The last time it had snowed in Cotton County was the day a white woman had been lynched in Meredith. It was near the end of the last December of the previous century, and the snow had come and gone in less than an hour. Juke Jesup was eight years old and it was his first lynching. He didn’t know you could string up a woman, and a white one. She was more girl than woman, fifteen, from a family of wandering halvers-hands new to the county, and she was pregnant, made so by the country doctor in Meredith, or so she’d said. The doctor was a grown white man with a wife of his own, and the girl’s brother had gotten in a quarrel with him and killed him with a jam knife, left it sticking out of his neck. The mob had gone after the brother but he’d run off, so they went after the girl instead and killed her with the same knife. When they strung her up in her nightgown from the barber’s pole next door to the doctor’s office, the knife still stuck out of her rounded belly like a flag planted on a hill. That was where Juke had seen her when the snow started to fall. His father had waked him up in the early hours of morning so they could join the wagon heading over the county line to see her. A Negro was one thing. If you were woken to join the mob, you might, or you might turn over and go back to sleep. But a white woman—that was something to see. The town square was crowded with more people than Juke had seen in one place before. His father put him on his shoulders so he could get a better look. The snow came as the morning broke, so it seemed the day was darkening before it began. The flakes fell on Juke’s head and on his father’s and on the girl’s, and on her face and shoulders and the tops of her bare feet. Juke thought she looked cold. “Is it cold when you’re dead, Pop?” he asked, and his father said, “Not where she’s going.” By the time they returned to the farm, the sun was shining and the girl had been taken down from the pole like the laundry and the snow on the ground had vanished. It was as though the night had not happened at all.
Manford Rawls too had seen the snow and the girl, and he had been haunted by her. It was no way for a white girl to die. But the doctor who was killed had been his associate. He had gone to see the dead girl and he’d gone to the doctor’s funeral, but afterward and for the rest of his life, he no longer went on country calls. He did not want to adopt the other doctor’s reputation. (As it was, he did not like going into the country at night, where he’d once gotten lost on a dark dirt road. He’d told no one that he’d had to wait in his wagon until morning’s light to find his way back to town.) Dr. Rawls did not have relations with anyone but his wife, but the country people who had no way of traveling to his office in town became sick with typhoid and tuberculosis and syphilis and some of them died.
Manford Rawls was buried on a Saturday at Florence Baptist. The patients who attended his funeral were the patients who had lived. Some of them brought the children the doctor had delivered, and some of the children brought their children, Johnny Manford and Billy Manford and Jimmy Manford. The mothers of Cotton County did not think Manford made for a good Christian name, but they thought it made a fine middle one.
It wasn’t snow on that day but a pebbly rain that fell just long enough for the procession from the church to the cemetery. Sheriff Cleave was there; Judge Jeffords was there. Q. L. Boothby, who had served with Dr. Rawls on the board of the Roosevelt Warm Springs Institute for Rehabilitation, was there from Macon. The Jesups and the Wilsons were not there, though the day before, Parthenia Wilson had sent Frank to the house with a boxwood wreath his sister had woven. By the time the doctor’s three sons and his one living brother had lowered his casket into the ground, the rain had ceased. He was a small man, and they carried it without much trouble.
Down the road some six and a half miles, the road men from Macon sat in their trucks, cigarettes hanging out the window in the rain. Lloyd Crow too had collected his men into the wagon until the rain passed, because road didn’t lay down right when it was wet. They lay on their backs in their bunks. They were grateful for the rain—everyone by then was grateful, so badly did the county need rain—but Crow was not. George Wilson wanted the road paved clear to the mill village by the end of February, but it had rained for most of three days last week, one gully washer after another, and they were behind schedule now, and Wilson was not a man he aimed to disappoint. Crow had his mind on the crossroads farm, which he knew to be halfway between camp and town. Once they crossed String Wilson Road, they’d have more behind them than ahead. And maybe the man with the banjo would be on the porch, and maybe he’d play “Ain’t Misbehavin’” again, and Crow would let his men rest their eyes on the women for a while, the redhead, the Negro, the brunette, who had Indian in her, he thought. The men were tired and cold and so was he. It was hard for him to believe that there’d been a lynch mob on that farm just a few months ago, and so he didn’t believe it, not really. Instead his mind saw the brunette clapping on the porch, her flat black shoes tapping the rhythm on the steps, her long black braid bouncing down her back.
* * *
When the gang finally approached the crossroads, it was a whole Saturday later—the sixth of February, ten thirty in the morning. Now a cool platinum fog lay thick over the road. Crow sat at the head of the wagon and inched it forward. Behind him, the gravel trucks groaned, and behind the trucks, the men laid the rock. Crow dozed, and so did the horses. Then they inched forward again. The warden liked to talk about a prisoner who’d escaped from the gang under cover of fog: if you were going to run, now was the time. Be vigilant in a fog, the warden warned. But the fog made Crow sleepy. He was half-dozing when he opened his eyes and saw the mailbox of the crossroads farm poking its black head through the fog. He sat up straight. He was awake now. Gave the horse some leather. The men were somewhere behind him in the fog, and he prodded the horse twenty yards forward. He heard Talvey on his horse call, “Crow?”
