PEOPLE TOOK SHELTER FROM the downpour that night in all the buildings up and down Main Street, except for Mr. Gordon’s law office, which was locked. They holed up in the hardware store and Dot’s former Café and the deputy sheriff’s office (happy to sleep in a jail cell just as long as it was dry), and in both churches and in the schoolhouse, and in barns and sheds and automobiles and anywhere else they could find. Rain pelted steadily on roofs over people’s heads, and in spite of all the excitement, most folks, being unaccustomed to all-night festivities, soon fell asleep where they lay.
By morning, it looked like Baghdad, Georgia, had fallen under a different kind of spell. Never in the history of our town had the hour of seven o’clock come around, and then half-past, and then eight o’clock on a sunny Saturday morning in June, with nary a person up and stirring. Cows were moaning, hungry chickens clucking, hogs complaining, and still folks slept on. The sun would be high in the sky before citizens and visitors began to free themselves from that spell, waking up one by one, stiff-necked and sore of back and wondering if they had really seen or only dreamed a jinn jumping out of a cloud of white smoke, or a boy in a tower singing like an angel, or a princess floating in the darkness, or a camel being born, or a wagon full of flames rolling toward them in the street. It must have seemed more likely, when they awoke to the muddy slough of Main Street, that they had dreamed it all.
I myself woke up in Bibbens’ barn, having fallen asleep there with my sister May and her three older girls. Our intention had been to check on the camels, but when we came dashing into the barn out of the rain as best we could, Mrs. Bibben appeared with a lantern and told us Uncle Mack had taken the camels away. She raised her voice over the sound of the rain pounding the roof of the barn. “I tried to tell him they all would be safe here,” she said, and shrugged. She didn’t say where they went—I had the feeling she didn’t know—but they couldn’t have gone far in this weather. We peeled off layers of sopping wet muslin, which we had pulled from the “sand dunes” on stage. Under the muslin, our clothes were mostly dry, although Mrs. Bibben insisted on providing warm socks for all of our feet. We curled up together like kittens on a quilt she threw down over the straw in a clean stall, May still in her midnight-blue gown studded with gold stars, and me in my harem outfit, and the girls in Sunday dresses topped by three of Mrs. Bibben’s old sweaters, which fit them more like coats. At some point, while we were sleeping, Momma must have come into the barn, looking to see where we were. She’d thrown her big white bedspread over us like a tent.
I sat up under it now, puzzling over where I was, and what was making that tap-tapping sound, and had I really just heard a train whistle? Who would be calling for the train to stop in Threestep on the morning after the Baghdad Bazaar?
Bits of straw were stuck to my arms and the bare skin around my middle. When I crawled out from under the bedspread, May and the girls sighed and snuggled together to fill up the space. I struggled to my feet. The left one felt numb and tingly, not yet ready to follow orders. I was giving it a minute, aiming to limp toward the sunlight down at the end of the barn, when I saw the eye. It was looking straight at me through a gap in the boards between stalls: a big brown heavy-lidded eye with long, thick curly lashes.
“Sabrina?” I whispered so as not to wake May and the girls. “Is that you?”
The eye disappeared. Almost immediately it was replaced by lips. They curled back in a grin full of teeth that looked white and new. I limped to the end of the stall and peeked around, and there was Sabrina’s baby, standing up straight on his own four clown feet. The top of his hump looked to be about even with my chin. It looked like he’d expanded a couple of sizes as he dried.
“Ahmed!” I said. “You have grown! What are you doin’ here?”
His color was another surprise. Last night, the lantern light and shadows—plus the straw and the sac all sticking to him—had made it hard to tell what color he was, but now I could see that this baby camel was as pure white as a clean boll of cotton. He came right on up to me and started poking at my armpit, as if he were looking for something. I had to take a step backwards to keep my footing, he was pushing so hard. “Little camel,” I said, “I don’t have a thing you want. Where’s your momma?” He was wearing a rope around his neck with the end dragging on the ground. I picked it up and shook it under his nose. “Are you causing her trouble already, sneakin’ off? Hey—listen!”
The tapping I heard earlier had started up again.
“It’s Miss Spivey!” I told Ahmed. She was up there now, in her room, typing with one hand tied behind her back, it sounded like. “I bet she knows where your momma is. You wait here,” I said. I closed the door of the stall and rolled a wheelbarrow up against it sideways to keep it shut.
On their back porch, the Bibbens had a half dozen wooden barrels lined up against the railing. The back door was open inward, so I could see the wooden staircase rising murkily to the second floor through the screen. When I stepped right up and cupped my hands around my eyes, I could just make out Miss Spivey’s door at the top of the stairs. It was closed. Behind it, the stop-and-start typing—so unlike the usual tap dance of Miss Spivey’s fingers on the keys—continued. I pulled my harem costume away from my sweaty back and armpits, and then I knocked politely on the wooden frame of the screen door. Upstairs, the typewriter fell silent. I listened for approaching footsteps, but all I heard now were doves cooing in the barn behind me and one cricket, tricked by the darkness under the porch into thinking it was evening. I knocked again.
