The Madman of Piney Woods

  Those words caused a cold blast to run across my scalp!

  Curly said, “I seen the knife and seen how his back looked a mile wide while he had his head down. I figured this would be the perfect time and place to bury that knife.”

  “Oh, Curly, say you didn’t, say you didn’t pick up the knife!”

  “I was going to. I swear it, Red, but before I could, Pa raises up his head and says in this whining voice, ‘He startled me; he ain’t got no business being in our woods no way. He know he suppose to stay farther south.’ ”

  I said, “Who? Who was he talking about, Curly?”

  Curly said, “Pa gets up and walks over to where Ma’s sitting and falls to his knees. Ma’s stiff as a board when Pa puts his head in her lap and …”

  Curly starts crying. I wanted to reach out to him, but my hands hung like weights at my side.

  He said, “This is what happens all the time. First he’s sorry and weepy to Ma, then he’s tanning her hide. I swore if he hit Ma this time, I was gonna stab him. And I meant it. But me and Quincy’s thinking just alike, and Quince grabbed the knife first. I couldn’t believe it when he walks up behind where Pa’s sitting on the floor.”

  My heart was racing.

  Curly said, “Pa tells us, ‘So I falls to sleep out by the big bend in the river, and all the sudden, I wakes up and it’s got dark and the moon’s high and I look and someone’s bent over down by the river. I blinks a couple times ’cause I can’t believe what I’m seeing. It ain’t nothing but luck that I had my pistol with me. I ain’t scared, but I grab it outta my coat. You can’t never be too sure.

  “ ‘He ain’t s’pose to be ’round here and he done thiefed from white folks his whole life, so I decides I’m ’bout to make one of them citizen arrests. I starts to creep closer to get this scalawag. I didn’t make a peep, but what they says is true; he’s got the hearing of a dog.

  “ ‘All the sudden he stands up and whips ’round at me. I done what I had to. I done what anyone woulda.

  “ ‘I yells, “Stop!!!” But he keeps coming! He growls like a madman and raises this club as big as a tree over his head and … and … I shot. He was gonna kill me and I got him ’fore he could! He dropped like a sack of rocks.’ ”

  There were tears in Curly’s eyes.

  “Pa wraps his arms ’round Ma, stops crying, and begins laughing again. He stands up, sees Quincy standing there with his hand behind his back. I’m thinking, Do it! Do it, Quincy!

  “Pa raises his arms above his head and tells us, ‘Boys, don’t ever let no one tell you no different. Your pa’s a hero! There ain’t no more bears nor wolves in these woods, and after tonight, there ain’t no more lions neither. I done shot that wild South Woods darky! His thieving days is over.’ ”

  I was stunned.

  Curly said, “Pa didn’t even notice that the knife fell outta Quincy’s hand. He screams, ‘They needs to build me a statue in the middle of Chatham!’ Then he runs out into the night.”

  I don’t know how long I stood there before I found my voice. “Curly, you said he shot him. Did he say he killed him?”

  Curly said, “I don’t know. He said he shot him, I guess. The coward probably fired and run off.”

  “Did you tell the constable?”

  Curly said, “The constable? You know I don’t have nothing to do with him. Besides, Pa’s probably lying.”

  I said, “But, Curly, you’re crying. You’re crying. You must know he’s telling the truth. You know he shot that poor man.”

  Curly looked at me like I was crazy.

  “Poor man? You think I’m crying about that crazy Lion Man fool? You think I care one raccoon turd about him?”

  He stood in my face like he was going to hit me.

  “I’ll tell you why I’m crying, Red.”

  He wiped his nose on his shirtsleeve. “Have you ever wondered what it’s like to know you’re seconds away from killing someone, Red? We’ve all got so mad we said ‘I’m gonna kill so and so,’ but that’s just talk. Have you ever wondered how it feels to know you’re going to do it? That if it don’t happen tonight, it will tomorrow or, by God, for sure on the day after? That you’re not just talking?”

