The Heavenly Table(78)

46


FOUR FEET OF water and a muddy bottom had broken Sugar’s fall from the bridge. After the initial shock, he took account of himself as best he could with his hands tied behind his back and determined that nothing was broken. He got to his feet and managed to get his razor from his pocket and cut the ropes that bound him, then struggled up the riverbank. The campfire glared above him by the tracks, and he could hear the men laughing, as if what they had done to him was no different than killing a dog or a possum. Though his legs were wobbly, he began walking, water dripping from his clothes, squishing from his shoes. He reached up to feel a knot on the back of his head. His nose throbbed, and he tasted blood in his mouth. The moon came out from behind some clouds and showed him a way through the cattails and brambles. He headed on south.

The next afternoon, he arrived in Shadesville. He walked through the little burg with its grocery and barbershop and post office, and went out the other side past the Baptist church. He continued another quarter mile until he came to the house he had been born in. It was empty. Sugar stood there for quite a while looking at it, weather-beaten and leaning a little eastward with two smallish rooms and a wood-shingled roof. It was hard to believe, he thought, that nine people had once lived there together. Shit, the apartment he had shared with Flora was twice as big. He went up the three rotten steps and through the unlocked door. Except for a rusty hairpin he found lying on one of the two windowsills, the house was completely bare inside; and judging from the dust on the floor, he figured nobody had been there in a long time. He was so tired that he didn’t feel anything, not even disappointment.

An hour later, he went back into town and saw an old man sitting on a bench in front of the post office. “You ’member me?” Sugar asked.

The man examined him for a minute with yellow eyeballs, then cleared his throat. “Can’t say I do.”

“Don’t matter,” Sugar said. “Them Milfords that lived down the road there, where’d they all go off to?”

“Oh, they ain’t lived around here for several years now,” the old man said. “Not since the mother passed. I think maybe they went to Detroit. They always claimed one of their brothers was up there makin’ good money buildin’ them automobiles, but only a fool would have ever believed that shit. I knew that boy well, and he never was nothing but a liar and a blowhard. George, I think his name was. He’d brag about gettin’ up in the morning, that boy. Like he’d done something big, just by cracking his eyes open. Most worthless nigger ever come out of Shadesville, if ye ask me. I warned them others not to go, but they wouldn’t listen. Shoot, I’d say they probably all dead or locked up by now.”

Sugar scowled and turned away. So his mother was dead. It didn’t surprise him really, now that he thought of it; she could barely get out of her chair the day he’d left. He looked up and saw the cemetery on the little knob behind the grocery. Crossing the road, he found her resting place a few minutes later, a rock with her name scratched on it marking the head of it. The only store-bought stone in the entire graveyard belonged to Mrs. Hitchens, whose son, Marcel, had gone to a Negro college in Alabama and made good. Fucking stuck-up bastard, always wearing that goddamn blue tie and carrying a book under his arm. Getting down on his knees, Sugar started clearing the plot of weeds and dead leaves. He was nearly done when a great tiredness overcame him. He stretched out on the ground in the warm sunlight and closed his eyes. When he awoke several hours later, he made his way back down the hill to the grocery and bought three slices of longhorn cheese and a handful of crackers and a bottle of milk from a young girl with a rag tied around her head and a colicky baby balanced on her hip. He ate his supper out front. Across the dirt road, a group of young black men had replaced the old man on the bench in front of the post office. They were talking loudly and passing a bottle around. Bedrolls and carpetbags lay on the ground about them. Sugar finished his meal and walked over. They were from all over the county, from Fish Creek to Sourdough, and they told him they were going to join Uncle Sam’s army. A man with a wagon was supposed to pick them up in the morning and take them to Lexington.

Sugar laughed. “They ain’t gonna take no niggers in the army,” he said.

“Oh, yes, they are, boy,” a tall, heavy man with a loud, confident voice said. Sugar glanced over at him coolly. His front teeth were missing and he had no shoes, but he was wearing a new pair of bibs, and it was evident from the way he rocked back and forth on his bare heels with his thumbs hooked under the brass buttons on the shoulder straps that he thought he was hot shit. If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought he was a well-to-do land baron standing on a balcony among a bunch of his lackeys, surveying his vast holdings.

For a moment, Sugar thought about how stupid and childish the man looked. He doubted if the poor sonofabitch had fifty cents in his pocket. But then he remembered the smug way he had felt right after purchasing the bowler, and his stomach clenched up a little. King of the world for just $2.95. Christ, he was no better than this f*cking clown. “Where’d you hear that?” he asked, swallowing some watery bile.

“Show him, Brownie,” the big man said.

A boy with bubbly white blisters around his mouth pulled a flyer from inside his homespun shirt and handed it over. Sugar scanned the drawing of a black man with thick lips and a broad nose dressed in a sharply creased uniform and saluting. Though it looked official, he still doubted the veracity of it. He figured someone was passing them around as a joke, like the ones he had seen in Detroit last winter promising five hundred dollars and twenty acres to any colored person over the age of eighteen who showed up at the courthouse in Fairbanks, Alaska, during the month of February. A dozen had frozen to death trying to make that journey, and several hundred more stranded before someone figured out it was all a hoax. It was just naturally assumed that some white folks were responsible, so imagine everyone’s surprise when it was discovered that a colored boy who swept up nights at a printing press was the culprit. His reason? Nobody knew. He disappeared the same night someone ratted him out, and by the time his body was discovered hanging like a side of beef in the back of a meat locker eight weeks later, it was too late to ask.