Cicada (4 page)

“Here now, Frances. I don’t think....”

There was a pause. Against the nearby window screen the coming weather heaved, seeming to give the thing life.

“No, Joshua,” Frances sighed as well, “you obviously don’t.”

“Here now…. There’s no call to insult me.”

“But there is to insult me and mine?”

When a patriarch dies unexpectedly it is understandable that his family might reel from the blow, some members losing their footing momentarily. When Joshua Lee Scott’s father—the revered founder of Melby’s First Baptist House of Worship—pitched forward into his mashed potatoes and peas, taken by an embolism and instantly struck as lifeless as the granite they’d soon bury him under, the resulting troubles became even more profound.

Not only had the elder Joshua Scott been the cornerstone of his own flesh and blood, but his wisdom and guidance had served as a spiritual foundation to the few dozen families that bowed their heads to his words each Sunday morning. His passing was a devastation.

So aggrieved was the community, that when his son took to the pulpit in his place, none had the heart to speak against it. This, even after the boy proved to be a shadow to the light his father had once cast. In the two years since the elder Scott had been snuffed, three families had suffered their fill of his boorish son and left the congregation, and, of late, to include the Sayres, at least three more were on the verge of following in those footsteps.

Where the elder Scott had built a haven for the community to gather in fellowship, his son had unleashed a tempest to rent them apart. Even if Frances had followed her heart and better sense, and led her family from the fold as others had before her, she still could have little avoided the catastrophe that was just now being set in motion by Joshua Lee Scott.

“Don’t be naïve, Frances,” Joshua Lee Scott said.

“I beg your pardon?” Frances shot back, cheeks flushed with anger.
This boy really knows how to endear himself
, she thought. “Joshua,” she began by addressing him with his first name for the first time in longer than she could have recalled if pressed to do so. “I wish I could say I appreciate just what you’re trying to get at. I really do.”

“It’s simple, Frances. I’m worried for your soul. I’m worried for all your souls,” he said, waving an arm around him as he referred to the Sayre household.

Her chin lowered a bit and Frances gave him the look she normally reserved for Buckshot’s tall tales.

“Frances, I know people. That is just the nature of my calling. I am a shepherd. A shepherd of men. The church is a family and its members are my children. And as such, I’ve come to suspect that you’re thinking of leaving the congregation.”

Her eyebrows rose, expanding her reddening face as they moved away from her dropping jaw. Joshua thought her head looked on the verge of popping and misread this to mean that he finally had her attention.

“Am I right? Yes, that’s just as I thought. I am.”

As a young teen, Joshua had agreed on a dare from some other boys to hold a firecracker as it went off. When it proved to be a dud he’d allowed things to escalate until he found himself with a sizzling stalk clenched in his teeth. To this day he had his father to thank that he still had a pleasant smile. When the old minister had happened upon the boys behind the barn—where he’d suspected they were smoking—he smacked the side of Joshua’s head so hard that the firecracker flew out of his mouth—as luck would have it— just before going off. Joshua’s ears rang for three hours. He couldn’t be sure if it was from the little pyrotechnic explosion two inches in front of his nose, or his father’s palm to the back of his head. Perhaps both.

“Joshua, my husband will be in later this afternoon. Why don’t you come back and we’ll discuss this then?”

“You heard what happened over in Ternsville, didn’t you, Frances?”

That was about the only thing Joshua could have said that would’ve kept her from shooing him out the door. She was just starting to get up from the kitchen table, but with Joshua Scott’s new tack she settled back down and looked him square in the eyes.

“I’ve heard things. Yes,” she said.

“Yes, I can imagine you have. Horrible business. Horrible business,” he elaborated.

“Was it as bad as they say?”

He sucked at his teeth momentarily. “I can’t be sure what you heard, but—”

“I heard the Klan went in there like devils. I heard they killed women and children.” Her anger was threatening again.

“Oh no, I don’t think those boys did anything that bad,” Minister Scott said.

“Men were killed...homes burned down. I know that much for certain.”

