Standing at the Scratch Line (85 page)

After a long day’s work delivering grain orders to a number of farms around Bodie Wells, King Tremain sat at a felt-covered table in his back-room card parlor with Mace Edwards, Octavius Boothe, Tobias Dorsett, and Lightning Smith discussing the news and events of the day. In the years since Mace had been elected mayor and Octavius had been appointed town marshal, King’s card parlor had become the informal place where Bodie Wells’s leaders met to discuss matters that affected the town. During that time Serena and King had risen to prominence in Bodie Wells’s affairs. After the tornado, Tremain’s Dry Goods had become the largest business in the township, employing over a dozen people. The general store had been expanded to include a full-service livery stable and a clothing store. Selling quality goods at fair prices, the Tremains had earned reputations as solid businesspeople and citizens.

The men sitting around the table with King were sipping shots of single malt bourbon as Mace relayed some information he had concerning the railroad, which was laying track to pass five miles north of Clairborne. The building of the railroad meant business for Bodie Wells. Most of the people employed in the heavy physical labor at the railhead were either colored or Chinese. It was the only town within twenty-five miles where they could shop for clothing and necessities without fear of racial violence. Mace took a swig of his bourbon and said, “The track boss had a colored man and a Chinaman horsewhipped damn near to death. He had both men’s backs laid open to the bone! The colored man and the Chinese man are down at Doc Stephens’s lying at death’s door. All those men did was complain about the paymaster shortening their weekly pay.”

King nodded his head, “I heard that it happens almost every week and if a man complains to the law, they up and fire him.”

“I think we got some big problems of our own and we better put our thinkin’ on ’em befo’ they rise up full-growed,” Octavius said with an easy smile.

“What you talkin’ about ’Tavius?” Tobias asked. Tobias Dorsett was a man in his early sixties and one of the town elders. His cabinet shop was one of the original businesses around which Bodie Wells was formed.

“Well, I hear that the track manager and the track boss done lost a lot of money gamblin’ down in Atoka and the mens they owe down there is putting pressure on them to pay up! For a while they was just willin’ to squeeze money out’n the colored payroll.” Octavius smiled again, showing his uneven white teeth. “But now it appears the track manager been dippin’ into the operatin’ money as well and work on the railhead is gon’ come to a standstill. So he been out tryin’ to sell shares in the company. Of course, the white banks just laugh at him. They knows he ain’t got no right to sell nothin’. So, now he tryin’ the colored banks. He offerin’ to let them hold next month’s payroll if’en they buy his paper.”

Tobias leaned forward, “Were that the white man I seen meetin’ with Buck Henry the other day?”

“I think so,” Octavius nodded.

Lightning had gotten up to wash glasses behind the bar. Now he exploded, “Damn it to tarnation! Every cent I done saved in these years since the tornado is in his bank!”

Tobias Dorsett ran his hands through his kinky white hair and shook his head. “You got to figure he gettin’ a pretty good kickback on the side to fall for somethin’ like this. Buck Henry ain’t no fool. He gettin’ his!”

“How’d you hear all this, Octavius?” Mace asked. “I thought I was staying on top of things.”

“You know I got a cousin who works in the colored section of Atoka Federated Bank,” Octavius answered, sipping his drink. “He overheard one of the managers laughin’ about the track manager’s troubles. He called me a couple of days ago and told me to be on the lookout for him.”

“If Buck Henry is doin’ business with the track manager, he must be gettin’ ready to leave town,” Tobias mused. “He know he can’t live here after the bank fails.”

Mace put his face in his hands and took a deep breath. “If the bank fails, people won’t have enough to start over! My God! When you combine this information with the fact that some big-time wheat farmers west of us are fighting for a redistribution of the water from Little River Dam, things look bad for Bodie Wells.”

“There are two big rivers between us and them,” Tobias observed. “Why should a redistribution of water hurt us?”

“Because they’ll divert the watershed above us in the Ouachitas into the canal that passes Clairborne and we won’t get spillover either.”

Tobias frowned. “That doesn’t make sense. Why that will dry up every farm for forty miles around. Even Clairborne farmers will be hit.”

Mace shook his head. “This is a war between white men. Big Daddy made some big enemies when he pushed through the Little River Dam Project. He’s been fighting them off for better than a decade, but now it looks like they’re getting the best of him. They’ll dry out every farm that doesn’t have a good producing well and then they’ll buy the land dirt cheap, change the water distribution agreement, and they’ll be growing wheat here fifteen years from now.”

