Jordan County (3 page)

The first shot hit the coffee urn dead center and a half-inch amber stream came spouting from the hole the bullet made. He swung on to the right where the Greek stood round-eyed, his hands on the open drawer, looking toward the sound of the explosion. “You and your goddam money,” Pauly said. “You wouldnt even hand a man a suitcase.” He took careful aim and shot him in the head. As the Greek went down he pushed with both hands, closing the cash drawer. So Pauly took two shots at the register. The second hit something vital and the drawer ran out again, ringing a bell. “Cigar!” he cried, and turned to look for other targets.

He found plenty of them — the light fixtures, the mirror behind the counter, the glasses racked along the wall, even the little cream jugs arranged on a tray beside a spigot. Each gave off its particular brand of fireworks when hit. The cream jugs were especially amusing, for they flew in all directions. He had thirty-five shots and he took his time, replacing the empty clips methodically. “This is doing me a lot of good,” he said at one point, and indeed it seemed to be true; he appeared to enjoy the whole display, from start to finish. The beer drinkers had disappeared, along with the three men who had sat at the counter. He had the place to himself. It was very quiet between shots. Between the sharp, popping explosions of cartridges he heard the rain murmur against the plate glass window and the low moans of the Greek proprietor from somewhere down behind the open register.

Though it seemed considerably longer to those who crouched
beneath the tables and behind the counter, the whole affair took less than five minutes by the clock. The thing that frightened them most, they said when they told about it later, was the way the shooter kept laughing between shots. He was sitting there eating the pie, quite happy, with the empty pistol and the four empty clips on the table in front of him, when the police arrived. He even smiled when they shook him, roughed him up. “Do your duty, men,” he said, “just like I did mine.”

Next day it was in all the papers, how he shot up the place for no reason at all. The Greek proprietor, whose injury had been more bloody than serious — all he lost was the lobe from one of his ears — used that day to date things from, the way old people once spoke of falling stars. The waitress was quoted too: “I knew it was something wrong with that one from the minute I laid eyes on him.”
DERANGED VETERAN
the headlines called him, and the stories gave a list of the various institutions he had been in and out of since the war. Everyone agreed that that was what he was, all right, deranged.

The state executioner had set up the portable electric chair in a cell on the lower floor; now he was testing his circuits. Whenever the switch clicked there was a pulsing hum and an odor of heated copper. The turnkey, who had helped with the installation, watched the rubber-insulated cable that ran like a long dusty blacksnake from a connection at the back, through the window bars, to the generator in a truck parked in the cool predawn darkness of the jailyard. He watched as if he expected it to writhe like a pressure hose with every surge of current — as if any force with that much power must have body, too — but it lay in loose coils without motion. Low and wide, with heavy arms and legs, the chair had an unfinished look; the workman, a clumsy copyist of Louis Seize pieces, might have dropped his tools, dissatisfied, and walked away. It had been invented and built six months before, on order from the Mississippi legislature, by a New Orleans electrician who stipulated that he was to receive no profit from the job. Luke Jeffcoat, the executioner, was not so squeamish. He called it “my old shocking chair.”

Deep creases extended from the wings of his nose to the corners of his mouth. Under the glare from the unshaded
bulb, they appeared to have been carved there, exaggerated like the lines on a tragedy mask. Tall and thin, about forty, he worked in a sleeveless undershirt. Tattooed snakes ran down his arms and spread their heads on the backs of his hands. Other, more intimate designs were hidden under his clothes — a three-bladed marine propeller on each cheek of his fundament, for instance, and a bee in a particular place, which he called “my old stingaree.” He hummed as he worked. It was low and within a narrow range, curiously like the hum of the generator.

Presently three men came into the cell. The first two, the sheriff and myself — I am county physician — were required by law to be there. But the third, the district attorney, came of his own accord: “to see this thing I’ll be sending them to,” he had said that afternoon, for he was young and recently elected; this had been his first death-penalty conviction. Entering, the sheriff jerked his thumb toward the window. “Who’s that out there?” he asked the turnkey. We had seen them as we came in, a man and a woman on the seat of a wagon under a bug-swirled arc light fifty yards down the alley, both of them hunched with waiting. Two mules dozed in the traces, knees locked, ears slanted forward, and a long box of unpainted pine lay like a pale six-sided shadow in the bed of the wagon.

