The Well and the Mine (12 page)

“Doin’ right well.”

“Glad to hear it. So I expect you’re here for him,” he said, jerking his head toward Jonah but not even looking at him. Ted was several inches shorter than me, but with a chest so wide you’d think his elbows would have to bow out. His stomach was a little smaller than his chest, but his buttons always looked near to popping. I thought he was one of those men who was so mad he couldn’t grow higher that he’d decided he’d just grow wider.

“Yep,” I said. “One of my boys came and told me you’d brought him in on some sort of charges.”

“Could smell the whiskey on him all the way down the street.”

I walked over to Jonah, who was still sitting and staring toward the door. “Can’t smell nothin’ now, Ted. Seems alright to me.”

“Must be wearin’ off.”

“He give you any trouble?”

“Nah. Meek as a lamb. Tried to tell me he was out trying to find wood to burn in the fire. Not unless he thought he’d find it at the bottom of a bottle.”

Jonah didn’t say a word, which was the best thing.

“Reckon he might have been out lookin’ for wood,” I said, casual-like. “Cool night tonight.”

Ted ignored me. “You let one of ’em get away with the least little thing, you end up with a whole pack of ’em roamin’ the streets, makin’ it where it ain’t even safe for women and kids to be out on the back porch at night.”

I’d had enough going in circles. It was too late at night for the normal hemming and hawing. “What’s this gone cost me?” I asked.

“No tellin’ what he coulda got up to if I’d left him alone.”

“How much, Ted?”

“Four dollars.”

I sighed. “He’s one of my best men. Ain’t never had any problems with him. Now you know he’s never caused a lick of trouble in the ten years he’s been here. I ain’t one of the big bosses. This is money comin’ out of my pocket.”

“S’pose you could get him for two dollars.” He finally looked at Jonah. “But you consider this a warning, boy.”

For the first time, Jonah looked over at us. His jaw worked and his tongue slid over his front teeth. But his mouth was soon still, and his face turned blank and calm.

“Yessir,” he said in a voice as empty as his face. “I’ll do that.”

I could tell Ted wanted to find fault, wanted to hear some crawling and cowering in Jonah’s voice. I could see Jonah’s jaw muscles still tensed up, though, and I didn’t care to think what he might say next. I didn’t care to pay four dollars, neither.

“Mighty decent of you,” I told Ted. “I best be headin’ on with him, then, so I can go on and get back. Might even work out good for Leta—I sure got plenty of time to do the milkin’ before I leave for the mines.”

Ted shifted over my way then, leaning against the bars of the cell. “That reminds me—I got some more news you might be interested in. ’Bout that baby.”

I waited for him to go on. Ted would always keep talking if you just kept quiet. “Doctor said he didn’t drown after all,” he said. “They cut him open and he didn’t have no water in his lungs. So looks like there wasn’t no murder.”

I couldn’t wrap my head around that quite so fast. “You sayin’ she threw a dead baby in there?”

“Yep.” He looked pleased with himself. I’d have sworn his face was even rounder and redder than usual.

“And he’s only findin’ this out a month after we found the baby?”

“Shoot, he knew the day after. I just ain’t seen you since then.”

“So what did kill him?”

“Don’t know.” He looked less puffed up. “Could’ve been anything. But no bruises on him, no blood. It don’t look like he was shook or beat or cut.”

“So what’re you doin’ next?”

“Not much to do. I’ll ask around, but I got my money on it bein’ some delicate-minded woman who lost her head when her baby died. Nervous condition, maybe. But ain’t nothin’ to charge her with, really, even if we did find her, ’specially with your water bein’ alright. We could prob’bly fine her if you felt that strong about it.”

“No,” I said. “No, I don’t care ’bout that. It just don’t make no sense. If she wasn’t meanin’ to kill the baby, why throw it in our well at all?”

I could tell Ted wasn’t losing sleep over it. He’d got to tell me something I didn’t know, and that was all the pleasure he had to get out of the thing. He went on and took my money and let Jonah out.

When we closed the door behind us, Jonah rolled his neck around and cracked his back like all of us had a habit of doing. Years of bending over left you with a fist always closed around your backbone, and that fist grabbed on like the devil when you’d been sitting for a while. Other than that cracking, we didn’t make much noise, scuffling along through the dirt to the car. He never talked much and didn’t expect me to chatter, neither. We could work for hours loading cars and digging into seams without a word. When one of us had a notion to say something, there was a reason to it.

