Gathering of Waters (10 page)

Mingo glanced down at his shirt and slacks. He seemed surprised to find that they were soaked through to the skin.

Sam T. chuckled. “You been drinking?”

“Nah.”

“You sure? Why you out here in the rain?”

Mingo sniffed and slowly brought himself erect. He made a face and began stomping his feet. “I got needles all up and down my legs.”

“Watch it!” Sam T. cried as he jumped away from the puddled water that Mingo splashed. He stepped under the tree and gave Mingo a long, hard look. “Ain’t seen you for a few days. Where you been?”

Mingo’s face went dark. “Greenville,” he said with a wince.

“What were you doing in Greenville?”

“I got people there,” Mingo muttered, and then brightening a bit he said, “Hey, listen, man, you got any on you?”

Sam T. understood the
any
to mean whiskey. “Nah, sorry.”

“Oh,” Mingo said, and the light leaked from his face.

“So, uhm, did you leave Greenville in a hurry or something?”

Mingo’s eyes narrowed. “Why, what you hear?” he barked menacingly.

Sam T. raised a protective arm. “I ain’t heard nothing. It’s just that it’s raining and you ain’t got no jacket, no slicker, no nothing on your back but that wet shirt. I just figured you left in a hurry, that’s all.”

Mingo smirked, and then instinctively reached for the cigarette behind his ear. When he found that it wasn’t there, he patted down his shirt and dug into the pockets of his pants.

Still nothing.

Mingo gave Sam T. a hopeful look. “You got any smokes?”

Sam T. pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook one free. It took three tries to get it lit.

Mingo took a few puffs and then pressed the tip against the bark of the tree, extinguishing it. He tucked the remainder behind his ear.

Sam T.’s eyes swung between Mingo and the road, which was beginning to look more and more like a stream.

“Me and my cousin Charlie was headed o’er to his mama’s house. We weren’t worrying nobody. The law just swooped down on us—guns drawn!” Mingo announced without warning.

Sam T. leaned in. “What now?”

Mingo’s right eyelid began to twitch. “The law come up behind us and stuck their guns in our backs. One man say,
Can’t you see its raining, boys?
Well, of course we could see that, wasn’t no getting around seeing it. We weren’t really understanding what point the man was trying to make. So me and Charlie said,
Yes suh, we sees
that
.
Turn around
, the man say. And we do like he say. And then the next man raised his pistol high and brought the nozzle to rest square between my eyes, and he say:
Then
why ain’t you boys down by the river working?
So then I says,
Why would we be down by the river?
And that’s when the first man hauled off and clobbered me upside my head with the butt of his gun.”

Mingo turned his head slightly to the left and pointed to the egg-sized knot above his temple.

Sam T. examined it and grimaced.

“When he hit me, I went down, I went down hard, and sent up a might amount of mud in the process. So the one that hit me say,
First you sass me and now you dirty up
my nice clean slicker? Get up, nigger!”

Mingo’s hands were shaking real hard when he snatched the butt from behind his ear and slipped it back between his quivering lips.

Sam T.’s eyes bulged. “They lock you and Charlie up?”

Mingo blew a stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth. “Nah, jail would have been a blessing. They walked us down to the river.”

Sam T. frowned. “The river? For what?”

“They got most of the colored men in Greenville down at the river.”

“What they got them doing down there?”

“Packing, hauling, and stacking sandbags.”

Sam T. scratched his chin. “What they paying?”

Mingo shot him an incredulous look. “Paying? Nigger, ain’t you heard me say the law plucked us right off the street and took us down to the river? The pay is you get to keep your goddamn life!”

Mingo sucked on the cigarette until the filter began to smoke; only then did he flick the butt out into the rain.

“Those niggers who refused to do the work were shot and thrown in the river.”

Sam T. shuddered.

Mingo spat a glob of phelgm into the mud. “They emptied out the jails too.”

“My God,” Sam T. murmured.

“It’s like a war zone up there. Men patroling both sides of the river with shotguns.”

“Why is that?”

“Don’t you know nothing, Sam T.?”

Sam T. shamefully shrugged his shoulders.

