Cecil? Cecil a thief I tell her. And not that sly a one neither.
Once was she says. No more.
Always was. My mind is made up on that. But what’s got me puzzled is what is this rareness he puts to the world or whatever?
Poetry is her answer. She reach her hand that has been overdone with various rings into the big purse and pulls out a booklet. She says Cecil has written it and the critics have claimed him as a natural in ability.
I take the booklet in my hands. It is of thick dry paper and the cover says “Dark Among the Grays” by Cecil McCoy. That is him all right I say. Tell me do this somehow line him up early for parole?
It could she says. She trying to face me bold enough but her eyes is playing hooky on her face and going places besides my own. She been teaching him for two years she says and what he has is a gift like she never seen before.
Gift I say. A gift is not like Cecil.
May I have the book she asks. I hand it to her. She opens it to a middle page. Like this listen to this. She begin to read to me from what apparently Cecil my son has written out. The name of it is “Soaring” and it is a string of words that say a bird is floating above the junkyard and has spotted a hot glowing old wreck below only the breeze sucks him down and he can’t help but land in it. When she done reading the thing she look up at me like I should maybe be ridiculous with pleasure. I can’t tell but that is my sense.
Is that the first chapter or what I want to know.
She lets out one of them whistly breaths that means I might overmatch her patience. These are poems of his life on the street she tells me. But they are brimful of accurate thoughts for all. Yet grounded in the tough streets of this area.
They have junkyards everywhere is my comeback to her.
But the bird Mister McCoy. The bird is soaring over death which is an old car wreck. The poet is wanting to be that white bird winging it free above death. What it really signifies is that Cecil want to be let off from having to die. That is the point of it she says.
Now to me this point is obvious but I feel sad for a second about Cecil. Two things he never going to be is a white bird.
Read on I suggest.
She slides out a smile for me that lets me know I’m catching on. Then she turn the book to another page. This was in some big-time poetry magazine she says. Then she read. The words of this one are about a situation I recognize. The poet has ripped off his momma’s paycheck to pay back some bad dudes he ain’t related to.
Hold it there I tell her. That is a poem that actually happen several times lady. Cecil a goddamn thief.
No no no. He wants to make amends for it. He wants to overcome the guilt of what he done.
I tell her it would be in the hundreds of dollars to do that. Is these poems going to get him that kind of money? My question is beneath her. She won’t answer it.
This poem has meanings for all the people she says. They look into it and see their selves.
That is nice and interesting I tell her but how come Wilma and me has to pay for this poem all alone? Everybody who looks in it and see their selves ought to pay some back to us.
This comment of mine puts pressure on her cool and she begins to pace about the room. The room is clean enough but the furniture is ragged. I have a hip weakness and janitor work pains it. Wilma has the job now.
The lady stops and looks out the window. Two cars is blocking traffic to say what’s going on to each other. Horns are honking. People get hurt over things like that.
Mister McCoy do you love Cecil?
There was a time I answer. It was a love that any daddy would have. But that was way back. If I love Cecil now it is like the way I love the Korean conflict. Something terrible I have lived through.
He has changed Mister McCoy. He has got in touch with his humanity. If he had a place to live he could be paroled to start fresh.
I believe I will sit down. As I say it I drop to the three-legged chair by the door. I am thinking of my son Cecil. He was one of a whole set of kids Wilma and me filled out because we had only each other. He ate from the same pot of chili as the rest but he turned out different. His eyes were shiny and his nose turned up instead of being flat. The better he knows you the more relaxed he is about stealing you blind. Same pot of chili but different.
I don’t believe we want to take him back I say.
But you are his family. There is no one else for him.
Family yes but main victims too lady. I reach up and pull the bridge from my mouth which leaves a bad fence of my teeth showing. See that? I ask. Cecil did that. He wasn’t but fifteen when he did that.
He has changed she says again. She says it like that settles it.
