All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By (23 page)

"I'm sorry," Jackson told her. "I can't raise the dead."

"You raised 'em in Peoria; you raised 'em in Saint Paul," Early Boy sang. He had reappeared wearing a window-pane-check suit and a shaggy red wig. In one hand he carried a horn with a rubber bulb that made rude noises, and there was a flower in his buttonhole that squirted a stream of water into Jackson's face. The audience ate it up.

Jackson stood grinning sheepishly in the glare of the key light. His tricky trousers ran up and down his bare legs. Whistles; rimshots.

"Folks," said Early Boy, mugging his way to the front of the stage, "if it walks like a quack, and has feathers like a quack, and quacks like a quack, WHAT IS IT?"

"QUACK QUACK QUACK!" they screamed. Early Boy turned and hit Jackson over the head with a pig's bladder. It made a farting sound.

"Tell me," Jackson pleaded. "Tell me how you know so much about me."

"Stick to the sketch, you chump!" Early Boy hissed in his ear. He flashed his crooked grin at the audience and gave Jackson a squirt from the fake flower. "Oh, doctor!"

"Yes, yes. That'll be five dollars."

"Five dollars! But you haven't heard my complaint."

"That'll be ten dollars. Now you really got something to complain about."

"The problem is my wife."

"Yes, I can cure the common scold."

"Doctor, my wife thinks she's a lamppost."

"Shed some more light on that for me, will you?"

"She hangs around the street corner all night."

"Take two aspirin and walk your dog someplace else."

They're not laughing
, Early Boy whispered.
It's all your fault. They'll never book us anywhere after this. Do something!

And suddenly he was gone, leaving Jackson alone before his auditors. A single work light burned feebly, throwing his shadow to the pit.

He could hear but not see them; they were dangerously restless out there, in the tropic dark. Jackson was streaming wet from that last squirt of the flower in Early Boy's lapel, from his own nervous perspiration. He advanced cautiously to the foot of the stage; sure enough, they were making the sound he most dreaded hearing.

Hisssss
      
Hissssssss

"Impresario!" Jackson called. "Please, sir! I want to get off. Let me off now."

He was soon aware of the old man's eyes, truculent orbs shining coldly in the dark. The rest of the face gradually came clear, and Jackson, quaked, dismayed by the revelation of time's cruelty, by the absence of love, by the pain of yet another judgment.

"Drunk," the impresario said.

"Oh, no, sir," Jackson protested.

"Dis-rep-u-ta-ble."

Jackson's mouth was too dry for him to speak.

"And a disgrace to my profession."

"You taught me everything," Jackson said. "I'm as good as you."

"
How dare you compare us?
"

"Don't," Jackson croaked. "I would have died for you. Let me have what's left of my life."

Hisssss

"Play," he begged the silent orchestra. But they'd packed up and gone home, leaving only the odd oboe glinting in the dark. He turned frantically upstage. "Lights!" He was ignored. The filament of the single bulb high on the brick fire wall was turning red. Soon it would die.

"Early Boy!" Jackson shouted. He heard the thunderous clang of a steel door closing somewhere off stage.

In the dark nothing was left but the gleam of an old man's vexed eyes.

"Help me, father!"

"I can't."

Hissssssssssssssssssssss
.

"
Can't you hear? Don't you know what's coming?
"

At last there was a hint of sympathy in his father's voice.

"I prayed to God, but she took me anyway. Just as she will take you. I have no advice to offer. We're an unfortunate lot. But I'm not telling you anything you don't already know."

Jackson whirled again. The work light flared briefly, and exploded.

In the last red trace of illumination before the world completely closed down on him, Jackson ran.

He ran, in the open air, down a weedy slope away from the railroad track and the standing, steaming train, beneath a moon that was red and as low as the treetops in the sky behind him. Big mosquitoes swarmed around his head. He splashed through the muck and shallow water of a drainage ditch with the noise of hounds baying in his ears. He came to a rutted clay road and angled across it, falling twice. Each time he scrambled to his feet the hounds sounded closer. They scared him. He knew he'd been drunk aboard the train, and dreaming. He was no longer dreaming but he was still a little drunk, and unable to get his bearings. Not knowing where he was or where he was going or what was after him worsened his panic. Flight was harrowing, but to stop was unthinkable.

Across the road there was a field, then a stand of bare, jagged trees that seemed close by. Jackson, hoping for the best, made for the deadwood and undergrowth. But the dogs were coming, followed by horsemen cutting around in front of the locomotive, plunging down the embankment in pursuit. Almost out of breath, Jackson floundered between tufts of coarse matted grass, his shoes laden with mud. But he forgot the pain in his chest when he heard the crack of a rifle.

He plunged into the eerie wood, too busy to be apprehensive about night-dwelling snakes that might be hanging around the windfalls. His clothes snagged in the prickly brush, and he soon found it impossible to flog himself through any more of it.

The dogs were having no trouble. Jackson heard them crashing and panting not far behind and at last he gave up, using his remaining strength to shinny up a leaning tree trunk, where he clung to a few broken stubs and shuddered, wrapping his head in his jacket for the protection from mosquitoes it afforded. By then all the dogs had gathered in bellicose ceremony at the base of his tree.

The lead horseman had a light Jackson perceived through the cloth of his jacket. The horseman had to shout to be heard over the barking dogs.

"You want to come down, Early Boy, or do we shoot you down?"

Jackson wearily unshrouded his face. The light from the electric torch stung his eyes. He blinked and shielded them and looked at the Negro on the horse below. The Negro had eyes pale as looking glass, and other features that told of mixed bloodlines. There was a rifle in the crook of his right arm. He laughed in a disgusted way and shook his head and called back over one shoulder,

"Take a look here at what we got."