Even in front of the mailbox, he couldn’t see but halfway down the driveway. The fog was so thick you could cut it with a knife and spread it on your toast. He hopped down from the wagon and tied the horse to the mailbox and grabbed his shotgun and called the hounds. They followed him up the drive. It was hard to believe, at ten thirty in the morning in a fog, that there might be a man on the porch playing a banjo and a girl dancing to it. He heard no banjo. But he was eager for a diversion. Some refreshment. Just before he reached the steps, two dogs darted out of the fog.
They were all on each other before he saw them. Two dogs and his two. He yelled for his two to get back. He yelled for Talvey. He saw a yellow coat, a black tail. He put his hand into the fog to draw one back and felt teeth. He thought of the rabid boar that had been found in this part of the county. He thought of his men, who could be running off now in the fog. He thought if he hadn’t gone up this blasted drive, listening for the imaginary siren of a black-haired girl, he wouldn’t have been caught in a cloud of four snarling dogs. He put himself in the middle of them, and then they toppled him, and when the yellow one was on him, he fired his shotgun.
That scattered them. Talvey was there then and hopping off his horse. He had a little of the dried groundhog meat in a sack and he called the hounds with it. The black dog was gone and the yellow one was on the ground, and blast if Crow hadn’t shot it dead. He put his hand back into the fog and felt blood on its neck. The shotgun had made a good mess.
“Goddamn of a sumbitch!”
Talvey had the hounds wagging their tails now. “Ain’t no worry, Crow. That dog was a danger. Them dogs as mean as their daddy.”
“Sumbitch.”
“We could roast it. I ate me a coyote before.”
“Sumbitch, Talvey! Get your ass back to the wagon and lock them dogs in it.”
He did not want to go into the house. Juke Jesup would not be pleased to see his dog was dead. The warden wouldn’t be pleased to hear it, either. He looked around. He could leave. He could run off himself into the fog. No one had come running when they heard the shot. The farm looked all but abandoned.
He looked again at the dog on the ground, as much as he could see of it. If it weren’t for the blood, it might have been taking a nap. Blast if he hadn’t had a yellow dog as a boy.
He climbed the steps. The porch was empty but for a couple of rocking chairs and, on the plank floor, a silent gramophone. Crow put his hands on his hips and eyed it. Then he walked down the breezeway and knocked on the door to the left. He knocked on the door to the right. He thought he heard a baby crying inside, but he was listening too hard, listening still for some music in the day. He turned and went back to the gramophone and, squatting, placed the needle on the record. From the road, his men could hear the tune. It was too bright for a funeral hymn, but Crow played it again and again as the men dug a grave for the dog under the cottonwood tree and buried it and marked it with stones. Together it took them only an hour, but it was another hour they were behind.
* * *
By the time morning gave way to afternoon, the sun was spinning its spokes of light through the gray. As the fog burned off, you could see the first of the purple martins just returning to nest in the gourd tree, and the purple martins could see clear to the crossroads, where a black Labrador was climbing out of the ditch. She’d been scrambling between the road and the creek for more than an hour, her nose and tail both skimming the ground, first heading east, beyond the crossroads, then changing her mind and turning around toward home. When she came up on String Wilson Road in front of the crossroads store, her coat was stuck with cockleburs and dripping with creek water. Jeb Simmons, who’d gotten up from his chair on the store porch to help direct traffic, said to no one in particular, “Mr. Juke’s bitch took her a bath.” Now that the road crew had reached String Wilson Road, which was paved, they’d had to cut off traffic all four ways in order for the men and the wagon and the two horses and a gravel truck to cross it. Across the intersection, Drink Simmons was doing the same. He wished he had a flag to wave. A line of cars was piling up and folks were honking. Drink went to each of their windows and said, “Sorry, Mr. Joe,” “Sorry, Miss Sadie. Them boys got to get acrost. We’ll let you through directly.”
Then a Coca-Cola truck fixing to make a delivery at the crossroads store got a back tire stuck in the ditch trying to turn around, and when it tried to climb out, the other back tire got stuck, and the truck fell ass down in the ditch and the back doors opened and case after case of Coca-Cola came tumbling out. The driver hopped out and started cussing. The angle was such that neither of the big gravel trucks could drag it out. So the truck sat there in the ditch with its headlights shooting through what remained of the fog while Jeb Simmons went to borrow some rope from the crossroads store, which held up the traffic more. While they waited, the chain gang turned around and made its way back across the road and all the while the black dog trotted alongside them, wagging, barking, confused. She recognized the smell of some of the men’s boots. They were caked with dirt from her farm. Then she trotted ahead to the wagon and all at once she smelled Lloyd Crow and gunpowder and the two hounds, caged inside, and she barked and darted sideways and skedaddled down into the ditch on the opposite side of the road, in front of the church. The hounds barked back. Her nose had never been so full. And now underneath the rising fog she smelled what she had nearly given up looking for, and she scrambled back up to the road and up the brick pathway to the Creek Baptist Missionary Church, her paws leaving white clay prints behind her.
