn about. There was flour dumped and a few tins and broken jars of food lying on the floor. I didn’t know if the mob or animals had done that after Mose’s death.

Lying on the floor, next to a broken jar of food that had gone rotten, was a photo of a colored woman in a frame. There was also a loose picture of what I figured was Mose’s son, the one that had gone out and never come back. It was stuck in the frame with the picture of the woman, just pushed into the edge of it. The picture had faded considerable. The boy appeared to be about eleven. I looked at the picture real close, realized it was a white boy’s picture cut from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue, the features colored dark with pencil. I wasn’t exactly sure what that was about. Not then. Not now. The woman was very dark and her features were not particularly distinguishable. I set the frame on the table.

In the corner of the room was a simple wood frame with a mattress on it and some covers strewn across it.

“Kind of smells in here,” Grandma said.

“Well, it ain’t Mose’s fault. It didn’t stink when he lived here.”

Grandma put her arm around my shoulders. “I know, Harry.”

The storm grew more violent, dark and thundery with cuts of lightning slashing through Mose’s two windows.

“I’m exhausted and cold, Harry,” Grandma said. “It’s gonna be a little wait. I’m gonna to lay down. There’s room for two.”

Grandma sat on the edge of the bed, gave me the flashlight. She suddenly looked her age.

“You all right, Grandma?”

“Of course. I’m just old. And my heart gets kind of tired now and then. Beats funny. I rest a bit, I’ll be all right.”

Without another word, she lay on the bed and pulled a cover
over her. I took the spare one and put it over my shoulders and sat in a chair at the little table. After a while I got up and picked up the canned goods and put them in the shelf. I put the photo and the Sears and Roebuck cutout in the center of the table. I sat in the chair again with the blanket around me, turned out the flashlight, and closed my eyes.

I hadn’t been sleepy, it being midday and all, but there was something hypnotic about the pounding rain and hail, the darkness. I could hear water leaking through the roof as well, dripping in a far corner of the shack.

I focused on that sound and fell asleep to it.

I was dreaming of Mose. Of how they must have beat on his door until he opened it, and then they pulled him out. Then Daddy showed up and he thought he was going to be all right, but he wasn’t. The fear he must have felt, the pain of strangling, feeling his life flying away from him, and for no reason at all, other than the color of his skin.

I jumped awake to a knocking sound.

I jerked my head around, looked at the rain-streaked window, and yelled, “Grandma!”

Grandma came awake. “Harry? Harry?”

“The window.”

She looked. There was a dark face in the window, horns on its head. It was looking in the glass at us, tapping with its knuckles. Rivers of rain fled down the glass, blurring the face.

The Goat Man.

Grandma sprang awake, tried to get hold of the box she had placed by the bed. She managed to kick it and slide it under the table.

The face went away. The door shook. The wooden bar held. There came a noise from outside like someone trying to talk
with a mouthful of mush. The door was tugged harder, and for a moment I thought it might break free.