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 and 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
