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  School could beat down hard on my brain, but cane milling sure didn’t. There weren’t no thought to it. Only sweat and noise. The faces of the other workers never cracked out a grin. The colored man who worked beside me didn’t tell his name.

  It was like he weren’t even proud enough to share it.

  Chapter 18

  “Fire!”

  I’d been too tired to eat supper or help cook much for Papa. Afterward, I’d sunk down on my bed tick, too wore out to even breathe. The yelling work me up.

  The voice hollered out again. “Fire! Over to Jailtown!” As I run to the door, I seed old Mr. Witt, one of the pickers, waving his arms and pointing toward town.

  Seeing as I hadn’t even skin off my clothes before lying down, I run out the door. Huff Cooter was there too, so we rabbit toward town like the road was burning under our bare feet. Ahead of us, orange flames licked upward into the night, spitting sparks like tiny red stars into a black sky.

  Huff said, “Looks like it’s Mrs. Stout’s place.”

  But it weren’t.

  As we ran in closer, people were scurrying up and down the street, toting buckets of water. Ever mouth seemed to be yelling an order. Working in close to the fire, I feeled the heat of it slapping my face and eyes.

  “It’s the empty store,” I said. “It ain’t Mrs. Stout’s place. Our school’s burning.”

  A few folks throwed water on the flames, which didn’t do more than just hiss out laughter. The fire’d took a real start, so not much short of a hurricane was going to wash it out. People filled their buckets at the mule troughs and then started wetting down Mrs. Stout’s store, so’s the flames wouldn’t jump over and spread.

  Brother Smith come.

  He just stood in the night, with orange light painted on his black face, and shook his head. His big hands tightened into fists the size of twin hammers.

  “It ain’t right,” Brother mumbled, his voice almost buried in the sharp crackles of the fire. He shook his gray head.

  Some of the town women stood nearby, all in bathrobes. I knowed what a bathrobe was, because Mrs. Addie Cooter wore hers every Sunday, all day. She called it her yeller robe, though it sure weren’t yeller no longer, but near to egg white, blotchy all over the front with coffee stains.

  Miss Hoe come too, in her bathrobe. It was deep blue with a shiny braided belt pulled tight, ending in front with a knot and two hanging tassels of fringe. I didn’t know her right off, on account her hair was different. She usual wore it up and wound in a bun, held by long amber pins, but now it was all tumbled down her back and most of it a tired gray.

  I run over to take her hand.

  “Don’t you worry none, Miss Hoe,” I telled her. “This ain’t the end of our school. It’s only the end of a building. That ol’ store ain’t our school. You are.”

  Maybe, I was thinking, my chances for school were burning up too. But at least some of the Cooters might have a shot at learning. It pleased me to figure that maybe a few of us picker kids might make it out of Jailtown. Didn’t look too sunny for Huff, me, or Essie May.

  “Arly,” she said softly, “do you know what you have become in my life.”

  “No’m,” I said, “I don’t guess I do.”

  “You,” she said, “are my rock … upon which I will somehow rebuild my school. And don’t you fret about missing today. Essie May reported it all to me, about you and her brother, and there are still a few laws in Florida, if matters come to that.”

  I didn’t understand all she was telling me. Hardly any. Yet the pitch of her voice seemed to say that the sun would come up on Jailtown, like always.

  “Miss Hoe, I sometimes get to wishing that all this town would burn up, or just sink into Okeechobee and drown. Me along with it.”

  She looked at me stern. “No,” she said, “don’t you waste your brain on sour prayers. The world’s too sweet for that, Arly, and so are you. Energy your thinking on school.”

  “I can’t come regular no more. Huff and me are standby workers. If’n we git ordered, we go work.”

  Miss Hoe pointed a finger in my face, a finger that looked brittler than a custard twig. Yet it was straighter than a tiny sword. “Wrong! You are coming to school, even if we don’t at the moment have one, and you are going to learn … to read, to count, and to think. You will attend school even if I have to march myself through the swamp in hip boots and drag you out of Captain Tant’s cane mill by one ear and the seat of your britches.”

  I tried to smile about as game as possible. Miss Hoe was staring at the burning store just as its roof rafters caved in and sent another blast of sparky cinders out into a cloud.