“If someone blow the levee closest to the north shore, the properties on the south shore might get spared. Someone blow the levee on the south shore, the property on the north shore might get spared.”

“Sure nuff?”

Mingo nodded his head. “While I was there a story come down the line said that some old boys from the north shore were caught with a box of dynamite on the wrong the side of the river.” He looked down at his battered shoes. “I believe they fish food now.”

The two men were quiet as they watched an old woman slosh slowly up the road.

“How long they had you?”

“Two days and two nights,” Mingo said in a trembling voice.

Thunder rolled across the sky and the rain began to fall in torrents. Sam T. and Mingo pressed their backs against the bark of the tree.

Mingo yelled over the din, “I finally got away—”

“Got away? They didn’t just let you go?”

“I had to run.”

“You run all the way from Greenville?”

“I believe so,” Mingo said as he reached up and felt behind his ear. Without asking, Sam T. offered him another cigarette.

“What happened to Charlie?”

Mingo looked off into the distance. “I don’t know.”

“You left him?”

“We weren’t together. They drop me at one end of the river, so I assumed they took him to the other end.”

Sam T. swiped rainwater from his face. When he looked at Mingo again, the man’s entire body was shaking. Sam. T. gripped his shoulder.

“Gotta get you outta of this weather,” Sam T. urged. “I’m headed over to the church. You wanna come? Church got plenty of room and it’s warm and dry inside.”

“Is today Sunday?”

“Nah, it’s Friday. Good Friday.”

“What so good about it?” Mingo cackled bitterly.

“God, that’s what’s good about it,” Sam T. retorted joyfully.

“Nah, Sam T., I don’t think I’d be welcome.”

Sam T. chuckled. “Sure you would. Everyone is welcomed in the house of the Lord.”

On that rain-drenched Good Friday, Hemmingway witnessed two very interesting things as she stood staring out of her bedroom window. The first was her mother hurrying across the bridge. Doll had claimed she was going to the church to assist August with any last-minute details before service.

After Hemmingway heard the front door slam, she crossed the floor to the window, parted the curtains, and watched her mother walk in the opposite direction of the church. The fact that Doll had told a lie did not strike Hemmingway as odd, but seeing her skipping like a child through the downpour wearing a yellow scarf and carrying a stack of records was strange, even for Doll.

Normally, Hemmingway could care less about Doll’s comings and goings, but she’d sensed her father’s melancholy and was deeply concerned about his physical decline, which she suspected had everything to do with the love-bite on her mother’s thigh.

Oh yes, Hemmingway saw it too.

The morning August’s howling had startled Hemmingway out of her sleep, she lay in bed listening for a good long time. Assuming the noise was coming from a wounded animal, she closed her eyes and pulled the pillow over her face in an effort to block it out. But the pillow did little to muffle the persistent noise. Unable to take much more, Hemmingway climbed from her bed and padded down the hall to her parents’ room with the intention of waking her father. She thought the two of them could seek out the animal and either attend to its wound or put it out of its misery.

The bedroom door was ajar and without knocking, Hemmingway pushed it back on its hinges. The room was filled with heather-colored, early-morning light. She saw that August was not in the bed and that Doll was still fast asleep. She walked over to the bed and was stopped short by the pink and purple bruise that seemed to glow against her mother’s flesh.

Hemmingway could not mistake the mark for anything else—Paris had bitten her enough times to make her an expert.

Disgust snaked through her body.

Certainly, her father hadn’t pressed his mouth so close to that place that leaked blood every month. Not the good Reverend August Hilson!

Hemmingway backed out of the room, returned to her bed, and closed her eyes. There, the longstanding repulsion she’d held for her mother turned hard with hate.

Outside, the howling finally came to an end. The outhouse door banged open and then closed and Hemming-way now understood that her father was the wounded animal.

The second interesting thing Hemmingway witnessed from her bedroom window was Mingo, running so fast and so hard she thought he would take flight. The near head-on collision with the horse and then Doll slowed him down to a stop. What Mingo called out to Doll, and Doll’s reply, would remain a mystery to Hemmingway. But whatever her mother had said, or
not
said, seemed to leave Mingo confused.

“You coming or what?”

