The Widow of the South (27 page)
Z
ACHARIAH
C
ASHWELL
I
should have knowed it would come my time eventually; it seemed I’d been running for years. I’d become good at it, a master of escape. Ought to have found a carnival and shipped out with them to perform escape tricks for money, but the kinds of escapes I’d mastered weren’t exactly the kind that could be done under the lights, and they weren’t all that exciting, either. Darkness was everything, and waiting for the right opportunity. That opportunity always came along, and I’d learned to count on it these last years. I come to count on it so much that I’d become sloppier and sloppier about staying the hell out of trouble. What did I care? I’d slipped right out from under that fat little Yankee officer’s watch back there without even a scratch. Just up and walked out the unlocked door of the old store in town, the little officer’s jail, while he and his other charges snored and farted around me dreaming their boring little dreams. I came to think I was being watched over, that I could do and say what I want without suffering for any of it.
If you got to hobble and limp everywhere with a dull ache of a wooden leg, working for the railroad is the kind of thing to make a man forget that there’s a thing wrong with him. You catch a ride on one of them engines with the cowcatchers, perched up there ahead of the fireman and off to the side of the engineer, just laying your head out the window and smelling that sweet, pulpy smell of summer on the fields, and you can very easily forget a whole lot of things. But I didn’t get to ride much. Not enough for my taste leastways.
It was something to watch what happened to the country when the railroad came through. I don’t mean
the country,
like the kind of thing you had to swear your allegiance to and vote about and all the rest of it. I mean the country, the place where we all from, at least those of us who didn’t have much before the war and didn’t have much to show for it after. I don’t mind saying that it was a great relief, maybe on all of us to one measure or another, to come through the country to build something for once, and not burning or digging or chopping or shooting. Not sitting in the cold rain and swallowing your fear, looking out at old fields full of unharvested cotton and wondering what you could have done with the money from that harvest if you’d just had the chance; but sitting in a saloon made of thick pine railroad ties and waxed canvas with a couple of aces on the flop and cash money on the table. Men
brought
us whiskey and women and money. They didn’t avoid us no more, they didn’t pull the shutters closed on their little cottages marooned in abandoned fields, they didn’t douse their lights when we passed.
I was working the Memphis & Selma Railroad, which weren’t much of a railroad then, and never got finished. Just tracks to nowhere that stopped where the last man sunk the last spike. It was the company of old General Nathan Bedford Forrest, who the Federals never got up the gumption to arrest after the war. A lot of the men got all fired up about being part of “Forrest’s company,” like they were back in the war riding with the man, but for my own self I didn’t care one damn who paid me at the end of the week. I’d take money from big Abe himself, if he were around to give it out. I knew the money weren’t going to last long, though, no matter who was paying wages. We was always running out of money at our camp, and I heard the other camps along the line down around Columbus and Selma were running out of money, too. I reckoned Forrest found railroading a right bit harder than running around on horses and shooting every damned thing he saw. He didn’t look like no Wizard of the Saddle no more, that’s for sure. He looked like a skinny, gray old man who had got over his head with this railroad thing.
In those years there were railroad camps like ours all over the South, and I did my time in plenty of them. There was thousands of miles of track to repair and thousands more to be laid afresh. There were men, men with money, who came through and got up on stumps and told us we were new men in a new South, forging by our sweat the means for the South to rise and take its share of the money and business we was owed, that we weren’t to be backward no more. Sounded like a bit of bullshit, truly, and I hadn’t never thought of myself as backward, exactly, but if I got to wear me one of them nice fob watches on a chain and dark striped vests like those fellers wore, well, I was all in favor of being dragged out of my backwardness.
So we laid track from Charleston to Little Rock, from Mobile to Nashville. We made our own towns temporary, outside the real towns, and we didn’t have no law except the law that the company made for us and the law that got sorted out between men at the point of a knife. After a while, that came to seem like plenty of law.
I had traveled around a little after getting away from those Union boys up in Franklin. I’d learned how to walk on my wooden leg so that it looked like I only had a little limp, and I’d learned to ride a horse even if I was a little unbalanced. I don’t mind saying that I got to looking pretty damned good when I was riding, and it was a shame I couldn’t ride except when I could pinch a horse out of a tenant man’s yard in the late night, to ease my travel. I ain’t no horse thief, I didn’t
keep
those horses. I’d ride ’em awhile and then send them back to where they come from, and I reckon a good many of ’em made it back to where they belonged. I reckoned I’d given my damned leg for people like them farmers, they could give me a ride on their nags every once in awhile.