The other horse appeared, a big roan gelding. Jackson turned his head and squinted at the rider, a tall woman who wore a shooting vest. Her hair was pulled back tightly from her face. Despite the poor light it was possible to tell that she was an extraordinarily handsome woman. She carried a pump-action shotgun, finger on the trigger. Obviously she was not happy, but to her credit she looked concerned about this case of mistaken identity.

Jackson slapped at a bitten ear and attempted a jaunty smile. But the concern he g1impsed in her green eyes reminded him that he'd had about all he could take for one night. He couldn't smile. Instead a tear slipped down his cheek.

"Good God," Nhora Bradwin said, as the Negro hushed their dogs. "Who are you?"

"DASHAROONS"

August 5, 1944, and after

Don't ya know God gwine keep 'er punishin' white folks—keep 'er sendin' dem floods, win' storms and lettin' disasters come to dier chillun, an' dier chillun's chillun in dis day an' time.

—ISHREAL MASSIE,
former slave interviewed at the Petersburg, Virginia, City Home in 1937

"D
r. Holley?"

Mosquito netting. Heat. A rank sweetness in the air of the room. The face of the elderly Negro, three paces beyond the bed, indistinct in a pearly light that could have been dawn, or dusk. The bed sheets in which he'd slept were clammy from the sweats of his anxious dreams. Jackson's throat was raw; he felt a touch of ague, there was a run of chills. It was all too familiar.

"Dr. Holley?"

His father was urgently needed. But the terrifying black men in snakeskins and crocodile masks had taken him away. Weeks ago. With the help of the tireless Sisters of Radiant Hope and the Negro orderlies his father had trained, Jackson had managed to keep the hospital open, functioning in a limited way. But there were too many seriously ill patients and not enough drugs, there were surgical cases he dared not touch, despite his precocious skill at excising tumors and repairing strangulated hernias. And his mother, going slowly mad with fear, inconsolable—how could he save her?

"What do you want?" Jackson said.

"My name is Hackaliah, suh. Miss Nhora ask me to look in on you."

"Miss Nhora?" Jackson rubbed his sore head. Memories of Tuleborné were fading, but his skin still tingled from the dreamlike impact of déjà vu. "Oh, yes." He sat up in the bed. "How long have I slept?"

"I reckon about fourteen hours."

"What time is it, Hackaliah?"

"Seven-thirty the even'. Is there somethin' I can do for you, Dr. Holley?"

"Light a lamp. And my robe, please. Is that coffee I smell?"

"Yassuh. Is."

Jackson parted the mosquito netting and got down from the four-poster bed. The air of the room was like a warm bath. Balcony doors stood open, but there was no evening breeze. Torch light was reflected in the glass of the doors. Jackson heard tree frogs, and the crunch of automobile tires on a gravel drive in front of the plantation house.

Hackaliah turned on a lamp and brought Jackson's silk robe, which had been painstakingly pressed for him. Hackaliah wore a gray cloth jacket, a string tie and striped pants. He was a large, stooped man with a palsy. Parkinson's, Jackson decided, but it was affecting only his head and not his hands, so he could go on working. He looked the sort of man who'd rather die than be considered useless.

"Have you seen a doctor recently, Hackaliah?"

"No, suh. I don't bother."

"Why not?"

"There's no doctor hereabout anymore. Just Old Lamb. He says I shake 'cause I's old." Hackaliah chuckled humorlessly.

"How old are you?"

"I's told I was born the last year of the war."

"The Civil War? Let's see, that's roughly eighty years."

"Yassuh. Is. You did tell me coffee." Hackaliah poured from a service that looked to be five or six pounds of pure silver. The china was eggshell-thin and very old. The coffee was bitter. That was the chicory in the coffee, Hackaliah explained. A southern tradition. Jackson decided the taste would require getting used to.

While Hackaliah ran his bath and laid out his clothes for the evening, Jackson finished his coffee, standing on the long balcony that overlooked the drive. Traffic was fairly heavy on the hundred-yard horseshoe of pure white gravel. Men, women, a few children, calling at the designated hour to pay their respects to the family. Torches burned at intervals along the boxwood hedges, and there were more torches on the lawn. The sun had set, the sky over Chisca Ridge was yellow, smoke drifted across the minor surface of an artificial pond. There were endless neat white fences running to the horizon, groups of barn-like buildings with metal roofs. He saw settlements and woodlots. He had a glimpse of the coiled river a mile away to the east across a flood plain of great richness, black soil eighteen hundred feet deep. Now a levee controlled the Mississippi's flooding. The wealth of Dasharoons would last forever.

"Hackaliah, have they found Nancy Bradwin's body?"

"They brought her home before noon today."

"The body's here, in the house?"

"No, suh. At the funeral home."

"What did she die of, Hackaliah?"

For the first time the old man's eyes touched briefly on Jackson's face; then his gaze faded away as if he feared empathy, or involvement. He spoke reluctantly.

"I don't know."

"But she was ill months before she died."

"Yassuh."

"Bedfast?"

The palsy seemed more pronounced. "Sometimes, Miss Nancy—she would sleep just like dead womans. Three, four days a spell. Nobody could get her up. Then, when she did wake up, she was most ways like her old self."

"I see. What do you think of that?"

"I don't know," Hackaliah said again, staying scrupulously shy of opinions.

"What did her physician have to say? Was he able to make a diagnosis? Oh, I forgot—you told me there's no doctor here. But surely the family would have sent for—"

"There
was
a white folks' doctor in Chisca Ridge, five months back. Dr. Talmadge. Younger mans than you. He looked after Miss Nancy, day and night." Hackaliah hesitated, then said softly, "Cared about her."

"I'm sure you all cared, very deeply. I'd be interested in talking to Dr. Talmadge. Could you tell me where he's practicing now?"