Hemmingway turned around to find Paris standing in the doorway, raking a comb through his wooly hair.

“You go on ahead, I’ll be there soon.”

“You better not be late.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Hemmingway hummed, then asked, “Where’s Dolly?”

Paris’s face went blank.

“What do you mean? Ain’t she in her room?”

Before she could respond, Paris was ambling away calling, “Dolly?” He stepped into the empty bedroom, pushed his fists into his sides, and bellowed, “Dolly!”

“She ain’t here!” Hemmingway screamed from her room.

Paris reappeared with a perplexed look on his face.

“She ain’t there,” he said.

Hemmingway rolled her eyes. “I just said that, fool.”

“Where she at?”

Hemmingway shrugged her shoulders.

Paris smirked. “Probably went to the church early,” he said confidently.

“Yeah, that’s probably where she went,” Hemmingway replied, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

Chapter Sixteen

O
n Candle Street Cole Payne was in bed, propped up on four silk pillows, watching Doll dance around the room naked, save for the wet yellow scarf she wore tied around her midsection.

He’d moved the phonograph from the drawing room into the bedroom and Doll had placed the well-worn Muggsy Spanier record “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” on the turntable and was raunchily swaying her hips.

It was the first time the two had had sex in his marriage bed. Before that, they’d ravished each other in the cellar on a stack of croker sacks, and up against the walls of the shed. Once they did it in the drawing room, on the couch, while Melinda slept in the bedroom above them.

The song ended and Doll took a bow. Cole sat up and applauded. “More, more!” he cried jubilantly.

Doll happily obliged, replacing Spanier with King Oliver. She lowered the needle onto the vinyl and King Oliver began to blare:
Ev-’ry bod-y gets the blues now and then,
and don’t know what to do. I’ve had it hap-pen man-y, man-y times
to me, and so have you …

Doll rolled her shoulders and sang along. Cole grinned and reached for the cigar that was smoldering in the ashtray on the nightstand.

“I like that song,” Cole said. “What’s it called?”

Doll crossed the floor in sleek, long strides. “‘Doctor Jazz,’” she purred.

After Paris left for church, Hemmingway headed out of the house, across the bridge, and down Candle Street in search of Doll. What Hemmingway would do if she found her hadn’t quite come together yet.

The street was empty, but Hemmingway could feel curious eyes watching her from behind heavy-curtained windows. Halfway down Candle, the wind snatched the umbrella out of her hands, blew it across the road and into the river. Within seconds, she was drenched.

Deflated, Hemmingway started back toward the bridge. As she passed Cole Payne’s house, she thought she heard King Oliver’s rippling voice exclaiming,
The
more I get, the more I want, it seems …

She knew that song well, because Doll played it endlessly. Hemmingway stopped and strained to hear above the roar of the rain. Soon Oliver’s famous horn splintered the din and Hemmingway followed the melody straight to Cole Payne’s front door.

Just as the weather turned sinister, August took his place behind the pulpit. He was so surprised to see Mingo Bailey, soaked through and shivering in the third pew, that he nodded in his direction and bellowed, “Welcome, Brother Mingo!”

Paris alone was seated in the front pew. August shot him a questioning glance, and the boy shrugged his shoulders in response.

August’s mind screamed:
Probably with that man!

Probably
, August concurred with himself inwardly.
But where’s Hemmingway?

“Let us bow our heads and pray. Dear Father …”

Outside, the thunder clapped so loudly that the parishioners shrieked and grabbed hold of one another.

After the opening prayer, August turned to the choir. “Choir,” he prompted, and the men and women burst into song.

The wind roared in protest, and August raised his arms high above his head and commanded, “Sing louder!”

Upstairs, in one of the numerous bedrooms of the Payne residence, a window banged open, shattering the glass. Cole jumped from the bed and darted from one room to the next until he came upon the mess. Rain, fueled by the wind, spewed in through the broken window and pooled on the floor.

At the church, someone looked down and saw that water was rising up through the seams of the floorboards. Another member spied it seeping in from beneath the door.

The choir continued to sing.

Outside, the wind raced around the church growling and snorting. The congregation rippled with fear.