The Saints of Swallow Hill(16)

Experience told him working at Swallow Hill might set him back, not ahead. Camp commissaries were prone to high pricing. As long as no one minded getting “tokens” or “scrips” instead of real money, it was possible to avoid starvation, barely. The system caused grumbling, but what else could be done? This was a time when men needed to provide for their families. Work camps offered shacks for living accommodations, though they might not be in the best shape; some believed it a step above Hoovervilles. The camps had churches, schools too, and there was always a juke joint somewhere in the midst for Saturday night rabble-rousing.

He’d been fourteen when they’d come to Georgia for the turpentine work the first time, so he’d been in a camp before. His grandpa and grandma, both too old and weak to tolerate the conditions, stayed behind. Mother had cried as she packed what would fit in the back of a wagon.

Pap hugged her shoulders, said, “Don’t you worry none. We’ll be back. I promise.”

The morning they left the old farmhouse along the Cape Fear River, Del had lain on his back in bed, allowing the golden rays of the sun to touch his face in the same spot it had for years. He wanted the memory and had stayed there till Mother yelled for him to get up. They ate the ham biscuits she’d fixed, drank hot coffee, and then he and his sister, Sudie May, hugged their grandparents and climbed onto the back of a wagon loaded with all they had in the world. Mother followed, her cast-iron skillet tied in a bedsheet with her other cooking implements, and the parcel thumped against the side of the wagon periodically after the mule got started.

For him, it was an adventure, but Mother cried again. The last view they had was of their grandparents in the doorway, waving. As they got going, he and Sudie May swiveled their heads, taking it all in, and while it was only more pine trees lining a long, hot road, soon they crossed over into South Carolina, and it was the farthest either of them had ever been. They arrived at the camp days later, and the work began. After a couple of months, Grandma wrote and said their grandpa’s heart had plumb give out, and he was gone.

“It was broke,” Mother said.

They stayed gone three years until his parents returned home to Bladen County, both having suffered typhoid and unable to work in such conditions anymore. They went back to take care of Grandma, and Sudie May went with them.

His father had said, “Come with us, son. See how them trees have fared. We might have a few we could work now.”

He’d refused, wanted to be on his own for a bit, see something of the world. There’d been such disappointment in Pap’s face as he’d turned away. The years passed, and it seemed before he knew it, Sudie May was the one writing, telling him Pap was gone. Another couple of years, and it was Mother. Sudie May had been the more practical presence in their lives, especially toward the end. Her last letter about Mother got forwarded several times before it made to his latest location, and in reading it, he felt a jolt of guilt, and an even deeper regret. Next came the thought, what was the point of going home now? Another letter arrived a couple years later when she wrote to say she’d married. As always, she extended the invitation to him to come home. She wrote, I miss you. Amos and me, we doing all right here, keeping it up, but it’s not the same no more without Mother, Pap, and you.

Del took a moment beneath the swaying statuesque pines capped with the deep-green needles, inhaling the pungent aroma of smoke, the sharp odor of turpentine, pitch and tar, all mingled in with the warm evergreen-scented wind. The cicadas sang, starting as a low buzz that worked to a feverish, high-pitched hum. The turpentine camp that was Swallow Hill came into view. There was a commissary, a house beside it, a cooper’s shed, and a distillery. Workers’ shacks were set some ways off, row after row of them. A couple of white women hung out the wash in one section. Another path led toward rows of smaller shanties farther down and on the opposite side. A colored woman came out of one those and tossed out a bucket of dirty water onto some plants in a small garden. For some, there was fencing to square off a tiny spot of land where chickens were kept, and most had little plots staked out for vegetables.

Del came upon a man sitting outside the commissary. He peeled an apple and ate the slices off the end of the knife. He didn’t look friendly, but he didn’t look unfriendly neither. He had dark brown hair, deep creases around his mouth, eyes the same color as his hair, set close together, one going inward a little more than the other. Beside him was a hat with a crow feather stuck in the band.

Del approached him and said, “Hidy. Who would I see about working here?”

The man’s gaze, while uneven, was steady. He pointed with his knife toward a small building with a sign hanging by the door that said OFFICE.

He said, “Feller named Pritchard Taylor. Over yonder.”

Del thanked him and walked away, the hairs pricking on the back of his neck. Inside the office, he found himself face-to-face with a short man and a wild, unruly head of hair. The man extended his hand, and Del shook it and started to speak, except he was cut off.

“Pritchard Taylor, call me Peewee, if you want. You here about a job? I assume you is ’cause you wouldn’t be standing there. We got work a plenty, but I ain’t got no need a no more boss men round here. Not right now, least ways. Could use a wagon driver, or someone to watch over that goofball, Weasel, in the distillery maybe, see to it he don’t blow us all to Kingdom Come.”

Del was about to tell him he didn’t necessarily want to be a boss man, only Peewee went on. “Got about two hundred men or so, lots with family, a few without, but what I really need me is some good nigras. If you know any, send’em my way, but it’s all I got. Nigra work.