Once we were pulling onto the road, I felt his eyes on me.

“Sorry for draggin’ you out, wakin’ your family,” he said, clearing his throat. “I do thank you. Wouldn’t have called on you if there’d been money to spare. You got my word I’ll pay you back next week.”

At least paychecks were every two weeks by then, which made things easier. Used to be once a month when I started, ’fore I married Leta. That kept most fellas borrowing from the company during that last week or two before payday, and they’d all but hand over that check when it finally came on account of all the interest. Striking hadn’t gotten us much—not any more money—but it got us that same money split in half and paid separate.

“Ain’t no hurry,” I said. Would have been an insult if I’d said he didn’t have to pay me.

“I wasn’t drinkin’ none. Thought you should know.”

“Didn’t think you was.”

“My wife got busy with the two sick ones today. She didn’t get no chance to bring wood in, and wasn’t until we headed to bed I realized the fire was about out. Thought I’d just get some limbs out in the woods to tide us over—didn’t want the children to get cold, ’specially them bein’ poorly an’ all.”

We rode on, both of us looking straight ahead.

“He give you trouble before?” I asked.

“Nah. Never ran across him ’fore tonight.”

“He sees mostly the good-for-nothin’ colored, I s’pose. Don’t know the difference between you and them.”

“You see a difference?” He didn’t say it like he was trying to be smart, I didn’t think. I gave him the first answer that popped into my head.

“There’s a difference. I know you walk the chalk. Not like some.”

He didn’t answer, staring out his window. I figured he was pleased. Then he said more in one chunk than I’d ever heard come out of his mouth.

“I got a cousin in Birmingham, always talkin’ ’bout uplift. ’Bout how we Negroes oughta do what the boss tells us, work real hard, not gamble or drink up our pay, and then we’d have somethin’ worth havin’. Well, I ain’t had a drink since I got married nine year ago. Wife don’t like it no more than your’n does. And not drinkin’ or playin’ cards still don’t make money magic itself into my pocket when there ain’t none. Boss pays you seven dollars a week, and food and rent and clothes for the children cost seven dollars and fifty cents a week, ain’t no use blamin’ sin for bein’ at rock bottom. Plenty of fellas at rock bottom who didn’t have no fun gettin’ there.”

I could see him look at me, but I kept on looking at the road. I didn’t have much of an answer.

“You ownin’ land, don’t s’pose you’d know much about it,” he said. “Ain’t complainin’, but it sits different with us.”

I was still as a stump, thinking. He fidgeted for the first time that night. “You ain’t mad that I spoke my mind? Didn’t mean no offense.”

“Didn’t take none,” I said. The street lamps hardly lit the road worth anything. “I figure I know somethin’. I know Ted Taylor wouldn’t cart me off to jail for walkin’ down the street. Know I get to be ‘Mr. Moore’ and you never get no kind of handle in front of your name. I know no shack rouster gets sent to a white man’s house to see if he’s really sick. No supervisor would so much as look wrong at Leta. Know I’ve worked next to you long as Tess has been alive and I ain’t never seen you lazy or drunk.”

We rode on, both resting from all those words, shucking the meaning out of them and sorting it.

“You’re sort of an odd egg, Albert,” Jonah said. “A good’un, mind you. But an odd one.”

We’d pulled up even with where his street hit Main, but before he pulled the door handle, I called his name. He looked back.

“You heard what Ted said about that dead baby,” I said. “You heard anybody say somethin’ worth repeatin’ about it? About its mama?”

He moved his hand off the door. “Can’t say I have.”

“Seems to me that a woman who’d do that would stand out. That it would pain her somethin’ awful. You ain’t noticed any, well, you might say, disturbed women?”

“Ain’t they all disturbed?”

I chuckled. “Any woman that seemed troubled by something? Negro women? Or white women, too, if you noticed any.”

“Now, Albert, you know durn well I ain’t spendin’ time around no white women. And if I am, they’s gone be troubled for sure. As for Negro women…” His tone changed, sounded harsher than I was used to. “They got their own reasons for bein’ troubled.”

