Hardscrabble Road Read online

Chet said, “Yeah, and we was making stick men, not shooting marbles.”

  “Fellas, I remember it clear as day. Nat does too.” Jay’s broad smile was in his voice even if I couldn’t see it.

  When my brothers had repeated Papa’s story to Nat, he’d sworn up and down that it was so. Now he said to me, “I’m right sorry I went along with it. That’s a powerful-bad thing I done to you.” He sounded sincere, but maybe he was coddling me because of my bloody lip.

  We climbed our fence and crossed the pitch-black barn lot. The kerosene lamp was unlit in the kitchen; our rented house stood dark and silent, as if waiting for something to happen. My brothers said goodnight to Nat. On the porch, they washed their feet in the ceramic basin and toweled off, murmuring to each other. They padded inside without hesitation.

  I took Nat’s hand, dry and tough and as big as a skillet, and looked at the black rectangle where my brothers had vanished. I stuttered, “Why ain’t I l-l-like Jay and Chet?”

  His fingers folded overtop of my knuckles and gave me a quick squeeze. “Someday you won’t never give a thought to being in the dark. Not long past, your brothers was just like you.”

  “M-maybe we really ain’t kin.”

  “This is your home,” he said very gently. “You’s a part of this family and loved the same as everybody else.” Then he took me up the porch stairs. I kept washing my feet over and over in the basin full of dirty water until he tapped me with the towel my brothers had used. The kitchen doorway gaped like the mouth of a cave. With a pat on my britches, he nudged me inside.

  I held my breath while I scuffed through the room and entered the hall. Nat had gone when I glanced back. I slid my hand along the wood-plank wall, touched my parents’ closed bedroom door and Darlene’s on the opposite side, and stopped at the threshold of the parlor, where Jay and Chet breathed deeply in the single bed we all had to share. As usual, they sounded confident of their place in the world. Meanwhile, Nat’s careful words ran in a loop through my mind, which distorted their emphasis and shadings until they confirmed my worst fear.

  I was an orphan.

  CHAPTER 2

  Papa sang out as he stalked down the hallway:

  “Hamestrang crackin

  Collar cryin

  Let’s git goin

  If we’re gwine!”

  My eyes snapped open at “crackin.” I slept with my head at the foot of the bed; Jay and Chet’s toes twitched against my arms. They scrabbled off their ends of the stifling feather mattress and we all hit the floor before Papa reached “gwine” in his mule-plowing song. Not to do so would’ve meant a belt-lashing or worse. Papa wouldn’t hesitate to grab a fistful of our hair and yank each of us from bed, so we made sure we’d climbed into our dusty overalls before he loomed in the entryway. His belt pressed the stub-nosed Colt against his shirtfront.

  “Jay,” he said, “I’ll only say this once…” He rattled off a list of chores and fieldwork we had to finish by supper. “And you’ll do it right if you know what’s good for you.” His orders to ten-year-old Jay always began and ended the same way. When Papa left our room, Jay repeated the chores to the letter, giving me and Chet our duties. Only six-going-on-seven, I got the lightest work but would try to help my brothers too. Jay always kept the hardest labor for himself.

  As the sun cleared the treetops, the summer heat throbbed like an oncoming brushfire. The kitchen floor warmed my feet where sunlight baked the heart-pine. With yawns and grumbles, we shuffled to our places at the table and dropped onto the benches. Darlene’s bedroom door remained shut. Since school wouldn’t start again until September, she slept in most mornings. She usually did her only chores—sweeping the front porch and helping Mama shell peas and corn—in the late afternoon, unless she’d gone to stay with girlfriends or hosted their visits, in which case I got her duties too.

  Fred greeted me with a rub of his flat orange crown against my ankle while my siblings’ gray-striped cats sat at attention, alert for scraps. Our hunting dogs, Sport and Dixie, had to stay on the front porch; they lay in the open doorway and stared down the hall at us with yellow eyes.

  Mama turned from the stove with a skillet that held fried eggs sizzling in red-eye gravy. The yolks were as orange as the bacon drippings in which they swam. She slid an egg onto each of our plates and returned with a pot of grits. She and Papa hadn’t crossed words since the night he’d pulled his gun, so she held her mouth a bit looser and almost looked us in the eye as she served breakfast.

