The Twelve-Mile Straight

But the Saturday after that, Elma heard his door open and close. She counted to one hundred, crept into the kitchen, and took the whole blackberry pie from the windowsill, where she’d left it to cool that afternoon. It would be her way of making amends for the hot water she’d put him in. There was no way to talk in the daytime, not with her father’s eyes on them. The moon was brighter tonight, near full, but her bare feet didn’t need it to find their way down the path. She knew which branches to move aside to avoid snapping, which roots and rocks to step over.

He was humming. She heard it as she came to the edge of the sandhill, before the land sloped down to the shore. Under the lowest-hanging turkey oak, she placed the pie on a flat rock and lay down, pressing her chest to the ground. She watched as Genus shed his union suit, took her soap from the catalpa, and waded into the water.

She had never seen a man the way the Lord intended. There had been men around her all her life, her father, Nan’s father, the landlord, the field hands from town, the last hired man who had lived in the shack—a scrappy, white-whiskered white man named Jeroboam who as far as Elma could tell didn’t bathe at all. She had seen nothing of them but their sunburnt backs. Now there was her beau Freddie Wilson, the landlord’s grandson, who liked to press his manhood upon her while he taught her to drive his Chevy. “Less go ride,” he’d say, and he’d sit her between his blue-jeaned legs, nearly in his lap, the jar of her daddy’s gin in his hand cool against her thigh through her dress, his left arm hanging a cigarette out the window, and he’d show her how to ease the engine into motion, how to work the pedals and turn the wheel without jerking the truck into next week. “That’s it, that’s it,” he’d say, his arms around hers on the wheel, the heat coming off his body like a sun-warmed shirt straight off the line, his pecker hard as a tree trunk against her tailbone. “Less go park in them trees,” he’d say, kissing behind her ear, his liquor breath thick as a swamp fog, and she’d say, “Freddie, quit,” and he’d say, “Gotdamn, Elma,” and she’d climb out of his reach and he’d drive her home. Goddamn, she allowed herself to say in her head. Goddamn if she didn’t like the way she felt in Freddie Wilson’s lap.

Under the moon, knee-deep in Lizard Creek, Genus Jackson stood humming. A slim brown branch hung between his legs. He lathered her soap between his hands. He washed his chest, his neck, under his arms. The cricket frogs called to each other from the bank. Gentle as a teapot, Genus poured a stream of piss into the water. She felt her body flush, the blood rushing between her legs.

It took all her will not to join him in his song, to join him in the water. But then what? She might spook him. He might call out. They might be heard. If her father found them, he’d take a hoe to both their hind sides. She looked at the pie, dark and dumb on its rock. What was she thinking, bringing a pie to a stranger in the middle of the night? Was he meant to eat it there, standing in the creek with his manhood hanging between them?

Besides, he would know that she’d followed him. What she needed was for him to come upon her. She lifted the pie, crawled out from under the branches, and tiptoed back up the path.

All week, at school, in the fields, in her bed, she counted the days to Saturday, when she would go down to the creek and wait for him. She imagined floating on her back in the creek, her hair swimming around her face like copper fish. Or she would sit on a rock on the bank, brushing it over her shoulder like a mermaid. Or she would be standing in the water where he had been, washing herself with her soap (that square of soap, the goose bumps of cornmeal, how they would brush against her skin), and he would come upon her. A vision. In her vision, she said, “Genus Jackson, have you been using my soap?”

Come Saturday, she listened to the sounds of the house settling down. As soon as she was sure her father was asleep, she slipped outside in her nightdress. It was October, and the clay path was cool under her feet. The light of day still paled the edge of the west field. The mules snuffed and snored in the barn.

