A Painted House (17 page)

He spotted something, and we slowed almost to a stop. “That’s the Embry place,” he said, nodding again. “You see them Mexicans?” I stretched and strained and finally saw them, four or five straw hats deep in the sea of white, bending low as if they had heard us and were hiding.

“They’re pickin’ on Sunday?” I said.

“Yep.”

We gained speed, and finally, they were out of sight. “What’re you gonna do?” I asked, as if the law were being broken.

“Nothin’. That’s Embry’s business.”

Mr. Embry was a member of our church. I couldn’t imagine him allowing his fields to be worked on the Sabbath. “Reckon he knows about it?” I asked.

“Maybe he doesn’t. I guess it’d be easy for the Mexicans to sneak out there after he left for church.” Pappy said this without much conviction.

“But they can’t weigh their own cotton,” I said, and Pappy actually smiled.

“No, I guess not,” he said. So it was determined that Mr. Embry allowed his Mexicans to pick on Sunday. There were rumors of this every fall, but I couldn’t imagine a fine deacon like Mr. Embry taking part in such a low sin. I was shocked; Pappy was not.

Those poor Mexicans. Haul ’em like cattle, work ’em like dogs, and their one day of rest was taken away while the owner hid in church.

“Let’s keep quiet about this,” Pappy said, smug that he’d confirmed a rumor.

More secrets.

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We heard the congregation singing as we walked toward the church. I’d never been on the outside when I wasn’t supposed to be. “Ten minutes late,” Pappy mumbled to himself as he opened the door. They were standing and singing, and we were able to slide into our seats without much commotion. I glanced at my parents, but they were ignoring me. When the song was over, we sat down, and I found myself sitting snugly between my grandparents. Ricky might be in danger, but I would certainly be protected.

The Reverend Akers knew better than to touch on the subjects of war and death. He began by delivering
the solemn news about Timmy Nance, news everyone had already heard. Mrs. Dockery had been taken home to recover. Meals were being planned by her Sunday school class. It was time, he said, for the church to close ranks and comfort one of its own.

It would be Mrs. Dockery’s finest hour, and we all knew it.

If he dwelt on war, he’d have to deal with Pappy when the service was over, so he stuck to his prepared message. We Baptists took great pride in sending missionaries all over the world, and the entire denomination was in the middle of a great campaign to raise money for their support. That’s what Brother Akers talked about—giving more money so we could send more of our people to places like India, Korea, Africa, and China. Jesus taught that we should love all people, regardless of their differences. And it was up to us as Baptists to convert the rest of the world.

I decided I wouldn’t give an extra dime.

I’d been taught to tithe one tenth of my earnings, and I did so grudgingly. It was there in the Scriptures, though, and hard to argue with. But Brother Akers was asking for something above and beyond, something optional, and he was flat out of luck as far as I was concerned. None of my money was going to Korea. I’m sure the rest of the Chandlers felt the same way. Probably the entire church.

He was subdued that morning. He was preaching on love and charity, not sin and death, and I don’t think his heart was in it. With things quieter than usual, I began to nod off.

After the service, we were in no mood for small
talk. The adults went straight to the truck, and we left in a hurry. On the edge of town, my father asked, “Where did you and Pappy go?”

“Just drivin’ around,” I said.

“Where to?”

I pointed to the east and said, “Over there. Nowhere, really. I think he just wanted to get away from church.”

He nodded as if he wished he’d gone with us.

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As we were finishing Sunday dinner, there was a slight knock at the back door. My father was the closest to it, so he stepped onto the back porch and found Miguel and Cowboy.

“Mother, you’re needed,” he said, and Gran hurried out of the kitchen. The rest of us followed.

Cowboy’s shirt was off; the left side of his chest was swollen and looked awful. He could barely raise his left arm, and when Gran made him do it, he grimaced. I felt sorry for him. There was a small flesh wound where the baseball had struck. “I can count the seams,” Gran said.

My mother brought a pan of water and a cloth. After a few minutes, Pappy and my father grew bored and left. I’m sure they were worrying about how an injured Mexican might affect production.

Gran was happiest when she was playing doctor, and Cowboy got the full treatment. After she dressed the wound, she made him lie on the back porch, his head on a pillow from our sofa.

“He’s got to be still,” she said to Miguel.

“How much pain?” she asked.

“Not much,” Cowboy said, shaking his head. His English surprised us.