The minister leaned back in his chair. “Yes, yes, maybe there was a bit of provoked violence. A few houses did catch fire, but those were just shacks really, from what I understand. Unfortunate business, that.”

“Minister Scott, forgive me if I’m wrong, but you sound almost as if you approve of this. I mean,
provoked
?
Unfortunate business?
”

“Now, Frances, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I approve. But, well, you have to understand the delicate nature of things like what they had for themselves over in Ternsville.” He paused, suspecting she’d have an interjection. When she didn’t, he stood and crossed to the window, unable to bear her scrutiny. It made him more comfortable to stand over people when he talked down to them.

“Most people can’t appreciate the way things’ve been and should be. It’s beyond their ken,” he began. “Years ‘round here abouts, the coloreds and the whites always enjoyed an understanding. Everyone knew and appreciated their place; each kept to his own.”

He began sucking at his teeth once more while he watched a tractor far off in the field clamoring over the rugged earth, shuddering like a slow but persistent beetle methodically bent to its toil.

He went on. “But you know they went and got themselves that new bottling plant out that way and sure enough it wasn’t the blessing the good folks of Ternsville counted on. With that plant came some Yankee management who thought they could start mixing things up. Can you believe there was talk of making some colored boy a shift foreman?”

Frances got up from the table and emptied her half-filled coffee mug into the kitchen sink. Her demeanor made it clear to Minister Scott that he wasn’t winning a convert to his cause.

She hadn’t had a hard life, but a life of hard work nonetheless. Keeping a farming household together and running smoothly had creased more than a few worry lines into her face over the years, and when those practiced lines scowled, as they did now, they left no doubt as to the concern on her mind and in her heart.

“Don’t you think it would be the Christian thing to do to welcome those folks who’re just trying to get out of harm’s way? If a few colored families want to come here, you aren’t going to turn your back on them? You don’t expect them to stay and live amongst those bigots out in Ternsville, do you?” she asked, trying to reason with him.

“See here now, we’re not talking about bigots. Those folks are not bigots,” Joshua said, getting a bit too excited suddenly.

Frances held her ground but leaned away with her head drifting even further back than her retreating shoulders as if to survey the whole of Joshua Scott’s abrupt defiance.

“Like I said, John’ll be home directly. I think if you got anymore to say it’d be best you come back then.”

“I’m sorry, Frances, I can’t come back for supper.”

She shook her head. “And I wasn’t offering a supper invite, Joshua.”

Frances didn’t wait to watch the minister as he huffed and sputtered for a moment before following her lead to the screen door she held open. He was just turning to offer his goodbye as he climbed into his pickup, when Buckshot’s voice shook them from the awkward moment.

“Mama! Mama!”

Frances had no idea why her son was barreling through the field, shortcutting from the dirt road that bent past their home, but it was immediately clear that something was gravely amiss.

“Mama!” he managed to shout once more as he flipped himself over the fence, stumbling face first into the dry lawn.

Rusty the cat, who’d been asleep under the back porch, twitched his tail in irritation at all the commotion and trotted off to find peace and quiet amongst the oak trees further out in the backyard.

“Timothy David Sayre! What in the wide world?” Frances cried, rushing to his side.

As his mother helped him up, Buckshot held out his palm to show her and Minister Scott—who’d ran over as well—the awful gash he’d just given himself on the barbed wire. He was so excited, however, that he acknowledged the fast-gushing wound in no other way.

“Mama, there’s a…there’s a dead man,” was all he could get out between heaving breaths. The last few words came as a whisper.

“
A dead man
?”

“Has there been a car accident, son?” the minister pressed.

“No...no, sir. No accident.”

“Timmy, settle down now,” Frances said as she produced a handkerchief from her apron and pushed it into his bloodied palm.

“It’s a dead man. He’s hung up in a tree.”

“A
hanging
?” Frances asked in disbelief.

Minister Scott took a step back and pushed his tongue deep into his cheek.

“Yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am,” Buckshot said as his breathing began to settle as much as it would for some time. “It’s a colored man, what somebody done hung up like, like....”

