The Bottoms (6 page)

Outside her house was Matt’s pen. It consisted of a rope tied tight to posts to form a square. Matt had a shed inside the rope and inside the shed there was always plenty of fresh water, grain, corn husks, and the like. Matt worked on the honor system, stayed inside that rope. He had a pretty good deal and knew it.

There was also a hog pen with a little shoat roaming about in ankle-deep stinky mud, nosing an empty number ten tub.

Tied to the house, stretched out with the other end tied to a chinaberry tree (everyone I knew called them chinerberry trees) was a rope clothesline on which hung sheets and what the women I knew called unmentionables, meaning underwear.

Miss Maggie’s house was a simple weathered shack with a loose tarpaper roof, a short narrow porch under which a number of chickens and the occasional stray dog liked to rest in the heat of the day. On the porch was a rocking chair made of warped cane. The house leaned slightly to the right. It had one door and a dusty screen. There were yellow oilskin shades she pulled down over her three patched screen windows when sunlight or privacy warranted it, and the glass itself was flyspecked. In the summer all the windows were raised to let air come in through the screens, which were essential to keep out the flies. If you kept stock, especially that close to the house, they were twice as bad.

I went to the screen door and chased away all the flies that were lit on it. Miss Maggie was at her wood stove, taking biscuits out of the oven. I could smell them through the screen, and they made my mouth water. I called her name, and she turned and greeted me like she always did, her braided hair whiter than when I had seen her last. “Hey, boy. You git in here and sit down.”

I shooed the flies again, went inside. I sat at her little table in a slightly tippy chair. She put some biscuits on a battered tin plate and poured me up some sorghum syrup from a can she heated on the stove, told me to eat. I did.

Those biscuits were so soft they melted in the mouth, and the sorghum, which she had most likely traded some corn for, was as good as any ever ground by a mule-operated mill and cooked down sweet by human hands.

As I ate, I looked at a double-barreled shotgun hung over
two huge nails driven into the wall, and her black hat hung up next to it. She sat across from me and ate, then said, “I think I’m gonna fry me some salt pork. You want some?”

“Yes’m.”

She opened the oven’s warmer, took out some salt pork. It was smoked already and could have just been warmed, but she put a little lard in a pan and stoked up the wood in the stove and set to frying it. It wasn’t long before it was ready. We ate the pork and more biscuits. She said, “I can tell you’re just ’bout to burst, dyin’ to tell me somethin’.”

“I don’t know I’m supposed to,” I said.

“Well then you don’t need to tell it.”

“But I ain’t exactly been told not to tell it.”

She grinned at me. She had two good teeth in the top of her mouth and four on the bottom, and one of them didn’t look so good. Still, they managed to chew biscuits and tear salt pork.

I figured whatever I told Miss Maggie didn’t matter. She wasn’t gonna get back to Daddy with it, so I told her about finding the colored woman down in the bottoms and about there being something in the woods following me and Tom.

When I finished she shook her head. “That a shame. Ain’t no one gonna do nothin’ about it. It just another dead nigger.”

“Daddy will,” I said.

“Well, he only one might, but he probably ain’t neither. He just one man. They’ll ride him down, boy. Best thing can happen ’bout all this is be gone on and forgot.”

“Don’t you want them to catch who done it?”

“It ain’t gonna be. You can rest on that. My people, they like chaff, boy. They blow away in the breeze and ain’t no one cares. Whoever done this have to kill a white person if he gonna get the big law on him.”

“That ain’t right,” I said.

“You better not be sayin’ that too loud, or them Kluxers be comin’ to see you.”

“My Daddy would run them off.”

She cackled. “He might at that.” She studied me for a long moment. “You best stay out of them woods, boy. Man do something like that, he ain’t got nothin’ ’gainst hurtin’ chil’ren. You hear me?”

“Why would someone do something like that, Miss Maggie?”

“Ain’t no one but Gawd knows reason ’hind that. I think what we got there is a Travelin’ Man.”

“Travelin’ Man?”

“That’s what they calls a man like that, does them kind of things to womens. Anyways, what my Daddy called ’em.”

“What’s a Traveling Man?”

Miss Maggie eased out of her chair, walked over to the cabinet, took out a little green tin and brought it to the table. She opened the tin, removed a pinch of snuff and poked it between cheek and gum.

I knew she was about to tell me a story. The snuff, the comfortable position, it was her way. It was how she had first told me tales about the tar baby and the big snake of the bottoms that was killed in nineteen and ten. It was said to be a water moccasin forty-five feet long, and when it was split open a child was found inside. When I told my Daddy that one, he just snorted.

