SPRING 1834
The Witch Dog
The boy lay under a mesquite bush to get shade from the Texas sun and watched the cow intently.
She was a longhorn with horns a full five feet across. He’d seen horns that size cut men and kill horses, so he waited. She was about to go into labor, what he called getting calf sick, and when she was actually having the calf she couldn’t attack him. Then he would run up, drop a noose around her head and dance back before one of those horns could catch him. The rope was twenty feet long and tied to a four-foot piece of log about five inches in diameter. When the cow tried to run, the log would tangle in the mesquite and rocks and stop her so she could be captured, branded and added to the mister’s herd to sell and make him rich.
The cow moved and he studied her with a knowing eye. She was huge for a cow, with flat sides and many scars from running through brush and fighting other cows.
It would be another half hour, at least, before labor. She wasn’t even hunched yet.
“You take the rope and the log,” the mister had told him. The boy never thought of him as the master, though legally he was, like all white men who owned slaves. The boy’s mammy had told him:“Your name is Bass, and ain’t no man your master. Not now. Not ever. We got to do what we got to do ’cause of the white man’s law. But that don’t make no man your master in God’s eyes.”
Bass studied the horns. They came around so fast, and sharp, sometimes you almost couldn’t see them move. Once he moved in too close on an old brindle cow and just the tip of a horn caught his trousers. Cut them open like a knife.
“Zzzzzttt!” The cloth almost sang. They were no-’count pants anyway, handed down from the mister, all patches and held up with a piece of tow over his shoulder. He knew his mammy would sew them up, but he didn’t like the feel of the horn swinging by that close.
Another inch and I’d have been looking at my guts, he thought, squinting in the sun. Pulled out on a horn like wet rope. He’d seen cow and pig guts when they slaughtered, horse guts once when a bull hooked a mare that wasn’t paying attention. He did not want to see his own.
Now he heard movement in the mesquite off to the right and waited. Might be the mister sneaking to see if he was working. Make sure he was doing.
No need at all, he thought. I work all the time. Not for the mister. I work because it makes the time pass.
It was two coyotes, low on their bellies. They knew there would soon be afterbirth for them to eat.
Bass watched them. They did not know he was there, back in the shady hole where he’d had to scare out a rattlesnake. The snake had buzzed some and then left when he pushed it with a stick. He didn’t like snakes. He wasn’t afraid of them—how could you be scared of something that couldn’t crawl faster than a slow walk?—but they were always mad. Seems like they bit just to be mean. His mammy told him of one that crawled in a cradle and bit a baby and killed it. Why? Baby wasn’t doing a thing. Sometimes Bass killed snakes, especially around the house where they could get a dog or cat or baby pig or a chicken. But when he was out in the mesquite or down at the creek bottom, he let them be. If, he thought, they let me be. He didn’t like killing things without a good reason.
The mister, now, would take his percussion pistol and shoot anything. Lizards off a rock, songbirds off a rail. Or try to. Whenever he got hold of a whiskey jug, he couldn’t hit the ground, let alone a bird on a fence.
Now, it was something, how the coyotes knew when a cow was ready. Maybe the smell, Bass thought, or they might be witch dogs. His mammy told him that, back in New Orleans where she was from, there were witch dogs that could tell you things if you knew how to understand them. She didn’t know how to talk to the dogs but her mammy could do it, could give a witch dog molasses, and when it wrinkled its lips to lick the molasses off its tongue, she could tell if someone was going to die or when they would have a baby, and was it a boy or a girl.
“Mammy said the power skips,” Bass’s mammy told him. “Didn’t come to me, but maybe to you, to read the witch dogs. Mostly women have it, but I didn’t have a girl and won’t be no more chirrun. So if it happens, it will have to be you.”
Bass was seven when his mammy told him that, better than three years ago come fall. He had lifted a jug of blackstrap molasses from the pump house and tried it on one of the mister’s old tick hounds. He tried it so often the dog took a liking to it and followed him around all day, waiting to have his tongue wiped with molasses.