I don’t believe it. He may well write out poems that say he sorry and guilty but I am leery of him. You listen to this lady. This porch right here. I was standing on this porch right here when it was less sunk and Cecil was out there in the street with a mess of boys. They were little but practicing to be dangerous someday. One of them picks up a stone and tosses it at the high-up streetlight there. He misses it by a house or two. He ain’t close. I stood there on the porch out of curiosity and watched. They all flung stones at the light but none was close to shattering it. Then Cecil pick up a slice of brick and hardly aims but he smash that light to bits. As soon as it left his hand I seen that his aim for being bad was awful accurate.
Well she says. He seems sensitive to her.
Oh he can do that lady. He could do that years ago.
You are a hard nut she tells me. He is lost without you. His parole could be denied.
Tell me why do you care? I ask her this but my suspicion is she would like to give Cecil lessons in gaiety.
Because I admire his talent Mister McCoy. Cecil is a poet who is pissed off at the big things in this world and that give him a heat that happy poets got to stand back from.
You want us to take him home because he pissed off? That ain’t no change.
Artistically she say wheezing that put-down breath again.
Lady that ain’t enough I tell her. Let me show you the door.
When we are on the porch she wants to shake hands again but I don’t chew my cabbage twice. I have been there so I lead her across the yard. Her cheeks get red. I look up and down the neighborhood and all the homes are like mine and Wilma’s. The kind that if they were people they would cough a lot and spit up tangled stuff. Spit shit into the sink.
At her car she hands me the booklet. It is yours she says. Cecil insisted.
I take it in my hands. I say thank you.
She slips into the rattly old thing and starts the motor. A puff of oil smoke come out the back and there is a knocking sound.
I lean down to her window.
Look lady I say. Wish Cecil well but it is like this. He ain’t getting no more poems off of us.
Her head nods and she flips her hand at me. The monster band-aid on the hood has caught my eye again. What kind of craziness is that about I wonder. I want to ask her but she shifts the car and pulls away. So I am left standing there alone to guess just what it is she believe that band-aid fix.
The Horse in Our History
The body fell within a shout of a house that still stands. A house shown up rudely in morning brightness, a dull small box gone shabby along the roof edge, with tar shingles hanging frayed over a gutter that has parted from the eaves and rolled under like a slackened lip. The yard between the house and the railroad tracks has become an undistinguished green, the old oaks have grown fatter with the decades, and new neighbors have built closer. At the bottom of the yard near the tracks there are burnished little stumps where elms that likely witnessed everything had been culled in the 1960s, probably, after the Dutch blight moved into our town and caught them all.
The body fell within a shout, and surely those in the house must have heard something. Shouts, pleas, cries, or brute laughter carrying loudly on that summer night before the war, here in the town this was then, of lulled hearts a
nd wincing spirits, a democratic mess of abashed citizenry hard to rouse toward anything but winked eyes and tut-tuts on “negro matters.” A Saturday in summer, the town square bunched with folks in for trading from the hills and hollers, hauling okra, tomatoes, chickens, goats, and alfalfa honey. Saturday crowds closed the streets around the square to traffic, and it became a huge veranda of massed amblers. Long hellos and nodded good-byes. Farmers in bib overalls with dirty seats, sporting dusted and crestfallen hats, raising pocket hankies already made stiff and angular with salt dried from sweat wiped during the hot wagon ride to town. In the shops and shade there were others, wearing creased town clothes, with the white hankies of gentlefolk folded to peak above breast pockets in a perfect suggestion of gentility and standing. The citizenry mingled—Howdy, Hello, Good gracious is that you? The hardware store was busy all day, and the bench seats outside became heavy with squatting men who spit brown splotches toward the gutter. Boys and girls hefted baskets of produce, ate penny candy, and screamed, begged nickels so they could catch the cowboy matinee at the Avenue Theater. Automobiles and trucks parked east of the square, wagons and mules rested north in the field below the stockyard pens. Toward evening the drinking and gambling men would gather to cheer or curse or wave weapons when local horses were raced on the flat, beaten track that circled the pens.
It was a man named Blue who fell on a night that followed such a day, a man and a falling I knew only from whispers, and the whispering had it that Blue tended horses here and there and was the only jockey around who could get the very best from a spectacular dun gelding named Greenvoe.
