Part 13

He moved his hand from the wall along the pole, until it collided with the first warm feathers. His mind wandered to a memory of a night when he had seen an owl steal one of Mr. Judson's prized game hens. The thief had settled on a tree limb occupied by the hen, and gradually commenced shoving. The hen sleepily gave way. As she came to the end of the lopped-off limb, she had fallen, and the bird of prey had caught her before she reached the ground. Then Tom had fired.... Good thing nobody was watching him!

There was a smothered gurgle as his fingers closed around the neck. Deftly he twisted the head until the bones gave, then slipped it into the bag. Another, and another--the fowls had increased their drowsy disturbance, but were not yet alarmed.

He got two more, then decided that he had enough. No need to be a hog about it.

He started back for the door; his knee hit a feeding trough with a sudden crack. The noise was not great; but at the same moment a voice rang out, "Come out, nigger, I've got the door covered. Come out, or I'll shoot hell out of you."

Lordie, lordie! No use lying low; there was no other door to the henhouse, and if he waited until morning, he was caught sure.

"All right, suh, Ah's comin'."

He slid open the door a trifle; the light of a lantern lit on the ground cut its way in. "No tricks, now. Drop whatever you've got, and come out with your hands in the air--or I'll blow your head off."

"Ah ain't doin' no tricks, boss. Doan' shoot, for de Lawd's sake!"

"Come on, or----" came another voice.

He slid fearfully out, his arms raised. He stood blinking in the sudden shine.

From his left two figures closed in, shotguns half raised. "Just one old nigger, Ned; we'll phone the constable and turn him over."

"Lawdie, lawdie! Doan' give me to no constable; Ah ain't done nuthin!"

"How many chickens did you get, you black----"

Tom spoke volubly. "Ah thought dis was Mr. Joneses' roos', cap'n, an' he said Ah could come in some night an'----"

"Why, I know that nigger. Didn't you bring in Mr. Judson's Jersey last month for service?"

"Yessuh, dat Ah did. Ah's a minister of de gospel, an' ef Ah's made a little mistake to-night, Ah'll swear ter Gawd never to----"

"Bring him along."

"Lawd, boss, doan' send me to jail. Dey'll give me five years. Let me go dis time.... Ah won't never----"

"Come on----"

"Ah's a minister of de gospel, suh, an' ef Ah's arrested, what will mah flock think? Ef you lets me go----"

"How many hens did you get?"

'Fo', suh; fo' or five."

"I'll give you four or five seconds to get out of here. And you leave Adamsville, do you hear me? We know you. We're too busy to waste time around the criminal court. But I warn you, get out! If I catch you around this town again, I'll have Judge Hawkes send you up for ten years. Git!"

"De Lawd will reward you, suh, for----"

He raised the shotgun suggestively. "Three seconds left. Git!"

Minus cap and bags, Tom "got"--stumbling into the brook ditch on his face, then hurrying up the stream, and running blindly through the woods to the road, and so to the mountain. He sat down at last on the crest, a stitch wracking his side.

What chance did he have, with the Ellis boys after him with shotguns? Maybe he could lie low for a while; keep on the mountain, until the shotguns' energetic memories had turned to other things. He shuffled along the outcrop, then turned in to avoid the cactus that punctuated the hillock before Locust Hedge.

Mammy Stella was waiting for him. "Get them hens?"

"Ah got hell, Stella. Ah gotter clear out er Adamsville; dem Ellis boys done said so."

"Whar you gwine?" Her marital suspicion strengthened his resolve; a holiday from home had its advantages.

"Ah 'lowed Ah'd walk down ter Hazelton 'r Coalstock. Ah could get somethin' to do 'roun' de rollin' mill."

"What de chu'ch gonter do?"

"Brudder Adams he kin preachify tell Ah comes back."

"Why 'n' cher stay here?"

"An' git shot?"

She dismissed him, in the limp dawn, with wifely solicitude. "Don' cher be up to no tricks, Tom, or Ah 'low Ah'll pull all yer wool out when Ah git hol' of you."

"You'll see me when you see me, ole' 'ooman." And he was gone.

One warm morning in the April following, the Judsons' watchman and man-of-all-work, Peter, hesitated before his mistress, a barrow of uprooted poison-ivy poised in the grip of sturdy old hands, which were immune from the noxious irritation. "Ah done got a letter f'um Tom Cole, Miss' Mary."

"Where is he?"

"He's dead."

"You got a letter from him?"

