The Twelve-Mile Straight

It gave her an idea. One morning when she was seven, when her father had gone to town, she found a jar of syrup in the pantry, made from their own sweet sorghum. She stripped down to her britches and painted herself with it, using the brush they used for basting. She covered every exposed inch, from her widow’s peak to her toes. When Ketty came into the kitchen carrying Nan on her hip, she let out a holler.

Elma said, “Look, Ketty! I’m Nan’s sister.”

The sorghum wasn’t as soothing as the aloe and black tea, nor was the kerosene that Ketty used to scrub it off. She poured it right into the water in the tub on the porch, and it stung worse than any sunburn. “You like playing around like a colored child, do you? Lucky your daddy ain’t here,” she said, holding Elma’s face and scrubbing her chin. “I won’t be telling him, and I suggest you don’t, either.”

“He won’t be mad, Ketty. He done the same thing hisself when he was a boy.” Elma told the story of when her father and his friend String, George Wilson’s son, had painted themselves with tar to play like colored folks. That was the first time George had told String not to play with Juke, but it wasn’t the last. It was true that it was Juke’s idea. He’d found the tar in a pail in the shed. It was the tar they used to paper the shack. The shack smelled of it, and as a child living there Juke had loved the smell and later he loved it because it smelled like that day with String, and now Elma loved it too.

Ketty shook her head and scrubbed some more and said, “You both crazier than a rat trapped in a tin shithouse. Ain’t enough kerosene on God’s earth for you fools.” Then, her voice softening, she said, “I reckon I should be glad this ain’t tar.” Ketty sent her to the creek to wash off the kerosene.

Now Ketty was gone, the only mother Elma knew. It was the three of them, Juke, Elma, and Nan, living in the big house, and though it all belonged to George Wilson—the house, the mules, the seeds in the ground—it was easy to think it was theirs, that they weren’t true sharecroppers, since other than the Wilsons the only ones they shared with were each other. They didn’t struggle the way of the other halvers-hands down the Straight, farmers with eight, ten, twelve mouths to feed, who wandered from county to county each harvest, who even before the hard times came were on hard times. The big house had glass in the windows and rugs on the floors. The Lord had blessed them.

(“Nigger lover think he mighty, three a them in that big house,” a neighbor might be heard to say. And then the wife would remind him, “You ain’t talk like that come slaying time, when you needed him to do for the hogs.” And the husband wouldn’t remind her, because she didn’t like to be reminded, how much he did like Juke Jesup’s gin.)

So the three of them worked the same fields, ate at the same table, shared the same Bible, Elma reading to Juke and Nan each night. And now that Nan slept in the big house—well, if they weren’t sisters, what were they?

Every Sunday morning since she was a girl (except for the winter ones, when she would heat water for the tub on the porch), Elma would follow the clay footpath through the pines behind the big house to bathe in the creek. A hundred years before, the Creek River had been called the Muskogee, for the people who had lived on its shores, but after the tribe was forced west and the land surveyed and mapped and distributed to whites, the town’s founder had renamed it the Creek, the tribe’s more civilized name, and a more suitable one for modern Florence. (It was the age when Georgia named her towns after the craggy city-states of ancient Europe—Athens, Sparta, Rome—though Florence was the name of the founder’s mother, who went by Flo.) That made the creek, when the river trickled into one, Creek Creek. George Wilson’s grandfather had been one of the men distributed two hundred acres of land along the road they called the Twelve-Mile Straight, for that was the age when they named a thing for what it was and no more. The Straight was straight, no kinks or curves, just a rise here or there, barely a hill.

Nobody called Creek Creek by its name. Some—the few Black Dutch left in the Indian village east of town—still called it the Muskogee. Most just called it the creek. Elma called it Lizard Creek, for the lizards that darted at her ankles and also because from the sandhill bank, it was shaped like a lizard looking over its shoulder, and the surface was as green and scaly as a lizard’s back. Sunday mornings she’d string up her clothes on the lowest branch of the catalpa tree—the overalls she’d stepped out of, and the clean dress she’d change into—slipping the branch through the sleeves like an arm, so the clothes hung from the tree side by side, two friends keeping her company while she bathed with a soap cake in the creek. It was the place where her father had taught her to fish, plucking a fat catalpa worm from a leaf and threading the hook through its leopard hide. In the fall, Elma and Nan would gather the catalpa’s pods from the bank, long as their arms and rattling with seeds, and they would make music with them and weave them into wreaths.

