Mississippi Cotton (2 page)

Instructions were interrupted by the blaring intercom: “Trailways scenic cruiser for Flora, Yazoo City, Belzoni, Indianola, Greenville, Cotton City and Cleveland, with final destination for Clarksdale now boarding from dock number two. Leaving in ten minutes. All aboard, please.”

“Okay, son, I checked your grip.” My daddy always called a suitcase a grip. “Better hurry if you wanna get a window seat. But don’t run, you’re liable to knock somebody down.”

“Yes, sir.” I hated to look at my mother because she was about to get all weepy and stuff. This was my first trip alone out of the county, but she acted like I was off on a mission to find King Solomon’s mine.

She pulled me toward her and gave me one of those colossal mother hugs while she was crying. Of course, she got snot on my shirt. “Oh dear! Give me your handkerchief, Zack.”

“Well, if you don’t quit slobberin’ on him he’s gonna miss the dab-blamed bus, Leslie.”

“Just you never-mind, this is my baby and he’s leaving home by himself. He’s not going to miss the bus.”

We walked outside to the buses, and went straight to the slot where the one had ‘Clarksdale’ printed above the front windshield. Its engine was idling with the diesel smells in your nose.

Last minute instructions came from my mother. “Now be nice. Don’t roughhouse in your good clothes, and don’t scratch yourself on the bus.”

“Yeah, only off the bus,” my daddy said.

This got him a stern look from my mother. “I’m trying to teach him manners. And you should be helping and not making your cute little stale remarks. If you want him to grow up to be an animal, well you can just jump off a barn.”

I climbed the steep steps. The aisle was narrow and lined on both sides by huge cushion seats sewn with white cloth patches where your head could rest. The bus hadn’t filled and there were still plenty of window seats, as everybody who had gotten on so far was pretty old and probably didn’t care whether they got a window or not.

I got the first window seat I saw, on the station side of the bus. I knew my parents would want to wave goodbye when the bus pulled out. My daddy would want to as much as my mother, but he wouldn’t do all that slobbering snot stuff like her. Course it’s not so bad if snot just gets on your shirt, but sometimes some gets on your face or neck and that’s pretty horrible.

I had no sooner sat down than I saw my parents. They appeared distorted through the window, like what funny mirrors do to your image in the house of mirrors at the State Fair. I thought at first there was something wrong with the window so I pushed it with my finger, revealing the problem. The last guy who had been sitting here must’ve been leaning his head on the glass with a dose of Wildroot Cream Oil in his hair. I wiped my finger on the back of the seat, then jumped up and moved down the aisle to select another seat.

Through the window I could see my mother mouthing something, probably trying to ask if something was wrong. I just waved and shook my head. If she knew why I had moved she probably wouldn’t let the bus driver leave until the whole bus had been steam-cleaned.

The bus pulled out onto Pascagoula Street and moved eastward. Then along the main artery, State Street, which was lined with crepe myrtles and old white-column houses. It turned north onto Woodrow Wilson Avenue, where its final turn would take it through town and onto Highway 49, straight to the Mississippi Delta. I could feel the big engine switching gears, building and losing power as it moved through several stoplights, often stopping, then re-gunning its engine.

Most of the passengers seemed settled for their trip, wherever it was they were going. I pulled on the window latch and slid the window backward in its frame. I wanted to reach out and grab some berries off the crepe myrtle bushes, like Farley and I did on the city buses, but the Trailways’ windows were too high for me to reach the bushes. The air streamed into the bus and though it was almost a hundred outside, the flow of air felt good.

The seat next to me was empty, which suited me just fine. I was afraid somebody about a thousand years old would sit next to me and try to talk to me, asking me questions like: “What’s a little fellow like you doing going off on a trip by himself?”—or “How far are you going?”

I would rather sit by myself until I got to Cousin Trek’s house, unless it was someone my age who had something to say I wanted to talk about. And even at that, I liked having the extra room. I put my sandwich sack on the seat hoping to discourage anyone who might stroll down the aisle looking for a seat.

