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
