A Painted House (35 page)

“Wonder if he’ll make it home,” Gran said. This launched a round of stories about folks who’d disappeared. Pappy had a cousin who had been migrating with his family from Mississippi to Arkansas. They were traveling in two old trucks. They came to a railroad crossing. The first truck, the one driven by the cousin in question, crossed first. A train came roaring by, and the second truck waited for it to pass. It was a long train, and when it finally cleared, there was no
sign of the first truck on the other side. The second truck crossed and came to a fork in the road. The cousin was never seen again, and that had been thirty years ago. No sign of him or the truck.

I’d heard this story many times. I knew Gran would go next, and sure enough, she told the tale about her mother’s father, a man who’d sired six kids then hopped on a train and fled to Texas. Someone in the family stumbled across him twenty years later. He had another wife and six more kids.

“You okay, Luke?” Pappy said when the eating was over. All of his gruffness was gone. They were telling stories for my benefit, trying to amuse me because I had them worried.

“Just tired, Pappy,” I said.

“You want to go to bed early?” my mother asked, and I nodded.

I went to Ricky’s room while they washed the dishes. My letter to him was now two pages long, a monumental effort. It was still in my writing tablet, hidden under the mattress, and it covered most of the Latcher conflict. I read it again and was quite pleased with myself. I toyed with the idea of telling Ricky about Cowboy and Hank, but decided to wait until he came home. By then the Mexicans would be gone, things would be safe again, and Ricky would know what to do.

I decided that the letter was ready to be mailed, then started worrying about how I might accomplish mailing it. We always sent our letters at the same time, often in the same large manila envelope. I decided that I’d consult with Mr. Lynch Thornton at the post office on Main Street.

My mother read me the story of Daniel in the lions’ den, one of my favorites. Once the weather broke and the nights became cool, we spent less time on the porch and more time reading before bed. My mother and I read, the others did not. She preferred Bible stories, and this suited me fine. She would read awhile, then explain things. Then read some more. There was a lesson in every story, and she made sure I understood each one. Nothing irritated me more than for Brother Akers to screw up the details in one of his long-winded sermons.

When I was ready for bed, I asked her if she would stay there, in Ricky’s bed with me, until I fell asleep.

“Of course I will,” she said.

Chapter 27

After a day of rest, there was no way my father would tolerate further absence from the fields. He pulled me out of bed at five, and we went about our routine chores of gathering eggs and milk.

I knew I couldn’t continue to hide in the house with my mother, so I bravely went through the motions of getting ready to pick cotton. I’d have to face Cowboy at some point before he left. It was best to get it over with and to do it with plenty of folks around.

The Mexicans were walking to the fields, skipping the morning ride on the flatbed trailer. They could start picking a few minutes earlier, plus it kept them away from the Spruills. We left the house just before dawn. I held firm to Pappy’s seat on the tractor and watched my mother’s face slowly disappear in the kitchen window. I’d prayed long and hard the night before, and something told me she would be safe.

As we made our way along the field road, I studied the John Deere tractor. I’d spent hours on it, plowing, disking, planting, even hauling cotton to town with my father or Pappy, and its operation had always seemed sufficiently complex and challenging. Now, after thirty minutes on the road grader, with its puzzling array of levers and pedals, the tractor seemed quite simple.
Pappy just sat there, hands on the wheel, feet still, half-asleep—while Otis had been a study in constant motion—another reason why I should grade roads and not farm if, of course, the baseball career did not work out, a most unlikely event.

The Mexicans were already half a row down, lost in the cotton and oblivious to our arrival. I knew Cowboy was with them, but in the early light I couldn’t tell one Mexican from the other.

I avoided him until we broke for lunch. Evidently he’d seen me during the morning, and I guess he figured a little reminder would be appropriate. While the rest of his pals ate leftovers under the shade of the cotton trailer, Cowboy rode in with us. He sat alone on one side of the flatbed, and I ignored him until we were almost to the house.