"No'm; it was f'um de man he wu'ked for, in Coalstock. Died Chuesday las' week, de letter said. Dey buried him. Ah done tol' Stella."

"That's too bad, Peter. I'll have to speak to Stella." Her heart went out to the black woman, who had lost her husband; what if it had been Paul! She determined to turn over to the widow an old black silk that she had noticed the wrinkled eyes coveting.

The gift was lavishly appreciated.

"Thank 'ee, thank 'ee, Miss' Mary. Ah'm gwineter fix it up wid puhple--it'll make a gran' mo'nin' dress!"

"You didn't go to the funeral?"

"Ah ain't got no time to waste on no funerals, Miss' Mary, 'less dey's closer'n Coalstock."

Jim, the second boy, joined Ed in work upon the mountain; Will and Babe continued at school, although Stella grumbled about a sixteen-year-old negro bothering with books, when a job was handy.

Diana arrived home the last of May. The whole family surrounded her admiringly, as she hung the framed diploma on the sitting-room wall.

"Hit's beautiful," Stella said simply, as the daughter pointed out the school buildings in the half-tone oval in the center.

There was no opening, however, for a negro milliner in Adamsville. Tired with the futile search for work prepared for by her education, she replaced Stella in the Judson kitchen, to allow the elder woman the greater freedom which "washin'" permitted. With the coming of the clearing gangs, Will joined his two brothers at the work, leaving only fourteen-year-old Babe at school. Even he longed for the jingle of pay-day wealth in his overalls. One day he announced at home that Mr. Hewin had taken him on as a helper. "Three dollars a week, maw. What good is school, anyway?"

Then began a new period in the life of the Cole boys. The mountain had taken them to its red bosom; the lesson of isolated self-reliance which it had taught to Pelham Judson came in parallel form to them. They were a gang, four strong, which could cope with any equal number of Lilydale negroes, or Scratch Ankle or Buzzard Roost rock-throwers. If a larger number got after them, there was the mountain they could retreat to; its rocky reinforcement and refuge furnished safety.

Stella scolded them sharply on the night when they had fought the Harlan Avenue white boys. "Let them Lilydale niggers fool wid white trash, ef dey wants to. De Judsons is quality, don't you fergit; you let dat white trash be. Fight wid you' own kind. Ef a white man gin you any trouble, you let Marster Judson fix 'im."

The lesson sank in. They were quality negroes, lords of the mountain domain. Stocky Jim was the champion rough-and-tumble fighter of the Zion Church. "Ah kin lick any three Neboes wid mah toes an' teeth," he would boast in religious snobbery. Tom had had one of Mr. Judson's shotguns, to warn off marauders; the care of this descended to Ed, as the oldest, and the boys took turns in potting rabbits, flickers, and an occasional partridge, with shells borrowed from the big house. First choice of the game went to the Judson table; but there was enough left to fill out the scanty Cole menu of corn-pone, sow-belly, molasses, and a seasonal mess of greens.

The boys practiced hurling outcrop boulders at the big-trunked oaks until they could skin the bark four times out of five at fifty feet. The outdoor life, the clearing work, the continual "toting" of water from the icy spring in balanced buckets, toughened them into exuberant manhood. They did not marry, although Stella constantly scolded the older pair for "hangin' 'roun' dem Avenoo C skirts"; and their wider rambles added grass-ripened watermelons and plump chickens to the fare.

Diana, alone of the family, found life on the mountain bleakly unhappy. She possessed a frightened, dusky beauty. Adolescence had changed her from a gawky immaturity to a lush roundness, large-lipped and full-figured, and yet with the well moulded face and the soft brown texture of skin that are occasionally found in a mixture of blood. From some Aryan ancestor she had inherited features the reverse of negroid; and she revealed nothing of the unpleasant pertness often developed in the twilight realm where black and white intermingle.

The liberating touch of education had been just potent enough to dissatisfy her with the old, and too weak to furnish a self-sufficient substitute. The world of books she had begun to explore at Tuskegee; there was no one in the family group who could go with her in the talk or the dreamings that this led to. The haphazard home life, the thick enunciation, worse at meal times, these were the things she had begun to get away from; she could not reconcile herself to the old slough of "nigger" life.