“It’s his mamma,” the turnkey said. His name was Jeffcoat too; he and the executioner were cousins. “She rented a dray and bought herself a box to carry him home in. I told her the county would furnish him one, but she said she wanted her own. Yair. They been there since before midnight, sitting like that; theyve got so they dont even slap at the bugs. Just after they got here I went up and took the horn away from him.”

“How is he?”

“I think he’s sleeping. Anyhow he’s quiet. Hoskins is up there with him.”

The sheriff took out his watch, a big one in a silver hunting case. He opened it, then snapped it shut with a sound like a
pistol shot. “Three thirty,” he said morosely. “Where’s Doc Benson?”

I said, “He told me he’d be here by three fifteen. But it dont really matter, does it?”

“The law says two doctors, we’ll have two doctors.” He shook his head, red-faced, with bulging eyes. This was Jordan County’s first electrocution and he didnt like it. “Damn these new-fangled inventions anyhow. The old rope and trapdoor method suited me fine.”

We heard the sudden tearing sound of tires on gravel, an automobile door being slammed; then Dr Benson came in. He was rubbing his palms and his spectacles glinted fiery in the glare. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I got held up.”

“We arent ready anyhow,” I told him.

Just then, however, Jeffcoat threw the switch for the final test, and again there was that pulsing hum, almost a throb, and the faint odor of heated copper. He smiled, then went to the washstand in the corner, soaped his hands, rinsed them under the tap, and dried them carefully on his undershirt.

“All right, sheriff,” he said: “I’m ready if he is.”

It may be I had seen him before. It seems likely, even. But so far as I know — since, with his shaved head and slit trousers and the fear and sickness in his face, he probably did not resemble himself much anyhow — my first sight of him was when they brought him into the cell a few minutes later. During the past twelve years I have learned his story and I intend to set it down, from beginning to end. I saw only the closing scene, as I said, but four people who knew him well have given me particulars. These were his mother, Nora Conway, a cook here in Bristol; Oscar Bailey, called Blind Bailey, a pianist in a local Negro dancehall; Pearly Jefferson, the New Orleans jazz musician, and Harry Van, the New England composer. In many cases I have merely transcribed notes of conversations with these four, or letters from them, and I
want to state my obligations at the outset. There was also a young woman, Julia Kinship, but I have been unable to find her; I understand she went North. At any rate, if ever this gets printed I hope she sees it.

He was born in a time of high water, the stormy May of 1913, in a Red Cross tent on the levee at the foot of the main street of Bristol, Mississippi. His mother was fifteen the month before. The birth was not due until six weeks later, but in the excitement of being herded, along with three or four hundred other Negroes, onto the only high ground within seventy miles, Nora became alarmed and the pains came on her. In a steady drizzle of rain, while water purled up the slope toward where she lay on a strip of salvaged awning, she moaned and bellered through five hours of labor. Between whiles she heard the rain murmur against the canvas, a spooky sound. When the flood reached the level of the river on the opposite side, and therefore ceased its advance up the levee, the child was born. Someone among the white refugee families in the adjoining camp sent her a paper sack of candy. The midwife swaddled the child and placed it beside her. She was content, holding her son against her breast and dissolving a lemon drop in her cheek; but she wished the father was there.

His name was Boola Durfee; originally he was from the lower delta, down around Nitta Yuma, son of a freedwoman and a halfbreed Choctaw blacksmith. Nora was with him less than two weeks, in September of the year before, when the big warm moon of late summer glazed the fields and gilded the corrugated metal roofs of the churches and barrelhouses where he played engagements while she waited outside, too young to enter. A gaunt, high-cheekboned man, he had no home; he roamed the country, tall and flat-chested, with his guitar and his songs. He had warned her at the outset.

“I got a itchy heel,” he said. “Some morning, doll baby, youll wake up and find me gone.”