When I finally mustered the courage to look at him, he was cleaning his fingernails with his switchblade, and he was waiting for me. He smiled—a wicked grin that conveyed a thousand words—and he gently waved the knife at me. No one else saw it, and I looked away immediately.

Our agreement had just been solidified even further.

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By late afternoon the cotton trailer was full. After a quick dinner Pappy announced that he and I would haul it to town. We went to the fields and hooked it to the truck, then left the farm on our newly graded road. Otis was quite a craftsman. The road was smooth, even in Pappy’s old truck.

As usual, Pappy said nothing as he drove, and this was fine with me because I also had nothing to say. Lots of secrets but no way to unload them. We crossed the bridge slowly, and I scanned the thick, slow waters below but saw nothing out of the ordinary—no sign of blood or of the crime I’d witnessed.

More than a full day had passed since the killing, a normal day of work and drudgery on the farm. I thought about the secret with every breath, but I was masking it well, I thought. My mother was safe, and that was all that mattered.

We passed the road to the Latchers’, and Pappy glanced their way. For the moment, they were just a minor nuisance.

On the highway, farther away from the farm, I began to think that one day soon I might be able to unload my burden. I could tell Pappy, alone, just the two of us. Before long Cowboy would be back in Mexico, safe in that foreign world. The Spruills would return home, and Hank wouldn’t be there. I could tell Pappy, and he would know what to do.

We entered Black Oak behind another trailer and followed it to the gin. When we parked I scrambled out and stuck close to Pappy’s side. Some farmers were huddled just outside the gin office, and a serious discussion had been under way for a while. We walked up on them and listened.

The news was somber and threatening. The night before, heavy rains had hit Clay County, north of us. Some places reported six inches in ten hours. Clay County was upstream on the St. Francis. The creeks and streams were flooded up there and pouring into the river.

The water was rising.

There was a debate as to whether this would affect us. The minority opinion was that the storm would have little impact on the river near Black Oak. We were too far away and, absent more rains, a small rise in the St. Francis wouldn’t flood anything. But the majority view was far more pessimistic, and since the bulk of them were professional worriers anyway, the news was accepted with great concern.

One farmer said his almanac called for heavy rains in mid-October.

Another said his cousin in Oklahoma was getting flooded, and since our weather came from the West, he felt it was a sure sign that the rains were inevitable.

Pappy mumbled something to the effect that the weather from Oklahoma traveled faster than any news.

There was much debate and lots of opinions, and the overall tone was one of gloom. We’d been beaten so many times by the weather, or by the markets, or by the price of seed and fertilizer, that we expected the worst.

“We ain’t had a flood in October in twenty years,” declared Mr. Red Fletcher, and this set off a heated debate on the history of autumn floods. There were so many different versions and recollections that the issue was hopelessly confused.

Pappy didn’t join the fray, and after half an hour of listening we backed away. He unhooked the trailer, and we headed home, in silence, of course. A couple of times I cut my eyes at him and found him just as I expected—mute, worried, driving with both hands, forehead wrinkled, his mind on nothing but the coming flood.

We parked at the bridge and walked through the mud to the edge of the St. Francis River. Pappy inspected it for a moment as if he might see it rise. I was terrified that Hank would suddenly float to the top and come ashore right in front of us. Without a word, Pappy picked up a stick of driftwood about an inch in diameter and three feet long. He knocked a small limb off it and drove it with a rock into the sandbar where the water was two inches deep. With his pocketknife, he notched it at water level. “We’ll check it in the mornin’,” he said, his first words in a long time.

We studied our new gauge for a few moments, both certain that we would see the river rise. When it didn’t happen, we returned to the truck.

The river scared me and not because it might flood. Hank was out there, cut and dead and bloated with river water, ready to wash ashore where someone would find him. We’d have a real murder on our hands, not a just a killing like the Sisco beating, but a genuine slaying.

The rains would get rid of Cowboy. And the rains would swell the river and move it faster. Hank, or what was left of him, would get swept downstream to another county or maybe even another state where someday someone would find him and not have the slightest clue as to who he was.