The church gave her some outlet. She joined the various Ladies' Aids, took over an advanced Sunday School class, wheedled different ones of her night-restless brothers to escort her to the Zion sociables, the chitterling suppers, the frequent revivals. But here an obstacle lay in the women of the congregation. No newfangled notions for them, thank you. They considered her careful accent, her ideas borrowed from more progressive members of her race, an affront to Lilydale's time-hallowed way of doing things; she was shouldered into the background. The few educated negro men, Wyatt the druggist, Tom Strickland, who owned the five-story building in the city, the young lawyer who lived in Lilydale, were married, or were disagreeable. They found in her only a desire for expanding culture, not its achievement; they did not seek her out.

The isolation frequently overcame her. Nauseated by the glut of the slipshod home living, she would pull open one of her text books ... often to sit and cry, unable to read a line.

"You're gettin' peaked, Diany," Stella worried. "Huc-come you ain't so pert as when you come back?... You got a good job."

"I'm all right, mother."

One night she overheard the older boys fussing at Babe. "You too little, kid. Ef a cop started chasin' you, yo' short legs wouldn't do no good."

"Ah kin run faster 'n you, Ed. An' 'Banjo' said Ah could come along," he whined. "Maw, tell Ed 'n' Will 'n' Jim not to leave me behin'."

"Where are you boys going?" asked Diana.

Ed fidgeted sourly. "Aw, nowhar."

"Ah'll tell you," said Will boastingly. "Goin' to de Union Depot, to see what we kin pick up."

"Mother, will you let yo' boys rob cars?"

"Shut up, won't you?" Ed injected savagely.

Stella looked helpless. "You boys'll be careful, won't you? Yo' pappy got caught.... Babe's too little."

"You know that that 'Banjo' Strickland is a regular criminal, ma--even his brother Tom says so."

Stella closed her mouth. "Dey kin look after dey-selves, Ah reckon. Dey's growed up."

To belong to a family of day-laborers and common thieves! In passionate rebellion she told herself that it was more than she could bear.

For several days she studied the poison labels in the Judson medicine chest. If she only knew which would be painless....

She picked her dark way, a few nights later, over the rough planking across the nearest ramp--the excavating had begun, which meant better pay for the boys, and a mountain full of white and negro workers. The chill breathing of the Autumn wind drove her limp calico skirts swirling around her body. As she entered the darker tree-shadows beyond, she stopped suddenly, a chiller fear shaking her. A dark figure stood squarely in front, a figure that made no motion of stepping out of her way.

"Where you goin', nigger?"

He was one of the men she had seen working, a slouching young fellow--a white man.

"Home," she said, in a roughened voice.

She endeavored to brush past on the lower side of the pathway; the sheer cut of the hill obstructed the upper.

He put out a friendly hand, catching her arm in rude assertiveness. "Not so fast. You're the Cole gal, ain't you?"

"I'm Diana Cole. I'm going home."

Her tone trailed off weakly, as he stepped closer. She could see his face now, uncertain eyes squinting directly at her.

"Hey, good-looker," he dropped to an ingratiating whisper, with a leer to increase the effectiveness of his words. "What you say--wanter show me a bit of good time? What you say?"

She tried to shake herself free. "Let me go! Don't dare touch me----"

"Don't say dare," Jim Hewin said warmly, his left hand sliding appraisingly up the bared softness of her right arm. "Plump, eh? Nice piece of dark meat. I like you; I'll treat you right."

A gust of sudden fright, the blind fright of the female when her well-ordered maiden state is first threatened, shook over her; her arm lashed out impotently.

He stepped aside to avoid the blow.

"If you touch me ... I'll kill you...." Her words were gasps.

He held her arms again, pushing them behind her until her face was close before his. "You black devil! I've a mind to----"

Then he pulled her closer, fastening his dry lips against her protesting mouth. For a hushed second she took the unexpected caress quiescently; then fought, kicked, scratched, to get away. He held her firmly, shaking her until she ceased. Then he let her go.

She ran a few frightened steps, then turned in the dusky safety, facing him. Her mind held only an outraged hate; her feelings quivered and rioted in disquieting turmoil.

He smacked his lips broadly.

"You--you white trash----"

He faced her coldly. "When I want you,"--whistling, as though calling a dog, he turned up toward the crest--"you'll come...."

Her heart panting in wrenching excitement, she listened to his retreating steps. She stared, helplessly rooted in the accusing silence. Her knees trembled; she waited to regain strength.

Then she moved heavily toward the house, entering by the rickety kitchen steps in the rear.

With a child's helpless seeking, she walked down the hall. She must tell her mother at once. She heard Stella's rocker moving monotonously on the sagging front porch. A loose board squeaked in soothing rhythm.

Sharply she visualized the simple, wrinkled face.... It could never understand....