Elma knew the sound of Mamie’s snoring, and of Archie’s shitting. She knew the sound a hog made just before it was slain, and the sound a stallion made when it was upon a jenny, and the sound the jenny made, which often as not was no sound at all. This was the sound she heard as she made her way down the path—the sound of one animal and the silence of another. The sound changed as she walked, a grunt, then a moan, and then nearly a hum. By the time Elma reached the end of the path, and the creek came into view, she did not want to look, but she did. She found her place on the sandhill under the skirt of the oak. It was so dark that at first the two silhouettes looked like round rocks in the creek. Then she made out the shoulders and heads above the water—the same shape, shorn of hair. If it hadn’t been for the sounds, Elma might have found beauty in their symmetry, two busts carved of black stone.

Above, a cloud drifted past the moon, and then the light caught the ripples of the creek and their open mouths, and both mouths now made a certain sound, a tongueless sound, one unlike any Elma had heard on the farm. The sound would stay in her ears for a long time, and later she would have to reckon that it was what the Lord intended, though at that moment it seemed that the two figures in the creek had invented it themselves.

The next Saturday, when Freddie Wilson directed Elma to drive his Chevy into the canopy of pines twelve miles west of town, she did. It was the place where the Straight dead-ended into scrubgrass, where no passing eyes could find them. Freddie looked as though he could hardly believe his luck, but he didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He shifted her off his lap and unbuckled his belt. Only if he would marry her, Elma said. Would he really marry her? Of course, he said. Of course what? she said, hand on his chest. He said, Of course I’ll marry you. And then Elma heard the sound again, though Freddie sounded more like a horse in a barn. Two months later, in the truck, when she told him her bleeding hadn’t come, he punched the window with his fist. It scared her so much she waited another month to tell her daddy, but her daddy wasn’t even mad, just nodded solemnly over his plate. He’s got to marry you now, he said. Long as he’ll do you right.

It wasn’t until she was far along, when the newspapers started using the word “Depression,” that Elma thought back to that fall and saw that the Crash had come then, not long after the night she first saw Genus Jackson disappear down the path to Lizard Creek. It was hard not to draw a line between the two, her following him, and what followed. Pregnant as a potbellied pig, she read the newspapers front to back—it was the one luxury her father allowed in those months—and she could feel the hot, inextinguishable flame of her badness, spreading beyond the horizon like fire on a field. Was it her watching, her wanting, that called the devil down to the creek? It seemed that way, even before the babies came. And after they did, and after Genus disappeared for good, it was hard not to feel that she’d caused the whole world to crash.

THREE (#ulink_a6b1d268-efaf-5aa1-ac92-5dc34e4ae310)

GENUS JACKSON HAD BEEN DEAD TWO HOURS WHEN A POWERFUL knock came at Sheriff Cleave’s door. He lived in the quarters below the jailhouse in the Third Ward, and he thought the ruckus was his fool guardsman, reporting a problem with a prisoner. Best he could recall the only one up there was Wolfie Brunswick, the raggedy-bearded drunk of a vet who was drying out in the bullpen. Last night Sheriff and the guard had rolled their chairs into the cell to play Georgia Skins with him, Sheriff and the guard drinking Cotton Gin in the office between hands, drinking it in the teacups that had belonged to Sheriff’s grandmother, clinking the cups daintily together, growing more and more boisterous, until they were drunker than the drunk himself and the drunk was beating them soundly, a fact that threw them into greater and greater hilarity, and more and more teacups of gin. They were playing for peanuts, real peanuts, and the dust of them was still caked in Sheriff’s teeth.

It wasn’t the fool guardsman at the door. It was George Wilson, a coat over his nightclothes, his silver head bare. Rarely had Sheriff seen him out of his pearl white suit. At the curb, his Buick idled. There was no driver waiting.

