The Bottoms

  “You don’t need to sir me,” Daddy said. “I won’t sir you, you don’t sir me.”

  “Yes suh … Very well, Constable.”

  At that moment, Doc Taylor came walking toward the icehouse. He was carrying a Dr Pepper and some sort of candy from Pappy’s place. He looked sharp in his clothes, which were a little more special than we were used to seeing. Very-well-made slacks, the cuffs of which he had somehow managed to keep clear of mud, though with the shoes he had not succeeded. He wore a clean white shirt that was so soft-looking it seemed to be made of angel wings. He had on a thin black tie that glistened like the wet back of a water snake, and his soft black felt hat was cocked at a jaunty angle that made him look more like he was going to a dance than to examine a mutilated body. I wondered if he had on his chain with the dented coin attached.

  “That there’s Doc Taylor,” Daddy said to Doc Tinn. “He’s what I think they call an intern. He’s with Stephenson ’cause he’s thinkin’ about retirin’, and he thought he’d get to know folks so he could take his place. He’s a little dandy, but he seems all right to me.”

  “I doubt he wants to know us folks,” Doc Tinn said.

  “I suppose you’re right,” Daddy said. “Let’s get this over with, then.”

  Daddy turned to me, gave me a pat on the head, said, “See you later, Harry.”

  Dejected, I wandered up the street a ways, turned, looked back at the icehouse, watched Daddy and Doc Tinn go inside with Doc Stephenson.

  It was confusing to me. I had heard Daddy say the doctor didn’t want anything to do with the body because it was colored, but here he was, away from his office, down in colored town for a looksee. And he had Doc Taylor with him.

  I was thinking on all this when I heard a squeaking behind me, turned to see an ancient, legless, colored man in a cart covered by a willow stick and tarp roof, drawn by a big glossy white hog fastened up in a leather harness. The old man was bald and his scalp was wrinkled like a leather bag that had been wadded up and smoothed out by hand. He could have hidden a pencil in the wrinkles on his face. There wasn’t a tooth in his head. He looked much older than Miss Maggie. In fact, she was a girl compared to him.

  He carried a thin green willow stick he was using to tap the hog on the hind quarters. The hog was grunting, trundling along at a pretty good gate. Walking beside the old man and his cart were two boys about my age, one colored, one white. Their clothes were even more worn-looking than mine. The colored boy’s pants were gone at the knee and there wasn’t any attempt there to hold patches. The white kid’s pants were gone at one knee, and there was a cotton sack patch there that had been multidyed by life, most likely the dye consisting of grass stains, clay roads, dirty riverbanks, and berry stains.

  I noticed folks that had been standing around were edging toward the icehouse, congregating outside of it like a bunch of blackbirds on a limb. I realized then the body in the icehouse wasn’t much of a secret.

  The old man in the hog-drawn cart pulled up beside me. He looked at me with his rheumy eyes and opened his toothless mouth to say: “How’re you, little white boy?”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  The truth of the matter was he scared me. I had never seen anyone that looked that old, and certainly no one in that circumstance, minus legs and drawn about in a cart by a hog.

  The white boy who had been walking along with him said, “I’m Richard Dale. I live on down the bottoms.”

  Richard Dale was a little older than me, I think. Thin of jaw, ripe of lips, with a nose that we used to call Roman. Some smart alecks used to say, “Yeah. It roams all over his face.”

  I told him I lived in the bottoms too, explained my part of the country. His part of the bottoms was on the other side from me. His section was called the Sandy Bottoms, because there was more white sand there than where we lived, which was rich with red clay and brown dirt.

  The colored boy with him introduced himself as Abraham. He looked very energetic, as if he had been drinking lots of coffee and was expecting something big to happen, like a tornado, a flood, or tripping over a boxful of money.

  Being all of the same general age, quick to bore, and a little tired of adults, we were immediate friends.

  Abraham said, “Me and Ricky got some cards with nekkid women on ’em.”

  “But we ain’t got ’em with us,” Richard hastened to add, lest I might ask for him to lay them out for examination.

  “Yeah,” Abraham said, disappointed. “They in the tree house, and it ain’t nowhere near here. We got nigger shooters too. I can shoot a tin can at maybe thirty feet.”