“Oh, sweet Lord,” Frances said and pulled the child in to hush him.

Minister Scott looked to Frances and then to Timmy. “Well, we don’t know someone…. Perhaps this man hung himself….”

“How very Christian of you to give folks the benefit of innocence,” Frances seethed. “At least, given to
most
folks, that is to say.”

“I best get the Sheriff on the phone,” Minister Scott said. When Frances didn’t respond, he turned and started back for the house anyway. After a few cautionary steps he broke into a little trot.

With that, Timothy David ‘Buckshot’ Sayre was spent. His personal marathon finished, and his calamity of fear, pain, confusion, and exhaustion overtaking him, the boy finally broke down and sobbed uncontrollably in his mother’s arms.

A many-tongued mimic berated the men for being a bother as they passed the time cajoling and spitting tobacco juice into the gravel from the loading dock of the Feed ‘n’ Grain store. The bird began with dog growls and when that garnered no attention it moved on to wailing off-key as it’d learned from the Melby High School marching band. Still, the men did little but sweat and shift their weight.

“Ya hear? That fool, Crispen, he been plowin’ at night again.”

“
Again
?”

“Yup. Again.”

Two of the five men grunted and one coughed up a blob of yellowish phlegm which failed to clear the loading dock when he expelled it.

“Thit,” he muttered a curse in a thick lisp and smeared the mess with the toe of his boot. Around one of his eyes, a shadow of purple and greenish yellow tainted the flesh.

“At night?” one of the five asked incredulously after a delay, as if such news needed much consideration to digest.

“Yep. Night. Folks done seen ‘im.”

“That one always has been a little screwy.”

“A
little
? Hell,
a lot
.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” a skinny man, who wore starched blue jeans with worn white ironed creases, said with a shake of his head.

Off in the trees, the mockingbird that had meant for the men to take notice of it decided to go one further and so it swooped in to settle on the head of a fiberglass stallion that needed a dime to be put into motion. It was a ride for the children who seldom frequented the Feed ‘n’ Grain, and although it made very little money for the proprietor, the stallion remained at the end of the loading dock year in and out, and always would, if only because it had been won on a hand of poker. As the bird landed, or tried to, it was put off by the slick surface of the horse’s glossy, wild mane. After a few misguided flutters of its wings, and fruitless mad grasps of its bony feet, the bird became flustered and beat its way back into the trees.

“Two more families of ‘em done took up in them shacks over to the Patterson’s ol’ place.”

“Yup.”

“Heard that too.”

“Nigger just don’t learn,” the skinny man said.

“Need to find out who owns them places now. Who’s renting ‘em out.”

“I can do that,” the man who’d spat on the dock said.

The mockingbird considered the men once more, but then conceded defeat and took to the wind as a pickup rumbled into the gravel lot. The men looked conspiringly at one another at first but when John Sayre slammed his truck door and approached them they responded to his casual greeting with an abundance of feigned enthusiasm.

“How ya boys doing?” he said.

“Hey there, John.”

“John.”

“Hey now.”

“Sayre.”

The skinny man spat more tobacco juice and only nodded.

As John strode up the four wide steps onto the platform he couldn’t help but notice when one of them elbowed another in the ribs. The prodded man grunted in response and spoke up.

“Say there, Sayre. You know we was just talkin’ about something might be a interest to ya.”

John stopped and looked them over for a few long seconds.

“Yeah, just talkin’ about all them coloreds what done moved in out past 301,” the skinny man said.

John was well aware of the people he referred to, the several families that had abandoned their homesteads outside of Ternsville for the bottom land out past State Road 301 in the southern portion of the county. Still, he said nothing. His steadfast gaze seemingly made three of the men nervous, and they grinned stupidly as a result. But two of the men—the skinny man and another who looked as though he might be his brother since he shared the same thin lips and wispy brown hair—they merely stared back with piercing eyes, but otherwise dead expressions.

“Don’t ya think there ought to be somebody does something afore things get outta hand?” the skinny man said in an acidic voice.