I was riding all the way to Cotton City without changing buses. There were a handful of stops but no changes. All I had to do was wait until I was outside Cotton City and walk to the front and tell the driver I wanted to get off at the Mayfield mailbox. Daddy had said that Cousin Trek knew when the bus came by and he would be waiting.

These last three weeks of summer would be spent with my country cousins, Casey and Taylor, in the Delta. We could stay out past dark and come and go as we wanted, as long as we were home for dinner and supper and didn’t destroy anything.

We had almost done that a couple of Christmases ago, when we were out in somebody’s field. The grass was dead and dry, and we were throwing firecrackers around.

Casey, who was in the first grade at the time, started striking matches and setting small clumps of grass on fire. Then before it spread he would stomp it out. For some reason, Taylor thought it would be a brilliant idea to throw firecrackers in the fire while he was stomping. But a gust of wind came up, and the fire began to spread. At first we began stomping as fast as we could, but the fire was gaining faster than the stomping. Finally it occurred to us that if we could get some of the pond water we had a chance. The fire had spread and it wouldn’t be long before the wind really took over and half the county would be on fire.

We pulled our t-shirts over our heads and soaked them in the pond. We then began to beat the edges of the fire with the water-soaked shirts. Driven by survival, as we could only imagine the whipping each would have gotten for his part in a county-wide disaster, we slapped the fire like professional smoke jumpers, finally putting it out. Each of us said a prayer that night that our t-shirts would somehow not be missed. I guess God gave us an extra present that year because my mother never asked; and that in a day when every dime was accounted for
.

There were open fields with ponds, and creeks and branches to fish in. Everything seemed fun in the Delta. And there was the windmill to climb. It stood next to the chicken house by the garage and was the first thing you’d see as you drove down the gravel road from Cousin Trek’s mailbox to the farm. For those who had the courage to climb it, you could see all the way to the highway and beyond.

There was a porch swing where we sat sometimes after supper and listen to my cousin play, slightly off key, on his harmonica, Dixie and Loch Lohman and Swanee River. In the back of the house on one of the big oaks there was an old Firestone without any tread tied to a rope and hanging from a limb. We would swing and spin until we got so dizzy we could hardly walk. One of the games was to see who could walk the farthest without falling down, after the others had spun him into dizziness. If he didn’t fall, someone would trip him or give a gentle nudge, because no one was supposed to be standing following a spin.

My grandmother had written about the family farm and our family in little notebooks and things. She had been a teacher, too, and had taught lots of things as best as I could tell. Music and painting and things like that. She had even taught at the Mississippi School for the Blind. I don’t think she sold her stories to anybody or anything like that. My mother gave me one of the notebooks to take with me for the family in Cotton City. My mother said they should have it for the home place. She also had given me instructions to not leave it on the bus or lose it.

Cousin Trek was going to let me work this summer in the cotton fields, hoeing or chopping, or whatever else you did before it was picked. I was going to get twenty cents an hour, enough to go to the picture show twice a day, though that would never be allowed. I would be advised to save, save, save.

This was my first trip to Cotton City alone. The Trailways was huge. It was fun riding on something as big as a bus. You could see farther than you could see in a car, and it seemed like all the other traffic was puny. The only bus trip, besides the city buses I had taken, was the year before on a school field trip. Our whole class had gone to Vicksburg, to spend a day at the Vicksburg Battlefield, visit the museum and learn about the courage of the Confederates and their battle against the invading Union Army.

It was then and there that we learned that two battles a thousand miles apart, twenty-four hours apart—Vicksburg and Gettysburg—had determined the fate of the Confederacy. We got to stay out of school the whole day and take dinners our mothers had made for us. It was like a day-long picnic. The trip there and back was over a hundred miles. It was the only world travel I had had.