“You don’t have a notion of who did it?”

He shook his head, and I believed him. I didn’t have any notions worth an Indian nickel myself.

“I got some thoughts on it,” he said, surprising me.

“Yeah?”

“It’s a sad woman that would do that, Albert. Not a mean one. Take your own dead child and toss it in a well belonging to good people—that says somethin’ to me. That she’s, you might say, a little crazy, but that’s nothin’ next to the size of the sadness.”

He stopped talking and didn’t start back again. Finally I asked, “Why you say that?”

“I figure she gave up on this life, and if this life don’t matter, that little body didn’t matter a whit. She’d already moved on to thinkin’ about the next life. One where the baby didn’t care about that body so neither did she.”

I understood that. It didn’t answer none of my questions about who and where—it being my well—but he’d done a better job getting inside her head than I’d come close to. I hadn’t expected that of him; I admitted that to myself right then and there. It didn’t make me proud. I couldn’t figure just what it made me. “There’s good sense in that, Jonah.”

And somehow I opened my mouth yet again before his hand got to the door.

“You knew Jesse Bridgeman killed hisself?”

Jonah nodded.

“Been on my mind. I passed that man on the street at least once a week, always saw him on the way to church on Sunday. I never saw that in him. Feel like I just looked at some shell of him not meant for nothin’ but to be throwed away. But I never knew it for a shell, never knew to peel it back or crack it to see what was underneath.”

He smiled, a flash of white I rarely saw in the mines, and I looked straight at him and met his eyes. They were deep and dark almost like Leta’s and the children’s, I thought, and it gave me a start to see them looking back at me. What shook me most was how clear they were at nearly three in the morning, no red in them, and I felt a shiver inside like I did when Leta would explain something in a simple way that made me know her eyes took in whole worlds mine never blinked at.

Jonah’s smile made him look older, not happier. “Shoot, I wouldn’t know nothin’ ’bout that,” he said.

I thought about that on the way home. And about how we’d used up a year’s worth of words.

Tess
SO THERE WAS NO WATER IN THAT BABY’S LUNGS. THE
doctors cut him open because Chief Taylor needed to see for sure how he was killed before he started carting women off to jail. And he didn’t have a bit of water in his lungs. Not any. Meaning that baby wasn’t breathing when he got thrown in. He was dead before he hit the water. And that set us to rethinking our list.

“What does it mean, Virgie?” I swung my book satchel from two fingers; she carried hers over her shoulder like a handbag. We’d gotten good and warm by the fire before we left, and the walk to school would just give us time to lose all the heat and be ready for the warm stove.

“I’ve been thinking about that,” she said. “It means she wasn’t a murderer, for one thing. I’d been thinking we were looking for someone wanting to get rid of her baby, somebody pushed into it by meanness or tiredness or misery. But maybe she wasn’t desperate at all. Maybe she was something else.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure.”

“So she threw a dead baby in our well.”
Crunch, crunch
—leaves fell apart under my feet. “That don’t seem any more sensible than throwing in a live baby.”

“But it’s different,” she insisted.

“How?” I answered back just as stubborn. I didn’t understand why she wanted to divide up crazy into different sections. We’d been looking for a crazy woman and we still were.

“I don’t know.” She caught my arm and looked down the road to school. The boys usually played around until the bell rang, and sometimes the little kids’ parents would stand around the road talking. “I hope nobody’s out this morning.” She chewed her lip while she started down the road and then pulled me in the opposite direction. “Oh, let’s just go the long way. I don’t feel like saying hello to everybody.”

It beat all how Virgie thought it was a chore to wave and answer back to people. But I followed her into the trees toward the creek, where nobody’d call out to us but the squirrels. Virgie loved the woods, liked being around trees more than she did people. I didn’t care much for being in the middle of all them branches and trunks and briars. I wouldn’t have set foot in the woods by myself. They seemed darker than they used to, and anything could be hiding. Jack had gotten me thinking about why we didn’t ever see fairies in the woods. I figured something ate them. Some sort of lizard, maybe, or one of those sharp-toothed possums. I leaned toward possums with their red eyes and rat tails. They could hang upside down and snatch those fairies right out of the air, ripping their wings off and chomping them like popped corn. The wings would be the tastiest part. If you were evil.