  “Well …”

  “Well, I know. I cried ’cause Quince is gonna kill Pa. I cried ’cause I know, Red. I thought about it and I ain’t gonna let Quince throw his life away. He’s always been the good one. He’s always done good in school and ain’t been the burden to Ma that I been.”

  Curly was openly sobbing. “Ever since I can remember, we all knowed which of us was like Pa and which waren’t. I thought hard on it and I ain’t gonna have Quince toss out all the work he’s done. I’m gonna do it, Red. I’m crying ’cause I know the only difference twixt me being a kid and being a murderer is time.

  “There’s a rope waiting for me at the gallows, Red, that’s why I’m crying.”

  He raised his shirt to wipe at his tears. Tucked into the waistband of his pants was the butt of a huge pistol.

  Curly was hurting horribly, and that probably should have mattered to me. But it didn’t. The only thing I could think about was how the Lion Man had looked at me and apologized. That wasn’t something one could easily forget.

  Maybe Curly’s father was telling the truth. Maybe the Lion Man was lying dead out at the river. Or maybe he’d missed him completely. Or maybe he hadn’t been killed and was lying in the woods slowly bleeding to death.

  “I have to go.”

  He yelled after me, “I trust you, Red. Don’t tell no one you seen me cry.”

  If it weren’t for the fact that I sounded so pathetic and silly when I practiced doing it at home in the mirror, I would have roundly and vilely cursed out Curly Bennett and his entire family.

  Miss Cary says for a news story to be something people will want to read, it’s got to be like a well-written novel by a great author; it’s got to touch on human emotions. She even gave me a list of what the most important human emotions are. I see this as proof of something I’ve suspected since we first met, that she doesn’t think I’m real bright.

  She told me, after I’d written something, I had to compare it to her list to make sure I was striking one of the emotions there. She says I have to do this until it happens without thought. The most important human emotions, in Miss Cary’s eyes, are:

  1. Anger

  2. Fear

  3. Happiness

  4. Sadness

  5. Surprise

  I’m well on my way to being a good reporter, because another one of Miss Cary’s lessons is that the best reporters always question what we’ve been told. Good reporters want to look deeper into whatever we’re investigating; we don’t just accept any old answer someone gives us. I’ve taken that lesson to heart and didn’t accept Miss Cary’s list of the most important human emotions as the undisputed truth either.

  I’m not saying the list isn’t a good start, but I think there are two more important human emotions that need to be included. I’ve never heard of them described as emotions, but they should be. From what I’ve seen, they have a stronger effect on you than feeling sad or happy do.

  I’m talking about sounds and smells. There is nothing that can bring up memories quicker than a certain sound, or clearer than a familiar smell.

  Someone singing a song can make you remember exactly where you were and what you were doing the first time you’d heard it. Hearing a belt get pulled out of its loops real fast can make your head jerk up whilst you remember a licking from a year ago like it just happened.

  But the emotion of smell is even stronger.

  A good whiff of something can quick-as-that pick you up and drop you in another place and time, just as surely as that contraption in the story The Time Machine.

  I can walk into our home and if Mother has baked cookies, a memory so strong sometimes gets into my head that I can remember conversations from years ago, or even the way the light was falling through a window.

  I was walki
ng home from school when I was around six or seven. I know it was then because that was the year the mayor gave me a Hudson Bay capote for my birthday, and I was so proud of it, I didn’t want to take it off, even when spring was edging close to summer.

  I remember becoming very excited when I opened the front door to home and breathed in air that was drenched with the smell of cookies. I dropped my Hudson Bay coat on the floor and ran to where the warm brown smell was coming from.

  Any time I smell chocolate chip cookies, I remember Mother’s exact words when I came into the kitchen. She said, “I know you didn’t just drop the mayor’s coat on the floor. Do you have any idea how much that cost?”

  I said, “Are the cookies done?”

  She whirled around from the stove and snapped, “And I know those aren’t your boots tracking wetness into my kitchen! You have to the count of three to get your clothes taken care of, Mr. Benjamin Alston, and the ‘one’ and the ‘two’ are silent.”