I climbed the stairs toward Miss Spivey’s room with some trepidation, a vocabulary word from late fall that I was finding more and more useful all the time. Instead of knocking on the door, I waited. The only sound inside was a bit of a chair scrape, as if she’d started to stand up but maybe thought better of it. “Miss Spivey?” I said. There was nothing but silence in response to that, and I think I would have gone back down the stairs without opening the door at all if I hadn’t been so suddenly, utterly convinced that there was nobody in Threestep who would have called for the train on the morning after the Baghdad Bazaar except Miss Spivey. I turned the knob and pushed. I could see before the door was even halfway open that the drawers were pulled out and the closet was empty, the shelves—except for the one that held ten green volumes of The Thousand Nights and a Night—were bare.
If you have not guessed who was sitting at Miss Spivey’s desk, banging away at her typewriter, don’t feel bad. If I hadn’t seen for myself who was punching the keys one at a time with two fingers, I never would have guessed it, either. I was so surprised that I cried, “Mavis! What are you doing here? Where’s Miss Spivey?”
“What does it look like I’m doing?” Mavis said.
She didn’t even try to hide that she was crying. Her face was wet, her eyes were red, her nose was running. I hadn’t seen Mavis cry since her daddy died, and that was so long ago I couldn’t picture it. She gave out with a loud and defiant sniffle, all the while looking me straight in the eye. “Where is Miss Spivey?” I asked again.
“I did a terrible thing,” Mavis said.
She had done something to Miss Spivey. I should have known. I could hardly get my breath to come. “What did you do?” I croaked.
“This.” Mavis sobbed. She picked up a piece of paper, obviously smoothed out after somebody had crunched it into a ball. Written in Mavis’s neat and tiny hand—I’d sat right in front of her in school long enough to recognize it anywhere—it seemed to be a list of dates and times and places. Pecan grove jumped out at me, written next to at least three different dates and times. All of a sudden, I got it. I gasped. “How?” I said.
“I was there,” she said, and she sniffled again, long and noisily.
“Every time?”
“Every time that’s written on that paper.”
“You spied on them?” I said, and immediately wished to take it back. I more than half expected her to ask me what I was doing up in the pine tree that time with Etta George. All she did was go on crying, which gave me leave to say, “Mavis, that is disgusting.”
“I know it,” she sobbed. “But that’s not the bad part, Gladys, not the really bad part.” And then she told me that she’d sold the list of places and times to Mr. Gordon.
“You sold it to him? What do you mean, you sold it?”
For a second, through her tears, she gave me the kind of look I’d come to expect from Mavis Davis over the years. “I mean I gave him the paper and he gave me money for it. That’s what I mean by I sold it.”
I wanted to ask for how much, but I didn’t, not then. I said, “What would Mr. Gordon want with it?”
“I don’t know!” She went back to sobbing.
“D’you reckon he wants to get her fired?”
“Oh, Gladys. Miss Spivey is already fired, for heaven’s sake.”
“Why would he give you money for this, then? What’s it good for?”
“I’ll tell you what it’s good for. It’s good for holding over her head, it’s good for making her do like Mr. Gordon wants. It’s blackmail, Gladys. Ain’t you ever heard of blackmail?”
“What would Mr. Gordon want to make her do?”
“How should I know?”
“But why are you here, in Miss Spivey’s room?”
“I am trying,” she said dramatically, “to finish what Miss Spivey started. See this here?” She held up a pile of envelopes. The top one had Supt of Schools typed on it. “Miss Spivey aimed to show Mr. Gordon she didn’t care what he did. He couldn’t hold it over her head because she was goin’ to spread it around herself! That’s how you stamp out blackmail.”
I reminded myself that this was Miss Spivey we were talking about. I said, “Why didn’t she do it, then? Why didn’t she type up the copies and hand ’em out?”
“She ran out of time. She said I had to do it.”
Suddenly I remembered the train whistle. My heart sank even lower than it already was. “What do you mean, she ran out of time?”
Mavis sat back then and told me how she’d been hiding among the barrels on the Bibbens’ back porch earlier this morning when Miss Spivey emerged from the stand of blooming crape myrtle next to the springhouse with my brother Force right behind her. I’ve come to believe that Mavis knew all along which side she really wanted to be on and she just couldn’t figure, as sometimes happens, how she’d wound up on the wrong one. She didn’t like Mr. Gordon any more than I did, after all. One way or another, when Force and Miss Spivey stopped to catch their breath together on the stoop, an arm’s length away from where the barrels were lined up, Mavis had popped up like one of Ali Baba’s forty thieves, and she had thrown herself on the mercy of them both.
Force was set to take pity on Mavis right away, moved by her weeping and beseeching and all. Miss Spivey was not at first so inclined. She was mad enough that she might have cast poor Mavis aside to stew in her own remorse if Mavis had not offered them what she believed to be an important piece of new information, namely, that she had sold the list of dates and times and places where she’d seen them touzling and the like to Mr. Gordon, who wanted it for what precise purpose Mavis did not know.
“Sold it? For how much?” said Force.
Mr. Gordon had paid Mavis two five-dollar bills for her detective work, as he called it—an amount that stunned Mavis when he offered it—but she did not say so to my brother Force. She didn’t say anything at first. She hung her head and hoped that Force and Miss Spivey—but especially Force—could see that she was truly sorry, that she was not and never had been on Mr. Gordon’s side, not really, that she was lost, she was wounded, she was stricken with grief, and that sometimes she just didn’t think things through, in fact, perhaps, it was possible that sometimes she didn’t think at all.