  “There it go,” said Huff, who’d drifted over our way, to stand with our teacher and me.

  “Somebody,” said Miss Hoe, “didn’t approve of our little school. And some hand struck a torch to it.”

  I looked at her with my mouth open. “You mean a body done this on purpose, to be mean?”

  Miss Hoe nodded her small head. “Yes, to be mean. You know, boys, burning down a school house, no matter how humble the structure, is one of the lowest acts that an adult can commit against a child. Or to his town.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Huff said. “I just can’t swaller that anybody’d do such to my brothers and sisters and to Brother Smith.”

  Miss Hoe’s lips tighted up firm. “We’ll need a modest parcel of land. Not much. Only a wee scrap of it. And perhaps with luck, we might get someone who’s handy with tools to raise us a structure.”

  She looked over at Brother Smith, then walked to where he stood. As we come close, he took off his hat. His face looked older tonight, and I could see that our burning school had scorched his spirit near to as black as the rest of him.

  “Missy Hoe,” his deep voice said, “I be powerful sorry ’bout the store place, and no more school. Powerful sorry.”

  Our teacher grunted. “Well,” she said, “seeing as you’re feeling so powerful, maybe you’d work up the strength to build us another.”

  With a log of a finger, Brother Smith pointed into his own massive chest. “Me?” he asked Miss Hoe.

  “You. Could you do it? I don’t plan to engage your talents for free, Brother Smith, and you shall be fairly compensated.”

  “I be what?”

  “Paid.”

  A big grin slowly got born on Brother Smith’s face and spread all over his cheeks like a Sunday sleep-late morning. “Oh,” he said, “I do it, Sister. Do it proud, for free.”

  Huff jabbed me to my ribs, giggling, on account of Miss Binnie Hoe and Brother Smith looked like brother and sister about as much as a bug and a beef bull.

  “Good,” said our teacher. “The question still lingering is where? We’ll have to be cocksure of our ground.”

  Huff scratched himself. “What’s that mean, Miss Hoe?

  “It means we can’t squat. So if we can muster up ourselves a plot of land, we’re in business, as soon as we can beg or borrow the lumber.”

  We turned away from the burning store, heading home with Miss Binnie Hoe, back toward Mrs. Newell’s.

  Huff said, “There’s a lumber yard in Jailtown.”

  Miss Hoe let out a snort. “I certainly do not need to inquire as to its ownership, do I?”

  “Captain Tant,” I said without a think.

  But that was when Brother Smith shook his head. “Ain’t so,” his big voice rumbled. “I heard it told, for sure, that he don’t own lumber no longer. Something to do with taxes.”

  “Who owns it then?” asked our teacher.

  Brother smiled. “Miss Liddy do.”

  Chapter 19

  There was no school.

  But there sure was a ample of work. Every morning, right after Addie Cooter would whoa the picker wagon to pick up Papa and the rest of the fielders, Huff and me’d git sent to the sugar mill.

  Sunday final come. My daddy slept late, like usual, and so did I. Then I got up, washed, ate, and did me some quiet thinking b
y the shoreline of the Lake. From across the inlet, near where a dead river knifed back into the thickety green of the gourd vine swamp, I could hear the Sunday morning voice of Brother Smith, humming an old hymn. And I could see him on his pier, a big black catfisherman dotting a pale blue Okeechobee.

  Nearby, the water was clearing.

  Usual did on Sunday, because during the other days of the work week, the dredger crews stir it into murky mud. Ever since I could remember, the dredgers and their big smokey machines work around Jailtown, trying to unclog an old canal or trench out a new one. Yet old Okeechobee just roll over in the night, and then, come the next morning or the next week, she ooze her way back to normal.

  Okeechobee country, I was thinking, weren’t too far from being a fat woman sleeping with bedbugs. Us people were the bugs. She was the lake. Folks, even like the big dredgers, could bite her … yet we’d never poke her awake to change.

  “I love Sunday,” I said to our lake.

  Jailtown turned hushy on a Sunday morning. Like the band of Saturday night quit thundering its tune. Even the Lucky Leg was asleep, as if tuckered out from the night before. I s’pose Sunday morning was a sad time for a lot of the workers in Jailtown, because Saturday night wages had a way of jumping out of your pocket by Sunday morn. So people claimed.

