Buster and I catalogued anything interesting on yellow pads, put the catalogued papers aside for future reference.
Mornings, when Buster wasn’t there, I read from the Sherlock Holmes stories or taught Rosy to read better. She had graduated from the movie magazines and comics, and was reading a few short stories out of Mom’s magazines, like
Sometimes Richard came by to visit, and we rode our bikes down to the wood-lined creek, hunted crawdads in the muddy shallow water.
We caught the crawdads by tying a piece of bacon to a string, jerking the mud bugs out of the creek when they grabbed hold of it.
Richard would bring a bucket with him, and by noon of a good day, we had it half full of crawdads. Richard took them home to give to his mother, who boiled them until they were pink. Then she made rice and cooked vegetables and mixed them together.
I had eaten crawdads once or twice at their house and didn’t like them much. They tasted muddy to me. And it was sad to see Richard’s mother move about like a whipped dog, her eye blacked, her nose swollen, her lip pooched out like a patch on a bicycle tire. Just looking across the table at Richard’s dad bent over his plate like a dark cloud about to rain on the world made the food in my mouth taste bad.
One day Richard came to our house on his bike and his eye was blacked.
“What happened?” I asked him.
“Daddy and Mama got into it,” he said. “I tried to stop Daddy from kickin’ her. He blacked my eye and she got kicked anyhow.”
“Sorry.”
“I reckon me and Mama had it comin’.”
“No you didn’t.”
“Come on, let’s go catch crawfish,” he said.
Down at the creek fishing for mud bugs, Richard and I started talking about the ghost by the railroad tracks.
“Hey, want to sneak out tonight and go have a look? I can have you back before you’re even missed.”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“You can’t be a sissy all your life.”
“I’m no sissy.”
“You do what you’re told, don’t you? I take chances.”
“Well, my daddy doesn’t beat the tar out of me over just anything either. He doesn’t beat the tar out of me at all.”
“My daddy says he’s just tryin’ to make me responsible.”
“He’s just tryin’ to beat your ass. And he hits your mother too. My daddy doesn’t ever hit my mother.”
“She’s sassy ’cause he don’t.”
“What if she is?”
“I don’t mean nothin’ by it, Stanley. But you want to fight, I’ll fight you. I ain’t afraid.”
“And you might whip me, but don’t talk about my mom or my family.”
“You started it.”
I was still squatting on the creek bank, holding a bacon-loaded string. I thought for a moment, said, “Guess I did. I didn’t mean nothing.”
“Me neither. I was just kiddin’ when I called you a sissy. You ain’t no sissy.”
“Thanks.”
“Sure. You want to slip off or not?”
“Why not,” I said.
“I can come by tonight. About eleven or so. That work for you?”
“Better make it midnight.”
“We can ride bikes to the sawmill, walk from there, since there ain’t nothing but a rough trail.”
We wrapped our lines on sticks, stuck them under the bridge for another time when we could get some bacon, then I walked home with Richard, him carrying the bucket with the crawdads in it.
We walked by the old abandoned sawmill. Most of it had rotted down and some of it had been torn away for lumber. One complete building remained. It was supported on posts and through a glassless window machinery could be seen. The roof was conical and had rusted and the rust made it look in the moonlight as if it were made of gold.
The structure was open in front and from it swung a long metal chute held up by rusted chains attached to rods on hinges. The chute dipped toward a damp, blackened sawdust pile which was flattened on top by wind and rain. Blue jays called out from the woods and one lit on the chute for a moment. Even its little weight made the long chute wobble on its chains. The bird took to the sky and made a dot that went away.
Dewmont was full of stories, and one of many I had heard from Richard was about a colored kid who had gone playing in the sawmill ruins and thought it would be fun to ride that old chute down into the sawdust pile. But when he got in the stuff, he went under, and was never found.
According to the story, somewhere beneath that huge mountain of sawdust were his bones, and maybe the bones of others as well.
I always wondered how people knew he was there if no one had seen it happen. And if he was there, surely someone would have dug his body out by now.
When I brought this up to Richard, he said, “That boy’s mama had twelve other kids. She wasn’t missin’ one little nigger much.”
When we got to his property, Richard’s demeanor changed. He lost a step and his shoulders sagged.
He said, “I think me havin’ these crawdads will calm Daddy’s temper, since I been gone so long.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so we just kept walking into his yard. According to Richard, their house had been handed down to them by his mother’s parents. It was huge and once grand, but that grandness was gone.
The yard was lush with high weeds divided by a cracked concrete walk. The porch sagged and the front door hung crooked on its hinges. One side of the porch roof had a hole in it and the lumber was hanging down, black and wet-looking, soft, as if you could tear it apart with your bare hands.
Out back of the house I could hear their big black dog barking, running on its chain attached to the clothesline.
Richard paused, studied the dog as it ran back and forth.
“Daddy loves that dog,” Richard said. “He’s crazy about him.”
Back and beyond the clothesline and the dog was the twenty acres or so Mr. Chapman farmed in potatoes and peas. There too were the crumbling outbuildings, the ill-fed plow mule contained within a rickety fence, and an anemic-looking hog in a mud hole surrounded by closely driven posts made of hoss apple wood. The hog lived on day-old toss-away cakes Mr. Chapman got from the bakery, scraps from the kitchen.
As we stepped on the porch, the door opened, and Mr. Chapman came out. He was a tall lean man who looked as if he had once been wet and wrung out too hard in a wash wringer. There didn’t seem to be a drop of moisture in him or his hair, and his eyes were as dark and dry as pine nuts.
He looked at me, then at Richard.
“You got in that bucket, boy?”
“Crawdads,” Richard said. “Enough for supper, I think.”
“You think. Do you or don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You been gone all day, boy. I had some work for you to do.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“Get in the house, give ’em to your mama. Your friend can’t stay.”
“See you, Stanley,” Richard said. The expression in his eyes was like a suicide note.
“Sure,” I said.
Behind me, I heard the door slam, followed by a flat whapping sound. Richard cried out shrilly from behind the door and his father said something sharp. Then I was gone, on out to the road, walking fast, the sunlight