“Y’all can have the money!” she told them, tearfully digging into her overalls’ front pocket for a five-dollar bill, like she was ready to cast it, Judas Iscariot–style, at their feet.
Force was set to take her up on that, too, but Miss Spivey held her hand up in the stop position—Mavis showed me just how she did it—and said, “I don’t want your money, Mavis. I’ll tell you what I want from you.”
That’s when she gave Mavis her mission, along with the crumpled list and the pile of envelopes she needed to complete it. Having done so, Miss Spivey turned her attention to helping Force get her trunk and two suitcases down the stairs. She left the typewriter behind, of course, and as soon as they were gone, Mavis set to work.
“This one here,” Mavis told me, ticking the typewriter carriage up and down, “is only the second copy I made. It takes a long time to find the letters on this thing.”
I said, “You ought to’ve tried to stop her, Mavis!”
“Oh, Gladys, you don’t know how it was. She was so mad at me for what I done, I thought she was fixing to slap my face.”
“You know Miss Spivey wouldn’t do that,” I said cruelly. “She never even hit you for tearing the map.”
The look on Mavis’s face was like I’d hit her then. She started crying so hard that she made the ink run on the list that was currently in the typewriter. We had to pull it on out and start over. I said I’d take a turn so she could clean up her face. I hadn’t typed but Schoolhouse and December 26, when I thought of something that made my face turn hot and my blood run cold.
“You don’t think Force went with her, do you?” He did try to follow that girl to Toledo, back when he was only fifteen.
“I don’t think so,” Mavis said from the washstand in the corner. She looked at me, her bangs dripping, over the top of an embroidered towel. “I believe she sent Force to see about the camels.”
At the mention of camels, I jumped to my feet. I had forgotten all about the baby camel in the barn.
As we thundered down the stairs toward the back door, Mavis and I could hear little girls’ voices, and then here they were, May’s little girls running from the barn, Bitsy and Mimi and Dolly, their best dresses all rumpled and their hair stuck with straw, hollering, “Gladys! Hey, Gladys!” “Did you see the baby camel? Did you see him? He can walk!” “He pushed me, Gladys!” “He’s drinking like a calf!” “Like a kitten!” “Like a baby lamb!” They pulled me and Mavis toward the barn. “Jest wait till you see!” “Gladys!” “He’s so white!”
May was kneeling in the straw inside, about nose to nose with that baby camel. She was holding a bottle up to his mouth, the kind you’d use to feed a calf, and he was nuzzling and sucking on the nipple, at least until he noticed me and Mavis, and then he had to break away to see if either of us was the one he was looking for.
May raised the bottle. It was empty now. “Mrs. Bibben brought it for him,” she said. “She and Mr. Bibben are looking for the camel man right now. She can’t wait to tell him they found his baby camel in their barn.”
“I wonder why he came here,” I said. “The baby camel, I mean.”
Mavis Davis frowned. “Didn’t that camel man say they can always find their way back to where their momma drank water before they was born?”
I was surprised that Mavis had taken note of such a thing. “But that’s if the baby’s lost and looking for his momma,” I pointed out. “How would he get lost?”
“He’s done eatin’ now,” May’s girls were saying. “Can we touch him, Momma?” “You said we could!”
May leaned back against the side of the stall and let the girls crowd in. Bitsy patted Ahmed’s neck while Mimi tried to interest him in a handful of straw and Dolly crouched down for a look at his flat feet, leaning closer and closer until she just had to touch the impossibly thin and bony part of his leg, below the ankle. Ahmed danced a step away from her, and May said, “Dolly! I don’t believe he likes that. Watch you don’t get kicked.”
“He’s all dirty, Momma,” Dolly said, and she twisted around to show us her hand.
That was the first we noticed the white dirt caked on his white, white camel hair.
Looking back, you can piece together a lot of things you didn’t know were happening at the time.
While I climbed the stairs to Miss Spivey’s room—and even before that, in the early morning hours, when it looked to the casual eye like no one was stirring anywhere in town—events were already occurring that would change all our lives to come. Long before I woke up in the barn, for example, Mr. John Gordon was already pacing back and forth in his law office on Main Street, smelling like fire and brimstone, which is to say, like smoke and creosote from the night before.
Mr. Gordon was one of the first to wake up on the morning after the Baghdad Bazaar, having hardly slept a wink since the downpour sent him scooting for cover. He had every reason to be feeling embarrassed and put out, if not downright nervous. Not only had the Ku Klucks of Piedmont County let him down by showing up in such pathetically unimpressive numbers last night that he might have had to cancel the event altogether if it hadn’t been for some hooligans the Lumpkin boy brought along from who knows where—oh, and weren’t they happy to avail themselves of Mr. Gordon’s stock of surplus hoods and robes, not a one of which could be sold as anything but sadly used now. And not only had his usually intelligent and reliable yardman misjudged the staying power of copper wire when it came to holding two trunks of pine together in perpendicular fashion, the result being what looked more like a burning clothes pole than a fiery cross lighting up the night, and not only had the deputy sheriff come running—in his ridiculous outfit and with that thing on his head—to warn them against burning down the whole town, which they had no intention of doing, their sole purpose being to show that teacher she had gone too far, and not only had the sky opened up to douse their flames before they got to the schoolhouse—not only all that, but the downpour had left Mr. Gordon no choice but to unlock his office and let the sodden hooligans just about run him over to get inside, where they spread mud and soot on every surface until he woke them up to kick them out at daybreak. Mrs. Gordon would not be speaking to him this morning or at any time in the foreseeable future, once she got down here to see the mess.