“I wonder if I should give him a painkiller,” she mused in the direction of my mother.

Gran’s painkillers were worse than any broken bone, and I gave Cowboy a horrified look. He read me perfectly and said, “No, no medicine.” She put ice from the kitchen into a small burlap bag and gently placed it on his swollen ribs. “Hold it there,” she said, putting his left arm over the bag. When the ice touched him, his entire body went rigid, but he relaxed as the numbness set in. Within seconds, water was running down his skin and dripping onto the porch. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

“Thank you,” Miguel said.

“Gracias,”
I said, and Miguel smiled at me.

We left them there, and gathered on the front porch for a glass of iced tea.

“His ribs are broken,” Gran said to Pappy, who was on the porch swing, digesting his dinner. He really didn’t want to say anything, but after a few seconds of silence he grunted and said, “That’s too bad.”

“He needs to see a doctor.”

“What’s a doctor gonna do?”

“Maybe there’s internal bleeding.”

“Maybe there ain’t.”

“It could be dangerous.”

“If he was bleedin’ inside, he’d be dead by now, wouldn’t he?”

“Sure he would,” my father added.

Two things were happening here. First and foremost,
the men were terrified of having to pay a doctor. Second, and almost as significant, both had fought in the trenches. They had seen stray body parts, mangled corpses, men with limbs missing, and they had no patience with the small stuff. Routine cuts and breaks were hazards of life. Tough it out.

Gran knew she would not prevail. “If he dies, it’ll be our fault.”

“He ain’t gonna die, Ruth,” Pappy said. “And even if he does, it won’t be our fault. Hank’s the one who broke his ribs.”

My mother left and went inside. She was not feeling well again, and I was beginning to worry about her. Talk shifted to the cotton, and I left the porch.

I crept around back, where Miguel was sitting not far from Cowboy. Both appeared to be sleeping. I sneaked into the house and went to check on my mother. She was lying on her bed, her eyes open. “Are you okay, Mom?” I asked.

“Yes, of course, Luke. Don’t worry about me.”

She would’ve said that no matter how bad she felt. I leaned on the edge of her bed for a few moments, and when I was ready to leave, I said, “You’re sure you’re okay?”

She patted my arm and said, “I’m fine, Luke.”

I went to Ricky’s room to get my glove and baseball. Miguel was gone when I walked quietly out of the kitchen. Cowboy was sitting on the edge of the porch, his feet hanging off the boards, his left arm pressing the ice to his wounds. He still scared me, but in his present condition I doubted if he would do any harm.

I swallowed hard and held out my baseball, the same
one that had broken his ribs. “How do you throw that curve?” I asked him. His unkind face relaxed, then he almost smiled. “Here,” he said, and pointed to the grass next to the porch. I hopped down, and stood next to his knees.

Cowboy gripped the baseball with his first two fingers directly on the seams. “Like this,” he said. It was the same way Pappy had taught me.

“And then you snap,” he said, twisting his wrist so that his fingers were under the ball when it was released. It was nothing new. I took the ball and did exactly as he said.

He watched me without a word. That hint of a smile was gone, and I got the impression he was in a lot of pain.

“Thanks,” I said. He barely nodded.

Then my eyes caught the tip of his switchblade protruding from a hole in the right front pocket of his work pants. I couldn’t help but stare at it. I looked at him, and then we both looked down at the weapon. Slowly, he removed it. The handle was dark green and smooth, with carvings on it. He held it up for me to see, then he pressed the switch, and the blade sprang forth. It snapped, and I jerked back.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked. A dumb question, to which he offered no answer.

“Do it again,” I said.

In a flash, he pressed the blade against his leg, folding it back into the handle, then waved it near my face as he snapped the blade out again.

“Can I do it?” I asked.

No, he shook his head firmly.

“You ever stuck anybody with it?”

He drew it closer to himself and gave me a nasty look. “Many men,” he said.

I’d seen enough. I backed away, then trotted past the silo, where I could be alone. I threw pop flies to myself for an hour, hoping desperately that Tally would happen by on her way to the creek again.

Chapter 14

We gathered in silence at the tractor early Monday morning. I wanted so badly to sneak back into the house and into Ricky’s bed and sleep for days. No cotton, no Hank Spruill, nothing to make life unpleasant. “We can rest in the winter,” Gran was fond of saying, and it was true. Once the cotton was picked and the fields plowed under, our little farm hibernated through the cold months.

