Chaneysville Incident (5 page)

Uncle Josh White had earned his more uncomplimentary nickname by being pale and dank-looking, with mangy yellowish hair and almost pink eyes. Since “albino” was not a term that was taught in the local elementary school, the suspicion that the children of the Hill, and of the Town too, often whispered—that “Snakebelly” White had been dead for some years—was allayed only by his actual demise and amazingly opulent burial; where the money had come from was a minor mystery, as nobody had ever thought “Snakebelly” White cared enough about tomorrow to take out burial insurance. To make matters more frightening, Uncle Josh White did not talk. Oh, he
could
talk, and if you followed him for hours you might actually hear him utter a word or two as he bought blackstrap or snuff or some other staple. But apart from those two or three words, Uncle Josh said nothing to anybody besides Old Jack Crawley and Moses Washington, and when he spoke to them it was on the other side of the Hill.

Old Jack was the opposite; he was dark, his skin the color of pine bark, his eyes blacker and beadier than those of the snakes he was rumored to keep as pets. His clothes were dark too; his pants were baggy gray-black things that had once been of a lighter color, perhaps, but which had gone too many years without washing to ever regain a fairer shade. In summer the top of Old Jack’s union suit served for a shirt, and although it was cleaner than his pants, it suffered from drippings of coffee and dribbles of tobacco juice that had miraculously escaped absorption in the hairs of his grizzled chin. Sweat had made the union suit’s underarms dark—there it matched the unholy color of the dark dirty suspenders that held up the dark dirty pants. The women of the Hill maintained that Old Jack owned only one set of underwear and one pair of pants, which he never took off, but that was a slander; he had two of each. He did have only one pair of shoes, old high-topped work shoes with studs instead of eyelets and rawhide thongs in place of laces, and they were stained with kerosene and soot and blood from his hunting. At most times Old Jack’s overall darkness was augmented by random smears of shoe polish, black and brown and oxblood, for every morning he took up his station at the Alliquippa Hotel on Pitt Street, at the foot of the elevated shoeshine stand with its raised brass footrests and high-backed chairs.

The stand was the Town’s official unofficial meeting place; for years the mayors and the judges and the lawyers and the Courthouse officers and the prominent businessmen had come there in the morning to read and comment on the news in the
Gazette
, and to do a little political horse trading: a man who had political aspirations would appear early and stay late into the morning; you could tell the candidates long before they announced it by looking to see who had the shiniest shoes. Over a hundred-odd years, more decisions had been handed down from that shoeshine bench than from the one in the Courthouse itself. And for the larger part of those years, Old Jack Crawley had moved among the decision-makers, slapping polish, making jokes, pocketing tips, and—although it was only a rumor—disposing of a good bit of Moses Washington’s high-octane moonshine. What effect he had had on policy was not known; it occurred to only a few that he might have had any at all. Unlike Uncle Josh, Old Jack did talk. Constantly. His patter was a bizarre mishmash of aphorism and jive, witticism and wisecrack. He had “once heard” almost everything: that willow bark cured headaches; that milk was bad for babies; that whiskey, taken in seemly moderation, aided the digestion, prolonged life, and cleared the wandering minds of older folk. He spun out endless webs of tales that were either true or so blatantly false as to seem true, and he would, at the drop of a two-second silence, hold forth at some length on every subject from the weather to the state of the Union. But when evening came he would pack up his brushes and move like a tiny dark shadow through the town, heading for the Hill. He would not go up the Avenue but would take the old path at the far end, climbing up past the graveyard where the black people were buried, then crossing through the trees that crowned the Hill until he met the path that led to the far side. And, so the stories went, once he took the first few steps on that path he changed. Because the far side of the Hill was
different.
The far side was guarded by ghosts. Adults laughed about all that. But they never went beyond the crown of the Hill. Children dared each other to take the first few steps, to go and bring back a rock or a bit of brush from beyond the point where the path made its first precipitous drop and vanished into the undergrowth; those with imagination and bravery—like Bill—would go far enough not to be seen, wait awhile, then come back, claiming to have discovered…almost anything. I never did that; I had no imagination, and before I ever mustered sufficient courage my life changed: Moses Washington went hunting and came home dead, and Old Jack Crawley came for me.