With all that on his mind, the last thing Mr. Gordon needed was the Lumpkin boy appearing at the back door minutes ago, still wearing a white robe, now filthy, over his ridiculous outfit, and blubbering about camels and White Sue, whoever that was. It seemed clear that something had happened, but Arnie ran off before Mr. Gordon could figure out what, and now Mr. Gordon had to decide if he should try to get to the bottom of Arnie’s babble, or if it would be wiser—and he was leaning this way—to maintain his ignorance, particularly if whatever happened involved any hooligans still wearing Mr. Gordon’s robes.
When Mr. Gordon’s pacing took him to the front window of the law office, he pushed the curtain aside and peered out. Main Street looked about as disenchanted at this point as a golden coach turned back into a pumpkin—a rotten, sagging pumpkin, at that. The street was a muddy slough of white dirt mixed with red and brown, the minaret and balconies exposed as nothing but mismatched lumber, the storefronts streaked white and gray. Every window was striped with dried white dirt—including the one Mr. Gordon was looking through—and lengths of dirty cloth appeared to have gotten themselves wound around every post and stuck in every crack and cranny in town. They flapped around the charred remains of the two pine trunks, one of which still stood while the other jutted out the back of the wagon, making it look like a burned-out boat with a long crazy prow. A bright June sun was shining without mercy over all of it.
Only the signs at either end of Main Street still said WELCOME TO BAGHDAD in letters that were sharp and clear. Mr. Gordon could see one of those signs from his window. The neat lettering—in real white paint which hadn’t run in the rain like all the white dirt did—made him think of the roadside signs the county had required him to post out by his kaolin pit north of town. By the look and style of the letters, he wouldn’t be surprised if the same fellow had painted them all. Those signs had cost him plenty. DANGER! and DEEP SLOUGH the county wanted, even though nobody used that old logging road anymore except for kaolin trucks, and their drivers knew to look out for drop-offs and white sloughs and quicksand and the like. Besides, it wasn’t all that deep near the road. It was remembering those signs, Mr. Gordon told the sheriff later, that made him suddenly suspect that he might know what Arnie Lumpkin meant when he said what sounded like “White Sue.” And that, in turn, made Mr. Gordon reach for a pair of rubber boots to pull over his leather shoes. He expected to catch up with the Lumpkin boy, who would have to leave his filthy white robe by the roadside if he wanted to get into Mr. Gordon’s car.
All of the above came out later, when the county sheriff from over in Claytonville—a man named Butts—was asking everybody: Where were you between the hours of six o’clock and half-past seven on the morning after the Baghdad Bazaar?
It was long before six o’clock that morning when Mrs. Faith Boykin fired up her black iron stove. She was trying to be as quiet as she could, so as not to wake up Uncle Mack the camel man, who was snoring softly on the bed she’d made up for him in the corner of the kitchen. They were all sleeping like babies, the boys on the porch and Etta George in the bedroom, plenty of room for her long legs last night since Mrs. Faith Boykin never went to bed at all. How could she, when she had let Miss Spivey and Uncle Mack McComb talk her into sending Theo off to Macon not in September, when school started, but today, this very morning, at daybreak, with himself, his best clothes, and his most prized possessions (one notebook, five pencils, and the books that Miss Templeton had given him) all packed on the top of a camel? Mrs. Boykin had Theo’s clothes to sort and mend and iron and fold and roll up in blankets, she had breakfast to make and a good lunch and supper to pack because who knew what he would get to eat in Macon. Is this the right thing? she asked her dead husband. Is this the right thing, letting him go? Theo had told her, “It’s for the best, Momma,” not just because the Ku Klucks were riled up, but on account of the job that Uncle Mack could arrange for Theo on the circus grounds this summer.
Was any of that reason enough to let him go?
Oh, she could be as quiet as she wanted, but the sky would start getting light anyway, and Uncle Mack would get up to fetch the camels, and the boys would wake up as soon as bacon and biscuits got into their dreams by way of their noses. They were going to go, no matter how many one-more-things she found to do or pack, like this pair of pants that needed laundering. Was he just going to leave them behind? His best pants!
“Put ’em in a sack, Momma, and I’ll wash ’em when I get there,” Theo said as he set himself down across from his brother, plates of biscuits and bacon and gravy and grits on the table between them. When she bent over the table with another bowl of something, he stretched up and gave her a kiss on the cheek.
No matter how much breakfast she made or how careful she was for all of his seventeen years, they had gotten to this moment here, where they were right now. Uncle Mack had his humpbacked creatures standing quietly next to her porch, waiting to take her boy away. They looked like somebody had cut them out of a picture and pasted them there, big old pines instead of palm trees in the background. Ahmed the snow-white baby camel was up there on Ivan, nicely settled on the load of Uncle Mack’s and Theo’s belongings, looking like a prince on his throne. Uncle Mack told her that baby camels who were born in midjourney across the desert got to ride for one day only, after which they were expected to make their way like everybody else. Mrs. Boykin could tell there was supposed to be a little lesson for her in that fact. She reminded Eugene that he was coming home from Macon this evening with Force Cailiff in the truck. “Before dark,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Eugene.