Problem was, Bass remembered now as he watched the coyotes move toward the cow, problem was it gave the hound the black skoots. Dog messed the yard and the pump house and all over the porch, and Bass had to quit because the mister said he was going to shoot the hound if he didn’t stop messing.
Bass never learned anything from the hound but that it liked molasses and had a straight pipe for a gut. It was a good dog and Bass felt bad when one day a snake cooling itself by the pump house bit it between the eyes. Killed that hound. After that, whenever Bass saw a snake in the yard, he would get a hoe and chop it and feed it to the pigs.
There. The cow hunched. Her labor was starting. Bass gathered the rope and the log. The coyotes saw him and one looked straight into Bass’s eyes and moved its lips.
At first he couldn’t believe what he saw. The coyotes were thirty-five yards away, just past the head of the cow, but when Bass shook his head, the coyote was still looking at him, straight up into his eyes. And the animal’s lips moved.
Things will change.
Bass wasn’t sure if he heard it or felt it like a touch on his skin, but the phrase was there. In his head. As clear as if somebody had said it aloud. And it came from the coyote.
Things will change.
“What will change?”
He said it so loud that the coyotes both jumped and the cow started and turned to see him for the first time, though she didn’t move, couldn’t move now that her labor had begun.
The coyotes didn’t answer him, either aloud or in his head, but they didn’t run. Instead they stood, one looking at the cow, the other staring directly at Bass.
“Are you a witch dog?” Bass said.
The question hung there until the coyote turned slowly and deliberately to look at the cow.
The cow.
It was time. The mister said Bass had to get one cow a day on a tangle rope, and the sun was going down fast in the west. He held the log under his arm, readied the rope, and just as the cow started to push the calf out, he rose and ran past her head, dropping the noose neatly over her horns as she swung to hook him, but missed him because she couldn’t move her body fast enough to match the swing.
The loop tightened and the hemp bunched at the bottom of her horn, against her head. It would stay and tighten when she tried to move through the mesquite later.
Still the coyotes did not run. They waited for the afterbirth, or the calf if it was born dead. Bass walked up the small rise, heading toward home.
Evening sun was coming, and though it was still hot, he could feel a coolness through the heat. Off a mile was the mister’s homestead—five adobe mud huts with sod and grass roofs laid out in a rough circle. There was a mesquite fence around the outside to hold stock in, or Comanches out if they came to raid. Bass had never seen them, but had heard talk. Everybody feared them, even the mister with his rifle and pistol.
It wasn’t much of a ranch. His mother had told him of plantations around New Orleans where even the slave quarters were better than the mister’s adobe shack. But this was all Bass knew. The mister had won Bass’s mother in a poker game in Austin when she was pregnant with Bass, and she had come here with the mister a month before her due time. Something had gone wrong and she had nearly died when Bass was born. Now she could have no more children. Luckily Bass had been born healthy and big.
The mister only had one other slave, Flowers, an old man who was nearly blind. There was something wrong in his head because he couldn’t talk. He spent most of his time splitting wood and fixing harnesses. Sometimes, when a harness didn’t need fixing, he would tear it apart and put it together again. He was nice enough to Bass, but mostly ignored him like he ignored everything.
As he walked into the small yard, Bass saw Flowers splitting wood. Then he trotted to the pump house near the mud hut where he and Mammy and Flowers lived and slept.
Bass drank with the slave dipper. The water was cool from the well, almost sweet, and he drank until his stomach was tight and full. Then he went to the mister’s hut and called into the door.
“Mister, Mister, it’s Bass.”
His mammy came to the opening. She had corn flour on her hands and she wiped them on her sack apron and smiled down at him. “The boss is gone, little boy. What do you want with him?”
“Where did he go?”
“He doesn’t tell me where he goes. He just saddled a horse and left. Could be he won’t be back today. Could be the Comanches’ll get him and we’ll never see him again.”
“Did he take the bay mare or the Roman nose?”
“What difference does it make?”
“If he took the bay, he’ll be gone a long time. She’s got good wind and a long trot. The Roman nose is strong but jerk-gaited and will wear you out on a long run.”