She turned wearily into her own room, and threw herself face downward on the bed. The loud pounding of her heart frightened her; she turned upon her back, staring at the constricted darkness of the blank ceiling.

XVII

An old negro, his sleep-wrinkled, shiny coat and paint-stained overalls itchy from stubble acquired in a deserted barn, idled down the switching track that ran behind the Judson lands. His scrubby gray beard was stained with blackberries; his knees were gritty and dank from kneeling beside the brook that slipped over the quartz ledges beside Billygoat Hill. In doubtful cogitation he knocked cinder and chert clusters down the steep fills, swinging his hickory stick with an air of ancient mastery.

"Lawd bless me, look at dem long houses!" as he passed the lower end of Hewintown.

A white man eyed him closely, a short man with a tarnished metal badge on his ore-stained coat.

"Got any wu'k?"

The guard relit his pipe. "Too old, nigger."

"I kin tote a powerful lot."

The guard continued to stare off at Shadow Mountain. Whistling good-naturedly, the old man continued down the track. "New houses! New fences! Things mus' be lookin' up!"

He observed the path that led to the crest just east of Hillcrest Cottage, and took instead the steep descent to the spring lot. He sniffed at the well-placed garden truck, noticed the ducks and the shiny duck house, skirted the widened concrete swimming pool, and came at last past the game house to the spring. From the tin dipper swinging on the twenty-penny nail he took a drink, first clearing out his mouth several times and spitting the warmed water into the spillway.

He looked furtively around, up toward the big estate, then along the path to the eastern crest. He took up the two buckets empty on a concrete pump base, filled them three-quarters, balanced them, and made his careful way up the latter path.

When he reached the top, he skirted the ramshackle house. At the back he paused at the two half-barrel tubs redolent with laundry soap. He stooped over it, pouring in the first big bucket.

A heavy voice rang from the kitchen above him. "Hey, nigger, what you doin'?"

He turned a puzzled face toward the window. "Ah'm--ah'm----"

A big roundish woman stepped out on the rickety porch. "Fuh Gawd's sake! Is you Tom?"

"Sho' Ah is." There was an aggrieved whine in his voice.

"You come back? Whar you been?"

He emptied the bucket, and brought the other to the bench under the back steps. "Ah been wu'kin'. Ah come back."

"We done got a letter sayin' you wuz dead."

He laughed broadly. "Ah ain't."

Tramping up the steps, he flung his wrinkled coat on its old nail above the lanterns, and sat down in a splint-bottomed chair, testing it carefully before he leaned back in it. "Got any breakfas', ole 'ooman? Ah's plumb starvin'."

She set out cold bacon, cold pone, a glass molasses pitcher with its top broken. "He'p yo'se'f, Tom. Ah's powerful glad you's home."

He spoke through a mouthful of bread and "long sweetening." "Ain't married agin, or nuthin'?"

"Ah ain't huntin' no mo' trouble."

She slid his emptied dishes into the loaded sink, and took up the two empty clothes baskets. "Come he'p me tote de clo'es back. Miss' Mary mebbe got somethin' for you to do."

At supper, the biggest kerosene lamp was lit on the middle of the table, and spread its smelly radiance over the reunited family. Ed and Jim had come in last, their cap-lamps still lit, their shirts clayey from the underground work. "Here's yo' pappy, boys, come back agin," announced Stella proudly.

Diana, her nerves on edge from another meeting with Jim Hewin, got in a side blow. "I suppose you've been with that 'Banjo' Strickland again, and couldn't get home in time for supper?"

"Aw, close yer trap," growled Ed. "Think you own the place!"

"Yer maw says you boys is wu'kin' hard."

Will, who possessed a good-natured sense of humor, chuckled appreciatively. "We sho' is! You know dat chicken-farm by de dam on Shadow Mountain, paw? We been wu'kin' powerful hard, an' dat's de Lawd's trufe!"

"We got fried chicken fo' supper, Tom," as Stella lifted the simmering pan with feigned indifference.

"An' dey ain't grow on no egg-plants, an' dat's a fack," continued Will.

"You'd a come in handy, paw, las' Sad'dy night," said Ed, who had recovered from his temporary ill-humor at Diana. "Ev'rybody's lef de place 'cep' club-foot Jake Simmons; dey lef him to watch. Me 'n' Banjo he'p'd him watch; we played poker, while de three boys poked off thuhteen hens an' a cockerel."

"And that isn't all that you all and 'Banjo' 'poke off,' either," interrupted Diana, her light brown face glowing a shade darker. "What would yo' paw say if I told him all I know?"

