My Drowning (11 page)

“It ain't no such thing.”

“A snake like that killed a man near Luma. They was talking about it at the Holiness. It latched onto his throat, and he coudn't draw one breath.”

“You will tell a lie,” Aunt Tula remarked.

“I believe it happened like they said at the Holiness.”

“You don't even go to the Holiness.”

We sat there in the late evening. We had worked a day, then Aunt Tula brought the sack of beans. If we helped her snap them we could have some, and new potatoes.

“Willie says you-all are moving again,” Aunt Tula noted evenly.

“That's what he says.” Mama sighed and studied the ends of snap beans in her lap. “It's a shame we can't keep this house.”

This was news to the rest of us, except Nora, who never looked up from her work.

“Willie is having a hard time, ain't he?” Aunt Tula spoke as if Daddy were having it by himself. “But that's probably a sweet little house you'll be moving to.”

“Ain't much to it from what I can tell.”

“There's some pretty country around Holberta. That's a nice little piece of road down there, and you can see right to the pond.”

Mama said, “These beans is a good size.”

WE MOVED TO
a shack near Holberta, where everything was worse. The house boasted no paint, only gray, weathered planks. Some of the windows had no glass and we nailed grease paper to keep out the rain. The back door hung on one hinge till Carl Jr. found an old hinge in the yard and nailed it in place. The stove flue was busted in the middle. We made brooms from broomstraw and swept, clouds of dust, but there was always more to sweep.

The well, in the backyard, had half a handle, with a tobacco stick tied on to make the rest. The well was hard to prime, and the walk to the kitchen and up the steps with a bucket of water could take your breath. We had another johnny house, this one a good ways down a path in the middle of some honeysuckle and blackberry bushes. The place reeked of snakes and mice.

Otis found a book in the johnny house the very first day. He never let me see it, and Daddy caught him with it and took it for himself. But I saw there was some man naked on the front, a drawing, showing everything the man had.

Across the road, around a curve and through some trees sat the houses of Holberta, a cluster of black families who grouped around Fork Road and Union Road at one end of Moss Pond. People walking to Holberta passed by our house. Seeing we were white, they turned their heads away.

An abandoned church lurked under trees at the bend in the road, and near it lay a cemetery. Them places were haunted, Mama said, because slaves were buried in the graves and they had slept so restless, they tossed the brick vaults out of the ground, you could walk and see it if you wanted. But
it was best to visit over there in the daylight, because in the night it could be dangerous. Even in the day, you should be careful in the high grass, because of whip snakes that could whip around your legs and drag you down and choke you, or tree snakes that could drop down on you from a tree and bite you and kill you. Those were the main dangers, she said. Other than the ghosts.

Nora, Otis, and me walked to the cemetery near the falling-down church. Part of the steeple was hanging in the branches of a tree nearest the graves, and even though it looked like it had been steady for a while, we kept our distance. But you could see something had torn up the grass around the graves, and these brick boxes were shoved up from the ground. The stone crosses and headstones stood every which way. Deep shade from the oak tree, its branches no doubt full of tree snakes, flowed down to the graves.

Otis wanted to climb inside the church but Nora said no.

“Now we live in Holberta with the niggers,” Nora said, “next to a nigger graveyard.” After she said that, we went home.

Everything was harder there, too. The walk to the Little Store took twice as long, and my arms could hardly hold the boxes by the end; there was a black store in Holberta but we were not allowed to go there. In the mornings Mr. Allison picked us up for the fieldwork with the black families, and that left Mama muttering all over again. She herded us all to the front of the truck, and we sat there around her like a brood of chicks.

One day, though, she found out that two of the young boys on the truck, Cunning and Arthur, were the sons of
Annalea Bates, the woman who saw the monster and rescued her dog's body. All of a sudden she was all ears.

“It was a gray thing,” Arthur said. “It had scales and a jaw.”

“Mama ain't say nothing about no jaw.”

“Hush, boy. Who telling this?”

“Misress Tote, it won't no jaw. Mama seen this gray thing, what was eating Raeford head.”

“Raeford were our dog.”