She remembered a blanket they’d forgotten.
“Momma, I just have to go,” Theo said.
Then a door slammed and they all looked over to see Ildred Cailiff running toward them, her nightgown stuffed down into and flowing over the top of a pair of overalls that belonged to someone a substantial size or two larger than she would ever be. In her good left hand, she was waving and swinging a metal bucket—no, it was Theo’s magic pitcher.
“They left it on the stage last night,” she said, out of breath, and offered it up on tiptoe. Theo leaned down from the saddle high on Sabrina’s hump. He had to slide sideways, holding on to the tall saddle horn, to take it from her. “I’m not sure I got anyplace to put it,” he said.
“All you need is this here,” said Ildred, handing up a ribbon of blue cloth.
Theo looked at the ribbon in his hand as if he were trying to think of something to say other than, I have to go.
She said, “Use that to tie it to the saddle, Theo.”
He said, “Thank you, Ildred, I will.” And he did.
Later, Ildred could recite word for word the little conversation she had with Theo Boykin while he sat up on top of the camel, about to set out for Macon. She would repeat it for anyone who cared to listen, line by line.
One person who was very busy between six and half-past seven on the morning after the Baghdad Bazaar was my brother Force. After carrying Miss Spivey’s baggage from her room above Bibbens’ to the whistle-stop to wait for the train, Force hightailed it home. He had to get Daddy’s truck so he could meet up with Theo and Uncle Mack and the camels, at the place where the old logging road came out on the highway. Now he wished more than ever that he had availed himself of the five dollars Mavis Davis offered on Bibbens’ porch. Five dollars would be nice to have in his pocket when he got to Macon. He found Ildred in the kitchen leaning her backside against the dry sink with her arms folded across her chest. (With Ildred that meant one arm folded and holding the elbow end of the other.) She was wearing overalls with her nightgown stuffed into them and a red-eyed expression on her face. He said, “Is something wrong?” to which she replied, scowling, “Not a thing in the world.”
Force opened the iron door of the warming oven above the stove and took out a plate of biscuits. “Theo left yet?”
“Of course they left. Daddy’s wondering if maybe you forgot you’re supposed to meet up with them. I think he’s fixin’ to go himself.”
Force, who was bent over the biscuits, straightened up. “He don’t need to do that.”
“Force Cailiff, don’t put them right in your pockets. You’ll get a stain. Let me wrap some and you go tell Daddy you’re ready to go.”
It didn’t take Force ten or fifteen minutes to get to the meeting place, a shady spot on the roadside where he’d be able to see the first of the camels coming out of the woods, a sight he was looking forward to. Force reckoned it might take them almost an hour to get to the highway. The logging road was only about three miles long, but it was overgrown in places, and they’d have to be more careful on the first stretch by the old chalk pit. “I say it’s good they left later than they meant to,” he’d told Ildred, “so they can see where the heck they’re going.” He couldn’t blame Uncle Mack for wanting to make a quick and quiet getaway, after last night. Force pulled a biscuit from the cloth Ildred had tied them up in. He wasn’t angry at Theo anymore or at Miss Spivey, either, but he still believed that they had been foolish and reckless in their behavior: Miss Spivey using those children to make a point, it looked like, and Theo collecting kids from fields and yards and off the side of the road without so much as asking their parents’ leave. They had been asking for trouble, and trouble had certainly arrived. Maybe if the world was changed, like Theo said, they could bring whoever they wanted into Threestep School, but the world wasn’t changed. Last night sure enough proved that.
Force had been waiting in the truck long enough to eat all four biscuits Ildred had wrapped for him when he heard the train whistle—which meant that it was 8:05 and that Miss Spivey, whom he’d been picturing sitting on her steamer trunk alongside the tracks, was standing up now, holding her tam onto her head and probably taking a few steps back, away from the approaching train. Force pictured the conductor reaching down to give her a hand, while the same porter who set her baggage down on the burnt grass back in August was taking it up again. And then she was making the tall step up onto the metal stairs at the end of the car, placing her hiking boot firmly on the metal tread, ignoring the glance of the conductor. She was boosting herself up, and Force could see the muscle of her calf flexing above the ankle-high boot, the shape of her knee under the hem of her skirt.
He might have fallen asleep, he thought later. When he opened his eyes, the sun seemed significantly higher. It was hot. He lifted his shoulder to wipe his face on his shirt. There were no camels in sight. They couldn’t have followed the logging road and come out of the woods without seeing him here. So where were they?
In Bibbens’ barn, we got the bad news from Ildred, but you could also say that she got the bad news from us. It went in both directions at the same time. She had been at the Boykins’ place, having gone back to keep Etta George and Mrs. Boykin company, when Mr. and Mrs. Bibben showed up, all set to tell Uncle Mack that his baby camel was safe at their place. Mrs. Faith Boykin told them that Uncle Mack and her boys had set out on that logging road over an hour ago—going on two hours now, in fact. She expected they were halfway to Macon by now, she said, exaggerating a little. Mrs. Bibben asked, “Well, then, what is that baby camel doing at our place?” Ildred had stood between the two women as they tried to make sense of the matter. She was the one who saw straight through the fog of confusion to the significance of baby Ahmed’s return, saw it like an arrow piercing straight through a heart. As Momma said later, a person didn’t want to jump to the worst possible conclusions at a time like this—unless that person was Ildred, who had a sixth sense. Ildred had commenced to bouncing nervously on her toes, muttering to herself, and when Mrs. Faith Boykin looked at her, she looked back and said, “Something’s happened!”