That was the way it turned out. The following week she woke with the sun in her eyes and found herself alone on the
pallet bed. She had expected this; she had not needed the warning, but at the time she told herself it was worth it. Later she was not so sure. For the next ten years she would hear people mention having seen him, sometimes in far places, Arkansas and Alabama and up in Tennessee, sometimes nearby, Moorhead and Holly Knowe and Midnight, still playing for what he called sukey jumps. But Nora never saw him again. She made it a point never to ask about him or even show an interest when his name came up. At first this indifference was a pretense. Later it was a habit, and quite real. Then she heard that he had been killed in a cutting fight, over near Itta Bena, when some man got jealous.

She gave the child its father’s name, Durfee, for a first name, and attached her family name, Conway, for a surname. By pronunciation, Durfee became Duffy, which later was shortened to Duff, and that was how he came to be called Duff Conway.

After the water went down she got a job as maid in a cotton factor’s house, and when the cook left three years later Nora took her place. She lived alone with her child in a two-room cabin in a section of Bristol known as Lick Skillet. When she had saved twelve dollars out of her weekly salary of three-fifty, she bought herself a mailorder pistol, a big one, nickel plated, which she kept in a bureau drawer in the front room, near her bed, so that she could turn to it in a time of trouble, as other women would turn to a man.

Aborted thus into a flooded world, Duff was undersized and sickly, cocoa-colored and solemn as a papoose. The red in his skin was like a warning sign to Nora. If the boy could inherit the Choctaw pigment and the pointed cheekbones, she reasoned that he might also inherit the guitar-calloused thumb and the itchy heel. So she kept him by her, in her cabin, at church, and at the cotton factor’s house, where at first she put him in a crib on the back porch and later propped him on a chair in one corner of the kitchen. Perched on the tall straight-back chair he passed the waking hours of early childhood
amid a clatter of pots and pans in an atmosphere of flour and frying food, his feet suspended ten inches clear of the floor, then six inches, then two inches, then touching it; then he was six and his mother enrolled him in school. Young enough herself to be mistaken for one of the girls in the upper grades, she would take him there every morning and call for him every afternoon.

“You going to mount to something,” she told him. “Study hard and stay away from riffraff.”

That was how it went; she sought to come between him and whatever shocks might be in store. Then on an April afternoon when Duff was in the fifth grade she missed him among the children trooping out of school. She went by the cabin, thinking perhaps he would get there before her, but he was not there. When she had waited as long as she could, muttering alternate imprecations and prayers, she went back to the cotton factor’s house to fix supper, and when she came home that night Duff was in bed, asleep. She stood over him for a moment, watching. Then she shook him. “Where you been?” she shouted while he rubbed his eyes with his fists.

“Lemmy lone.”

“Where you been all day?”

“Lemmy lone, mamma. I’m sleepy.”

“Sleepy!” She shook him further awake. “Where you been, boy, till all hours of the night? Answer me when I’m talking to you!”

She whipped him. But he cried himself back to sleep without telling her anything, and four days later it happened again.

This time she went looking for him. On Bantam Street, in Bristol’s redlight district, she found a crowd gathered around something on the sidewalk. Mostly silk-shirted bucks and their bright-dressed women, they were standing so closely packed that Nora could not see what they were watching but she heard strange music. She elbowed her way toward the center. There she saw four small boys performing on four outlandish instruments, including a jug, a banjo made from a cigar box
and a length of lath, a jew’s harp, and a set of drums invented from a battered suitcase top and a sawhorse with three stove lids suspended from the crosspiece.

Duff was the drummer. He sat on an upended cracker box, drumming steadily with a pair of chair rungs. Oblivious, he was entering a solo break, a caricature of a real full-sized drummer — head turned sideways down near one shoulder, eyes tight shut, lower lip sucked between his teeth — when Nora caught him by the arm, hauled him off the box, and snatched him through the crowd.

“Wait up, mamma,” he wailed, straining back and waving the chair rungs; “I got to get my drums!”

Nora shook him until his teeth rattled above the laughter of the crowd. “Wait till I get you home,” she said. “I’ll drum you.”