  I remember I had a moment of stupidness, wondering if it might be worthwhile to make a dash at the cookies that were cooling next to the stove. I wasn’t particularly bright at six or seven years old.

  But when Mother said, “Three,” I was brought to my senses and went to do as I was told.

  Or I can go tomorrow into the icehouse in Buxton and pick a coat off a nail and pull it around me, and in no time, the brisk smell of dampness and cold that are clinging to the coat will carry me into the middle of a snowball war that happened years ago.

  Me and Spencer were pinned down in our snow fort while the twins and Pilot pelted us with snowballs. They’d cheated and soaked the snowballs in water to turn them into ice balls, and we were defenseless. Trying to protect my head, I pushed my face into my jacket and first smelled that smell that the icehouse coat brings up.

  If I had closed my eyes, I would have been back in the ice fort, listening to Spencer’s laughs, feeling his legs kicking at me as we lay huddled behind the crumbling walls of our soon-to-be overrun fort.

  Spencer had said, “ ’Tis an honour and a pleasure to die in battle with such a wonderful chum, Benji.”

  I’d replied, “No, Spencer, the pleasure’s all mine,” just before one of the ice balls sent Spence crying home with a busted lip.

  So even though Miss Cary was the first black woman in North America to have her own newspaper and had done a bunch of other things that people celebrated, she didn’t know everything.

  She had refused to publish another article, but that’s not the reason today’s headline was going to be:

  SCIENTISTS DISCOVER NEW EMOTION. FAMOUS NEWSPAPER EDITOR EMBARRASSED FOR GETTING IT SO WRONG.

  I am not a coward. Fear isn’t what slowed me while running through the woods toward the big bend in the Chatham River to see if Curly’s father was telling the truth. It was careful thinking, not fear, that gave me pause.

  Since Father was in London for two days, my first instinct was to run and tell the constable, but I knew I had to go check. If the Lion Man really was wounded in the woods, bleeding all alone, every second counted. But as I got deeper in the forest, I began to have doubts.

  A debate raged in my head so fiercely that I sat on a fallen log and tried to work this quandary out.

  Curly’s father was a liar, that much everybody knew. But even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day and even the most dedicated liar can accidentally be truthful.

  He was indeed low enough to bushwhack another person. That was something else everyone knew. And even though Father said there wasn’t enough evidence to try him, the stories still fly about how it was Curly’s father who’d murdered that railroad agent years ago.

  I remembered what my grade six economics teacher, Mr. Camden, had said about how, decades ago, he used to hunt bears in these woods and how the worst thing to do was wound one, to not kill it cleanly. He said bears are vengeful creatures and, no matter what their injuries, will drag themselves around and ambush any hunter who wounded them. Maybe the Lion Man was out in the woods doing something similar; maybe he was waiting to take revenge on anyone who was white.

  Maybe he was dead. Maybe his body would be flyblown by now. I’m not afraid of a dead body; I’ve seen plenty at funerals. But it reasons that someone who’d been shot and died in the woods would be a whole different level of dead than a neatly washed body in a casket. A level I wasn’t particularly looking forward to seeing.

  The doubts began weighing heavily on me and I knew there were two choices: Either run back to Chatham and tell someone, or go deeper into the woods on a wild goose chase.

  Providence can guide one when the way seems lost, and it had to have been Providence that told me there was a third choice: Benji!

  The fish had given up on us, so me and the boys began swimming and swinging off the rope, seeing whose splash was most impressive.

  The watched feeling wrapped its fingers around me again. I can’t say why, but it was different this time. I realized in the weeks since I’d talked to the Madman, the feeling had changed from one of being watched to a feeling of being watched over.

  And what I was feeling now was being watched. Whoever it was, was watching loud, not so loud that anyone else noticed but loud enough that within a few moments after they found a spot from which to spy, I knew right where they were hiding.