Mrs. E. H. Chambliss, in conversation outside Otto and Belle’s Barbecue, probably in June of 1976: “That horse had a grandeur like no man and few beasts. He’d fly if he wanted to go slow.”
Mr. Todd Pilkington, smoking in the men’s room just before the funeral of a classmate he’d served beside at Anzio, spring 1984: “I’ve heard that horse mentioned—but wasn’t that from you? Askin’ me at some other funeral?”
Mr. Edward H. Chambliss, during a phone call in winter of 1994: “That nigra Blue was the best rider and hand hereabouts in them days, and him’n your granddaddy trained that horse up together real well. Real well.”
My father, as the whistling breaths from his oxygen tubes kept the cat scared, and after the dog had smelled the near future on his master and run into the woods, never to return, the week of his death, 1993: “Son, I heard the water pump squeakin’ in the yard late that night. That old pump, gushin’ water for quite a spell, so late, and voices.”
Black families had been recruited in Oxford, Mississippi, and brought to town by Dr. Brumleigh in 1910. The doctor owned vast fruit orchards just east of town, several hundred acres, and brought fourteen complete families north to work them for him. A bare clutch of rudimentary houses were built for the families on a gullied slope out of view from the square in the still largely forsaken northeastern reaches of town. The orchard failed within a decade. The blacks remained in homes that were soon too small, unsnug, and uneven against the sky. New rooms were made of what was easily found—wood scraps from backyards and trash piles, sheets of crumpled metal blown free by storms, chicken wire, river stones, with foundation stumps of almost the right size tipping the floors slightly this way and that. There were no romantic entryways or cozy embellishments. Windows cracked at angles as the houses relaxed further into the dirt.
Mr. Micah Kerr, beside Howl Creek, holding a cane pole while watching his bobber not bob, around 1969: “Them days, boy, furniture’d really start a-fallin’ of a Saturday night over on Nigger Hill, there. Somebody’d a-get to fussin’ with somebody else ’til furniture started flyin’ and a-fallin’, and that fussin’d go on and on ’til the makin’ up started, which was usually louder.”
My oldest living relative, who had, with great single-mindedness, remarried in less than a year, at her spacious new home, late 1993: “Don’t write that. Why write that? There wasn’t any murder like that. It never happened. Never happened. And please listen good to me for once—they’re not all dead yet.”
The horse was, in most versions of the story, a bangtail grown powerful from running the sand bottoms of the Jacks Fork. Sometimes the horse had been stolen out of Sallisaw by one of the Grieve brothers, or a sly stranger who gave a false name on sale day and promptly left town. The horse was always dun, a bitter gelding, with a crisp stride and endless stamina. A horse worth fighting over.
Mr. Willie Johnstone, bourbon in hand, at a fish fry of redear perch on the Eleven Point, 1995: “I guess your granddaddy and ol’ Blue was with the horse most days in them years. The lunch whistle’d blow at the mill’n lots of times you’d pretty quick see William Sidney walkin’ the path yonder above Eccleston’s, the path that’s gone now but used to be the nigh cut through those woods that were there and came out into a backyard on the Hill. Fetchin’ ol’ Blue, I guess, to work that horse for the lunch hour in a field somewhere over there. I can still see him in my head, his shape goin’ up that path—your granddaddy walked about like you do, kid, sort of hunched, like he was halfway duckin’ from somethin’ all the time.”
Mrs. E. H. Chambliss, with her eyes closed and her hands clasped, on a porch swing in July 1995: “Oh, them two loved that horse. Which is sad, ’cause I think the horse is what killed him, really. The heartbreak, don’t you know?”
Mr. Tom Finney, after my father’s funeral, while carving a ham: “Shit, boy, his name wasn’t Greenvoe—wherever’d you get that from? And he wasn’t much of a horse, neither, if I’m rememberin’ the horse you mean. Used to stop on the far half of the track and drop horse apples in the midst of a goddamn race—that sound like a great champ to you?”
