Across the chest was a new crude tattoo that read, NIGGER.
Daddy put it together this way. Red loved Miss Maggie like a mother, but when he discovered she was his mother, he lost his bearings, his position in life. He was no longer a good white man looking after a poor colored woman, he was colored himself. He then tried to save Mose, his father, and when he couldn’t, and when he decided his life had been duped, he went to Miss Maggie. Maybe he thought she would say it was all a joke, or something of that nature. It’s impossible to know. Or maybe Red decided to get rid of the one person who he knew knew for sure he wasn’t white.
Again, we’ll never know. But the guilt of who he was, and what he had done, caused him to torture himself with a crude tattoo cut into his chest, hot tar, and a slow choking death.
Maybe the Klan done it. Having discovered Red was black and that he had an arm tattooed with the names of near a dozen white women. Or maybe it was because they knew Red had tried to save Mose.
No way to know for sure. Life’s like that. It isn’t like one of Grandma’s murder mysteries. Everything doesn’t get sewn up neatly.
Like that damn picture colored with pencil in Mose’s old shack.
What was that about?
Could Mose have done that?
Since he didn’t have a picture of his boy, had he made one to go with his long-lost wife? Just colored in one to remind him he had a son?
Or had Cecil put it there?
He liked to put those little rolled-up pieces of newspaper in the bodies, hang up those pictures out of the Sears and Roebuck, for whatever reason. He had left them with his victims. Did he in some way consider Mose a victim of his; a man punished for his crime? He hadn’t had a chance to put the paper on the body, so had he placed it in the cabin?
And what was on those other pieces of paper? Pictures of women? Did he blame those pictures for what they made him do? Lust and murder?
For a time, here in the home, before he stroked out, there was a retired psychiatrist, and I told him my story of that time, and asked him about those pieces of paper. He had no set answer, but thought they might even have been clippings about women from the papers. Maybe crimes that had to do with women.
He said it could be a lot of things, but none of those things were really an answer.
I didn’t know then what it was about. And I don’t have any better idea now.
There’s not much left to tell. Just some general business. I was a hero for a while, then things settled down and we went to doing what everyone else was doing.
They finally got a schoolteacher, and before long they had several and we were attending regular. I made it all the way to the tenth grade. Tom finished the whole thing up, and even went on to college some years later.
But after that night in the bottoms, Grandma never fully recovered. It was like the anxiety took it out of her, made her old and wrecked her heart. She saw Mr. Groon a bit, but that didn’t take. She got sick, stayed in bed for a year or so, then one morning she just didn’t wake up.
We were living then in a new house on five acres Daddy bought in town. There was already a small cemetery back there, a family plot for some family long gone and forgotten, though those who had owned the house and the land had kept it up out of respect. We did the same. Grandma was buried back there under a huge oak tree that still grows, or did when I was there some ten years ago, back when I could get around. The grave has broken down and blended with the land. That’s exactly what Grandma wanted, to be consumed by and dumped all over East Texas by earthworms.
Toby’s buried somewhere out there as well.
After the events I’ve told you about, Toby lived another five years. He had run of the new place, inside and out. One morning Daddy let him out for his morning constitutional. He limped down the steps and out of sight. By nightfall he hadn’t returned. Next morning Mama found his body not far from where Grandma was buried.
As for our old place, well, Daddy sold it. He just couldn’t crop it anymore, and he wanted to be closer to the barbershop. Mose’s grave got lost among trees and brambles, and now there’s a parking lot and savings and loan built over it. It’s like he never existed.
Daddy quit being constable. He wasn’t no good at it anyway. He went to full-time hair cutting, and gradually times got better and he did well until the cancer. Fortunately, when it came, he went fast. He was sixty-two years old. Mama, as if Daddy were calling her, followed close behind.
Tom was killed by a drunk driver in nineteen sixty-nine. She grew into a woman lovely as our mother, made a kindergarten teacher. Her husband was a jackass. He ran off when she got pregnant, and was seldom heard of again.