I had awakened in the night. I had been bathed and soothed and fed and put to bed like a baby and, exhausted, I had slept through the heat of the afternoon and the cool of the evening. Now darkness lay on the mountains, and the blaze of daylight heat was a barely recalled name. Air that was almost cold poured through the window beside my bed, and gusts of wind billowed the curtains and slammed insects against the screen. For a long time I lay there in the darkness, listening to Bill’s light snores coming from across the room, wondering what it was that Old Jack had wanted. I tried to reason it out, but I could not. And then I realized why it was that he had frightened me, had frightened everybody: none of them knew what he had wanted. Whatever had frightened them, it had been something they were only guessing at. For some reason, that seemed
wrong
to me; or not wrong—pointless. And then it came to me: I would go now and find Old Jack, go and find him and ask him what he wanted.

And so I slipped out of bed, being careful not to let the mattress creak—my mother claimed to be a light sleeper, but it had always seemed to me that she never slept at all. I found my sneakers beside the bed, moved carefully across the floor to where my pants hung on a peg. Carrying shoes and pants. I made my way to the window. It took me only a moment to slip through it onto the porch roof, then to put the screen back in place. I sat on the roof and slipped my pants on over my pajama bottoms, pulled my sneakers on. Then I made the drop to the ground. It was a lot farther than I had thought, and I landed hard, my knees jarring up into my chin. I tasted blood silvery in my mouth but I did not cry out, I just climbed to my feet and stood hauling air into my lungs and looking around.

I had never been out in the darkness like that before, without someone there to guide me and hold my hand. But I wasn’t afraid, and I moved away from the house and stood at the top of the Avenue looking down. The Hill was dark. In the Town the streetlights were pale yellow, spaced like markers. I turned and started up the slope, finding the path with no difficulty; it was easy to see by the light of the full moon, which hung silver white in the sky. I moved confidently in that light for the first few yards, but then the path took its first big drop, and the moon vanished behind the Hill, and the trees closed over me. I lost my footing and my courage at the same time; as I tried to turn back I found myself slipping and sliding, all out of control, my arms windmilling as I fought for balance. I fell and rolled, it seemed, forever, finally coming to a stop against a pine tree. I was hurt and scratched, but too stunned to cry. I just lay there, with pine needles and pebbles digging into my back, listening to the night.

I had never done that before. I had heard the sounds—there was nothing new in the chirpings of crickets or the musical croakings of spring frogs—but I had never lain in the darkness listening to them. Suddenly I forgot my scratches. I listened to the faint rustlings in the underbrush, the creakings of the trees moving in the wind, the calling of nightbirds at whose names I could not guess. It was pleasant, and the world seemed a warm and friendly place. I got to my feet and regained the path, and moved ahead, feeling for the path with the toe of my sneaker.

The path was clear but the hillside dropped away; I had to fight to stay on course, to avoid being dragged off into the underbrush by the force of gravity. I began to be really frightened, recalling the stories about how once Old Jack and Snakebelly White reached the far side of the Hill they became something other than human. Boogeymen. But I thought it out, and reasoned that if being there changed them, then it ought to change me too. Now
I
was a boogeyman, and it would serve everybody well to stay out of my way. I moved on steadily for a few hundred yards, and then the path went diving almost straight down the slope again, twisting and turning between trees and boulders, but always heading down. I went with it, but more carefully this time, lowering my body to the point where I was almost sitting in the dirt and sliding. On either side of me the underbrush rose in purplish-black billows, and honeysuckle vines crawled over the trees and rocks like snakes. In a few more yards I came out of the trees into a clearing. By then my eyes had adjusted; I could see a little. What I saw was the outline of a cabin made of weatherbeaten wood and bejeweled with softly glimmering patches made of flattened tin cans. I knew it was Old Jack’s house; I did not know how I knew, but I knew. Somehow I found the courage to move forward, but I was not without wariness; I got down on my hands and knees and crept forward as quietly as I could, hoping to detect the boogeyman before he detected me. It took me so long to reach the cabin I lost track of time. When I did reach it I crept around it, looking for a window to peer through and finding none. In a sudden burst of courage I got to my feet and moved to the door and reached up for the knob, but found instead a latch string. Then the unfamiliarity, the strangeness of it hit me. The night grew darker and suddenly silent. I trembled. I backed away, my eyes fixed on the door. I turned to run. And found myself staring at the boogeyman himself, holding a shotgun pointed at my head. “God, boy,” the boogeyman said, “you near to got your head blowed off. If you’re gonna sneak, for Ned’s sake,
sneak
!”