Nan did not go to church with the family (what did she need with the Lord, Juke said, when He had already withheld his blessings?), and so she did not go to the creek with Elma on Sundays. It wasn’t proper to bathe with coloreds, Juke said, though Elma had washed Nan in the tub when she was small, though they went to the privy together, and though Elma had shown Nan how to fold a rag when her bleeding came last year, just as Ketty had shown her. Nan bathed on Tuesdays, the day they did the wash, and Elma’s father bathed in town at the mill when he made deliveries, in a shower stall with heated water.

So late one September night in 1929, when Elma went to the privy and heard footsteps on the path to the creek, she thought it must be the new field hand. The footsteps were slow, careful. Branches snapped. Genus Jackson had lived in the tar paper shack for little more than a month. Other than the field hand they called Long John, he was as tall a man as she’d seen, but he made his way through the cotton field hunched over on his long, cornstalk legs, his back sickle shaped, his gait tight, as though hiding some pain in his gut. He’d said barely ten words since he’d come to the crossroads. He didn’t join in the songs while he picked. He kept his distance from Elma and Nan, from Ezra and Long John and Al and, when they were there, Al’s three sons. He hid his face under his hat. But the other day, when the gate to the chicken yard had come off its hinge, he’d helped her lift it back into place, and when he’d smiled she saw that one of his front teeth was missing, and when she looked again she saw that it wasn’t missing but gray as a fossil. He told her his name. He asked for hers, and nodding at the house, Nan’s. The tooth made him look like a little child and an old man at the same time. He was, she noticed, not much older than she was, which was seventeen. On his head was a corn-shuck hat and on his feet were a pair of boots made from what looked like alligator hide.

Now he walked without shoes, and without a lantern. There was a slice of moon to see by, and under its white glow, through the privy window, Elma watched him disappear in his union suit through the pines.

It was Saturday—maybe Sunday already. In a few hours, she would wake to do her milking and her feeding and then she would go down to the creek herself. And in fact the next morning, the cake of lye soap she’d left in the crook of the catalpa tree wasn’t yet dry. She had made it herself, with bits of cornmeal and lavender leaf, in the same tub where she washed the laundry and cooked the lard. She held the soap to her nose, then ran it roughly between her legs, then dried and dressed and went to church with her father.

That evening, after a day of picking, after supper, she knocked on the door of Genus Jackson’s shack with a slice of blackberry pie. He wasn’t there. She looked in the fields, in the yard, the barn. She found him in the hayloft. He tossed a bale of hay down the ladder and almost knocked her over with it, knocked the plate out of her hands instead, sent the fork flying. He raced down the ladder fast as he could in those boots, swearing under his breath. “Miss Elma! I could a crushed you flat!”

Under the bale, the pie was smashed to muck. Elma laughed, and then Genus laughed at her laughing, and then seeing the tooth’s dull shine made her stop laughing and filled her chest with an icy heat. She shook the hay from her apron. “Well, there goes one delicious slice of blackberry pie,” she said.

She could see he was pained by this. She wondered if he was sorry for her trouble or just hungry. He took breakfast and supper alone in his shack, and dinner with the other hands, under the cottonwood tree. Nan delivered it to him in a straw basket.

“I’m powerful sorry, miss,” he said. The barn cat appeared and began to lick the plate, and Elma let her. “And you just trying to do me a kindness.”

“What happened to your tooth?” she asked him, pointing to her own incisor. He touched the tooth. He had large hands and long fingers and fingernails the shape and color of the inside of an almond. She could smell the sweat on him, and her soap, lavender and lye.

“My auntie called it my shark tooth.”

“You were born with it?”

“Naw. I got kicked by a horse name of Baby.”

Elma laughed again. “Did it hurt?”

“Like the devil. She had the devil in her, that one. Horse the same color as the tooth. I reckon she didn’t want me to forget her.”

“It don’t look like that,” Elma said. “It’s pretty as a silver tooth.”

He smiled, showing it again.

“How come you walk bent over that way? Was that the devil horse too?”

“You ain’t afeared of asking questions, are you, miss?”

“My daddy says I got a loose tongue.”

“You ever carry a cotton bag over your shoulder?”

“Since I was a tot.”