The bus reached the city limits and moved northwest picking up speed. The huge red and silver cruiser was in its highest gear headed toward Cotton City, and to a strange adventure.

I stuck my arm out of the window and let the air rush between my fingers. It felt good, the air flowing and blowing at high speed.

Just then a gravel-garbled announcement came over the bus intercom: “Do not extend your arms out of the windows, please.”

Of course everyone on the bus turned and looked at me. If the driver had known my name, he probably would have used the opportunity to yell it out, “Jake Conner, get your arm inside. Now!” I felt an early twinge of fear. Was the FBI on the phone to my mother and daddy? I tried to forget about it. Anyway, that was just something Farley had made up—about the FBI informing our parents.

CHAPTER 2

Flora, Mississippi was the first stop, but I didn’t count it as a real stop because no one actually got off. There were only a couple of passengers getting on at the bus stop, which was just a grocery store with a Trailways sign stuck on it.

Some seedy-looking man got on and sat across the aisle. He wore a straw Stetson and a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled up above his elbows. He wadded his sport coat up and put it behind his head for a pillow. The shirt was too small for his fat stomach, and you could see his undershirt between the buttons which were stretching his shirt open between them. He had a tattoo of an eagle on his arm and underneath it was written, YEAH BOY. It didn’t look like he had shaved in a while, and I would make a guess that he was about fifty or sixty. A pretty old guy anyway.

But the bad thing was, the thing that I had been most afraid of, was that some old lady with straw-looking hair got on, and stopped next to my seat. After staring at my sandwich bag for about five minutes, she said, “Anybody settin’ here, Hon’?”

I started to say something smart like, “Oh yeah, a little bitty guy is in that sack.” I didn’t though. The FBI might find out that I had smarted off. There’d be a black mark on my conduct, plus the wrath of my mother and daddy if they found out.

“No, ma’am.”

She sat down. Fortunately, I was able to swoop up my bag before she made mush out of it.

“Well now, that feels better,” she said. “I feel like I been on my feet forever and ever.” She plopped a big round-ish bag down in her lap.

I couldn’t tell if it was a huge purse or a clothes bag of some kind, but it had a bunch of stuff in it, and it was really round and big, like she had her own toilet in it or something. She hugged it like it was a prize she had won. “Well, now I guess we’re gonna be fellow travelers for a while,” she said. She smiled yellow.

“Yes, ma’am, I guess so.” I didn’t know what that meant for sure. I heard my daddy talk a lot about communists and their fellow travelers, so maybe she thought I was some kind of a communist or something.

“And where’re you goin’ this fine day?”

“Cotton City.”

“You got family there?”

“Hope you ain’t kin to that dead guy they found in the river,” blurted the man with the Yeah Boy tattoo.

“Dead guy? In the river?” My lips almost quivered when I said it.

Her glare brought him up without a word. “Now you just keep your mouth shut. This young gentleman don’t need your comments. Now go ahead, young man.” Yeah Boy frowned and slumped more in his seat.

“Yes, ma’am. I have a bunch of cousins up there. None of my parents or grand people or regular family though. They’re mostly all in Jackson. Except for a’ uncle in Meridian.”

I hated talking to grownups. I never knew the right thing to say to them. She was kind of beat-up looking, and her hair was scraggly, and she had on about a hundred pounds of rouge, like she’d been smacked with a ripe pomegranate on each cheek. It made her yellow teeth look more yellow. It was hard enough to talk to regular grownups like teachers or baseball coaches, or even Sunday School teachers, but old ones that were, as my daddy would say, ‘haggard -looking,’ were even harder to talk to for some reason.

“Oh, why cousins are regular family, too,” she said. “Jus’ a bit more distant.”

“Yes, ma’am, that’s right. They live way up in Cotton City.”

“No, no,” she said. “I meant distant, like they don’t have as strong a blood tie as yo’ momma and daddy and such.”

“Yes, ma’am, I guess.”