  Not far away, the giant pink leg stood very still over Miss Angel Free’s place of business, like it had never danced at all. The big leg looked too tired to tap a toe.

  For some reason, I liked to spend a hunk of Sunday morning all by my lonesome. I wasn’t praying, but my thoughts were neighborly close.

  I sat there on a cotton bale for a long time, just being a speck of Sunday.

  Then I jumped into the water to half-swim and half-wade my way over to Brother Smith’s. He fed me a hot white hunk of steamy catfish and boiled swamp cabbage. The two of us, me an’ Brother, ate like we was never going to stuff our guts again. Or like Captain Tant was fixing to pass a rule to forbid chewing.

  “Good morning, gentlemen.”

  Seeing the grin on Brother’s face, I turned around, even though I already knew the voice of Miss Binnie Hoe. She sure was suited up for Sunday. Her dress was a deep blue, darker than a thunder sky, with lace at the collar and cuffs. The lace was creamy, not white. On her head perched a hat, yet there weren’t no bird on it, and no feathers either. To me, her hat looked as if’n it was turned out of mule stable straw. On top, the hat-maker had poked in a few fake flowers that were red, white, and blue.

  “You look righteous nice, Miss Hoe.”

  “Thank you, Arly. Such a sincere compliment is always a welcome.”

  Brother nodded, as if to say how proper she looked. As soon as he’d saw Miss Hoe coming our way, his hat got yanked off his head by a hurry hand. It pleasure me to notice.

  “This morning,” Miss Hoe said, “I took myself a walk around Jailtown and inspected the lumberyard.”

  “Good,” I said, knowing that Miss Binnie Hoe was laying a plan in her head to put up a possible new school. She sure had gumption.

  “And,” she went on to say, “right now, if the two of you will come along as my escorts, we are going to take a stroll together.”

  “Where to?” I asked her.

  “Trust me,” she telled us. “But please come. I’ll need both of you to hold me up if my knees decide to jack.” Behind her glasses, her eyes looked bluer and sharper than I’d ever earlier took notice of; our little teacher sported eyes like a pair of Okeechobees. “Let’s be off,” she said.

  Brother didn’t ask her where we was going, so I had me a hunch that he already knew. Miss Hoe knew too. Which left only dumb ol’ Arly Poole who couldn’t reason enough to dump a pebble out a lame boot.

  “Miss Hoe, where we be off to?”

  “You shall very soon see,” she answered me. “As for now, I want you to munch on the mystery. Milk it for all it’s worth.”

  “Sure,” I said, knotting up my face. I walked along, milking away, yet coming to no clear reasoning. Miss Hoe could be worse than a dredge when it come to riling my brain water into a muddy swamp.

  As the three of us marched along in the Sunday afternoon, we must’ve looked like a strange crew.

  For one thing, I wasn’t wearing no shirt; only trousers that were still soaked wet from wading. Plus, when I’d kicked through the road dust, going to Brother’s, my wet toes had gleaned up enough dirt to make my bare feet appear as if I was into earthen stockings. It was sort of fun, on account I’d never owned even one pair of stockings in all my entire life.

  Brother Smith was also barefoot. Yet, at least, he was shirted and not bareback, like me. His shirt and trousers was a pale gray, sort of like two big clouds that could pillow around his big body. Miss Hoe’d ordered him to put his hat back on his head so’s he wouldn’t have to squint. So he final done it.

  Whenever I’d seen Brother walking home with Miss Hoe, he’d always take care to walk behind her, on account it just wouldn’t look proper for a colored man to walk beside a white lady. Papa usual telled me that if’n you be colored or a picker, best we know our place. Still and all, I feeled sort of belonging when I’d walk with Miss Hoe. In the rear, I knowed that Brother did too, like he was her watchdog.

  I believe Brother Smith would carry Miss Binnie around in her porch rocker chair, wicker and all, if’n she’d asked it of him. He’d follow her, I was thinking to myself, all the way down to Hell or up to Heaven. I’d seen Brother lift up a kitten one time, hold it in the light palm of his giant hand, then touch its head, flower gentle, with the light-colored tip of one of his thick fingers. And that was also how my mind pictured the way Brother’d tote around Miss Hoe, as if she was a parcel too precious to drop to busting.