“And the monster ate his head.”

“Mama run, but then she went back after the dog. Do you believe that?”

“Crazy fool,” one of the other women said. “I would have left the dog where it was.”

“What else did she seen?” Mama asked.

“Wasn't nothing much.” Arthur shrugged. “She seen this gray thing. That was all.”

“It was some tracks.”

“That's right. It was some tracks.”

“It was your Daddy's liquor, is was it was; that's what your mama seen,” said the woman.

“Naw, it was a gray thing eating Raeford head.”

We cropped tobacco through August, as far toward school as we could. Mama would work longer, if needed. I would certainly have gone to the fields with her to tend the smaller children. But this year I was starting school.

ONE DAY, WHEN
we were waiting for the truck to take us home at the end of the day, Cunning Bates told Otis, “It was a witch hung in that tree behind your house. The Hawfords move because they found out.”

“My daddy got us this house,” Otis answered. “We use to live down the road towards the bridge.”

“Your daddy is common. Ain't no white peoples want to live down here.”

Otis flushed red and doubled his fists. “You hush.”

Cunning shrugged. “You can live there if you want to. But it's not right.” He paused for effect. “Sometime you can see that old witch under that tree, my mama seen it and her hair turn white.”

Nora said, “You lie.”

“It's the truth.”

“I ain't seen nothing out there. It's no witch.”

“You wait. When you see it, you wish you listen.”

Cunning and Nora faced each other. “Who was the Hawfords?”

“It was people who live there who pick one season for Mr. James. They from Georgia, they real backwoods.”

“They was colored.”

“That's right. They went on back home.”

Nora nudged clods of the black earth. Sweat had smudged her face, running in dark lines down her neck. The whole way home in the truck, she was quiet. When we got home, she sat on the bed for a long time.

ME AND OTIS
went walking in the high grass sometimes, in the late sun after supper, trying to find a whip snake, until Mama said it was getting to be too late in the year to find them in this part of the country.

Daddy found the shed skin of a rattlesnake at the base of the tree where Cunning Bates said the witch was hung.
Daddy counted sixteen rattles, and Mama said to count one for each year the snake lived, but Daddy said that was a bunch of shit.

Daddy liked to chain the dogs under the elm in the front yard, because the pack of them had a vicious look and a hateful sound to their bark, and they made folks nervous. He had trained the dogs to hate everybody, even the rest of his family. But in Holberta everybody reckoned we had trained our dogs especially to eat black folks, and we became known as the trash with the ugly dogs in the yard.

Nora liked to sit with the dogs, she had no fear of them and even brought them the little we had to give them as food in those days, grease-soaked biscuit and wormy oatmeal. She and Carl Jr. were the only ones, other than Daddy, who dared go near their tree. When we lived in Holberta, Nora sat under the elm scratching their ears and brushing the knots out of their coats with half a brush she found under the porch. Whenever she was not working around the house, she sat dreaming with the dogs, their heads in her lap, flies buzzing around their ears. Mama fretted that her blood would come on her and the dogs would turn. “Dogs is wild like that, sometimes,” Mama said, as Nora stretched, stood and walked toward us. “It was a man in my family who was eat by his own dog, one winter. They didn't have nothing else in the house to feed it.”

“Oh, Mama, you make up a bunch of mess,” Nora said, continuing to the bedroom we children all shared.

Mama tottered after her. “You better pick that dog hair out of that skirt else you won't be able to wear it to school.”

“I'm quitting school.”

“You hush that. You ain't no such thing.”

“I ain't going to school.”

“Well you ain't quitting, not unless I say so.”

“You let Carl Jr. quit.”

“Your Daddy did that.”

A shiver was beginning to running through Nora's voice. “I hate school. I hate them other kids. I don't want to go back.”

“Well, you're going back.”

Nora reappeared in the door, her voice shaking and her eyes flooded with tears. “Then let me go to school with the niggers. We live in a nigger house. That's all anybody's going to talk about. So let me go to school with the niggers too.”