“Well, you tall as I am, it’s inclined to bend you in half too.”

Then it was Genus’s tongue that got loose. He had questions for Elma, about the house, the farm, about Nan. With her mind Elma followed the sweat traveling down his temples. She traced the curve of his nostrils. They stayed out in the barn until the yard was in shadow.

“Stay here.” She held up a finger. “I’ll get you another slice of pie.”

But from the porch, Elma’s father saw her coming through the yard looking dazed, saw her smoothing her apron, pulling hay from her hair. He stood up from his chair. Where had she been? What was she doing in the barn? She was to bring no one no kind of pie, get in that house. And Elma went inside and Juke went to the barn, where he found Genus Jackson sitting on a hay bale, sweaty and satisfied, licking blackberry juice from the tines of a fork. When Juke returned to the house, he said to Elma, “Learned that boy not to come near you again. Don’t make me take the hoe to you too.”

He had never taken a hoe or a hand to her. She had not known him to take a hand to anyone. So she had said nothing. She had not protested. She had not explained. She did not know how bad a beating it had been. Later, when she suspected how bad, when she began to learn to protest, she would wonder why her father had kept Genus on the farm when he could have had a new man in the shack by dark. If only he had run him off the farm! But Genus woke up same as always and carried on, and so she did too. She believed she must have done wrong, that she had invited Genus’s punishment, and that she must be very careful.

The following Saturday, there was rain. They were all glad. Genus did not go down to the creek in the middle of the night, or Elma didn’t hear him.

But the Saturday after that, Elma heard his door open and close. She counted to one hundred, crept into the kitchen, and took the whole blackberry pie from the windowsill, where she’d left it to cool that afternoon. It would be her way of making amends for the hot water she’d put him in. There was no way to talk in the daytime, not with her father’s eyes on them. The moon was brighter tonight, near full, but her bare feet didn’t need it to find their way down the path. She knew which branches to move aside to avoid snapping, which roots and rocks to step over.

He was humming. She heard it as she came to the edge of the sandhill, before the land sloped down to the shore. Under the lowest-hanging turkey oak, she placed the pie on a flat rock and lay down, pressing her chest to the ground. She watched as Genus shed his union suit, took her soap from the catalpa, and waded into the water.

She had never seen a man the way the Lord intended. There had been men around her all her life, her father, Nan’s father, the landlord, the field hands from town, the last hired man who had lived in the shack—a scrappy, white-whiskered white man named Jeroboam who as far as Elma could tell didn’t bathe at all. She had seen nothing of them but their sunburnt backs. Now there was her beau Freddie Wilson, the landlord’s grandson, who liked to press his manhood upon her while he taught her to drive his Chevy. “Less go ride,” he’d say, and he’d sit her between his blue-jeaned legs, nearly in his lap, the jar of her daddy’s gin in his hand cool against her thigh through her dress, his left arm hanging a cigarette out the window, and he’d show her how to ease the engine into motion, how to work the pedals and turn the wheel without jerking the truck into next week. “That’s it, that’s it,” he’d say, his arms around hers on the wheel, the heat coming off his body like a sun-warmed shirt straight off the line, his pecker hard as a tree trunk against her tailbone. “Less go park in them trees,” he’d say, kissing behind her ear, his liquor breath thick as a swamp fog, and she’d say, “Freddie, quit,” and he’d say, “Gotdamn, Elma,” and she’d climb out of his reach and he’d drive her home. Goddamn, she allowed herself to say in her head. Goddamn if she didn’t like the way she felt in Freddie Wilson’s lap.

Under the moon, knee-deep in Lizard Creek, Genus Jackson stood humming. A slim brown branch hung between his legs. He lathered her soap between his hands. He washed his chest, his neck, under his arms. The cricket frogs called to each other from the bank. Gentle as a teapot, Genus poured a stream of piss into the water. She felt her body flush, the blood rushing between her legs.

It took all her will not to join him in his song, to join him in the water. But then what? She might spook him. He might call out. They might be heard. If her father found them, he’d take a hoe to both their hind sides. She looked at the pie, dark and dumb on its rock. What was she thinking, bringing a pie to a stranger in the middle of the night? Was he meant to eat it there, standing in the creek with his manhood hanging between them?

Besides, he would know that she’d followed him. What she needed was for him to come upon her. She lifted the pie, crawled out from under the branches, and tiptoed back up the path.