Then she took off on foot. She covered the mile and then some from Boykins’ place to Bibbens’ barn in record time, I’m sure, judging by the way she couldn’t do anything but hold on to the wooden side of Ahmed’s stall with her one hand while she gasped and writhed and coughed, trying to catch her breath, her short arm in plain view instead of tucked inside her overalls, the way she usually kept it. When she was finally able to whisper, “Something terrible has happened to them,” not a one of us could doubt that she was right.
The Bibbens’ truck showed up not long after Ildred did, its tires and fenders spattered with white dirt. The truck pulled around the back to where we were, half of us in and half out of the barn. Mr. Bibben dropped out the driver’s side to the ground and tore around to open the back of the truck, saying, “Git in, git in! They pulled him out of the slough. He’s still alive. Git in!”
It seemed like a long time that nobody moved, but it was likely no more than the second between breaths before May said, “Who? Who’s still alive?”
Mr. Bibben straightened up from pulling crates out of the truck to make room for us. He wanted to say that he just told us who, but he could tell from our waiting faces that he had not.
At home, a crowd was already waiting. Nobody had far to go, after all. It looked like every Negro family in the county was milling around the Boykins’ house, and where their front yard blended into our back yard, there was a blend of colored folks and white, the proportion of which got whiter, sure enough, as they got nearer to our house. Many of them were people I knew—the Reverends, the Wickers, the Hodges, the Veals—but at least as many were strangers left over from the Baghdad Bazaar, people who had spent the night in odd places and woke up to the news that trouble had struck at the edge of town in the early morning hours. Our front yard appeared to be the parking lot—T-Model Fords and wagons, mostly, and Ed’s old truck—but also Mrs. Lulu Blount’s Hudson and Mr. Gordon’s beautiful Cadillac LaSalle, the shiny maroon doors and fenders streaked and spattered white. Mr. Bibben could hardly get his truck down the lane for the crowd.
It was another few minutes—time enough for us to tumble out of Mr. Bibben’s truck and scramble up to Momma on the back porch—before Linwood Perkins’s Model A, the SHERIFF hand-painted on the doors half covered in white, made the turn into the lane. Linwood and Mr. Gordon were inside. They were followed by Daddy’s truck, with Daddy at the wheel and Ralphord—that was a surprise—in the passenger seat. Not until they went past us, oh so slowly, could I see Eugene Boykin kneeling in the bed of the truck. All I saw of Theo, past Eugene’s wide back, was that he was white with clay—his bare chest and arms and feet coated whiter than they were onstage last night at the Baghdad Bazaar, and his pants dusted and streaked with white. Eugene was holding his hand.
“Jesus Lord,” my mother said. “Have mercy.”
It was the deputy sheriff who hopped out of his car and announced to the crowd, “He’s still breathing.” This sent a ripple of relief you could hear traveling in all directions from where he stood.
As soon as Daddy’s truck stopped alongside the Boykins’ house, one of the men jumped up into the back of it and helped Eugene hand Theo down to another two men waiting on the ground to take him. Daddy helped the four of them carry Theo to a wooden table set up in the Boykins’ yard, with a sheet thrown over it and a straw-filled pillow for his head. Mrs. Boykin had no running water or full-sized bathtub in the house—nobody out here at the end of town did—so she had a mind to clean him up before they carried him inside, where she would finish bathing him, and change his clothes, and put him to bed. Eugene and Daddy and the other three men laid Theo gently down on the table, which was situated to keep his face and shoulders in the shade while the rest of him was warmed by the sun, and then the men stepped back to give Mrs. Boykin room. Smears and streaks of white were left on their brown arms from where they had cradled Theo’s head or feet or white dirt-covered pants, as though they all suffered from the same ailment that had brought him low. Standing among them, only my daddy appeared to be afflicted with whiteness from head to toe. Eugene Boykin wore his face—which was battered and bloody, streaked pink and white with fear and anger—like a mask.
Mrs. Boykin was quiet as she bent to the task of washing Theo clean. Other colored ladies were standing by, helping her. They’d warmed up water from the pump by mixing it in a washtub with kettlefuls heated on the stove. One of the women handed Mrs. Boykin a pitcher filled from the tub. She took it, leaned over to kiss Theo’s forehead, and, wiping the white dirt from her mouth with the back of her hand, she tipped the pitcher and poured a stream of water over his forehead that ran down over his hair, just like she was baptizing him. Somebody handed her another pitcher, and this time, as she poured it, she smoothed her palm around his head. The white dirt ran in streams away from him, and his hair was dark again. The pitchers refilled again and again, she poured the cleansing water over his arms and chest and shoulders. She let it run over his face and neck, into his ears. From the porch, we could see his skin begin to shine through the white in dark streaks and patches. Then she took the cloth towel they handed her and carefully wiped his face and behind his ears and under his chin the way she would have washed him when he was a baby.
