Yank was waiting for us behind a bush on the riverbank side of the road. Clatoo didn’t have to stop, just slow down, and old Yank hopped in the back of the truck. Yank was in his early seventies, but he still thought he was a cowboy. He used to break horses and mules thirty, forty years ago, and he still wore the same kinda clothes he wore back then. His straw hat was draped like a cowboy hat. Wore a faded red polka-dotted handkerchief, tied in a loose knot round his neck. His pants legs was stucked down in his rubber boots—not cowboy boots. Back, shoulders had been broke I don’t know how many times; made him walk leaning forward. Hands had been broke and rebroke; now he couldn’t shut them too tight, or open them too wide. But he still thought he was a cowboy. He spoke when he first got in the truck, but after that we didn’t do much talking. We was just feeling proud. I could see it on Yank’s face; I could feel it sitting next to Chimley and Mat. Proud as we could be.
A mile or so after we picked up Yank, we picked up Dirty Red at Talbot. Clatoo had to blow the horn twice before we saw Dirty Red shuffling from behind the house. He carried the old shotgun by the barrel, the stock almost touching the ground. He had a self-rolled cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. He had as much ashes hanging on the cigarette as the cigarette was long. Dirty Red wouldn’t take time to knock the ashes off a cigarette. Ashes fell off when it couldn’t hang on any longer. Dirty Red got in the truck and spoke to everybody.
“Hoa,” he said. We greeted him back. He looked at Chimley. “What’s happening there, Chimley?”
Chimley nodded. Dirty Red grinned at him.
Three or four miles after we picked up Dirty Red, Clatoo turned off the main highway, down a dirt road that separated Morgan and Marshall plantations. There was cane on both sides, Morgan on one side, Marshall on the other. The cane was so tall the blades hung over the ditches and over the road. After going a little ways so the people on the highway couldn’t see us, Clatoo stopped the truck and told us to get out. He had to go farther up the highway for another load. He told us to wait for them at the graveyard, and we would all walk up to Mathu’s house together. He thought that would look better than if we straggled in one or two at a time. He turned the truck around and headed back to the highway, and we started walking.
Jacob and Mat was in front, Chimley right behind them. Jacob had his gun over his shoulder, carrying it like a soldier. Mat had his tucked under his arm, barrel pointed toward the ground, like a hunter. Chimley had his under his arm, too, but he didn’t walk nearly as straight as Mat or Jacob. Just shuffling along, head down, like he was following their tracks in the dust. If they had made a quick stop, Chimley woulda butt into them, I’m sure. Me and Yank followed Chimley, with Dirty Red and Billy Washington behind us. Billy carried his gun over his shoulder, but carried it too loosely. More like he was carrying a stick of wood than a gun. Billy couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn if he stood two feet in front of it. Next to him, Dirty Red was nearly dragging his gun in the dust. I don’t know who looked worse, Dirty Red, Billy Washington, or Chimley. Neither one of them looked like he was ready for battle, that’s for sure.
We still had cane, tall and blue-green, on both sides of the road. Morgan on the left, Marshall on the right. But it wasn’t Marshall cane anymore. Beau Boutan was leasing the plantation from the Marshall family. Beau and his family had been leasing all the land the past twenty-five, thirty years. The very same land we had worked, our people had worked, our people’s people had worked since the time of slavery. Now Mr. Beau had it all. Or, I should say, he had it all up to about twelve o’clock that day.
After about half a mile, we turned right on another headland. You had cane here, too, but just on one side. On the left the cane had been cut and hauled away, and you could see all the way back to the swamps. It made me feel lonely. In my old age, specially in grinding, when I saw an empty cane field, it always made me feel lonely. The rows looked so naked and gray and lonely—like an old house where the people have moved from. Where good friends have moved from, leaving the house empty and bare, with nothing but ghosts now to keep it company.
I was still looking across the field when I heard the shot. I turned just in time to see a little rabbit bobbing across the empty rows. By the time I took aim, he was already down one of the middles, and all I could see was his little ears bobbing every now and then. I looked back at Billy and Dirty Red. Billy was just bringing the gun down from his shoulder. Me and Yank waited for him and Dirty Red to catch up.
“Missed him, huh, Billy?” I asked.
Billy didn’t answer. He wouldn’t even look at me or Yank. He was too ’shamed.