All week, at school, in the fields, in her bed, she counted the days to Saturday, when she would go down to the creek and wait for him. She imagined floating on her back in the creek, her hair swimming around her face like copper fish. Or she would sit on a rock on the bank, brushing it over her shoulder like a mermaid. Or she would be standing in the water where he had been, washing herself with her soap (that square of soap, the goose bumps of cornmeal, how they would brush against her skin), and he would come upon her. A vision. In her vision, she said, “Genus Jackson, have you been using my soap?”

Come Saturday, she listened to the sounds of the house settling down. As soon as she was sure her father was asleep, she slipped outside in her nightdress. It was October, and the clay path was cool under her feet. The light of day still paled the edge of the west field. The mules snuffed and snored in the barn.

Elma knew the sound of Mamie’s snoring, and of Archie’s shitting. She knew the sound a hog made just before it was slain, and the sound a stallion made when it was upon a jenny, and the sound the jenny made, which often as not was no sound at all. This was the sound she heard as she made her way down the path—the sound of one animal and the silence of another. The sound changed as she walked, a grunt, then a moan, and then nearly a hum. By the time Elma reached the end of the path, and the creek came into view, she did not want to look, but she did. She found her place on the sandhill under the skirt of the oak. It was so dark that at first the two silhouettes looked like round rocks in the creek. Then she made out the shoulders and heads above the water—the same shape, shorn of hair. If it hadn’t been for the sounds, Elma might have found beauty in their symmetry, two busts carved of black stone.

Above, a cloud drifted past the moon, and then the light caught the ripples of the creek and their open mouths, and both mouths now made a certain sound, a tongueless sound, one unlike any Elma had heard on the farm. The sound would stay in her ears for a long time, and later she would have to reckon that it was what the Lord intended, though at that moment it seemed that the two figures in the creek had invented it themselves.

The next Saturday, when Freddie Wilson directed Elma to drive his Chevy into the canopy of pines twelve miles west of town, she did. It was the place where the Straight dead-ended into scrubgrass, where no passing eyes could find them. Freddie looked as though he could hardly believe his luck, but he didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He shifted her off his lap and unbuckled his belt. Only if he would marry her, Elma said. Would he really marry her? Of course, he said. Of course what? she said, hand on his chest. He said, Of course I’ll marry you. And then Elma heard the sound again, though Freddie sounded more like a horse in a barn. Two months later, in the truck, when she told him her bleeding hadn’t come, he punched the window with his fist. It scared her so much she waited another month to tell her daddy, but her daddy wasn’t even mad, just nodded solemnly over his plate. He’s got to marry you now, he said. Long as he’ll do you right.

It wasn’t until she was far along, when the newspapers started using the word “Depression,” that Elma thought back to that fall and saw that the Crash had come then, not long after the night she first saw Genus Jackson disappear down the path to Lizard Creek. It was hard not to draw a line between the two, her following him, and what followed. Pregnant as a potbellied pig, she read the newspapers front to back—it was the one luxury her father allowed in those months—and she could feel the hot, inextinguishable flame of her badness, spreading beyond the horizon like fire on a field. Was it her watching, her wanting, that called the devil down to the creek? It seemed that way, even before the babies came. And after they did, and after Genus disappeared for good, it was hard not to feel that she’d caused the whole world to crash.

THREE

GENUS JACKSON HAD BEEN DEAD TWO HOURS WHEN A POWERFUL knock came at Sheriff Cleave’s door. He lived in the quarters below the jailhouse in the Third Ward, and he thought the ruckus was his fool guardsman, reporting a problem with a prisoner. Best he could recall the only one up there was Wolfie Brunswick, the raggedy-bearded drunk of a vet who was drying out in the bullpen. Last night Sheriff and the guard had rolled their chairs into the cell to play Georgia Skins with him, Sheriff and the guard drinking Cotton Gin in the office between hands, drinking it in the teacups that had belonged to Sheriff’s grandmother, clinking the cups daintily together, growing more and more boisterous, until they were drunker than the drunk himself and the drunk was beating them soundly, a fact that threw them into greater and greater hilarity, and more and more teacups of gin. They were playing for peanuts, real peanuts, and the dust of them was still caked in Sheriff’s teeth.