“You talk like you ride yourself, little boy.”
“I do. When nobody is looking.”
“You stay off the mister’s horses. He’ll nail you to the door and whip you pink. You know the colored ain’t to ride nothing except plugs and old mules—nothing higher than the mister.”
Bass knew the rules. Well, not all of them. The whole list of rules governing slaves and masters filled books that he couldn’t read. No slave was allowed to read, so how could they know all the rules? But Bass knew plenty. No slave could be in a position where the master had to look up at him. No slave could run in front of a master unless ordered to do so. No slave could eat before a master did. No slave could speak unless spoken to. No slave could walk on a sidewalk with a master. No slave could eat with the same utensils as the master. No slave could drink from the same dipper, sit on the same furniture, sleep in the same bed, wear better clothes, be close enough to exhale air into the master’s lungs … on and on and on.
White men called it law. But even at ten years old Bass knew better. Mammy said the true law come down from God, from a man named Moses on the Mountain, and the law was for everybody, even slaves.
What white men had were just rules.
Rules to keep the colored down. And you didn’t have to obey them unless you were being watched. Bass rode horses when nobody was looking. Sometimes at night when the mister was drunk asleep, he would take the bay or the Roman nose for a ride in the moonlight. Out and out, away from the homestead, riding bareback so there wouldn’t be saddle marks in the morning for the mister to find, out across the sandy prairie in the silver light, the wind on his face and the powerful muscles of the horse driving him forward, driving him away, free and free and free …
“The bay or the Roman nose?”
“He took the bay.”
“Then he’s gone long. Maybe overnight. Probably went to Paris to court that widow woman.”
“How do you know so much?” His mother shook her head, but the smile widened and she could not hide her pride. “You talk like you know everything there is to know in the whole world.”
“I just look and see. I know he’s courting because he puts that stink water on him of a morning. Won’t do him no good, but he keeps trying.”
“Why won’t it do him any good? He’s got some money, and lord only knows how many cattle you’ve tangled for him. Seems like he’d be a good one to marry.”
“I heard that visiting ranger say, ‘He’s too close to the jug,’ when he came by, and that the widow Plunkett would never marry a drinker, ’cause that’s what killed her first husband. And mister, he does take the jug.”
“Every night,” Mammy said. “I didn’t think there was that much whiskey in the world. Now, you run along. I’m making corn bread with bacon grease and I’ll call you when it’s done. You get me some good dry wood for the stove and I’ll give you a drop of honey on a slab of bread.”
Bass ran off for the woodpile by the pump house, shaking a stick to scare out any snakes. Then he ate the corn bread, so hot that the honey melted like butter and soaked into it. They didn’t have a cow to get milk for butter, but Mammy saved all the bacon and pork drippings in a jar, and she had smeared the drippings on the hot corn bread to mix with the honey.
“Your cooking”—Bass stood in the kitchen door, grease on his hands and face, honey in his mouth—“it must come from heaven.”
“I bet you want another piece.” Mammy smiled. “And maybe a slice of pork belly.”
She handed him another chunk of bread and a slab of pork, mostly rubbery hot fat, the way he liked it. He went to the shade side of the hut to squat and eat.
When he was done he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, wiped his hands on his pants and went to the pump house for a drink of cool water.
It was evening and he had sundown chores. There were hogs to feed, wood to gather for coffee and breakfast in the morning, water to carry for the Roman nose and the mules. He worked steadily, using the large wooden bucket to carry water to the troughs. He did this every night and every morning, and he didn’t need to think about it while he worked, so his mind wandered back to the day with the cow and the coyotes.
Things will change.
It was there the minute he stopped thinking about anything else. He muttered to himself, “Of course things will change.” Nothing stood still. But he knew the coyote’s words meant more than that and when he was done with chores and had eaten again, he told his mother, “Coyote talked to me today.”
They were sitting at the front of the slave quarters and she was sipping a cup of water with just a touch of the master’s whiskey in it (“For my bones,” she said) while they watched the sun go down. If the mister was there, they had to keep working until full dark when he went in to sleep. He didn’t like to see them resting. But when he was gone, they’d sit like this and talk until it was time for bed.