“I hope he don’t miss Fix like that,” Dirty Red teased Billy. Dirty Red had a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth, and he helt his head a little to the side to keep the smoke out his eyes. “Rabbit was so close I started to hit him in the head with the butt of my gun, but I wanted Billy to have him.”
“He was moving,” Billy said. He said it quietly. He wouldn’t look at us.
“After you stumbled over him, he started moving,” Dirty Red teased Billy.
Billy kept his head down.
“You’ll get another chance, Billy, you just wait,” I told him.
We started walking again. Me and Yank in front, and Billy and Dirty Red following us. Mat, Jacob, and Chimley had stopped for a second, and started walking again. Behind us, I could hear Dirty Red laughing. He would be quiet a second, then laugh again. I knowed he was still laughing at Billy. I hoped Billy missing that rabbit wasn’t a bad sign for the rest of that day.
Now, up ahead, I could see the pecan and oak trees in the graveyard at Marshall. You had a dozen trees spread out over the graveyard, and about that same number of headstones, maybe two or three more. But twenty-five, thirty years ago you didn’t have more than two or three headstones in there all total. Back there when I was growing up, people didn’t even mark the graves. Each family had a little plot, and everybody knowed where that little plot was. If it was a big family, then they had to have a little bit more, sometimes from the plot of a smaller family. But who cared? They had all come from the same place, they had mixed together when they was alive, so what’s the difference if they mixed together now? That old graveyard had been the burial ground for black folks ever since the time of slavery. I was seventy-four, and I had grandparents in there.
We squatted under a pecan tree just outside the graveyard fence. You had pecans on the ground all around you, and if you looked up you could see them hanging loose in the shells. The next good wind or rain was go’n bring them all down. It was a good year for pecans.
We hadn’t been there more than ten, maybe fifteen minutes when Jacob stood up and went inside the graveyard. I looked back over my shoulder, and I seen him pulling up weeds from Tessie’s grave. Tessie was his sister. She was one of them great big pretty mulatto gals who messed around with the white man and the black man. The white men wanted her all for themself, and they told her to stay away from the niggers. But she didn’t listen, and they killed her. Ran her through the quarters out into that St. Charles River—Mardi Gras Day, 1947.
But listen to this now. Her own people at the old Mulatto Place wouldn’t even take her body home. They was against her living here in the first place round the darker people. I’m not dark myself, I’m light as them, but I’m not French, not quality. Them, they’re quality, them; but they wouldn’t even take her body home. Buried her with the kind she had lived with. Maybe that’s why Jacob was here today, to make up for what he had done his sister over thirty years ago. After pulling up the weeds, he knelt down at the head of the grave and made the sign of the cross. Next thing you knowed, every last one of us was in there visiting our people’s graves.
You had to walk in grass knee-high to reach some of the graves. The people usually cleaned up the graveyard if they had to bury somebody, or for La Toussaint. But nobody had been buried there in a good while, and La Toussaint wasn’t for another month, so you had grass, weeds everywhere. Pecans and acorns—you could feel them under your feet, you could hear them crack when you stepped on them.
We went to our different little family plots. But we wasn’t too sure about all the graves. If they had been put there the last twenty, twenty-five years, yes, then we could tell for sure. But, say, if they had been put there forty, fifty years ago, it was no way we could tell if we was looking at the right grave for the right person. Most of the graves after a while had just shifted and mixed with all the others.
Dirty Red was a little bit farther away from the rest of us, more over into the corner. We had never mixed too well with his people. We thought they was too trifling, never doing anything for themself. Dirty Red was the last one. Maybe that’s why he was here today, to do something for all the others. But maybe that’s why we was all there, to do something for the others.
After I had knelt down and prayed over my own family plot, I wandered over to where Dirty Red was standing all by himself. He was eating a pecan and looking down at the weeds that covered the graves. Dirty Red hadn’t knelt down or pulled one weed from one grave. Some of the graves was all sunked in.
“My brother Gabe there,” Dirty Red said. I didn’t know for sure what spot he was looking at, because soon as he said it he cracked another pecan with his teeth. Not cracking couple of them together in his hand, but cracking them one at a time with his teeth. “My mon, Jude; my pa, François, right there,” he said. I still didn’t know for sure where he was looking. “Uncle Ned right in there—somewhere,” he said.
The whole place was all sunked in, and you had weeds everywhere, so I couldn’t tell for sure where Dirty Red was looking. I never looked at his eyes to see if they shifted from one spot to another. But, knowing Dirty Red, I figured they probably didn’t. That woulda been too much like work. Even to bat his eyes was too much work for Dirty Red.