  A “nigger shooter” was a word for a slingshot made of shoe tongue, tire rubber, and a forked stick. The name was common, and Abraham had said it without shame or consideration.

  “We hear they’s a body in there,” Abraham added. “A woman got murdered.”

  I couldn’t contain myself. “I found the body.”

  “Say you did,” Abraham said. “Naw. Naw you didn’t. You pullin’ our leg.”

  “Did too. That’s my Daddy in there. He’s the constable over our parts.”

  “This ain’t his constablin’ here,” the old man in the hog cart said. He could hear right good. I figured he’d heard us talking about those cards with naked women on them, and I was embarrassed.

  Richard Dale said, “That’s Uncle Pharaoh. He got his legs torn up and cut off ’cause of a wild hog. Hog is Pig Jesse. That ain’t the wild hog. That’s a tame one.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the old man.

  He looked at me like I was some sort of strange vegetable he had never seen before. “Sorry ’bout what?” he said.

  “Your legs.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, don’t be. Didn’t happen yesterd’y. I done got over it.”

  “Where’d you find that body?” Abraham asked, and I told all three of them the story. I finished with: “I thought since I found it and done seen it, Daddy might let me look again and hear what the doctor’s got to say about it, but he wouldn’t do it.”

  “That’s the way it always is,” Richard said. “Adults think they got to know everything and we ain’t supposed to know or see nothin’. Hey, you want to go off and play?”

  “No,” I said. “I think I’ll wait here.”

  Richard winked at me. “Let’s play.”

  Abraham was smiling, and I wondered what it was they were after. I hoped they didn’t want to smoke grapevine, or even tobacco, ’cause I never liked either a bit. Times I had tried they had made my stomach sick.

  Richard leaned over close and said, “Me and Abraham know somethin’ you might like to know about that body. Come with us.”

  I thought on that, but only for a second. They told Uncle Pharaoh goodbye, and I went running with them, away from the crowd, toward the creek. They led me along the edge of the creek and up behind the icehouse to where the big chinaberry tree grew.

  Richard whispered: “Me and Abraham we know everything there is to know about over here. There’s a big hole in the roof up there, right over the front room, where they bring the ice out. There’s a piece of tin over it, but it’ll twist aside and you can see in. If you don’t twist it too much, they won’t notice ’cause the tree shades that spot. Won’t be a bunch of sunlight slippin’ in. ’Sides, there’s all sorts of cracks in that roof anyway. Little sunlight here and there won’t be noticed none.”

  “What if they ain’t in that room?” I said.

  “Then they ain’t,” Abraham said. “But what if they is?”

  Richard led the way up the chinaberry tree, Abraham after him, and me following up last. The chinaberry was a big one, and several of the limbs branched over the top of the icehouse. We climbed out on those and onto the roof. Richard moved along the roof to a spot in the shingles with a tin patch. He used his hand to push the patch back. Cold air came up from the icehouse and hit us in the face, and it felt good. Above us, the clouds had turned dark, as if filling up with shadow to aid our ca
use.

  We looked out at the crowd. Most of them could see us. Some of them waved. I thought: Boy, am I gonna be in for it. But it was worth the gamble. These folks had no reason to tell my Daddy anything. They didn’t even know him. And like most colored, they pretty much minded their own business when it came to whites.

  There wasn’t nothing to see at first, but we could hear men talking. I recognized Doc Stephenson’s voice. He sounded loud, and drunk. Just when I was getting cold feet, and thinking about climbing down, Richard put his hand on my shoulder, and into view came two colored men carrying a long, narrow, galvanized tub packed with ice and, of course, the body.

  The corpse was covered with a big burlap sack, and soon as they set it down on the ice-cutting table, they removed the sack, and I got a good look.

  Looking down on it, I felt strange. It was the same body I had found that night. But it had seemed ten feet tall and terrible then. Now it was small and bloated and sad-looking, and suddenly, a person. Someone’s spirit had inhabited that body and it had been alive and had eaten and laughed and had plans. Now it was a pathetic shell of wasting flesh, minus a soul. I either smelled, or imagined I could smell, the decaying odor of the body rising up with the cold from the icehouse’s interior.