Outside a cloud moved over the sun and darkened the greasy windows and the light through the screen door. I watched as the flies regrouped on the screen, lighting slowly, clustering together in a dusky wad, as if they too wanted to hear Miss Maggie’s story; their accumulation made a shadow on the floor and across the table, like a rain cloud.

Off in the distance I heard a wagon clatter, followed by the sound of a car. It was a hot day and even warmer in the shack because of the stove and the tight space. I felt cozy and almost sleepy.

“Dat ole Travelin’ Man, he someone you don’t want no truck with, boy. They’s folks wants to have anything at any ole price. Wants it so bad, they makes ’em a deal.”

“What kind of deal?”

“With the debil.”

“Uh uh. No one would do that.”

“Would too. They was this colored man named Dandy back in the time the numbers turned to nineteen and ought. It was the year that big ole hur’a’cun blowed Galveston away. I had a sister down there and she was drowned durin’ that.”

“Really?”

“Uh huh. They gathered up all them bodies and burned ’em, boy. I don’t know nothin’ other than she had to have drowned, and if her body got found, then she got burned up. That’s what they had to do, was so many dead’ns. Coloreds. Whites. Womens and chil’ren.”

This was interesting, but I didn’t want her to stray too far away from her story about the Travelin’ Man and Dandy. I said, “What about Dandy?”

“Dandy,” she said. “Well, he loved to play a fiddle, but he weren’t no good at it. He couldn’t make that fiddle talk. He wanted to be like them could, but ‘ceptin’ for a tune or two he could play to kinfolks, and them puttin’ up with it, he weren’t no good at all. So you know what he done, Little Man?”

“No ma’am.”

“He got him some whiskey, and he drank him a little of it, then made water in it. You know, pee-peed in it.”

“In the whiskey?”

“That’s what I done said. Just let it go in that bottle till it fill on back up. Put back what he drunk, guess you could say. He put the cap on it and shook it up. You know why he done that?”

“No.”

“ ’Cause they says that’s the way the Old Man likes it. He think a man’s water spices it up.”

“The Old Man?”

“Old Man got other names. Satan. Beezlebubba. The debil. Thing is, you don’t know you call him up you really talkin’ to him or one of dem soldiers he got, but that don’t matter none. Dandy, you see, was tryin’ to become a Travelin’ Man.”

Miss Maggie paused to spit. She had a big cracked cup she kept for the purpose, and now she reached it off the little shelf by the stove behind her and spat snuff juice into it. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, said, “You gonna do this right, thing Dandy wanted to do, you got to gets down in them bottoms where it’s the thickest, and there’s a crossroads.”

“There’s crossroads everywhere, Miss Maggie.”

“Uh huh. But the best place to meet the debil or one of his soldiers is down in the deepest part of them bottoms, on a walkin’ trail that crosses. And you got to be there right when it’s gonna turn both hands up.”

“Both hands up?”

“Hands on the clock, boy. Twelve midnight. You got to have you a good pocket watch keeps the right time. ’Cause you got to be on time. You got to be standin’ right there in the center where the crossroads cross, and you got to be havin’ you that peed-in whiskey with you.”

“That what Dandy did?”

“They say he did. Say he went down in them bottoms with his peed-in whiskey and his fiddle and bow, stood at them crossroads, and sure ’nuff, right when he’s checkin’ the face of his turnip watch with a match, there’s a tap on his shoulder.

“Now he jerks ’round fast, and there’s the debil. He got a big ole pumpkin head and wear him a little black suit with shiny black shoes, and got a big ole smile, and he says to Dandy, noddin’ at that whiskey bottle, ‘ ’At for me?’ And Dandy, he
says, ‘Yeah it is, if’n youse the debil.’ And this pumpkin head, he say, ‘I’m what you might call his lead man, Bubba.’ ”

“Bubba?”

Miss Maggie paused to spit in her cup again. “Uh huh. Bubba. I always figured Bubba was probably Beezlebubba. You gets it. BeezleBUBBA.”

“Oh, yes ma’am … Who’s Beezlebubba?”

“It’s just another name for the debil, Little Man. Like Scratch. It’s probably a Northern name or somethin’. But this here fella, whether he’s really the debil or the debil’s man, I can’t tell you. But whoever he was, he got the power to make the deal. So he takes that peed-in whiskey and drinks him a big jolt, and he say to Dandy, ‘What is it you want?’ and Dandy, he say, ‘I want I can play this here fiddle better’n anyone they is.’ And Bubba tell him, that’s fine, he can do that, but Dandy gonna have to write his mark on a line.”