“He’s breathing,” I reminded my momma in a whisper. “He’ll be all right, won’t he?” She put one arm each around me and Ralphord. I hoped she wasn’t thinking about old Mrs. Brazel’s nephew, who fell out of a boat on O’Quinn’s pond when he was young. I’d heard the story many times. He was still breathing when they pulled him out, and he went on breathing for three days after that. Then he stopped.
Theo had been carried into the house when two little boys came running up the lane to report that the camel man was coming along the road. He was riding the white camel, they said. They had no other camels to report, but there was a sheriff’s car—Piedmont County—driving along behind the white camel, slow, slow, slow, with two white boys in the backseat.
We waited, but only Uncle Mack and Ivan arrived, coming up the lane at a weary pace, Ivan smiling sadly and Uncle Mack with his head bowed over the tall horn of the terik saddle. The Piedmont County sheriff had gone straight past the lane and carried the two boys in the backseat directly to jail in Claytonville. The boys were Arnie Lumpkin and my brother Force.
They made Uncle Mack tell his story over and over again. We saw him through the window of the deputy sheriff’s office, sitting in the same chair Miss Spivey sat in that time but looking weary, drawing his hand over his eyes sometimes, dropping his head into his hands. Listening to Uncle Mack, Linwood Perkins walked back and forth across the room. When the sheriff came back from Claytonville to hear the story, he perched himself on the edge of Linwood’s desk. The Piedmont County sheriff wanted to take Uncle Mack to jail in Claytonville, too, for his own safety, the sheriff said. Linwood Perkins wouldn’t stand for it, we heard. When the sheriff, unaccustomed to being argued with, raised his eyebrows, Linwood Perkins said, “The man needs to look after his animals.”
He still had two.
Uncle Mack said the truck that came along and surprised them on the logging road had to be someone who knew they were setting out this morning, and from where. The truck was a Model A Ford, like most every other truck in these parts, and Uncle Mack didn’t get much of a look at the boys in it, but whoever it was knew about camels and pigs.
“What about camels and pigs?” the Piedmont County sheriff asked.
Ivan V and Sabrina were circus camels, Uncle Mack explained wearily. They were accustomed to noise and surprises. It was Uncle Mack’s opinion that the camels would have stepped to the side of the old logging road and waited serenely, even disdainfully, for this thing to pass, in spite of the boys banging on the rickety wooden sides of the truck, if two or three of them hadn’t started up squealing and snorting and doing their best hog calls. That’s what sent Sabrina off down the slope toward the kaolin pit. Ivan did his share of dancing and trying to bolt, and it was all that Uncle Mack could do, snatching up the lead rope with both hands, to stop that camel before he got to where the soft white dirt would have swallowed his feet, too. From his bed of cargo on Ivan’s back, Ahmed gave a cry of alarm.
Eugene Boykin leaped to the other side of the logging road, away from the slough, and when the truck passed in a cacophony of squealing gears and hog calls and cussing and laughter, Eugene came scrambling back up to the roadbed.
“Be still!” Uncle Mack said, his voice at once so quiet and so urgent that both boys froze, Theo on Sabrina with his knees clenched and his weight forward, his hands wrapped around the saddle horn and his feet dangling above the white slough she was already mired in, and Eugene standing on the road, holding his arms out a little from his sides, almost like a tightrope walker, as if he were trying to disturb as little of the air as he could. There was some careful breathing and shifting of weight—even Ahmed kept still—and then Uncle Mack said, in a low voice, “Eugene, I got to send you back for help. Sabrina may get herself out of this, but if she can’t, we’ll need us something to pull her out.”
Eugene whispered, “A truck?”
“Could be,” Uncle Mack said softly.
The woods had already swallowed up the noise of the truck and its rowdy passengers, leaving only the shady rustling of leaves and the frustrated grunts of Sabrina, as she tested the depth of her troubles, accompanied by Uncle Mack’s calm and melodious voice.
“Could be a tractor or a wagon,” he told Eugene, “or mules. Whatever you can get here quick—but don’t forget to ask permission. Walk away, now—don’t run!—walk till you get far enough away that you can’t hear me at all, and then wait a little longer, count to ten, because camels hear better than people, and then run as fast as you can. All right? Go on, now.”
While Eugene hurried off, Uncle Mack kept talking, sometimes to Theo—“Y’all did a nice job arranging this cargo for Ahmed, he’s sitting like a prince up here”—but mostly to the camels. He gave a gentle tug downward on the lead rope that hung from Ivan’s bridle. Ivan folded his front legs to kneel, then lowered his hindquarters, and finally settled all the way down. Uncle Mack took hold of Ahmed as soon as he could reach him and lifted him to the ground. He tied a rope like a collar around the baby camel’s neck and looped the other end over a log too big for him to pull. He did all this in a minute, ninety seconds at the most, and kept talking the whole time, using some of the Arabic words that he believed all camels understood although he himself did not know what they meant. It wasn’t the meaning that mattered but the feeling they contained, and that was a feeling of home, of calm, of well-being and safety. He tried not to think about what might happen if the truck came back this way again.