Jerrod, my old friend from Carnton, had been the one to find me in a saloon in a new town—Birmingham—and told me about the job on Forrest’s railroad. His hair was as black and as greasy and as long as ever. It still hung over his face like he didn’t want no one to ever see him. He’d taken to wearing all black duds, too, and so he had the look of an undertaker or a devil, depending on your point of view. But I knew him to be a sweet boy, and he still was, when I met up with him in Birmingham, even though I come to find out he’d learned to shoot pretty good with just that one eye of his and that he’d got into a career as a private detective, which meant he was a gun for hire.
Our camp was a few miles south of Memphis, and we was a rough crowd. The more we thought of ourselves that way, the rougher we got. You don’t know how depraved a man can be until you let him do just what the hell he wants, and most of us—I’d bet that included most all of the men who’d worn gray at one time or another—were of a mind, in those years after the war was over, to do whatever the hell we wanted.
Some of the men’d clear brush and sweet gum and poplars during the day and watch the track men come through the cut, amidst the buzzing of flies and humming of mosquitoes, laying down crushed rock and pounding down crossties. The evening sun never wanted to go down, seemed like, and in the last minutes of its trip across the hazy white sky the light would shoot through the crowns of the trees, right on through the leaves and the veins of the leaves, and make them glow just at the edges, and that’s how you knew it was about time for someone to go on down to the creek and pull out whatever whiskey or liquor was on hand. Whiskey ain’t best served cold, but that really weren’t a consideration for men who leaked out enough water in the Tennessee heat to fill a dozen troughs each himself. Once they were in the liquor, there weren’t no telling what kind of man would pop out of that jug when it’d been tipped up and emptied and licked dry of every drop. Some men you just didn’t want to know, and they didn’t care if you knew them or not.
I felt much at home.
There were always people running away from a railroad camp. The same things that would draw you in—money and liquor and women—could be your downfall if you weren’t careful. If you was running, it was because you done something you oughtn’t have and it was your own damned fault. It weren’t like war, when everything you had in the world, even your life, was likely to be taken from you without any explaining or reasoning. Now there were
reasons
for being whumped on, even if those reasons didn’t make no sense. Men carried pistols and Bibles and liquor, and there wasn’t no trying to piece out what didn’t belong, because it all belonged. I wasn’t anything special in that camp, and the ladies were ready to take me on for a piece of silver, if I’d had the inkling. I hadn’t the inkling, but I did like the whiskey and the gambling and the way the lamps sent off wavy, glassy beads of light that slapped against the sides of the tents, beads that would slip and slide over the beams and poles and canvas as the wind blew or as I got drunker.
I had the title
Exchequer of Camp, Memphis & Selma Railroad,
but everybody knew I was the clerk. The money man. The man who had his ear to the wall, who knew the people who knew the people who could get a man what he wanted. I was important, if not indispensable, although the supervisor used to call me that. I was most definitely dispensable, though, as things turned out. Dispensable was a mighty polite word for it.
My escape began the week old Forrest decided to show up and pore over the books I’d been keeping, looking to see if there weren’t someplace he could save some money, to see if he could find some money hidden somewhere. That was the week Twist Fitzhugh, who ran the log tavern we all drank at, decided to catch him a nigger and chain the fella to a post in the backyard of his saloon. Twist was a fat little bastard with a red shiny head and a face like a slab of rock. He owned some acres on either side of the tracks, but Twist was not the kind of man who liked to work up a sweat, and so his land remained uncleared. He tried like hell to get some of the men to jump ship and spend a couple months chopping down trees in exchange for free liquor, but when you consider that it was out of goodwill that any of us actually paid for Twist’s nasty swill, his proposition didn’t seem like such a bargain. His land lay unused, and it drove that little schemer crazy, and he’d stand behind that pinewood bar picking at splinters, scratching his hairy belly through the gaps between the buttons of his shirt, and yammering about “work ethics” and the way men used to pitch in and help each other, and a whole lot of other bullshit that none of us paid much attention to.