But in the middle of September, cold weather was a distant dream. Pappy and Mr. Spruill and Miguel huddled near the tractor and spoke earnestly while the rest of us tried to listen. The Mexicans were waiting in a group not far away. A plan was devised whereby they would start with the cotton near the barn, so they could simply walk to the fields. We Arkansans would work a little farther away, and the cotton trailer would act as a dividing line between the two groups. Distance was needed between Hank and Cowboy, otherwise there would be another killing.

“I don’t want any more trouble,” I heard Pappy say. Everyone knew the switchblade would never leave Cowboy’s pocket, and we doubted that Hank, dumb as he was, would be stupid enough to attack him again. Over breakfast that morning Pappy had ventured the
guess that Cowboy wasn’t the only armed Mexican. One reckless move by Hank, and there might be switchblades flying everywhere. This had been shared with Mr. Spruill, who had assured Pappy that there would be no more trouble. But by then no one believed that Mr. Spruill, or anybody else, could control Hank.

It had rained late last night, but there was no trace of it in the fields; the cotton was dry, the soil almost dusty. But the rain had been seen by Pappy and my father as an ominous warning of the inevitable flooding, and there was an anxiousness about the two that was contagious.

Our crops were nearly perfect, and we had just a few more weeks to gather them before the skies opened. When the tractor stopped near the cotton trailer, we quickly grabbed our sacks and disappeared among the stalks. There was no laughing or singing from the Spruills, not a sound from the Mexicans in the distance. And no napping on my part. I picked as fast as I could.

The sun rose quickly and cooked the dew from the bolls of cotton. The thick air clung to my skin and soaked my overalls, and sweat dripped from my chin. One slight advantage in being so small was that most of the stalks were taller than me; I was partially shaded.

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Two days of heavy picking, and the cotton trailer was full. Pappy took it to town; always Pappy, never my father. Like my mother and the garden, it was one of those chores that had been designated long before I
came along. I was expected to ride with him, something I always enjoyed because it meant a trip to town, if only to the gin.

After a quick dinner, we took the truck to the field and hitched up the cotton trailer. Then we climbed along its edges and secured the tarp so that no bolls would blow away. It seemed a crime to waste a single ounce of something we’d worked so hard to gather.

As we drove back to the house, I saw the Mexicans behind the barn, grouped tightly, slowly eating their tortillas. My father was at the toolshed, patching an inner tube for a front tire on the John Deere. The women were washing dishes. Pappy abruptly stopped the truck. “Stay here,” he said to me. “I’ll be right back.” He’d forgotten something.

When he returned from the house, he was carrying his twelve-gauge shotgun, which he slid under the seat without a word.

“We goin’ huntin’?” I asked, knowing full well that I would not get an answer.

The Sisco affair had not been discussed over dinner or on the front porch. I think the adults had agreed to leave the subject alone, at least in my presence. But the shotgun suggested an abundance of possibilities.

I immediately thought of a gunfight, Gene Autry style, at the gin. The good guys, the farmers, of course, on one side, blasting away while ducking behind and between their cotton trailers; the bad guys, the Siscos and their friends, on the other side returning fire. Freshly picked cotton flying through the air as the trailers took one hit after another. Windows crashing. Trucks exploding. By the time we crossed the river, there were casualties all over the gin lot.

“You gonna shoot somebody?” I asked, in an effort to force Pappy to say something.

“Tend to your own business,” he said gruffly as he shifted gears.

Perhaps he had a score to settle with some offending soul. This brought to mind one of the favorite Chandler stories. When Pappy was much younger, he, like all farmers, worked the fields with a team of mules. This was long before tractors, and all farming was done by man and animal. A ne’er-do-well neighbor named Woolbright saw Pappy in the fields one day, and evidently Pappy was having a bad day with the mules. According to Woolbright, Pappy was beating the poor beasts about their heads with a large stick. As Woolbright later told the story at the Tea Shoppe, he’d said, “If I’d had a wet burlap sack, I’d’ve taught Eli Chandler a thing or two.” Word filtered back, and Pappy heard what Woolbright said. A few days later, after a long hot day in the fields, Pappy took a burlap sack, put it in a bucket of water, and skipping dinner, walked three miles to Woolbright’s house. Or five miles or ten miles, depending on who happened to be telling the story.