The Road to Memphis (23 page)

“What you do that for?” I asked, as if it were a puzzle I was trying to solve. I didn’t feel uncomfortable about the kiss. I just wanted to understand it.

He shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Just got moved to do it, I s’pose. What?” he asked, his eyes smiling. “Am I crazy?”

“You’re the one said it.”

“Yeah,” he admitted with a laugh. “Yeah . . . guess so. That’s what some folks keep telling me, anyway: I’m crazy.” He looked away from me. “Cassie . . . Cassie, there’s something I been wanting to ask you—”

He didn’t get the chance. Two white men carrying shotguns emerged abruptly from the forest and came toward us. We got
up from the stumps. The men eyed us, then the older of them said good day and asked what we were doing there. Being quicker with my mouth than Moe, I answered. “Had car trouble.”

The man glanced over at the Ford. “That car yonder?”

“Yes, sir.”

The man looked at Moe. “That your car, boy?”

Moe cleared his throat. “No, sir.”

“Whose is it, then?”

“This here girl’s brother’s.”

“Well, where he at?”

Moe again cleared his throat. “Gone to see if maybe he couldn’t fine a place where he can buy us a fan belt for it. Fan belt on it’s shot.”

“Ain’t gonna find no place ’round here open on a Sunday mornin’ ’less’n he go back a ways to that highway truckstop. That where he gone?”

“’Fraid I don’t know,” answered Moe. “He just took off walking.”

The man squinted, then went over to the car and walked slowly around it. He saw Clarence sleeping in back and stopped. “What y’all doin’ this far off the road?”

Moe hesitated; I didn’t. “Pulled in here to sleep.”

“This far off the road?”

“Yes, sir. Couldn’t park on the highway and didn’t want to park on that road leading in. Just wanted to sleep. But then when we woke up and tried to get this car started, it just wouldn’t start. Found that fan belt busted.”

The man grunted, seeming to think that tale plausible, and walked to the front of the Ford. “Let me see that fan belt ya talkin’ ’bout.”

“Her brother, he took it with him,” said Moe.

“Well, let me see under here anyway.” He gave the hood a slap.

Moe and I looked at each other, then Moe went over and put up the hood. The man stooped down to look. After a few moments he straightened. “My boy here and me, we maybe have what ya need. Y’all goin’ a spell, it won’t last ya long, but it oughta do ya till ya get to a city. Can pick another one up there.” He motioned to Moe. “You, boy, come on with us. Keep us a lotta old parts up at the house. You can find what you need, you can have it.”

Moe glanced at me, then back at the man. “Thank you kindly, sir, but we don’t wanna cause you no trouble—”

“Ain’t no trouble,” said the man, then he turned and started back into the woods with his son.

“I best go with them,” Moe told me.

“Are you crazy?” I hissed. “You can’t go with them!”

“I gotta, Cassie, else they be wonderin’ why—”

“Let them wonder—”

“Look, Cassie, they might just have what we need, and could be Stacey and Little Willie won’t be finding a fan belt in that town. They don’t, then what do we do?”

The man stopped and looked back. “’Ey, boy! You comin’?”

Moe nodded and moved off. I caught his arm. “I’m going to wake Clarence so we can go with you.”

“No! Y’all wait here for Stacey.”

“But, Moe—”

“Got no time, Cassie,” he said and pulled away. “Got no time.” As he turned I saw his fear. I think he saw mine, too, but he left me anyway.

I returned to the car, figuring to wake Clarence; but I didn’t. There was nothing that Clarence could do except go after Moe, and maybe that would just make things worse. Maybe all three
of us should have gone with the men, and just left a note for Stacey and Little Willie, but the men might have wondered about that too. Anyway, the decision was made. Moe was gone. I leaned against a tree and waited. I felt all alone.

Finally Stacey and Little Willie returned. “What’s the matter?” Stacey asked when I ran to meet them. He glanced around the glade. “Where’s Moe and Clarence?”

I told them.

“That fool, he done what?” exclaimed Willie.

“How long ago Moe leave?” asked Stacey.

“About an hour. Think we ought to try and find him?”

“You got any idea where to look?”

“Just know which way they went,” I said, pointing to the east.

Stacey stared out at the forest and heaved a heavy sigh.

“Well, anyway,” said Little Willie, “look on the bright side. Leastways maybe he’ll come back with the fan belt we need.”

“You didn’t get one?”