Then he got his nigger. Don’t know how Twist got up the energy to catch one, but one night we came by the tavern and there was this Negro sitting with his back against Twist’s chicken coop. He had a collar around his neck and a heavy chain attached to it. He was a tall and young Negro, kind of yellow with a sharp nose and deep black eyes. He’d look at you if he raised his head while you were out pissing behind the tavern, and his face was the face of a man who could take anything and still figure out a way to keep going on. He’d have been a powerful enough man if he weren’t so damned underfed. Twist said he’d caught the nigger trying to steal a chicken, which I knew to be a lie because Twist didn’t actually
have
chickens, unless that was the word you used for the women who roosted in his coop with their tricks. Back then, though, if you had any story to justify whipping a Negro, it was a good enough story for most people.
Twist kept his Negro chained up at night, but during the day, when the tavern was closed, he’d take him off the chain and make him clear brush. Twist had a cross-eyed son named Gypsum, who we all called the Gyp. The Gyp was thirteen years old, and dumb as a board, but he could handle a rifle, and so the two of them would accompany the nigger into the woods, where Twist would whip him into working harder and faster, while the Gyp stood by to make sure their new friend didn’t run. That’s what they called him:
our new friend
. People didn’t have
slaves
no more, understand.
The first couple days of the Negro’s captivity, I went along with it like the rest. Didn’t want to say anything likely to get me in trouble. I know there were some other men who were sickened by the sight of that Negro’s neck, which was hatching sores where the collar rubbed him wrong. There were a couple whispers about letting the Negro go, but as bad as the whiskey was at Twist’s, it wasn’t bad enough to be cut off entirely, which Twist would do if he found out who let his prize go. And you couldn’t predict what that demon child, the Gyp, would do.
So I kept silent. I didn’t like it much, but I reckoned that the nigger had done something to get himself in trouble, and I had learned that there was some rough justice out here. It weren’t right to chain a man up like that, Negro or not. I’d never known many Negroes except for the ones at Carnton, Mariah and Theopolis, and they were all right. As for others, I didn’t have much to say about ’em one way or another. But I could see pain in the man’s face, and some smarts, too, and it was impossible for me to think of the Negro out back on the chain as just another animal. I had been spoiled by knowing that Mariah nigra. Not enough to do anything about it, but enough to feel guilty about letting things go on.
I didn’t much respect myself then, truth be told. Didn’t like the man I was, not much anyway.
Things changed the night before Forrest’s arrival at the camp. We didn’t reckon we could be ass drunk while he was on the premises, so Jerrod and me and some others decided to get ass drunk
before
he was on the premises. Toward the end of the night, after swaying between the tables made of trestles and boards and knocking over some glasses, I made my way out the back door and down the three steps to the yard, where I intended to relieve myself. Instead, I tripped over the nigger’s chain and fell to the ground. The way I remember it, though, I looked down and I was sinking
into
the ground, and soon I could barely see anything above the tips of the grass looming so high above me. I must have passed out. That night I had the only dream that had ever scared me, which was also the only dream I ever had since leaving Carnton.
The preacher man took my mama. I saw her go. I heard her go. I heard her say, “Good-bye, my love.”
An angel came to me with a message. He said, “Deeper, saith the Lord.” And so I thought and I thought, and then I remembered. The angel took me roughly by the hand, and I was surprised by the calluses on his palm. He asked me to stand by the door. I’d forgotten that door. He said, “Wait, wait,” and then “Now!” and he pushed it open. He walked quickly into the room, where my father sat with his back turned and his face in his hands. I could see the brown hills through the window over his head, and I noticed that there were no trees. Just hill after hill of brown grass rolling away. The angel glided toward my father and pulled something from beneath his wing. A gun. A little pistol. My father turned and said, “I saw you in the window,” and then the angel put him down with that little pistol. My father’s head came to rest on the windowsill. His eyes were open, and he seemed to be looking up. He hadn’t shaved that week, and I saw my father’s gray hair for the first time. The long, deep wrinkles on his cheeks, like trenches, had disappeared. His faded coveralls showed the growing stain. I wondered,
Had he seen me in the window?
I wanted to tell him that there was no use looking up like that, weren’t nothing up there, the angel was standing right there in front of him. But my mother appeared behind me and covered my mouth with her hand. Her hand was sweaty, and she smelled sour. She had been gone for days, and she was wearing the same frock she’d left in. She was shaking, but I wasn’t sure who scared her the most—the angel or me.