  So the three of us must have more’n looked a mite strange to the rest of Jailtown. Not just to my eyes. As we walked through town, people turned to look at us, even from up on their porches where they’d sat in the shade.

  Someday, I was thinking, I’d sure cotton to live myself in a house that sported a step-up porch on its front. Whenever my daddy talked, or dreamed, about his quit-work day, he always promised himself that he’d “ease back on the porch of poverty and salt away worry.” That was smack how he’d said it, righteous oft.

  Papa spoke about shade like it was Heaven.

  As we went walking through Jailtown, I still had no notion as to where we were headed. Miss Hoe led the way. Me and Brother Smith trailed a step behind, the two of us walking hip to hip. There sure wasn’t one eye that miss us. They all stare.

  Soon as we turn the next corner, I knowed.

  Ahead was the big white house, the one that people in Jailtown sometime called the Gingerbread Castle. Maybe because the house looked like it got carpented with boards of sugar and roofed with brown molasses cookies. I’d eaten one once.

  Brother Smith stopped. “We best go no further, Missy,” he warned our teacher. “We go back.”

  I said, “We can’t go to Captain’s house.”

  Chapter 20

  Brother Smith and I waited.

  We couldn’t believe seeing Miss Hoe actual do it; trot up on the big porch, ring the bell, and then parade by that big wooden door when it opened. Miss Hoe said something and then went inside. Just looking at Captain’s house made me back up a step. Both my lungs held back breathing until Miss Hoe come out again. She wasn’t inside Captain Tant’s too ample a time.

  Out she come, and along beside her was Miss Liddy Tant, looking frail, like she snap easier than a dry twig. Miss Hoe walked down the steps and Miss Liddy come too. She waved a thin salute to Brother Smith and to me. I couldn’t make my feet move, though I’d wanted to run away. The two ladies come closer and closer, so near that I could inhale Miss Liddy Tant. She smelled of lilac.

  “Good morning,” Miss Liddy said in her fluttery voice.

  As Brother Smith yanked off his hat, I wanted to hide behind it. Looking down at my ankles, I near to bended down to clean myself.

  “We hav
e good news,” said Miss Liddy. “You will have land and lumber, at no charge. Not a penny. And if Brother Smith can construct it, you shall have a new school.” Smiling, she turned to our teacher. “And it shall be away from Mrs. Stout.”

  Brother did a little dance. But I still didn’t dare to do much more than breathe, without a sound.

  “It’s about time,” Miss Liddy said, “that Jailtown turns into a more fitting monument to our family. A school itself cannot do this. Yet it shall be our start.”

  Miss Hoe nodded a firm nod. Then she snapped at me sudden.

  “Arly Poole, the least you could do is quit staring down at your filthy feet, and say a thank-you to Miss Tant.”

  My throat choked. All it could do was swallow, and when my mouth final opened, not a word come out. So I tried a grin, and it made Miss Liddy Tant smile too.

  “I was shy at that age,” Miss Tant said. “And perhaps I shall never become socially at ease. But I intend to attend our business, and try to fill the Captain’s shoes.”

  Miss Hoe thanked her once again, and turned away. Brother Smith and I tagged along behind her. As we got close to Newell’s Boarding House, she stopped, turned, and fired us both a pleased grin.

  “Tomorrow morn,” Miss Hoe said, “lumber shall arrive by mule and wagon at your dock, Brother Smith. I’ll be there. And I want you there too, Arly.”

  “Yes’m.” I said. “But why can’t we start today?” Brother poked me with his big finger. “Arly, it be Sunday. The lumberyard place be still resting.”

  Miss Hoe nodded. “Allow me to suggest, by chance, if either of you chance to meet Miss Liddy, that you thank her properly for donating our lumber.”

  “Maybe,” I said, “she done it because her pa order our school burnt.”

  Miss Hoe shook her head. “No, he didn’t. Miss Liddy told me, and neither of you are to repeat a word of this, that Captain Tant is quite ill. Perhaps this explains why his daughter is making her own decisions. Genesis Tant may be dying sooner than his town.”