The shack looked much as it always had: an improbably ugly structure leaning defiantly against the pull of gravity and the weight of time, the boards of weird grayish-green from the effects of weather. Once, when they had come to take the census, they had asked me (nobody, not even a representative of the federal government, was going to go over there to find out if Old Jack had an indoor bathroom, and I was the only person who would know) whether the house was deteriorating, dilapidated, or unfit for human habitation. (The census-taker had paused for a moment, trying to figure out a way to explain the terms to a twelve-year-old, who, presumably, did not understand them.) It had been a hard question, and I had said finally that it was dilapidated, an evaluation I happened on by elimination: the house could not be unfit for human habitation since Old Jack, who, I knew by then, was thoroughly human, lived there quite happily; nor could it be deteriorating—it had gone to ruin long before I was born. The census-taker had shaken her head and made clucking sounds, but that I really did not understand; Old Jack’s house seemed fine to me. Then an outhouse was still an adventure, and so was getting water from the spring and transporting it in a galvanized bucket. Although I had never tried it, I imagined that bathing—if you ever did—in a big tin tub was the acme of bliss.

But my perceptions had changed over the years; now the shack looked as if it might be unfit for human habitation. And not only the shack, but the land around it; the whole scene, ravaged by winter, treated harshly by the morning light, foretold disaster. There was no grass to soften the impression as there was in the summer, no flowers blooming in the three old coal scuttles that he used for planters. The woodpile was depleted and the logs that remained were washed-out looking, the sharp browns of bark and pulp bleached an unholy gray. Down the slope the outhouse sagged, and the vines that covered it were brown and limp. The scene depressed me—it spoke of decay. Of death. I wondered how much of that had to do with the fact that the man who for years had made it all go, who had added life and force and interest to it, was not moving through it, might not be moving at all. There was no sign of him, not even smoke from the chimney. And so I hurried, breaking into a run as soon as I reached level ground, pounding towards the door. I slowed as I reached it, pausing for a moment to get my breath back, taking time to get a smile on my face. I knocked. And then I waited.

He had left me standing in the open doorway while he went to light the lamp, and waited there while I looked around, letting me take my time. After a few minutes he came toward me and placed his hand on my shoulder. “You pack a pretty good wallop for a youngster,” he said.

It took me a while to figure out that he was talking about my hitting him, but once I had I felt a flush of a curiously mixed emotion: embarrassment at the praise, fear at the thought of reprisal, pride at my sudden capacity for violence. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I hope I didn’t hurt you.”

“Hurt,” he roared. “Hell, you damn near kilt me. But you ain’t got no need to be sorry. If you hadda kilt me it woulda served me right—I didn’t have no business comin’ up there like that, stickin’ ma face up in yours. It was the wrong way to go about things. I always was like that, get the idea ’bout what oughta be done, an’ then haul off an’ do it jest backwards. Your daddy now, he always thought things out, knowed what he wanted to do
an’
what was the right way to go about it. He—” He stopped, looked at me. “Damn, I guess I’m doin’ it again. I hadn’t oughta be speakin’ a your daddy now.”

“I don’t mind,” I said.

He must have heard indifference, or something, in my voice. “You don’t care if he’s gone, do you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“It ain’t nothin’ to be ashamed of,” he said. “Can’t nobody make you feel somethin’ you don’t feel, an’ there ain’t no point in tryin’ to pretend you feel it. Hell, I bet you didn’t even like him.”