Tom was driving my worthless nephew into Houston to see a doctor about shaking his drug habit when it happened. It was a head-on collision. Tom died instantly.
My nephew, named Jacob after my father, got a bruise on his head, recovered, and lived long enough to impregnate several women, poison the lives of numerous people with his drug and alcohol problems, and finally, almost mercifully, ended his life with a drug overdose in nineteen seventy-five.
Doc Tinn and his wife moved off to Houston sometime in the sixties. We really didn’t have much association with each other. I never saw or heard from them again.
Pappy Treesome’s boy Root was castrated and burned by the Klan in nineteen thirty-nine. When Pappy died and Camilla became an invalid from a stroke, Root was on his own more, and turned out he wasn’t so harmless. He committed a half dozen rapes on colored girls, for which not a thing was done, it being determined by white and black alike they had it comin’. I’m not sure why they had it comin’, other than they were female and he was male and he wanted to satisfy himself.
Finally Root made a bigger mistake in the eyes of white society than the rape of colored girls. I don’t know where it happened, or the circumstances around it, but he exposed himself to a white woman, and he was done in. Daddy once said he estimated Root had the mind of a five-year-old.
Old Man Nation lived a drunken life and made trouble throughout it. It didn’t catch up with him, though. He lived until he was eighty or more and died in his sleep.
His wife, long run off, was never replaced, and the two boys … Well, I don’t exactly know what came of them. They moved off. I heard tell that one of them died in a fishing accident, but I don’t know that’s the truth, and if it is, I don’t know which one of them it was.
Doc Stephenson, I have no memory of him going. Just one day he wasn’t there, and Dr. Taylor was. When I was twenty-two I became marshal of Marvel Creek. Its first. Before that there had just been a constable for the area, but the place, though never big, had grown and felt it needed its own personal law.
When World War Two started up I enlisted, but they wouldn’t take me. Years earlier, Sally Redback, stung by a hornet one day while I was plowing her, had kicked back in terror, catching me on the side of the cheek, causing damage to my right eye. I recovered with only a small scar, but it affected my vision. It was presumed I wouldn’t be able to shoot a rifle. I tried to explain I could shoot left-handed, but at that point in time they weren’t scrambling for soldiers, so I ended up staying home.
In the course of my marshaling duties, I met a lovely young woman named Eleanor Piggle—no joke. She ended up in Marvel Creek after her folks arrived from California. They had fled the Dust Bowl from Oklahoma and had come to East Texas, having found no Promised Land in California.
Doc Taylor delivered both our children, and pronounced Eleanor dead eleven years ago. Her big sweet heart just gave out.
James, my first boy, grew up to fight in Vietnam. He died there. William, who was a little younger, went to law school and does well. He helps pay for a lot of my care; he moved me to his home in Houston, then when I decided I was too much of a burden, he helped me find a rest home to finish off my days. He didn’t like the idea, but to tell the truth I prefer it.
The family comes to see me twice a week, and more if I want. His wife,
Coreen, is like a daughter to me, and my grandchildren are wonderful.
But time is wearing. It takes away the spirit. And though I love my son, his wife, and my grandchildren, I have no desire to lie here day after day with this tube in my shank, waiting on mashed peas and corn, and some awful thing that will pass for meat, all to be handfed to me by a beautiful nurse who reminds me of my long dead wife.
So now I close my eyes with my memories of those times. The bad things that happened aren’t nearly as memorable as the good. When I sleep I find myself in our little house next to the woods and the Sabine River. I can hear the crickets and the frogs and the moon is bright and the night is cool. I’m young and strong, full of piss and vinegar.
Each time I visit now, close my eyes to go there, I hope when I awake I will no longer be of this world, but one where Mama and Daddy, Tom and Grandma, perhaps even Mose and the Goat Man, and of course good old Toby, will be waiting for me.
Joe R. Lansdale, The Bottoms
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