“Couldn’t find any place open.” Stacey took a few steps, then stopped and gazed out at the trees.

“Moe don’t bring one back,” said Willie, “we gonna hafta wait here till morning, or one of us gonna hafta hitch to Memphis and get the thing. Man we met said that’d be the closest place we can find something open on a Sunday.”

“Moe doesn’t get back,” I said, “I don’t suppose it much matters about the fan belt.”

Stacey noted my pessimism with a glance. Little Willie looked at me, too, and shook his head. Then we heard someone coming on the forest trail. We waited, hoping it would be Moe. It was. He stepped grinning from the forest, holding the much needed fan belt in his hand. As he held it up for us all to see, I ran to him and gave him a hug, fussing all the while. “Don’t
you be coming out here grinning!” I warned. “We’ve been worried to death about you!”

Moe grinned down at me, and his eyes danced.

“See you got the fan belt,” said Little Willie.

“Yeah . . . yeah, I did.”

Stacey took the fan belt and looked it over. “Any trouble?”

Moe said no. “Gone back up to those men’s place, and like the man said, they had a lotta old parts and things. They told me to just go ahead and look for what I needed. Took me awhile, but I found it.”

“How much you have to pay?”

“Not a thing. They said I could have it.”

“Well, that was nice of them,” Stacey admitted and looked somewhat apprehensively to the woods again.

“Yeah, nice, all right, but how come?” said Willie. Moe and I didn’t say anything, for we understood their suspicions. It most times paid to be suspicious of white folks, even in good deeds.

Stacey glanced around, expecting the men to come back. “We’d best get this fan belt on and get out of here.”

“Yeah, I can sure enough agree with that, son,” said Willie. “Them scounds could come back and maybe not be so nice. Could be they—”

There was a sudden scream. We turned back toward the car and saw Clarence bursting from it, his hands to his head and hollering like a madman.

“Clarence!” cried Little Willie, sounding a bit exasperated with him. “What the devil the matter with you, boy, carrying on like some fool—”

Clarence fell to his knees and screamed again. Then he lowered his head and began pounding it against the ground.

We ran to him.

Stacey knelt beside him. “Clarence! Clarence! What is it?”

Clarence didn’t answer. He continued to beat his head against the ground, and Stacey and Moe tried to hold him. Clarence thrashed his arms about and would not be stilled. “Oh, Lordy, Lordy!” he screamed. “It’s killing me! It’s killing me! Oh, Lordy, it’s killing me!”

I knelt in front of him and tried to pull his hands from his head. “Clarence?”

Little Willie looked on irritably. “What’s the matter with you, hoss? You doing all this carrying on like this ’bout a little ole headache? Thought you called yourself a soldier!”

Clarence was crying openly now, his body writhing on the ground.

“Damn, man!” Willie snapped. “What kind of headache you got? Where’s that B.C. powder?”

“I think he took them all,” I said.

“Then we oughta try and find him some more, then,” said unsympathetic Little Willie. “Keep him from carrying on so.”

Moe shook his head. “Won’t be anything open, seeing it’s Sunday—”

“Besides,” said Stacey, “I’m thinking BCs won’t do much good now. Looks like something more than a headache wrong with him.”

Suddenly Clarence wrenched away from us, leapt up again, hands to his head, and ran across the glade faster than I had thought would have been possible with all his pain. We ran after him. Screaming, he dashed deeper into the woods. We followed, but we couldn’t catch him. He was running like a madman. Finally he tripped and fell down a rocky slope, and we found him sprawled out flat and unconscious with a bloody gash along the side of his head.

“He out like a light!” exclaimed Willie.

I knelt on raw knees beside Clarence, then looked frantically up at Stacey. “We’ve got to get him some help. Stacey, we’ve got to get him some help!”

“But where can we go?” said Moe, looking and sounding bewildered. “We don’t know anybody—”

“Hospital,” decided Stacey. “We’ll have to try and find a hospital.”

“A hospital!” exclaimed Willie, staring at Stacey as if he had lost his mind. “Man, you gone mad? You think we gonna find a hospital take colored folks way out here?”

Stacey ignored him. “Help me get him up.”

Little Willie ranted on. “White folks ain’t gonna let Clarence in no hospital!”

“He got on a uniform,” retorted Stacey. “They ought to allow him something!”

Willie shook his head. “You crazy, man!”

“Just help us get him in the car, will ya?”