Sheriff, still in nightclothes himself, covered his own head with the hat hanging by the door. His first thought was the mill. A quarrel between two drunk lintheads on the graveyard shift. Maybe a quarrel with Wilson himself. There had been unrest in the mill village, you could say, doffers and spinners complaining of too many hours and too little pay, as folks were given to. Folks not showing up for their shifts, or showing up drunk. If they were drunk, they were drunk on Juke Jesup’s Cotton Gin, which Wilson ran himself, if “run” was the word for it, for it didn’t run far beyond the county, and mostly ran his own help into the ground. But he did not suggest this to George Wilson. It was Sheriff’s job to look away, and besides, Sheriff too was drunk on it. Years before, Sheriff’s father and Wilson’s brothers had all followed their fortunes north, and Sheriff and Wilson had stayed behind in the little county seat that no one beyond twenty miles could find on a map, and so their loyalty to each other was a tonic for their shame—that together they might make themselves worthy.

“It’s Jesup,” George Wilson said, standing at the door. So it wasn’t the mill—it was the gin. And then Sheriff thought of himself, of his own badge. Things had gone sour between Wilson and Jesup. Sour as they’d gone in the mill. Sheriff didn’t know why, but he could smell it. When Wilson said, “He’s gone and killed my man on the farm,” Sheriff had to hold himself up in the doorway. “He’ll say it’s Freddie, but it ain’t Freddie. Well, Freddie was there—I saw him with my own eyes when he come back to the mill—but he’s gone now.”

“Gone where?”

“Hell if I know. Gone.”

“Come in, George. Sit down.”

“No, thank you kindly. The man is still there. He’s there in the road at the mill, what’s left of him. Freddie cut him from his truck.”

“From his truck?”

“The men at the mill said he’d … he’d defiled Jesup’s daughter.” A thread of spit sprung from Wilson’s mouth and caught in his mustache. “That’s why he did it. I reckon Juke’s the one tied him to my grandson’s truck. But there’s a whole mess of them come out from the Straight.”

Sheriff had to look down at his feet. That a mob had gone through the county and lynched a man without so much as a courtesy whisper, that Sheriff had been having a tea party while it happened, that he hadn’t been given a chance to at least provide the necessary performance of peacekeeping—it was an embarrassment.

But maybe it was for the best, that his hands should be clean. The guardsman and the prisoner would vouch for him, when the papers came around.

He said, “What is it I can do for you, George?”

George Wilson tugged on his earlobe and sucked his square white teeth. “Quiet it down, honey, for pity’s sake.”

So Sheriff mounted his motorcycle and followed Wilson’s car back to the mill village. Through the bars of the bullpen, Wolfie Brunswick watched him buzz down the road like a tiny king, kicking up dust. He was no taller than a mule, Sheriff was, with a slick, mule-colored mustache, and a Homburg hat that looked ready to topple him. If he’d ever had a name other than Sheriff, a name his mother had singsonged over the cradle, it was long lost.

In the headlights of the motorbike, the men scattered over the mill village, back to their shacks. From George Wilson’s house Sheriff rang up the undertaker and waited for him to arrive and load the body into the Negro ambulance. On Monday, the local doctor would help arrange for the autopsy at the colored hospital in Americus. When no one claimed the body, it would be transported back to Florence and buried, what was left of it, in the cemetery behind the colored church, no marker but a dried gourd. By then Sheriff had gone knocking on doors throughout the village. Not one of the mill hands had seen it, they said, but all of them knew it was Freddie Wilson. “How do you know,” Sheriff asked them, “if you ain’t seen it?” And they all said that Freddie had it in him, that he was madder than a blind bull, that he was not the sort of man to be cuckold to no darky. The men didn’t say they’d had a grievance toward Freddie since he started as foreman, that he liked to knock them with his broom when they were too slow, and flick his cigarette butts in their looms, and put his hands under the dresses of their daughters and wives, and then disappear into the office and drink his grandfather’s gin and pass out on his leather couch. If Sheriff didn’t know better, he’d ask the lintheads if they had any prejudice against the Wilsons, or any allegiance to Juke Jesup, who when asked, when Wilson wasn’t looking, might sell a case or two straight to a thirsty mill hand for a song.