“Coyotes talk all the time,” Mammy said.“We hear them every night yakking and cakking down by the bottoms. They don’t mean nothing by it.”
“No. It’s not like that. I was waiting on the cow and there was two of them and one of them kept looking into my eyes. I don’t know how but his lips moved and I heard what he said inside, in my head.”
Mammy believed in God and Moses on the Mountain and God’s Dearly Loved Son, Jesus, with all her heart and soul but, at the same time, she knew the value and truth of signs and omens.
“What did he say to you?” She put her cup down and held his face in her hands. “What were his words, his ’zact words?”
“ ‘Things will change.’ ”
“For the better? For the worse? Did he say?”
Bass shook his head. “No more. The words came into my head just like that, not up or down, good or bad. ‘Things will change.’ Then he went back to watching the cow. He didn’t say more.”
Mammy thought for a time. “He’s talking about a good change. You’re young, very young, to be talking to witch dogs, and they don’t never say bad things, bad omens, to the young. It’s always about something good when they talk to babies.”
“I ain’t no baby.”
“You’ll always be my baby.” The sun dropped the last bit below the horizon and they were in warm, soft spring darkness. She hugged him tightly. “You live to be ninety, you’ll still be my baby.”
“No baby can tangle them cows, ride that Roman nose.”
“Hush, boy. Don’t sass your mammy.”
“I’m not sassing. I’m just saying, no baby can tangle cows, ride that old jerk-gaited Roman nose the way I can.”
“I know. I know. Tomorrow morning I’ll make a pot of some of that Chinee tea the mister got in a silver tin box and look at the leaves. They might tell me what the omen means.”
“It means a thing is going to change.”
“Omens are funny and sometimes talk sideways and don’t always mean what they say.” Mammy stood, slowly easing her back straight, stretching the pain out. Flowers came out of the darkness and walked past them into the quarters without speaking, holding a piece of harness he had been working on. He slept back in the rear corner in a small room made by stretching two pieces of canvas out from the walls. Bass and Mammy’s rope cots were at the other end of the building. Flowers went to bed with the sun, got up with the sun. Bass had never heard him utter a sound except to grunt once when a mule stepped on his bare foot. He didn’t even dream, it seemed, or make sounds in his sleep. Not even snoring.
“How come Flowers don’t talk, Mammy?”
“Nobody knows,” she said. “All I know about him is that he came from a very hard place back in Georgia where he was whipped and beaten, and it made the thinking part of his brain shut down. The mister traded six goats for him just to have him split wood and work leather.”
“Were you ever whipped?”
“Not whipped. Tapped a couple of times when I was a young one like you for not knowing my manners. But not whipped, thank God.”
“I ain’t going to be whipped either.” No one, he thought, no man will ever lay a whip to me, no man will ever turn me into something like Flowers.
“Lord, I hope not. Whipping and branding are like bad dogs coming after you.” She pulled him to his feet. “Come in to bed now. It ain’t good to go to sleep with bad thoughts in your head. Think on pretty things like the sunset, like corn bread and honey and cool springwater on a hot day. The days are getting longer and the sleeping time is shorter, and you need rest to grow.” She said the last sentence the way she used to sing to him when he was a baby going to sleep.
The days are getting longer
And the nights are getting shorter.
Hush, little baby, don’t you cry,
Mammy’s going to love you by and by….
All my trials, Lord, soon be over …
She made up songs, letting her voice, deep and soft, move around the words. He stood and followed her inside. He crawled into his bed, but sleep didn’t come for a long time.
Somewhere outside, far off, a coyote sang. Another answered closer, and then eight or ten of them started yipping. He tried to listen to see if his witch dog was there with a message. But all he heard was a bunch of coyotes.
Silly old witch dog saying dumb words.
Things will change.
And his own sleep song came into his thoughts, round words rolling through his mind:
The sun came up,
the sun went down,
And all the clouds
went round and round.…
How could things not change?
Then sleep.