“You got plenty of us in here,” I said, looking around the graveyard. I could see Mat, Chimley, Yank—all of them standing near their people’s graves. “This where you want them to bring you?” I asked Dirty Red.
“Might as well, if it’s still here,” he said.
“They getting rid of these old graveyards more and more,” I said. “These white folks coming up today don’t have no respect for the dead.”
Dirty Red cracked another pecan with his teeth.
“Graveyard pecan always taste good,” he said. “You tried any of them?”
“I’ll gather me up a few before we leave,” I said.
I looked out on the empty field on the other side of the fence. The cane rows came up to twenty or thirty feet of the graveyard. Beau had cut and hauled the cane away, and I could see all the way back to the swamps. Them long old lonely cane rows took me back back, I can tell you that.
“Him and Charlie had a chance to get some of it done,” I said to Dirty Red.
“He sure won’t be getting no more done,” Dirty Red said.
“What you think of all this, Dirty Red?” I asked him.
“Well, I look at it this way,” he said. “How many more years I got here on this old earth?”
That was all he had to say. He stopped right there. Just like Dirty Red not to finish something. That woulda taken too much of his strength, and him and his people believed in saving as much strength as they could.
“With that little time left, you thought you ought to do something worthwhile with your life?” I asked, trying to coax him on.
“Something like that,” he said. He ate another pecan.
“Your people will be proud of you, Dirty Red.”
“I reckon lot of them in here go’n be proud after this day is over,” he said. “Might have some of us joining them, too.”
“You think it might come to that?”
“That’s up to Fix,” he said. He looked at me and grinned. Then he looked past me and nodded. “Here come Clatoo and them.”
They came down the road, where the old railroad tracks used to be. Clatoo was in front, with his gun in one hand and a shoe box under his left arm. Bing and Ding Lejeune from the Two Indian Bayou was a step behind him. Both had on khakis and both had on straw hats, and you had to get right on them to tell who was who, and if you didn’t know Ding had the scar ’cross the left side of his face, you still couldn’t tell which one you was talking to. Clabber Hornsby, the albino from Jarreau, came behind Bing and Ding Lejeune, walking by himself. Clabber’s head and face from this distance was all one color—white white. What he had a gun for, only God knows. He couldn’t stop blinking long enough to sight, let alone kill somebody. Behind Clabber came Jean Pierre Ricord and Gable Rauand. Now, that was somebody, Gable, I never woulda expected to see. He very seldomed ever left home. To church, maybe, but that was about all. Behind him and Jean Pierre came Cedrick Tucker and Sidney Brooks. Cedrick’s brother Silas was the last black sharecropper on the place. He was buried here. Walking next to Cedrick was Sidney Brooks—we all called him Coot. Old Coot was in his World War I uniform. Even had on the cap, and the belt ’cross his shoulder. He carried his gun ’cross the other shoulder in a soldier’s manner. We left the graveyard to meet them. We met under the pecan tree, and couple of the fellows squatted down against the wire fence.
“Everybody shot?” Clatoo asked soon as he walked up.
“Billy shot at a rabbit on his foot and missed him,” Dirty Red said. Dirty Red was squatting by the fence.
Couple of the fellows laughed at Dirty Red.
“That rabbit was moving, Dirty Red,” Billy told him. “But you ain’t, and don’t forget it.”
The men laughed again. Not loud. Quiet. Thoughtful. More from nervousness than anything else.
“Save your fighting for later,” Clatoo told Billy Washington.
“Them ain’t shot, shoot,” he said. “She told us to bring empty shells.”
“What we suppose to do with them empties, throw them at Fix?” I asked Clatoo.
“You can ask her that when you get there,” Clatoo said. “Them ain’t shot yet, shoot up in them trees. Let them down there hear you.”
Five or six of us raised our guns and shot. A few pecans, a few acorns, some moss and leaves fell down on the sunked-in graves under the trees.
“Anybody got anything to say ’Fore we get started?” Clatoo asked. “Anybody feel like turning around? It can get a little hot out there today. Anybody?”
Nobody said they wanted to turn around.
“All right,” Clatoo said. “Let’s get moving. Heads up and backs straight. We going in like soldiers, not like tramps. All right?”
He started out first, gun in one hand, shoe box under his arm. Mat and Jacob followed, then the rest of us. Jean Pierre, Billy Washington, and Chimley was doing all they could to walk with their heads up and backs straight.