Her words shocked Mama, who slapped Nora sharply, almost by instinct. A blank look on her face. She slapped Nora again, hard, with the flat of her hand, and all her weight behind it. Then, moving mechanically, she returned to the kitchen, sweetened herself a cup of coffee, took a biscuit off the plate and sat on the back porch, where two stray cats waited for a field mouse to die.

MAMA BOUGHT CLOTHES
with some of the cotton money, and I got one dress for school. I got no shoes because some church lady had given us a pair from one of her daughters. We did all the school shopping in one day. Uncle Bray drove us to Smithfield, and Mama marched us from a shoe store to a dime store. I tried on the dress in the fitting room with the mirror. I was ashamed to undress at first because I was wearing only step-ins under the dress.

The new dress was green and blue plaid with buttons and
a smart collar. I looked at the dress and at me in the mirror. I could hardly breathe, my heart was pounding.

Nora knocked to find out what was taking so long, and she slid inside when she saw. She looked me up and down. “Show it to Mama,” she said.

I held the bag in my fists all the way home, careful to keep the wind from snatching it out of my hands. Mama gave me a hanger at home, and I hung it on the tobacco pole in the corner that we used for our clothes, next to the blue-flowered dress that had been Nora's till she outgrew it.

THE DAY BEFORE
school started, Otis found a piece of bone under the house and picked it up. When he had it in his hand, Mama warned gravely that he should have left it where it was because it was a rattlesnake's fang and it probably still had poison in it. If there was poison in it, it could kill anybody who touched it. But Otis had already touched it and, when Mama went back in the house, he wondered whether he was going to die.

“First you start to swell up, then you get numb,” Nora had taken his plump white hand and began to stroke it with comforting gestures. “Then you get blue in the face and your heart stops and you choke to death. That's what Mama says.”

“Daddy found a snake skin,” Joe Robbie murmured. “If it was a fang I bet it was the same snake.”

“How do you feel?” Nora asked Otis.

“I feel fine. I don't feel nothing.”

“That could be a bad sign,” Nora predicted.

We walked with Nora around the house. With the bright summer sun pouring across the road and dirt yard, we could
almost see through the walls of the house to Mama's squat, round figure treading the rough floors of the kitchen. I was not thinking about the snake's bone or tooth or whatever it was, I was thinking about my new dress, and school to start, and the grandeur of things. But all of a sudden Otis started to cry and sat down and balled up his fists and shoved them against his eyes. “I feel funny,” he wailed.

“Hush, Otis,” Nora says. “You're being a crybaby.”

“It'll be all right,” Joe Robbie whispered. Nora carried Madson, who still refused to walk most of the time. I was dragging Joe Robbie in the wagon. We had worn a path around the yard, where the tree roots would not tip the wagon over.

“My shoulder stings. And my ears is popping. And I can't hardly breathe.”

“That's because you're crying,” Nora said.

“I ain't crying.”

“You are too. Look at you.”

“I can't help it, I'm scared.”

We got him moving again and rounded the house to where Carl Jr. and Daddy were drinking. Daddy had started to drink with Carl Jr. pretty much every evening after they got home. They propped under the elm tree where a rusted-out icebox sat in the grass. Daddy was fussing with the snout of the bitch dog; he called her Patsy. “What's that fuss?” Daddy asked.

“Otis found a snake fang and it had poison on it.”

“What snake fang?” Daddy drew one thin hand out of his overalls and reached. “Ain't no goddamn snake fang. Let me see.”

Daddy always scared Otis, and Otis never would go near him. Otis was still carrying the fang in a rag, in case it was needed for the antidote. He gave the thing to Nora, who carried it to Daddy under the tree. Daddy took one look at it and spit. “Who told you this come out of a snake?”

“Mama. She said it was from a rattlesnake and if it was poison in it whoever touched it could die or get paralyzed.” Nora reported the facts with the slightest smirk.

“Your Mama is full of shit about a snake. This ain't even no kind of a tooth, it's a goddamn fish bone.” He scowled, gave Otis the once over, and curled his lip in disgust. “You sissy. Look at you, crying like some sugar-ass little darling. Ain't you got no better sense than to listen to your goddamn mama?”