It wasn’t the fool guardsman at the door. It was George Wilson, a coat over his nightclothes, his silver head bare. Rarely had Sheriff seen him out of his pearl white suit. At the curb, his Buick idled. There was no driver waiting.

Sheriff, still in nightclothes himself, covered his own head with the hat hanging by the door. His first thought was the mill. A quarrel between two drunk lintheads on the graveyard shift. Maybe a quarrel with Wilson himself. There had been unrest in the mill village, you could say, doffers and spinners complaining of too many hours and too little pay, as folks were given to. Folks not showing up for their shifts, or showing up drunk. If they were drunk, they were drunk on Juke Jesup’s Cotton Gin, which Wilson ran himself, if “run” was the word for it, for it didn’t run far beyond the county, and mostly ran his own help into the ground. But he did not suggest this to George Wilson. It was Sheriff’s job to look away, and besides, Sheriff too was drunk on it. Years before, Sheriff’s father and Wilson’s brothers had all followed their fortunes north, and Sheriff and Wilson had stayed behind in the little county seat that no one beyond twenty miles could find on a map, and so their loyalty to each other was a tonic for their shame—that together they might make themselves worthy.

“It’s Jesup,” George Wilson said, standing at the door. So it wasn’t the mill—it was the gin. And then Sheriff thought of himself, of his own badge. Things had gone sour between Wilson and Jesup. Sour as they’d gone in the mill. Sheriff didn’t know why, but he could smell it. When Wilson said, “He’s gone and killed my man on the farm,” Sheriff had to hold himself up in the doorway. “He’ll say it’s Freddie, but it ain’t Freddie. Well, Freddie was there—I saw him with my own eyes when he come back to the mill—but he’s gone now.”

“Gone where?”

“Hell if I know. Gone.”

“Come in, George. Sit down.”

“No, thank you kindly. The man is still there. He’s there in the road at the mill, what’s left of him. Freddie cut him from his truck.”

“From his truck?”

“The men at the mill said he’d … he’d defiled Jesup’s daughter.” A thread of spit sprung from Wilson’s mouth and caught in his mustache. “That’s why he did it. I reckon Juke’s the one tied him to my grandson’s truck. But there’s a whole mess of them come out from the Straight.”

Sheriff had to look down at his feet. That a mob had gone through the county and lynched a man without so much as a courtesy whisper, that Sheriff had been having a tea party while it happened, that he hadn’t been given a chance to at least provide the necessary performance of peacekeeping—it was an embarrassment.

But maybe it was for the best, that his hands should be clean. The guardsman and the prisoner would vouch for him, when the papers came around.

He said, “What is it I can do for you, George?”

George Wilson tugged on his earlobe and sucked his square white teeth. “Quiet it down, honey, for pity’s sake.”

So Sheriff mounted his motorcycle and followed Wilson’s car back to the mill village. Through the bars of the bullpen, Wolfie Brunswick watched him buzz down the road like a tiny king, kicking up dust. He was no taller than a mule, Sheriff was, with a slick, mule-colored mustache, and a Homburg hat that looked ready to topple him. If he’d ever had a name other than Sheriff, a name his mother had singsonged over the cradle, it was long lost.

In the headlights of the motorbike, the men scattered over the mill village, back to their shacks. From George Wilson’s house Sheriff rang up the undertaker and waited for him to arrive and load the body into the Negro ambulance. On Monday, the local doctor would help arrange for the autopsy at the colored hospital in Americus. When no one claimed the body, it would be transported back to Florence and buried, what was left of it, in the cemetery behind the colored church, no marker but a dried gourd. By then Sheriff had gone knocking on doors throughout the village. Not one of the mill hands had seen it, they said, but all of them knew it was Freddie Wilson. “How do you know,” Sheriff asked them, “if you ain’t seen it?” And they all said that Freddie had it in him, that he was madder than a blind bull, that he was not the sort of man to be cuckold to no darky. The men didn’t say they’d had a grievance toward Freddie since he started as foreman, that he liked to knock them with his broom when they were too slow, and flick his cigarette butts in their looms, and put his hands under the dresses of their daughters and wives, and then disappear into the office and drink his grandfather’s gin and pass out on his leather couch. If Sheriff didn’t know better, he’d ask the lintheads if they had any prejudice against the Wilsons, or any allegiance to Juke Jesup, who when asked, when Wilson wasn’t looking, might sell a case or two straight to a thirsty mill hand for a song.