There was one more errand he had to make. It was still the middle of the night—that first July night—when Sheriff drove his motorcycle from the mill out to the crossroads farm, but there was a lamp on in a window of the big house. A colored maid answered Sheriff’s knock, no more than a girl, though at first, with her short hair, Sheriff took her for a boy. It was so dark in the doorway he collided with her as he stepped through it.

“Beg your pardon, child.” Sheriff took off his hat and placed it over his heart.

“Sheriff,” Juke said by way of a greeting, coming in from the breezeway carrying a lamp. He was still in the overalls he’d worn that day. He looked tired or drunk or both. He may have been in deep with George Wilson, he may have brewed the gin that flowed through the county, but up close Sheriff saw he was just a rednecked farmer, his sunburnt face lined with creeks and crags, spotted as a pine snake. He set his kerosene lamp down on the kitchen table. “I told that boy to mind his ire. They weren’t no stopping him. Lord knows I tried.”

Juke pulled out a chair. Sheriff sat while the girl made coffee. The daughter, poor child, was nowhere to be seen. Juke told him about the mill men who’d arrived in their cars, how he stayed indoors to protect his daughter from the mob, how the farmhand was swinging from the gourd tree before he knew what had happened. “Just younguns,” Juke said, shaking his head. “Younguns full of fire.”

“You saying Freddie led the whole thing?”

“Why else would he run? Other than he couldn’t abide being no father?”

Sheriff shrugged. “Spect you put the idea in his head.”

“The idea of stringing the man up, or the idea of running?”

“Both.”

“Freddie ain’t need no help. He got ideas of his own.”

Sheriff knew how these things happened. It might not have happened in Cotton County, but it happened in every county it touched. A hill of men, too many to count, too many to haul in, too many most times for a sheriff to do anything about except throw up his arms. But in all his years he’d never seen a mob finger one of its own.

“You sure you ain’t out there, helping em, after what the nigger done to your child? It was me, I might a done the same.”

Juke stood, walked to the pantry, and returned with a jar of gin, which he poured into Sheriff’s black coffee, then his own.

“I might a done it.” Up close, Sheriff could see that burns braided the man’s right arm from his knuckles to his elbow, his skin a mess of scar tissue, hairless and pink as a pecker. “All us sinners is capable, I reckon.”

Sheriff lifted his hands to the ceiling. “Spect we’ll have to wait till he come back and tell us.”

“If he come back.”

“If?” He thought Jesup was betting, figuring it out as he went. He was counting on those men covering for him, fingering Freddie, and he was probably right. “Where’s he gone go?”

“Where he ain’t a wanted man, I reckon.”

Sheriff laughed. “If you say so. Ain’t the law that wants him back much as his pawpaw.”

Then the house girl put a plate of corn pone on the table, each one cold and hard as a brick. Something was wrong with her. Her eyes were bloodshot, and they stared through the room as though they didn’t see anything in it. Sheriff thought she might be touched, or empty in the head, but then he remembered. “She the one can’t form words?” he asked Juke. All those years he’d allowed him and George Wilson to run their liquor and he’d never set foot in the big house. It was his job to look away.

“Show him,” said Juke, and the girl, still dead in the eyes, rolled her head back and opened her mouth to reveal the pink stub veined with scars, a blind slug in the cave of her mouth. “She’s the one delivered the twins. Her momma learned her good.” And from there he told the story he’d tell the neighbors that visited in the days after, the reporters, the other lawmen bearing the badges of curious county seats. Wilson came first, Juke said, and Winnafred minutes later, their cords braided like streamers on a maypole, sister nearly taking hold of brother’s heel, like Isaac’s children. They were so surprised to know there were two babies in there that they hadn’t noticed, at first, that one was darker than the other. Even Juke hadn’t been sure. Babies looked all kinds of ways when they were born. But there was no denying it. Freddie saw that the baby boy wasn’t his blood, and after that, well, it was a damn shame, all of it.