“Come on!” Lucille yelled and clapped her hands together. “I can’t be waitin all day.”
“Let’s go get in the car,” Audy Rae said to us and turned to walk off the porch.
Just then, a brown El Camino pulled into the driveway behind Pops’ truck. Sen Budget got out and walked toward the house, eyeing the truck in his driveway. My mind immediately went to the cold killing of the family mule six weeks ago. I swallowed. He sauntered up the steps, looked to Mom and Audy Rae. “What the hell are they doin here?” he said to Lucille under his breath.
The skin on my neck went to goose bumps as he said it, and I found myself clenching fists.
Lucille was solicitous. “Nothin, Sen, honey; she was jus droppin off some needfuls.”
“Where’s Daddy’s medicine?”
“Right here, Bunny.” She held up a medicine bottle.
He looked down at the bag of clothes at her feet. “What’s all this stuff?”
“Just some extra clothes from my family and social services,” Audy Rae said. “I thought you could use them.”
Sen smiled at her from a canted facade. “You thought I could use them?” He slowly took the food from the bag and placed it on the side table and walked over to Audy Rae and held out the bag. He was standing as tall as he could, which was only eye to eye with Audy Rae, his thin frame blown up like a puffer fish. Audy Rae took the bag.
“The day I take charity from a nigger is the day I put a bullet in my brain.”
Audy Rae said nothing but kept her gaze locked onto his.
“I beg your pardon… what did you call her?” came an incredulous voice from Mom. She stormed up to Sen Budget and stood a half head taller in front of him. “How dare you speak to her that way.” She jabbed a finger into his chest. “Came all the way out here to help you. You’ve got a lot of nerve.” I was taken aback at the fury in her voice. Her face was flushed and her left hand was planted on her hip—finger still in the air.
Sen stood with his mouth agape. Lucille was hiding her thoughts somewhere behind all that flesh. My goose bumps became the size of ball bearings. Rayful and the girls were shrubbed together on the other side of the screen door, displaying a rare solidarity that only an outside threat could convey.
Sen looked at the ground and smiled, then opened his mouth to reply, but Lucille beat him to it. “Who the hell you think you are, comin into a body’s porch an tellin them how to behave? Y’all take your bag a shit an git the hell off our propty, you hear?” She pushed up from the chair and lurched forward so the heaving appendage that was her belly touched Mom, adding an exclamation point to the command.
Mom took the bag from Audy Rae and we marched off the porch and into the truck. Sen’s El Camino had blocked our exit, so Audy Rae drove off the driveway onto the dirt yard and up to the road. George regained a jot of confidence and offered a decisive yap.
Chapter 43
JUKES HOLLOW
Each day the next week Pops became stronger, moved around better. On the Friday before school started, we walked down to Biddle’s for lunch. He was on a cane now, moving slowly, arm and chest still trussed. We stopped into Hivey’s to say hello before the meal. Paitsel, Jesper, Bobby, Grubby, and the rest of the crew were loafing earnestly at the back by the cold woodstove.
“Mornin, ladies,” Pops said.
“Look who’s found his legs,” Paitsel said.
“You goin to the big meetin tonight, Arthur?” Jesper asked.
“Don’t know anything about it. Is it yours, Paitsel?”
“Not one a my meetins. Billy Boyd called it. Says he wants to lay out his plans for the Company. Says when the Mitchell farm permit goes through he’s gonna need eighty more workers. Plus about forty temps for the construction.”
Pops shook his head.
Paitsel took a sip of coffee. “Wars ain’t won on a single battle, Arthur. We gotta take the long view. Mitchell’s gonna happen. We gotta focus on preventing future permits.”
“How do they know Mose Bleeker actually ate human flesh?” I asked Buzzy later that afternoon, referring to the likely source of his prized toenail.
“He spent three weeks down the mine with nothin but a canteen a water an come out fatter than when he went in. They found three a the bodies unspoilt, but they never found the other two.”
“That doesn’t prove he ate them.”
It was his first day in a wheelchair and he was testing its workings back and forth across the hospital room. He stopped and spun to me. “They asked him how he stayed alive down there, an he jus smiled crazy an said over and over, ‘Ain’t kilt nothin, won’t nothin die; ain’t kilt nothin, won’t nothin die.’ Mr. Mose couldn’t walk the streets without people starin an kids throwin stones. They all took him for a man-eater, so he started drinkin and become the town drunk. My grandaddy says he was a terrible miner, but he was a first-rate town drunk.”
“I think I’d let myself starve before I’d eat human flesh.”
“Not me. I’d cut a chunk a leg meat an roast it whole over an open flame an make me a sauce outta blood an kidney. That’s the best part, the kidney.”
“I thought the best part is the liver—baked in a piecrust.”
We both laughed.
Buzzy thought about that for a moment, then said, “What if you got your arm chopped off an it was the only thing left to eat; would you eat it?”
“I’d probably bleed to death.”
“Naw, you tied the blood off with your shoelace an lived.”
“I guess I’d rather eat my own arm than someone else’s.”
“Druther lose an arm than a leg.”
“I’d rather lose neither.” I gripped them both.
“Suppose you was a prisoner a war and they was gonna chop off an arm or a leg but they was gonna let you choose; which would you choose?”
“They couldn’t do that; it’s against the Geneva Convention. I saw it on an old movie.”
“Okay, you was stolen by aliens; they ain’t got no conventions… which would you choose?”
“Where on the leg would they chop it?”
“At the knee.”
“Definitely the leg then.”
“Not me.”
“Imagine having to scratch with no arms.”
“Or havin to pick your nose.” He did.
“Back in the Middle Ages in Persia they used to chop off people’s hands for stealing—Pops told me.”
“What’d they chop off if you lied?”
“Dunno, your tongue, I guess.”
“I’d like to be a king back then. Wouldn’t have to listen to nobody. What would you want to be?”
“What do you mean?”
“If you could go back in time an be someone else anywhere, what would you want to be?”
“Maybe a pirate on a ship in the 1600s, exploring the islands and plundering stuff.”
“I’d like that too. I’m gonna change my time to that time.”
We talked for hours that day of the ships we would skipper and storms we would breach; the sails we would unfurl and the crews we would captain. The precise place on the horizon where the ocean becomes the sky; the exact spot on the chest to run through a rival with a sword; the configuration of the southern stars. We talked of the islands we would visit and the suns we would set; the mountains we would scale and the beaches we would take; the pillage we would covet and the beautiful girls who would fall in love; the hearts we would break.