  Lonnie Nugent perched at the cook’s table—the end of the kitchen counter—eating the same food. A rangy Negro in his mid-twenties, Lonnie was Nat’s partner in sharecropping and lived alone in a shack on the other side of our rented cotton field. He ate the first two meals of each day in our kitchen. He always dressed the same as us: a long-sleeved work shirt and overalls. The sun had darkened his skin to the color of the flies darting around his food. He snatched one with his left hand, shook his fist hard, and discarded the pest on the floor while eating a syrup-drenched biscuit with his right. He wiped his mouth on a faded kerchief and said, “The general got my orders?”

  Jay nodded and swallowed his mouthful of grits. Lonnie sometimes went with us to the Saturday picture-show, where he’d sit way up in the colored balcony while we grabbed seats down front. He’d taken a liking to the westerns and cavalry stories. Jay had set his rank as sergeant; Nat received a commission to lieutenant. Chet and I were privates but at least our general had given us pretend horses to ride. Jay said, “Sergeant, you’re to hoe out the cotton with me and Lt. Nat, same as yesterday. The commandant wants us done by supper.”

  The back porch creaked as Papa went through his morning routine. He stood in the shade, knees bent and shoulders sloped, the way I imagined he’d gotten set to field a grounder during his old barnstorming baseball days. I watched him through the kitchen doorway as he kicked out his right foot and held that leg even with the porch floor. Then he crouched on his left leg until his seat almost touched the wood planks. His arms drifted outward for balance, but he never tipped or even wobbled from the effort. Whenever I tried to imitate him, I’d fall right over. He rose and practiced the strength exercise on his right leg with equal ease. Neither my brothers nor I could ever match him.

  With a flick of each wrist, Papa shot his heavily starched cuffs and strolled around the side of the house. He always waited to eat his breakfast after us, “in peace and quiet,” he’d say.

  Just as we soaked up the last of the red-eye gravy with our biscuits, Mama took away our plates. She plopped the dishes and forks into a galvanized basin full of greasy water, rubbed off anything that stuck, and set them in a drain rack to dry. Lonnie waited until Mama had finished her cleanup and then washed off his own plate and fork and set them on a separate rack. “Thank you, Miz Reva,” he said. “That was mighty fine.”

  She mopped the counter with a graying washrag that she’d cut from the same bolt of gingham as the homemade apron she always wore. In her tight voice, she replied, “You’re high near family, Lonnie. Family don’t need to say thanks.” They had the same brief conversation almost every day.

  He headed out the back door, hauling the basin to water her garden, and we filed out after him to begin our chores. While leaning over a hog-wire fence and sloshing rinse water at the base of Mama’s tomato vines, he called to me, “Hey, private. Your buddy’s done chewed some lettuce clear down to the dirt.”

  Our dogs kept away every critter except a small honey-brown rabbit that I’d seen once at sunup in Mama’s garden. It had a creamy blaze between its long eyes and a shocking pink scar on its back where something big must’ve taken a bite. Fur hadn’t grown over the damaged skin. Either the rabbit didn’t understand that it was in even more danger in Mama’s garden or it didn’t care. It had sat beside a row of carrots and worked its little mouth as it watched me.

  The rabbit had moved over to the onions by the time I’d run inside, got down Papa’s single-shot .22 rifle from the kitchen wall, an
d took aim from the back porch. We always kept the rifle loaded. I could’ve awakened Sport and Dixie and sent them after the rabbit, but I wanted to show everyone what a good shot I’d become.

  The rabbit’s narrow face regarded me, mouth twitching as if in mockery of my nervous stutter. Its ears bent sideways and I could see the broad pink scar on its back, a clear target as I sighted along the barrel. The action was so stiff I barely managed to cock the hammer. As soon as I pulled the trigger, I knew I’d missed.

  The rifle boomed and dirt behind the rabbit kicked up. I’d killed some Irish potatoes. Chickens in the henhouse squawked as the gunshot echoed. Our dogs gave chase too late; the rabbit had crawled under the wire fence and bounded away.

  Papa ran out bare-chested, hitching up his trousers and shouting, “Goddammit, that ain’t a toy.” He snatched the rifle from my hands and nearly knocked my head off with its walnut stock. As I lay on the porch, holding the lump growing behind my ear and crying loud enough to match our rooster, I could see the rabbit in my mind, the pink scar flaring on its back, taunting me as it escaped.