Mr. Ronnie Thigpen, at his daughter’s home near Egypt Grove, with the television blaring world news and a rack of medicine bottles on the table at his side, 1994: “There had been a drunk hobo run over by a train’n broken apart a month or so earlier, so when I seen all this blood’n splintered wood’n stuff, I thought, Uh-oh, another drunk hobo forgot to jump. Then I seen it was a nigger, a nigger from town, there, that had forgot to jump. So I told the man at the train depot there was a sort of familiar-lookin’ nigger dead in the weeds over by the tracks, and I guess he flagged a deputy.”
My oldest living relative, while picking cherries from her yard trees, 1996: “That’s ’cause you got the name wrong. His name wasn’t Blue—it was Ballou. Folks misheard his last name and thought it was his first name, so that’s what he got called. His wife used to be around, did housework and the like, and her name was Ballou. Look for him under Ballou.”
Summer had its fangs out sharp and long that year, sucking the joy from every sunny hour. The heat led to erupting meannesses between intimates, bursts of spite that bubbled the truth up top to be hurled from one sweated sopping side of the bed to the other, never to be truly forgotten or gotten over. Howl Creek, a rumpled, dissolute puddling of water, became the nearest splashing place, and many folks of both sexes took small relief in the darkness there. A fainting quiet fell over the darkened town, and headaches ebbed in the silence, until an approaching train would release a rallying moan into the night. The railroad tracks ran beside the creek and the moan stirred sleep all across town.
Sheriff Solomon Combs, in a ledger found under a basement staircase at the courthouse, dated August 4, 1938: “Ballou. Colored. First name not sure. Drunk and hit by a train hauling timber. Deceased. Accident.”
Mrs. E. H. Chambliss, waiting for hot rolls at the Ramada Inn buffet, on Easter Sunday, 1996: “The horse. I’m sure anything that might’ve happened, or maybe didn’t, was about that horse.”
Mr. Tom Finney, in the parking lot outside Kenny’s Walleye Restaurant, summer 1996: “That worthless pony is probably still lollygaggin’ on the far turn to spread horse apples, Danny. Hurry’n you can maybe still catch a glimpse of ’im yet, dawdling along the rail with his ass to the finish line and his tail in the air.”
Someone official mu
st’ve carried the news to the Hill. Knocking on doors to raised houses made of things not meant to be nailed together, but that stood for years, invalid structures patched further with odds and ends as passing seasons brought rot to the wood and old nails fell away. In the shade and fine dust beneath the houses, dogs have belly-dragged in and out until belly-shaped draws have been wiggled into the dirt. Kids follow dogs, and on the Sundays of most seasons muffled playing voices rise from the shaded crawl spaces and catch the wind to fly. Knock, knock—You Blue’s wife? These li’l girls his kids? Well, he won’t be home no more. Jumped in front of a timber train. Must’ve been drunk. You can bury the boy over at Sadie’s.
Mr. Edward H. Chambliss, with his chin in the air and his ancient fists balled, on his front porch, early 1997: “William Sidney always was my best friend, goddamn you, Danny. And best friend don’t mean nothin’ if you won’t stand for each other when the bad time comes. You might oughta keep clear of me. You might oughta do that. And don’t call my wife, neither.”
My oldest living relative, on the phone, early 1997: “These were not men lamed by any sorts of doubts about anything they did. Or might do yet—hear me?”
An uncle who’d had two ships blown wide and sunk beneath him in the Pacific, and came home with what they called “shell shock”—a cracked and occasionally cascading state of mind that was accompanied by a delicate lacing of public shame—on the phone from Australia, where he’d emigrated in 1955: “I knew Blue from when I ran errands for the men out at Cozy Grove, the bar there. I never saw him with a horse. He wasn’t much higher’n a belt buckle, but he was stronger’n Limburger cheese. He’d carry feed sacks from town for a nickel. I never heard of Dad doin’ much of anything with horses, neither, but go broke bettin’ on ’em. You knew Dad was born well-to-do, didn’t you? Had all that land once out by JJ Highway. Lost everything before I was born on moonshine and ladies in red and mighty slow horses, and never even said sorry, either.”