Along the path, the congregation was spilling out the open doors, and the dog, wagging her tail, smelled each of their fine patent leather oxfords and worn farm boots, for today, a Saturday, the church had called together town and country folks alike. “Git!” the folks said. Someone was distributing a sack of rice, pouring a few grains into each of their open hands, and they thought it was the rice the dog was after. Among them was a photographer for the Florence Messenger, and though he was there for the society page, he turned to aim his camera at the intersection, where twelve men were now playing tug-of-war with a two-ton panel truck. Behind them, unspooling westward, six miles of gravel road glittered. When finally the men hoisted the vehicle out, the driver gave them each a bottle of Coca-Cola, and of course it was the best bottle of Coca-Cola any of them had ever had, the bottle they would remember on the hottest and driest days to come. Then Talvey moved them across String Wilson Road again to let the traffic pass. They were only halfway to town, but they walked with pride, their chests leading them, as though already they were crossing the invisible tape of a finish line. They had paved that road. They had moved that truck. They had not had so many eyes on them for a long time. The photographer’s camera clicked, and they lifted their faces as they drank from their bottles, the sun, now bright, catching the green, misty light through the glass.
* * *
Elma Rawls, for that was who she was now, was not carried across the church threshold by her husband. She might have been able to carry him. When they appeared in the doorway side by side, Elma carrying a paperwhite bouquet, Oliver clinging to Elma’s elbow (“I’ll be your cane,” she said), the newspaperman’s camera turned back to the church, and the congregation clapped and cheered and tossed the rice in the air. It rained down on them over the path. It landed in the bouquet and in the hem of Elma’s dress and in her eyelashes. The fog was no thicker now than the steam from a kettle. Through the fog, through the falling rice, she saw the men in stripes who were standing across from the church on the other side of the ditch, finishing their drinks. Goddamn, was what she thought—she did not want convicts at her wedding. Then she saw the twelve men’s eyes turn to her. She saw all of them without seeing any of them. She too had not had so many eyes on her for a long time. The babies were home with Nan. The men weren’t looking at the twins but at her. She wasn’t the Whore of Babylon, she wasn’t Mother Mary in a chore coat. She was an eighteen-year-old woman in a McCall’s wedding dress, and she’d just married a doctor, and that was what they saw. Go ahead and look, she thought.
Then there was Pollux panting at her feet. The dog nudged her wet snout into Elma’s dress. Elma pushed her away, trying to laugh. Goddamn, she thought. “What you doing out here? You been in the creek?”
Behind her, her father came through the doors and Pollux set to panting and wagging her tail and burying her wet snout in his knees. “Get on home, girl. You ain’t been invited.”
The dogs didn’t wander far off the farm. They never wandered off alone.
Lloyd Crow came over on his horse and said, “Pardon, Mr. Juke. I got to speak with you.” He got off the horse and led Juke around the side of the church. Again the traffic heading north and south was passing by like any day. The sack of rice was emptied.
Elma thought, What now?
If Castor hadn’t been shot by Lloyd Crow, or if it had rained for two days instead of three, the crew might have been past the church by the time the wedding let out. If Sterling had known, while he dug a grave for the dead dog under the cottonwood tree, that his daughter hid in the pantry not ten yards from him, two babies bundled to her chest, she would have been the one he called out to. Instead it was Elma’s name he said. He was not much more than ten yards from her too. All at once she heard his voice and remembered it and realized she had forgotten it. She saw him. He stood at the edge of the road in the middle of the chain. He couldn’t move any closer to her without taking the whole gang with him. He was waving his bottle. He had a clean-shaven face.
To Oliver she said, “Good Lord. That’s Uncle Sterling.”
What could she do but wave back?
That might have been plenty, that might have been a full wedding day, enough for folks to talk about. She picked up the hem of her dress and made her way down the path to the edge of the ditch. She did not want to get her shoes dirty, but what did it matter now? Nothing was the way she’d pictured it.
She held the bouquet above her brow, looking across the ditch through the last breath of fog. “Uncle Sterling, is that you?”
And then, from a short way down the chain, a voice said, “It sure is. Uncle Sterling, you fixing to introduce me?”
She stopped short before she slid down into the ditch.
“Howdy, Miss Elma.”
The man was smiling at her. One of his eyes was squeezed shut. He wore a striped knit cap low over his brow, and now he took it off and she saw the peeled, pale onion of Freddie Wilson’s face.
“I got a riddle for you, Elma. Why did the chain gang cross the road?”
Oliver was at her elbow now. She’d left him without a cane, and he’d found his way to her, and now he was the one holding her up straight.
Freddie lifted his bottle of Coca-Cola. “To get to toast the bride.”