Up on Sabrina, which put him three or four feet above the surface of the white slough, Theo sat as silent as a stone. He looked alarmed, nervous, but not terrified, not yet. He didn’t know about camels the size of Sabrina and what happened when their flat camel feet, so useful on the desert sands, got buried in mud or clay, or whatever this was that they had been forced into. Sabrina was in well up over her hind ankles and close to her knees in front, so the slough was a good two feet deep where she stood. How much of it was muck and how much was milky water, Uncle Mack couldn’t tell. If what held her feet down was thick enough, and if she kept on trying to lift the weight, he thought she might have only minutes before she broke a leg. On the road above them, Ahmed took a few restless steps, snorting and blowing, making his lips buzz, and Sabrina struggled again to get free.
“Uncle Mack!” Theo said.
Sabrina tossed her head back and made a noise like a deep roar. Uncle Mack tried singing a trill of notes to her. Her ears turned, yearning, and she stood still, but she had sunk a little deeper. Now he wished that he hadn’t sent Eugene away. The first thing—it was suddenly so clear—was to get Theo onto solid ground.
“Theo,” Uncle Mack said, “I’m thinking it might be easier for her to get out with you off her back. I’ll just put this rope around Ivan’s neck and we’ll move in a little closer to you. When I reach my arm out, you grab hold.”
“But Ivan will sink, too!”
“Shh, no, take a look. It’s solid here.” Uncle Mack shuffled forward and tapped his foot on the white ground at the edge of the slough. “All you got to do—” he began calmly, but then there was a sound like a strong wet branch breaking. It was a sickening sound, and it made Sabrina shudder and pitch like a boat, sideways, dropping Theo in the white soup. He landed on his feet, sank immediately to his knees.
“Uncle Mack!” Theo threw his arms around whatever he could reach of the camel. She was making an indescribable sound now, like a person with no breath to scream, screaming. Up on the road, Ahmed gave a real cry and then another and another, his mouth open wide, cries like a horn blasting.
“Now, you hold still right there, Theo!” Uncle Mack said. He had already pulled Ivan back. “Oosh!” he said, keeping his eye on the boy while he looped the rope around his own waist. Uncle Mack glanced down for an instant, to secure the knot, and when he looked up again, the scene before him was transformed. There was only, terribly, a camel struggling to hold her head out of the white slough, her body half submerged and heaving—only that and nothing else. Theo was gone.
For a moment Uncle Mack was paralyzed, stunned into stillness by this new configuration, unable to take it in, and then, after how many precious seconds lost, he slid heedlessly down the slope and threw himself over Sabrina. She screamed again, and up on the road Ahmed’s cries reached a new pitch of alarm. Begging her forgiveness, Uncle Mack slid over the bulk of her to the other side. His feet sank completely, over the ankles, in the muck. Opaque water reached his knees. He plunged his hands under the white surface and groped and found something he could close his fingers on and pull. He pulled, pulled, and nearly flew backwards when his right hand came up with a white-soaked piece of plaid shirt. He flung it away and plunged again. His hands filled with thicker stuff—the bib of Theo’s overalls—and this time when he pulled, the dark crown of Theo’s head appeared, murkily, right underneath and then breaking the white surface, but no farther. “Jesus Jesus Jesus Jesus God!” He understood. She had rolled into the boy. She had knocked him down and now she held him under. Uncle Mack tried to throw his body against the bulk of her without letting go of Theo’s overalls. Then he staggered up and pulled again—again, the dark crown, a finger’s-width of forehead above the surface—no more? No more? He pulled and sobbed and pulled until his shoulders seemed to leave their sockets, his elbows stretched apart, and in the instant his fingers seemed to lose their grip, there was the new sound of splashing. Sabrina’s body moved. It was a tiny movement, like a sharp intake of breath, but as Uncle Mack pulled again, Theo rose suddenly, white and limp, into his arms.
Eugene was halfway back to town when he saw a truck parked off the side of the logging road, nobody at the wheel. He made straight for it, and he knew in an instant, as the swarm of dirty white robes rose like maggots from the back, that he had made a mistake, that this was as far as he was going to get. Although he was such a tall and broad and muscular boy, a boy bigger than most men, he could not prevail against so many. Long minutes later, blindfolded and tied to a tree, he felt a cold splash on his neck and chest, and the sharp smell of alcohol burned his nostrils. An argument erupted about wasting good whiskey—and lumber, too, if the trees caught on. Eugene thought he recognized the voice that talked the others out of setting fire to him.
On solid ground, Uncle Mack wiped Theo’s mouth and nose. He listened. He pounded on Theo’s chest and listened. He opened Theo’s mouth and blew a breath into him. He rolled him over and pounded his back, rolled him back and blew another breath into him, listened, blew, pounded, listened. Somebody said, “He’s dead, ain’t he?”
“Who? Who said it?”
Perched on Linwood Perkins’s desk in the deputy sheriff’s office, the Piedmont County sheriff wanted to know: Who said it?
Uncle Mack couldn’t say. He didn’t know. He reckoned it was Eugene at the time.
“How could that be?” the sheriff asked. “Those boys had him tied to a tree, up the road a piece. It was somebody else come and helped you save that boy. Who?”
Uncle Mack didn’t know. He’d passed out himself, it looked like. Next thing he knew, he was lying on the solid ground. It took a minute for him to recognize the whitened hump at his feet—“Aw, my girl,” he breathed—and another to realize that the sound that woke him, very near at hand, was Theo, coughing.