  In that moment, something else changed for me. I realized that a person could truly die. Daddy and Mama could die. I could die. We would all someday die. Something went hollow inside me, shifted, found a place to lie down and be still, if not entirely in comfort.

  Her head was tilted back and slightly submerged in chunks of ice. The mouth was open, and missing teeth. Many of the remaining teeth were jagged or broken, and I immediately realized they had been knocked out. The woman’s breasts were split open and laid back and the blood had gone gray and was frozen.

  For the first time I was seeing a woman’s privates, but there was really nothing to see. Just a triangle of darkness. The poor woman’s knees were slightly bent and she lay with her left hip down and her right hip up. Her hands were out to her sides and cupped into claws. Her face was hard to make out. Things had been done to it. There were rips in her body where the barbed wire had torn it. There were cuts all over.

  Doc Stephenson, sucking from his flask, wobbled over to the body and looked down. He said, “Now that is one dead darkie.”

  The colored men who had toted the body out in the galvanized tub looked at the floor. Doc Stephenson punched the one on his right with his elbow, said, “Ain’t it, boy?”

  The man lifted his chin slightly, and without looking at Doc Stephenson directly, said, “Yas suh, she sho is.”

  It embarrassed me to see that colored man have to act like that. He was big and strong and could have pulled Doc Stephenson’s head off. But if he had, he would have been swinging from a limb before nightfall, and maybe his entire family, and any other colored who just happened to be in sight when the Klan came riding.

  Stephenson knew that. White folks knew that. It gave them a lot of room.

  I glanced out of the corner of my eye at Abraham. The look on his face had gone from boyish excitement to one I couldn’t quite identify.

  Daddy moved to look at the body then, and said to Doc Stephenson, “I thought you couldn’t look at the body? Wouldn’t.”

  “Not in town. Wouldn’t a white person within a hundred miles have anything to do with me they knew I was hauling a colored into my place. A decent white woman sure wouldn’t want to be examined in no place like that. No offense, boys, but colored and white need their separation. Even the Bible tells us that. Hell, you boys are happier when you don’t have the worries we do. You’re lucky, is what you are … Taylor here told me I ought to have a look. That we ought to come out and help you boys.”

  Doc Taylor grinned shyly; the dampness on his teeth caught the lamplight and made them shine.

  Doc Tinn had not stepped forward. He stood slightly back of Daddy and Doc Stephenson, his head down, not quite knowing what to do with his hands, though I had an idea what he’d like to do.

  Doc Taylor stood at the end of the table, looking at the body calmly, taking it all in.

  Doc Stephenson looked the body over, touched it, moved it slightly, said, “Looks to me a wild hog got her.”

  “Then tied her with barbed wire to a tree?” Daddy said.

  Doc Stephenson looked at Daddy as if he were an idiot. “I mean before she was tied to the tree.”

  “You saying a hog killed her?”

  “I’m saying it could be like that. They got tusks like knives. I’ve seen them do some bad things to flesh.”

  “Doctor Tinn,” Daddy said. “Do you know this woman?”

  Doc Tinn came forward, looked the body over. “I don’t think so. I’ve sent for the Reverend Bail, though. He’s supposed to be here already.”

  “What’d you do that for?” Doc Stephenson said.

  “He knows most everybody in these parts,” Doc Tinn said. “I thought he might could identify her.”

  “Hell, how you tell one colored woman from another is hard for me to figure,” Doc Stephenson said. “I wouldn’t think you boys could keep up with your wives. ’Course, maybe you don’t try to.”

  Stephenson laughed as if everyone were in on the joke. He had no idea he was being rude. He believed so strongly that colored and white were truly different at the core, he thought it was evident to everyone.

  I could see Doc Tinn’s shoulders shaking. Doc Taylor’s expression changed slightly. He glanced at the floor briefly, then looked up again, focusing on the body.

  Doc Stephenson said, “Now that I look at her better, I think a panther did it.”

  “A panther ain’t any more prone to tying bodies to trees with barbed wire than a hog,” Daddy said. I saw Doc Tinn’s face change slightly. He had liked that.