Before I fell asleep that night, I prayed for rain. I prayed as hard as I possibly could. I asked God to send the biggest flood since Noah.

We were in the middle of breakfast on Saturday morning when Pappy stomped in from the back porch. One look at his face satisfied our curiosity. “River’s up four inches, Luke,” he said to me as he took his seat and began reaching for food. “And there’s lightnin’ to the west.”

My father frowned but kept chewing. When it came to the weather, he was always pessimistic. If the weather was fine, then it was just a matter of time before it turned bad. If it was bad, then that’s what he’d expected all along. Gran took the news with no expression at all. Her younger son was fighting in Korea, and that was far more important than the next rain. She had never left the soil, and she knew that some years were good, some bad, but life didn’t stop. God gave us life and health and plenty of food, and that was more than most folks could say. Plus, Gran had little patience for all the fretting over the weather. “Can’t do anything about it,” she said over and over.

My mother didn’t smile or frown, but she had a curious look of contentment. She was determined not to spend her life scratching a meager existence from the land. And she was even more determined that I would not farm. Her days on the farm were numbered, and another lost crop could only hasten our departure.

By the time we finished eating, we heard thunder. Gran and my mother cleared the dishes, then made another pot of coffee. We sat at the table, talking and listening, waiting to see how rough the storm would be. I thought my prayer was about to be answered, and I felt guilty for such a devious wish.

But the thunder and lightning moved to the north. No rain fell. By 7 A.M. we were in the fields, picking hard and longing for noon.

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When we left for town, only Miguel hopped in the back of the truck. The rest of the Mexicans were working, he explained, and he needed to buy a few things for them. I was relieved beyond words. I wouldn’t be forced to ride in with Cowboy crouched just a few feet away from me.

We hit rain at the edge of Black Oak, a cool drizzle instead of a fierce storm. The sidewalks were busy with folks moving slowly under the store canopies and balconies, trying, but failing, to stay dry.

The weather kept many farm families away from town. This was evident when the four o’clock matinee began at the Dixie theater. Half the seats were empty, a sure sign that it was not a normal Saturday. Halfway through the first show the aisle lights flickered, then the screen went blank. We sat in the darkness, ready to panic and bolt, and listened to the thunder.

“Power’s out,” said an official voice in the rear. “Please leave slowly.”

We huddled into the cramped lobby and watched the rain fall in sheets along Main Street. The sky was dark gray, and the few cars that passed by used their headlights.

Even as kids we knew that there was too much rain, too many storms, too many rumors of rising waters.
Floods happened in the spring, rarely during the harvest. In a world where everyone either farmed or traded with farmers, a wet season in mid-October was quite depressing.

When it slacked off a little, we ran down the sidewalk to find our parents. Heavy rains meant muddy roads, and the town would soon be empty as the farm families left for home before dark. My father had mentioned buying a saw blade, so I ducked into the hardware store in hopes of finding him. It was crowded with people waiting and watching the weather outside. In little pockets of conversation, old men were telling stories of ancient floods. Women were talking about how much rain there’d been in other towns—Paragould, Lepanto, and Manila. The aisles were filled with people who were just talking, not buying or looking for merchandise.

I worked my way through the crowd, looking for my father. The hardware store was ancient, and toward the rear it became darker and cavern-like. The wooden floors were wet from the traffic and sagged from years of use. At the end of an aisle, I turned and came face-to-face with Tally and Trot. She was holding a gallon of white paint. Trot was holding a quart. They were loitering like everybody else, waiting for the storm to pass. Trot saw me and tried to hide behind Tally. “Hello, Luke,” she said with a smile.

“Howdy,” I said, looking at the paint bucket. She set it on the floor beside her. “What’s the paint for?”

“Oh, it’s nothin’,” she said, smiling again. Once again I was reminded that Tally was the prettiest girl I’d ever met, and when she smiled at me my mind went
blank. Once you’ve seen a pretty girl naked, you feel a certain attachment to her.