Little Willie grumbled on as he helped Moe and Stacey carry Clarence back. They put him inside the car, and I tried to stop the bleeding by wrapping his head with the boys’ pocket handkerchiefs. As I sat with Clarence, his head slumped on my shoulder, Stacey, Moe, and Little Willie got the fan belt on and reconnected the loose wires. Then Stacey started the car. There was an awful grinding sound to the engine, but at least the car could move. We left the glade and headed north again.

The nearest town looked much like the town of Strawberry, sad and red and desolate-looking on this Sunday morning. As we rode slowly over the main road we saw a colored boy of around fourteen or so and asked about a hospital. The boy frowned, then muttered the word as if he had never heard it spoken before. “Hospital?”

“That’s right,” said Stacey.

“We ain’t got us no hospital.”

“Nothing at all? What about a doctor?”

The boy studied on the matter. “Ain’t got us no doctor neither.”

“What about the white folks? They got one?”

“Yeah . . .”

“Well, where can I find him?”

He shrugged. “Maybe at they hospital—”

“And where’s that?” asked Stacey, his patience giving way.

The boy shook his head. “Y’all can’t go there—”

“Yeah, we know. Where is it?”

The boy pointed straight ahead, eyeing us, though, as if we all belonged at the state mental institution. Stacey thanked the boy and drove on. When we reached the hospital, we got Clarence out of the car and to an entrance. A nurse stopped us there. “Y’all can’t come in here,” she said. A few feet away a colored cleaning woman was mopping the hallway floor. She stopped her mopping and stared at us much as the boy had done.

Stacey glanced at Clarence, whom he and Moe were holding upright between them. “We know . . . but this fella here, he’s a soldier, and he’s sick something awful. Something’s wrong with his head. He was having some terrible headaches, and then he fell, hit his head, and knocked himself out.”

The woman looked at the blood seeping through the handkerchiefs. “Well, I’m sorry . . . but y’all can’t bring him in here. We don’t treat nigras here.”

“Well, what’re we supposed to do? You’ve got no colored hospital.”

The woman looked flustered. “Well, y’all’ll have to go on
to Memphis or back to Jackson, where they can take care of y’all.”

“But we can’t make it that far! He’s hurt bad! Can’t you—”

“Nurse!” A man in white was coming down the hall. “What’s going on here?”

The nurse turned to him, waited until he reached her, then looked at us as if we were the cause of some personal embarrassment to her. She seemed chagrined to have to explain the connection. “They . . . they want to bring that boy there in here for treatment, Doctor McClurg. I told them—”

“Yes,” said the doctor, cutting her off and sparing her from mouthing any further embarrassment. He set cold eyes on us. “Y’all niggers know y’all got no business here.”

Clarence began to moan again; he was coming to.

“Now, y’all get from here!”

“But his head—” said Stacey.

“Now!”

Stacey started to say something else, but then the cleaning woman, standing behind the folks in white, shook her head in a warning, and Stacey said no more. After all, it was their hospital, like it was their laws that said they didn’t have to admit colored folks to it, and we couldn’t fight them on it. They ruled the hospitals like they ruled everything else.

We took Clarence back to the car. As Stacey started the motor the cleaning woman came running out, waving for us to stop. “Y’all come on with me,” she said in a hoarse kind of whisper. “Just drive this car on ’round to the back. There be three doors there. Y’all stop at the first one. I meet y’all!” Then she darted back into the hospital entrance and disappeared.

“Well, what we supposed to make of that?” I wondered.

“Guess we best find out,” said Stacey. He drove to the back
of the hospital and stopped at the first door, as the woman had instructed. We waited several minutes before the woman appeared. When she did, she glanced out cautiously, then hurried to the car and peered inside. “Seen y’all inside there talkin’ to that ole Doctor McClurg. Like talkin’ t’ a wall! What’s the matter wit’ the boy?”

“You know medicine?” I questioned.

“Knows somebody who do.” She studied Clarence. “What y’all done for him?”

“He’s been taking B.C. powder since yesterday,” Stacey said. “This morning he ran out, but wasn’t anything open to get him any.”

“B.C. powder, huh? Y’all wait here a minute. I’ll get ya some.” Then she ran back inside the hospital. She was gone only a few minutes. When she returned, she pulled a thin tissue of paper from her apron. “Give him this,” she said.

We just looked at the tissue. We didn’t know anything about this powder.