“His mark?”

“Them can’t write they name, they use they mark.”

“Oh.”

“So Bubba pulls out of his coat this big long paper, which is what them lawyers, who is a lot like the debil, calls a contact.”

“Contact?”

“Yes suh, Little Man. A contact.”

“Oh, a contract.”

“All righty then, then it’s that. But don’t be correctin’ me now. Ain’t polite.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Then Bubba, he jerks the fiddle bow out of Dandy’s hand, and it cuts him on the tip of one of his fangers. Then he has Dandy make his mark on the line with the blood on his fanger, and he says, ‘Now here’s your fiddle bow back. You done give me your soul for what I done give to you.’

“That’s good with Dandy, and he goes to play right there,
and danged if that ain’t a different bow in his hand than the one jerked from him, and a different fiddle. I mean it’s the same, but it ain’t. You follow me?”

I didn’t entirely, but I said I did.

“So Dandy, he gets to playin’ right there, and it’s the most beautifullest sound you ever done heard. And when he looks up from hittin’ a few notes, Bubba and that blood-marked contact … contract, is done gone.

“Now Dandy a happy man. He got the best fiddle playin’ ’round. And the womens love him. He goes to dances, and them womens all around. He gets give free drinks and lots of folks tell him how good he is. It’s the life for Dandy. Then he goes to this barn dance over’n Big Sandy, and he’s playin’ and people are dancin’, and when he pauses to get him some rest, this stutterin’ fella with a fiddle comes up and asks can he play and sang a bit. A song or two, you see.

“Dandy sees a chance to look even better. He lets this fella play. Figures that man ain’t gonna match what the debil’s done done for him, and if he sangs some, all that stutterin’, he’s bound to sound like a chicken workin’ on a ear of corn. It gonna make Dandy look even better, see.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“So now, Dandy, he ’sides to really polish the apple, so he brings up this here fella and says how he’s a man wants to play a song or two, sang a little. And he says how he ain’t never heard him, but always wants to give a fella a chance. So this nervous fella, who turns out is from a little ole town called Gilmer, gets up there, hits on his strangs with the bow, then cuts into it. And you know what, Little Man?”

“No ma’am.”

“He good. He can play that fiddle like he part of it. And sang. He sang real purty, ’cause when he sangs, he don’t stutter. So all them folks is dancin’ and start’n to happy hoot and holler, and after one tune, this here fella, who I heard was named
Ormond, he plays him ’nuther, then a ’nuther, and it’s like one of the angels got hold of that fiddle bow, and pretty soon, ole Dandy, he done forgot. Ain’t nobody missin’ him.”

“Bet that made him mad.”

“Oooowweeeeee. All of a sudden, right in the middle of a breakdown, Dandy jump up with his fiddle and crack that Ormond fella right upside the head and knock him down. Then he go to beatin’ on him. And he beat him till he done broke that fiddle all apart, and then he start to choke Ormond, and pretty soon, Ormond, he’s dead.

“Well, now. People are starin’ at Dandy, and he got death on his hands, and no fiddle. Busted it all to pieces. So he snatch up Ormond’s fiddle and bow an run off through the back door ’fore folks can figure on what to do. Then they after ’em. But it’s too late. He know them bottoms like the back of his hand, and he gone. He done become a Travelin’ Man.

“Since it was a colored killin’ a colored, white law didn’t go after him none, and all the colored ’round here wasn’t in no place to do nothin’, so Dandy, he get off on the other side of the bottoms, and he start at it.”

“At what?”

“Travelin’. He kind of like a bum, you see. He go from house to house, tryin’ to beg him a little somethin’ to eat and such, and people hear about this fella travelin’ around with a fiddle, playin’ a tune or two for his dinner, but he ain’t no good on the fiddle. No good at all. So folks that hear this, they don’t figure on it being Dandy, ’cause Dandy, he can play good as a pig can eat. But it’s Dandy.”

“How come he can’t play?”

“Comin’ to that. You jumpin’ ahead.”

“Sorry, Miss Maggie.”

“Where this Travelin’ Man and his fiddle go, they’s womens start turnin’ up dead. You see, he got a bitter thing in him now. He always did want the womens to like him, but now he
ain’t got that goin’ for him ’cause he ain’t got no fiddlin’ to draw them in, and it’s boilin’ him inside. Or, that’s how I figure on it. Ain’t no one really knows. But this is certain, for three years he wandered all over East Texas killin’ colored womens and girls, and to the white law it don’t mean a thing.