  “I know that,” Doc Stephenson said, and his tone was sharper than before. “What I’m suggestin’ is she was killed by a panther, then someone else came along, some colored boys, and tied her to a tree.”

  “What for?” Daddy asked.

  “For fun. Why not? You was a boy once. You ever done somethin’ foolish, Constable?”

  “Lots of times. But I wouldn’t have done nothing like that, and I don’t know any boys would.”

  “Maybe not white boys. And listen here now, Tinn, I don’t mean nothin’ by it. I know you. You’re all right. But colored and whites is different. You know that. Down deep you do. Hell, there’s things that a colored can’t help, and I think folks are wrong to hold every little thing you coloreds do against you. Boys wouldn’t have meant nothing by it. It’d just be somethin’ to do. You know, like finding a dead fish and draggin’ it around.”

  “A dead fish ain’t a woman,” Daddy said.

  “Yeah, but don’t you think a couple little colored boys would have a pretty good time playin’ with a naked colored gal?”

  “Doc,” Daddy said. “You been drinkin’. Why don’t you go somewhere and get sober.”

  “I’m all right.”

  Doc Taylor, who had been silent, said, “Doctor, maybe you have had a bit too much to drink. I ought to get you home.”

  “What for,” Doc Stephenson said. “Nothin’ there.”

  I had heard how his wife had up and ran off from him, and since he always seemed mean as a snake to me, I couldn’t say I blamed her.

  “You could rest,” Doc Taylor said.

  “I can rest fine right here, anywhere I want to.”

  I saw Doc Taylor look at Daddy and shake his head, as if to indicate he was sorry.

  “I don’t want you here,” Daddy said. “Go somewhere and get sober.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I don’t stutter. Go somewhere and get sober.”

  “You talkin’ to me like that in front of these colored boys?”

  “These men haven’t been boys in years. And I’m just talkin’ to you, period.”

  “This ain’t your jurisdiction no how.”

  “Did I say anything about arr
esting you? Now get on your horse and ride.”

  “I got a car.”

  “It’s an expression, you jackass.”

  “Jackass. You callin’ me a jackass?”

  Daddy turned and moved close to Doc Stephenson. “I am. I’m callin’ you a jackass. Straight to your face. Right now. Here. Ain’t it bad enough we got a woman’s been murdered, and not by no goddamn panther neither. Ain’t that bad enough? We ain’t supposed to be quarrelin’ over her poor dead body. Get out before I put you out on the end of my shoe.”

  “Well, I never …”

  “Right now. Go. Taylor, get him out of here.”

  Doc Taylor touched Doc Stephenson’s arm, and Stephenson jerked it away. “I don’t need no damn seein’ eye dog.”

  Doc Stephenson, perhaps trying to show some defiance, took a big swig of his whiskey and wobbled off toward the door. Just before goin’ out he turned and said, “I ain’t forgettin’ you, Constable.”

  “Well, I almost done forgot you, and will, quick as you go out that door.”

  Doc Stephenson hesitated, then said, “I’ll just leave you then. See what you can learn from that boy. I can’t believe they even give the title Doctor to a colored. You ain’t no doctor to me, nigger. You hear me?”

  “Come on,” Doc Taylor said.

  “You leave me alone,” Doc Stephenson said.

  And out the door he went.

  I looked at Richard, then Abraham. They both had big grins on their faces. We looked back down through the split in the roof.

  “Sorry about him,” Doc Taylor said. “His wife run off from him. He ain’t got over it yet.”

  “He’s not the kind that will.”

  “I talked him into coming,” Doc Taylor said. “I thought he could help. And I guess I was curious.”

  “I appreciate you,” Daddy said. “You better take care of him.”

  It was polite, but it was clear Daddy wanted Doc Taylor out of the icehouse too.

  “Yeah,” Doc Taylor said, and left.

  Daddy said, “Doctor, would you like to examine and give me your opinion on the patient?”

  “Yes, I would,” Dr. Tinn said.

  He set his bag on the edge of the table and opened it. He said, “Billy Ray, light me up a lantern, would you?”