  Even though the watcher kept ducking, they’d occasionally raise their head, and their brown hat stood out amongst the forest green.

  I did nothing to alert my chums. When my turn to swing on the rope came, I sailed over the pond and, instead of trying to raise as much water and splash as I could, I took a quick breath and dove deep. I swam along the bottom of the pond toward the north side, where the reeds rose out of the water in a thicket a good twelve or fifteen feet tall.

  Staying half submerged, I snaked my way to the pond’s north bank and slinked into the trees. Once I was deep enough in the woods to be hidden, I looked back toward the pond.

  The watcher hadn’t noticed me slip away. His head kept popping out of the bushes, spying on my friends. I grew sore disappointed that none of my friends noticed I’d slipped away either; what if I’d been tangled in the lily pads and was drowning? They wouldn’t have come looking for me until long after I’d met Saint Peter, gotten my golden slippers, and was stomping all over God’s heaven.

  I circled into the woods so I could come up on the watcher from behind. Just to be safe, I picked up two baseball-sized stones and held them tight. If he was carrying a weapon, the fact that I could sneak up on him might give me the upper hand.

  I silently stole toward where he was.

  He was flattened to the ground, raising his head every once in a while. From his size, I could see the spy was a boy, a brown hat covering his head. And he was unarmed. I grew emboldened.

  I set the stones down and crept nearer.

  I was close enough to hear his breath as he drew it in.

  I waited for his head to go down one more time. I was only one leap away.

  Perhaps it’s because of what I went through with the Lion Man before. Perhaps it’s because there’s a limit as to how frightened one can be, and once you get to that point, nothing else is as much of a bother. Whatever the reason, this time, when the wounded Lion Man pounced and began the process of ripping my throat out of my neck to gain vengeance on the first white person he came across after being so foully ambushed, I neither screamed nor moaned. I accepted the hand I’d been dealt and waited to be dispatched to heaven.

  As I felt his icy fingers wrap around my mouth to stifle any of my dying wails, I had second thoughts. If I screamed loudly enough, maybe Benji and the other boys from Buxton would hear me and come to my rescue. Maybe my dying screams could serve as a warning and they could save themselves.

  The Lion Man’s hand was over my lips, so I opened my mouth wide, then clamped down.

  I was shocked when the Lion Man cried out, “Oww! Red?”

  I released his fingers just as he released my face. br />
  The uncontrollable trembling that shook my body showed that my courage had been false.

  Benji Alston furiously waved his right hand in the air and hopped from one foot to the other.

  “That hurt!”

  “I thought you were the Lion Man come to kill me!”

  “What are you talking about? You’re making me believe what they say about everyone from Chatham, that you’re all addled in the head.”

  “No, Benji, this is kismet! I was looking for you.”

  “What? Why?”

  “It’s the Lion Man. I’m afraid a drunkard from Chatham has shot him.”

  “Shot who?”

  “The Lion Man.”

  “Wait, what is it this man is lying about?”

  “No, not that. Lion, l-i-o-n, the South Woods Lion Man.”

  Benji stared at me, and I can find no fault in the exasperated expression that worried his face.

  He said, “Addled. Every single one of you.”

  “No, Benji, you must know of him, the escaped slave who lives in the woods with the lion’s mane of hair!”

  “What!”

  “Surely you must have heard of him. We always believed he was from Buxton.”

  Benji’s expression changed from bewilderment to horror.

  “You mean the Madman of Piney Woods?”

  He stopped hopping and shaking his bitten finger.

  “It must be he. We call him the Lion Man because of his mane.”

  “You said he was shot?”

  “Yes, I believe so.”

  “How badly was he hurt?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t even know where he is.”

  “Did you tell the constable in Chatham?”

  “No.”

  His tone changed, beginning to edge toward anger. “Who have you told?”

  I was embarrassed by my answer. “No one. I discovered it myself less than an hour or so ago. I wanted to find you so we could go together to see if it was true. I figured if he was wounded, you’d be able to track him.”