"What's dis? What's dis?" His explosive tones regained something of the former authority.

Stella laughed comfortably. "Nuthin' at all, Tom. Diana got a fool notion dat de boys been meddlin' wid cars at de Union Depot; dat's all."

Tom scratched his head in profound silence; the rest of the family watched him with differing emotions. At length he spoke unctuously. "De Lawd he put chicken-roos'eses an' melon-patches whar dey is easy to get at; it ain't nacheral for a nigger to let a hen suffer dis vale of tribulation, or let a melon grow ole an' useless on de vine. Cars is different. Cars is different. You boys ain't got kotched at nothin'?"

"You bet we ain't!"

"Den Ah don't know nothin', an' Diana don't know nothin'. You'd better watch out, dat's all Ah say. Calaboose never wuz no black man's frien'."

"We's careful, paw. We got regular jobs."

"Dat's all Ah say. Bring out mah Bible, Babe; Ah ain't read de Scripchers for two years."

"We done jined de union, paw," said Babe, laying the shaggy-eared family Bible in the yellow circle of lamp light. "De miners' union."

"A lot you all know about unions!" sniffed Diana.

Tom nodded reverently. "Unions is good. Ah am de resurrection an' de life, says de Lawd. De Lawd done sont unions to he'p his cullud chillun."

"An' Jim's de finansher secretary. He gits de money."

"Dat's good too. You boys is hustlers, lak yo' ole paw was."

The Cole life went on as if he had never been away.

Some weeks later, Stella Cole had just straightened up from the half-barrel tubs, to wring a soggy batch of towels before "renchin'" them in the clearer water, when she looked up with that uncanny premonition of danger which lower animals and lower races possess. The ground shivered; then a hideous noise broke over the sunned and silent trees, deafening her. The vast growl of the dynamite explosion rang shrilly in her ears; she fell on trembling knees, praying.

The crash of falling timbers behind made her look around. The unsteady ground, she said afterwards, "shook lak you wuz shakin' a counterpane." The rickety step supports crumpled, the rotted square of the back porch crashed in on the bench of water-buckets below.

There was a droning noise in the air, the sound of running steps along the road passing above the house. Toward the farther mines, beyond her house and the next hill, she saw a palpable haze, smoke-like and yet not smoke, dulling the sky.

"Mah boys!" she gasped, and started running puffily for the front gate, and the road beyond.

She stood aside to let a screeching machine throb past her. It was Mr. Pelham; the sight of his tense and collected gaze reassured her. Mr. Pelham wouldn't let anything happen to her boys.

She shrank into the outer fringe of the tear-eyed, wailing Hewintown women, trying desperately to get some news. She wandered twice into the thick air at the top of the ramp, but the acrid heaviness drove her back. The men she spoke to cursed, shoving her aside. She slumped to the ground, moaning in inarticulate misery. Lord, they were all dead!

Then she saw Ed running with an empty bucket, his head bandaged, his face grimed and ferocious. "Ed! Eddie! Whar's Babe, an' Jim, an' Will----"

He stopped, coughing, gasping. "Jim's killed, ma. Dey brung out his body. Hit's yonder under dem trees.... Babe's all right; ain't seed Will. Mebbe he's caved in." He hurried off, face set and purposeful.

"Mah Jim! Mah Jim!" She pulled her trembling body from the ground, and set off on unsteady feet toward the ominous trees.

The body was not there. "You might look in the Company stores, in Hewintown," said a sweet voiced girl, her face torn with sympathy.

"Thank 'ee, ma'am." She stumbled weakly off, her uncovered head dizzy from the excitement and the sun. Her lips repeated over and over, "Mah Will! Mah Jim!"

The sudden dark of the storeroom clouded her vision. From body to body she went. Here were the negroes. This bloodied face was like--No. She went on.

At length she found what she sought. Weak from exhaustion and shock, she crumpled up beside the limp warmness that had been her second son.

Here Diana found her, a Diana pale and frightened, her right arm bandaged to the shoulder, blood caked in dusky crimson at the height of her breast. "Mother! Is this.... Jim?"

Stella raised herself drowsily. "Yeh, dis is Jim." She looked at the girl fearfully, a vague horror channelling her face. "Is Will daid too?"

"Will's all right.... You come home with me."

Stella faced the girl when they were outside. "Will all right? Babe all right?"

Diana nodded.

"What's wrong wid yo' arm, girl?"

"Nothin'. A pane of glass scratched it. It's all right."