  Now, I looked at the mushy green base of lettuce the rabbit had chewed level with the ground, and cursed it with the only swear-words a six year old was allowed, “D-d-dadgum, blasted thing. M-maybe we can learn Dixie t-t-to sleep out back.”

  “Better a dog gets cracked upside its head than you.” Lonnie filled the basin from the hand-pump and went back inside to deliver the fresh water to Mama.

  Already late with my chores, I trotted toward the chicken coop. Our rooster changed its patrol route across the barn lot to cut me off. Papa had named all our animals; he called this little lord That Goddamn Rooster. I tossed aside some leftover biscuit and dashed into the darkened henhouse as the rooster collected his daily toll.

  Hens and young chicks clucked and cheeped and fluffed their feathers to scare me, a rusty rainbow of colors in the gloom. My knuckles grazed coarse feathers as I reached into the warm, humid pit beneath a few hens to gather eggs in a wire basket. The previous week, the mail-rider had delivered our order of twenty-five new biddies in a long box. As usual, a few were dead. I’d removed three plush, cool balls of greenish-yellow fluff and put them over the fence into the woods. They had disappeared when I checked later that day, most likely eaten by our razorback hogs. In my daydreams, though, they’d only played possum when we opened the lid, and a whole kingdom of wily chickens lived deep in the forest.

  After leaving the eggs in the kitchen, I helped Chet set out more hay in the mule pen for Mike, Blue, and Della. Both of us breathed through our mouths because of the stink of manure and unwashed animals, shifting our jaws back and forth to blow the ever-present gnats away from one eye and then the other. Every breath had a dual purpose; we never wasted anything on the farm.

  Chet slung his arms around Mike and Blue’s necks to bring them closer together. He whispered into their long, trowel-shaped ears and laughed when they snorted.

  “What’chu s-s-saying to ’em today?”

  “I asked who’d win a fight between Hopalong Cassidy and The Lone Ranger.”

  “They’d never fight,” I stuttered. “Both of ’em are good guys.”

  “You and me fight all the time.”

  “Well th-they ain’t brothers.”

  Chet didn’t take my bait. “The Lone Ranger’s a mystery man,” he said. “Who knows who he really is?”

  We recited in unison, “The Shadow knows.” Chet handed me a massive bale of hay and ordered me to the barn. The top of the straw pile poked at my eyes.

  I tipped my head back so I could talk without getting a mouthful. “Can a private give orders?”

  “I’m an older private than you, so sure.”

  My arms trembled under the weight, but I still had a question. “Who c-can I order around?”

  “Nobody. You don’t rank.”

  I staggered into the barn. With a grunt I dropped the load into the stall of Papa’s black warhorse, Dan, then climbed over the gate to stand before him. With the rest of my biscuit, I made a peace offering to the huge stallion. He seized it in one alarming bite that grazed my palm like a steel trap slamming shut. As I scooped out the dung he’d left overnight, Dan stamped his hooves within a gnat’s eyebrow of my bare feet. I called out to Chet, “So who’d Mike and Blue s-say would win?”

  “Not telling.” He shoveled mule hockies into a wheelbarrow, and I added Dan’s heavy manure. Later, we’d put in chicken droppings swept up from the barn lot and work it all into Mama’s garden.

  While my brothers and I kneeled beside our three rawboned cows, each filling up a bucket with warm, frothy milk, I asked Jay who’d win the fight between our two favorite heroes. He pumped on a teat until he got milk to squirt out roughly in the rhythm of The Lone Ranger’s theme. I cheered and Chet shouted, “No—Hopalong,” but Jay said, “Actually, fellas, Tonto could whip both their backsides. He does all the heavy lifting out West.” Jay hauled two of the buckets himself onto the back porch so Mama could skim off the cream for churning and make buttermilk with the rest.

  We prodded the cows into the woods to scavenge, and then I hand-pumped water into a dented hubcap. As I set it in the shade for the chickens, That Goddamn Rooster sprang at me with a wild cry and spurred my leg. Talons ripped my clothes and skin while he beat my knees with his strong wings. I kicked him away and limped to the back porch. “I’m gonna sh-shoot that doggone—that damn—”

  “A mouthful of lye soap don’t taste any better after breakfast,” Mama called from the kitchen.

  With a broom handle, I swirled a thatch of spider webs from under the porch roof. Jay got a handful of kerosene in his cupped palm and made a dirty gray poultice flecked with cocooned bugs. We pressed it on the cuts and tied the curative in place with strips of worn-out rags. Sweat slicked my back and armpits. The morning had just begun.