There were several minutes of silence as Mace’s words reverberated in the room. Then King said, “We can’t do nothin’ about the water, but we can stop Henry from breakin’ the bank.”

“How do you plan to do that?” Mace asked.

“Go to the bank and take our money out,” King answered with a smile. “I know he ain’t gon’ leave town befo’ tomorrow!”

Sampson pushed through the mesh and stood in the doorway, holding the mesh that hung from the top of the door and was weighted at the bottom by a piece of wood. A light brown–skinned boy, barely twenty months old toddled into the room behind him. The child gurgled when he saw King and waddled as fast as his little legs could carry him to where King was sitting. King picked up the child and sat him on his lap.

“The older boy, LaValle, ain’t around?” Octavius asked.

“No, he’s with Serena,” King answered before he turned his attention to his son. “You looks mighty dirty, Jacques. What you been doin’, boy?” King asked. The child gurgled happily in his father’s lap and reached for his glass of bourbon. King pushed the glass out of reach and said, “You got plenty of time for that when you’s growed.” He turned to Lightning. “Ain’t we got some lemonade or sarsaparilla for this here child?”

“Sho’ do,” Lightning answered with a smile. “I made some this afternoon special for him.” He took a metal pitcher out of a bucket of ice and poured a small glass of lemonade for Jacques.

“Yo’ Missus down to Johnsonville outfittin’ folks fo’ that big weddin’?” Octavius asked as he watched Jacques gulp down his lemonade.

“Yeah, she travel quite a good deal now with dresses made to order.”

Tobias said, “Yo’ Missus is a real go-getter! She on about every major town committee there is.”

King just nodded and smiled, but he did not voice his opinion. He was intimately aware of his wife’s social ambitions and it had become a source of contention between them. She seemed more concerned with social acceptance and image than with charitable purposes of her various committees. What people thought was a principal force in all of her decisions. Nor did she miss an opportunity to deride his continued involvement in his bootleg business. King was impervious to her machinations and her arguments fell on deaf ears. He continued on without the slightest deviation in his activities. As far as he was concerned, she had her priorities and he had his.

“I hear she’s making fifteen dresses for that wedding.” Mace questioned, “Your older son is with her while she’s doing all those fittings?”

“Yep,” King answered without elaboration.

Sampson signed some information to King to which he responded with a nod. Sampson then turned to walk out the door and Jacques began to squirm on his father’s lap. “Mson!” Jacques called out, pointing to Sampson.

King set his squirming son on the floor. “You don’t want to stay with me?” he asked.

Jacques shook his head vigorously and said, “Nell,” then toddled to Sampson, who waited for him at the door.

“If that don’t beat all,” King said with a smile. “He done left me to go play with the dogs!”

Octavius got to his feet. “Let me go on down to Doc Stephens’s and see how them two mens is doin’. I’ll take a report and send it in to the circuit court judge.”

“Don’t forget my truck,” King said with a chuckle. “You just make sho’ you fix that transmission, so’s we can make a run to Atoka tonight to pick up our shipment of store merchandise.”

Octavius nodded, “I’ll go straight to the garage from Doc Stephens’s. I’ll have it ready by eight.” He picked up his hat and waved it around to all present and pushed through the mesh into the darkening purple of the evening sky.

Mace leaned forward and said to Tobias, “Maybe Octavius is wrong about Buck Henry.”

Tobias shook his head. “I got to go to the bank tomorrow. I can’t gamble that things is gon’ be alright. Me and the wife is too old to lose our savings now. Shoot, if we didn’t have help from the Tremains, we might not have rebuilt the cabinet shop after the tornado. I’m sorry, Mace. I can’t think about the good of the town, I got to take care of me and the missus.”

“That go for me too!” Lightning declared. “I done already seen the force of nature take everythin’ I had. I sho’ ain’t gon’ give up what I got saved now to no low-down cheat!”

Mace sighed, “Without a bank, Bodie Wells is just a collection of buildings. Everything we fought for and sweated for will be gone!”

