The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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      Every Sunday morning since she was a girl (except for the winter ones, when she would heat water for the tub on the porch), Elma would follow the clay footpath through the pines behind the big house to bathe in the creek. A hundred years before, the Creek River had been called the Muskogee, for the people who had lived on its shores, but after the tribe was forced west and the land surveyed and mapped and distributed to whites, the town’s founder had renamed it the Creek, the tribe’s more civilized name, and a more suitable one for modern Florence. (It was the age when Georgia named her towns after the craggy city-states of ancient Europe—Athens, Sparta, Rome—though Florence was the name of the founder’s mother, who went by Flo.) That made the creek, when the river trickled into one, Creek Creek. George Wilson’s grandfather had been one of the men distributed two hundred acres of land along the road they called the Twelve-Mile Straight, for that was the age when they named a thing for what it was and no more. The Straight was straight, no kinks or curves, just a rise here or there, barely a hill.

      Nobody called Creek Creek by its name. Some—the few Black Dutch left in the Indian village east of town—still called it the Muskogee. Most just called it the creek. Elma called it Lizard Creek, for the lizards that darted at her ankles and also because from the sandhill bank, it was shaped like a lizard looking over its shoulder, and the surface was as green and scaly as a lizard’s back. Sunday mornings she’d string up her clothes on the lowest branch of the catalpa tree—the overalls she’d stepped out of, and the clean dress she’d change into—slipping the branch through the sleeves like an arm, so the clothes hung from the tree side by side, two friends keeping her company while she bathed with a soap cake in the creek. It was the place where her father had taught her to fish, plucking a fat catalpa worm from a leaf and threading the hook through its leopard hide. In the fall, Elma and Nan would gather the catalpa’s pods from the bank, long as their arms and rattling with seeds, and they would make music with them and weave them into wreaths.

      Nan did not go to church with the family (what did she need with the Lord, Juke said, when He had already withheld his blessings?), and so she did not go to the creek with Elma on Sundays. It wasn’t proper to bathe with coloreds, Juke said, though Elma had washed Nan in the tub when she was small, though they went to the privy together, and though Elma had shown Nan how to fold a rag when her bleeding came last year, just as Ketty had shown her. Nan bathed on Tuesdays, the day they did the wash, and Elma’s father bathed in town at the mill when he made deliveries, in a shower stall with heated water.

      So late one September night in 1929, when Elma went to the privy and heard footsteps on the path to the creek, she thought it must be the new field hand. The footsteps were slow, careful. Branches snapped. Genus Jackson had lived in the tar paper shack for little more than a month. Other than the field hand they called Long John, he was as tall a man as she’d seen, but he made his way through the cotton field hunched over on his long, cornstalk legs, his back sickle shaped, his gait tight, as though hiding some pain in his gut. He’d said barely ten words since he’d come to the crossroads. He didn’t join in the songs while he picked. He kept his distance from Elma and Nan, from Ezra and Long John and Al and, when they were there, Al’s three sons. He hid his face under his hat. But the other day, when the gate to the chicken yard had come off its hinge, he’d helped her lift it back into place, and when he’d smiled she saw that one of his front teeth was missing, and when she looked again she saw that it wasn’t missing but gray as a fossil. He told her his name. He asked for hers, and nodding at the house, Nan’s. The tooth made him look like a little child and an old man at the same time. He was, she noticed, not much older than she was, which was seventeen. On his head was a corn-shuck hat and on his feet were a pair of boots made from what looked like alligator hide.

      Now he walked without shoes, and without a lantern. There was a slice of moon to see by, and under its white glow, through the privy window, Elma watched him disappear in his union suit through the pines.

      It was Saturday—maybe Sunday already. In a few hours, she would wake to do her milking and her feeding and then she would go down to the creek herself. And in fact the next morning, the cake of lye soap she’d left in the crook of the catalpa tree wasn’t yet dry. She had made it herself, with bits of cornmeal and lavender leaf, in the same tub where she washed the laundry and cooked the lard. She held the soap to her nose, then ran it roughly between her legs, then dried and dressed and went to church with her father.

      That evening, after a day of picking, after supper, she knocked on the door of Genus Jackson’s shack with a slice of blackberry pie. He wasn’t there. She looked in the fields, in the yard, the barn. She found him in the hayloft. He tossed a bale of hay down the ladder and almost knocked her over with it, knocked the plate out of her hands instead, sent the fork flying. He raced down the ladder fast as he could in those boots, swearing under his breath. “Miss Elma! I could a crushed you flat!”

      Under the bale, the pie was smashed to muck. Elma laughed, and then Genus laughed at her laughing, and then seeing the tooth’s dull shine made her stop laughing and filled her chest with an icy heat. She shook the hay from her apron. “Well, there goes one delicious slice of blackberry pie,” she said.

      She could see he was pained by this. She wondered if he was sorry for her trouble or just hungry. He took breakfast and supper alone in his shack, and dinner with the other hands, under the cottonwood tree. Nan delivered it to him in a straw basket.

      “I’m powerful sorry, miss,” he said. The barn cat appeared and began to lick the plate, and Elma let her. “And you just trying to do me a kindness.”

      “What happened to your tooth?” she asked him, pointing to her own incisor. He touched the tooth. He had large hands and long fingers and fingernails the shape and color of the inside of an almond. She could smell the sweat on him, and her soap, lavender and lye.

      “My auntie called it my shark tooth.”

      “You were born with it?”

      “Naw. I got kicked by a horse name of Baby.”

      Elma laughed again. “Did it hurt?”

      “Like the devil. She had the devil in her, that one. Horse the same color as the tooth. I reckon she didn’t want me to forget her.”

      “It don’t look like that,” Elma said. “It’s pretty as a silver tooth.”

      He smiled, showing it again.

      “How come you walk bent over that way? Was that the devil horse too?”

      “You ain’t afeared of asking questions, are you, miss?”

      “My daddy says I got a loose tongue.”

      “You ever carry a cotton bag over your shoulder?”

      “Since I was a tot.”

      “Well, you tall as I am, it’s inclined to bend you in half too.”

      Then it was Genus’s tongue that got loose. He had questions for Elma, about the house, the farm, about Nan. With her mind Elma followed the sweat traveling down his temples. She traced the curve of his nostrils. They stayed out in the barn until the yard was in shadow.

      “Stay here.” She held up a finger. “I’ll get you another slice of pie.”

      But СКАЧАТЬ