  *

  “Can I use your hoe this time?” I gripped my rusty straight-neck grubbing hoe, but pointed at the gooseneck tool that Chet had gotten for Christmas six months before. Everybody, even Nat and Lonnie, had received a newfangled hoe but me.

  “Not my fault Papa figured you was too little to need one.” On Christmas Day, Jay and Chet’s hoes were propped against the chairs they’d set in front of the fireplace the night before. A scaly orange and a bag of marbles perched on all three of our seats, while Darlene found fruit, new shoes, and a store-bought dress on her chair. I asked where my hoe was and Papa sent me to the barn to look for it. By the time I’d come back empty-handed, my presents were missing. Papa had said I’d get them next year if I didn’t mouth off again.

  I pointed at Chet’s hoe and said, “For a little while, j-just until the train whistles for dinner.”

  “That’s all morning.”

  “Pretty please?” I laced my fingers together around my cracked hoe handle and stared at Chet.

  “Aw, shoot, take it. Use it all dadgum day for all I care.” He threw the hoe at me, but easy enough for me to dodge.

  “That’s OK, I’ll keep mine.” I walked toward the cotton field dragging my heavy hoe, making a wide trough in the sand.

  “Well, hellfire, Bud, why’d you put me through all that?” He grabbed his gooseneck grubber and caught up at a run.

  “Not telling.” I failed to keep the smile off my face.

  He bumped me with a sharp elbow, muttering, “Idiot.”

  So my brothers and Nat and Lonnie weeded around the cotton plants with their gooseneck hoes, mostly using their wrists and arms to dig out the grass, sandspurs, and dandelions. I chopped with my old straight hoe, my back and shoulders aching. Sweat ran down my legs, making the cuts from That Goddamn Rooster sting, while sunlight blazed through a flimsy straw hat to brand my neck and head.

  Weevils had ruined the cotton. Tiny, wriggling larvae nestled in almost every boll, eating up the thin white strands that should’ve been growing into fluffy clouds by now. I asked Nat why we bothered with grubbing that crop, since Papa planned to replace the cot
ton with peanuts. Nat’s hoe blade chopped, snick-snick, while sweat dripped from his chin and nose. A salt ring whitened his hatband. He said, “Me and Lonnie gotta make some money off this cotton. We got no moonshine to be selling like your daddy does, nuthin to fall back on.”

  Lonnie said, “I’ll sift through a whole field to make one good bale.” He was our champion cotton-picker. Before the weevils, he’d pick six hundred pounds a day, crawling on his knees as he plucked two rows clean at a time. All for five cents a pound.

  Mama came out to work in the adjacent cornfield for a few hours before she had to make dinner. We didn’t see Papa until he rode out on Dan to inspect our progress around noontime. He sat upright in the saddle, one hand holding the reins and the other resting on his belt, between the silver buckle and the grip of his Colt. The white, wide-brimmed Stetson hid most of his face in deep shade. Musk from Dan’s warm flanks filled my nose as hooves crushed the sand in the next row. I sensed Papa leaning over to watch me.

  I jabbed at a single blade of grass sprouting beside a scraggly cotton plant. The hoe edge dug out a handful of sandy dirt but I’d missed my target. Huffing, Dan pounded the earth. The saddle creaked as Papa towered above me. I choked up on the neck of my hoe and dragged the blade once more. The grass almost pulled free of the soil. I struck over and over until I’d chopped the sprout into bits of green.

  Papa hocked and spit a gob onto my dirty bare foot. “Goddammit, you’re gonna take all day to get one row—”

  A high-pitched horn blew from the direction of the crossroads, a mile away. Chet flung down his hoe, but Lonnie murmured, “Mm-mmmm,” his voice lifting upward in warning. My brother had been too eager to hear the train whistle that we used to signal our dinner-break. He stooped to grab his tool as the car horn sounded a second time.

  Papa vaulted from the saddle, his belt-hand already drawing the leather from around his waist. “You think it’s quitting time?” He yanked the belt free and flicked it at Chet’s head. The pointed tip reddened my brother’s ear. “You got better things to do?” He spun Chet around and lashed his back. Papa struck with fluid ease, the belt a dark blur as he snapped his wrist over and over. Chet hunkered, arms protecting his head, but made no sound. He held still and took it.