“That ain’t so, Mace,” Tobias countered. “There is plenty of colored towns that don’t have no banks and the people in ’em is doin’ just fine. Colored folks has kept they money in tin cans, cookie jars, cigar boxes, and under floorboards since slavery and have survived. But if Buck Henry done spent our hard-earned money on a lot of useless paper, this here town is dead; that’s the one thing will kill it for sho’: stealin’ folks savin’s.”

“I’m gon’ pull my money out,” King declared. “I ain’t trusted Henry since that time them boys in Clairborne wanted to ride on us.”

Elijah Wells pushed through the mesh and walked into the room, “How do, everybody?” he called out as he walked over to the small bar. “It be the end of a long week, Lightnin’. I needs a shot of that there whiskey just to wet my throat.”

“I best be gettin’ home,” Tobias said as he stood up. He nodded to King, “I’ll see you at the bank tomorrow mo’nin’.”

Mace stood up reluctantly as well and said, “I’ll walk out with you, Mr. Dorsett. Thanks for the drink, King.” Both Tobias and Mace pushed through the mesh and walked out.

“You’s here early ain’t you, Lige?” Lightning asked as he poured Elijah a drink.

“Yep, I been workin’ for the paymaster these last couple of days, movin’ boxes and pay records, so I ain’t been out sweatin’ on the track ’til six and seven in the evening like everybody else.” Elijah took a sip of his drink and a smile creased his dark-brown face. He was a likable, young, muscular man with a smooth face and even features. He was one of the few colored men who followed the work of the railroad who had brought his family to Bodie Wells. His wife worked for Serena as a seamstress. Elijah walked over and took the seat vacated by Mace. “There is some crazy stuff goin’ at the railroad,” he said, shaking his head.

King nodded and asked, “What’s this you say about workin’ for the paymaster?”

Elijah smiled. “Yep, been havin’ an easy job for near three days. It ’pears they expectin’ some bigwigs to come out tomorrow with a big shipment of money to stop all the grumblin’ by the white workers and the folks in Clairborne.

“Why are they sendin’ all this money?” King asked.

“Oh, it’s all hush-hush,” Elijah answered, dropping his voice. “ ’Course, they talk all the time like I ain’t there. The track manager, the track boss, and the paymaster been stealin’ from the track payroll for over a year. But they is scramblin’ now! I overheard that an accountant is comin’ on the money train to look at the books they been keepin’.”

King asked as he dealt himself a hand of solitaire, “Is they worried about gettin’ arrested?”

Elijah scoffed, “They shittin’ in they britches! They’s tryin’ to get money from everywhere! I even saw Buck Henry come sneakin’ in to visit them. Course I didn’t let him see me. But shoot, they ain’t got no time to work nothin’ out. The Pinkertons arrive tomorrow and the railroad has got every police department within thirty miles goin’ to the railhead tonight to protect that money shipment. I bet there ain’t a policeman from between Clairborne and the Oklahoma border that ain’t been summoned to the railhead tonight.”

“About time them boys paid the piper. They been stealin’ from the colored and Chinese for years,” King commented as he went through the deck card by card.

There was a knock at the door and Buck Henry pushed through the mesh and was followed by a light-skinned man wearing a brown plaid suit cut in the latest style. Buck Henry was a tall, slender man with a thin mustache just above his lip. He looked more like a mortician than a banker, for he had the oily, ingratiating smile of a coffin-seller. “You playing cards tonight?” Buck asked.

“Sorry, not tonight,” King answered, covering his irritation. The fact that Buck had the gall and presumption to act as if no one knew about his dirty dealings made King want to hurt him. But he restrained himself with the knowledge that Buck was the type of man who was most vulnerable through his wallet. All King had to do was wait. Once he and Tobias Dorsett started the run on the bank in the morning, that would deliver the most telling blow.

Buck asked, “Do you mind if we have a drink before we head out to the Black Rose?”

King smiled. He could afford to be generous. “Sho’, have one on me. Who’s yo’ friend?”

“Oh, this is my cousin, Charles Manning from Memphis,” Buck replied with one of his oily smiles. “He’s just in town to visit for a few days.” Buck turned to his cousin. “Charles, this is King Tremain and that’s Lightning Smith at the bar. And I believe the other man at the table is Elijah Wells.”

Charles Manning nodded to King and Elijah. He had a condescending smirk on his face and possessed a haughty bearing. He removed the riding gloves he wore and tossed them on the table nonchalantly. He turned and waved to Lightning, beckoning him over.