Horrible Harvest

Two day later they fount the round, stink-of-horse-piss sheriff – All the way dead. Daddy’d choked him with his shackle chain. Rex was put on high alert. Most everybody that didn’t know him expected him to come back and get payback for his life getting turnt to shit, but Me, Momma, and Charles knew him better than that. His life was shit before, Didn’t much change just ‘cause he lost an eye and rice farm. He’d been done with farming long ago. He just didn’t have the jimmies to cut loose from it. The eye he’d miss. His family and bust-ass labor, not for a second.

Took near three weeks for things to calm down at the kingdom of Rex. Word come, Daddy’d been spotted all the way in the Upstate somewheres. He was headed for the mountains to recover and rethink. It was about that time Douglas was dragged onto the property, wearing his own set of shackles.

He was thrown in the stables, chained at the neck, looked after by the advance man. He was give food once a day – Disciplined a half-dozen times. He was give lashes for near everything – Talking back, talking an inch or two sideways, talking out of turn, most his talking brought him the lash now that I think about it. He had him a mouth on him. All us Tennyson boys did, but his mouth come with debt attached. Mr. Miller paid off Douglas’s debt to save him stripes, and for that, he was expected to live in service to the plantation ‘til it was paid back. That didn’t set right with my brother by half. He’d rather the whip. Suited him.

It was two weeks with him on the property ‘fore I was allowed to see him. By then, we Miller Men were five students strong. The schoolhouse was built and the dormitory was just about done. We was dressed in powder-blue, wool, itchy-as-shit uniforms. And I was sent, looking like an asshole, to deliver Douglas his daily stew.

When I entered the stall where he was kept chained at the wall, I barely thought it was him. His hair was longer by half a foot, it seemed, and he’d shed so much weight, I could near see the wrinkles in his brain under the skin across his forehead.

He took one look at me in my sissy-blue uniform and said, “You soft now, boy? Rich man buy you up like you’re some kind of nigger? Your momma giving it to him? That whore going heels up for Mr. Miller?”

“Kenneth says his daddy bought you.”

“Kenneth?” He give a laugh. “That the rich man’s little girl? She go by Kenneth, does she?”

“No. I mean. She ain’t a girl. He ain’t.”

He give a bigger laugh. “You don’t know what you mean, boy. You sweet on that little girl?”

“No. He’s a boy. We’re friends.”

“You a sodomite, little brother? You stickin’ it to sweet little Kenneth?”

“No.”

“That ain’t what Charles says. Says he catches you and the fat princess sharing googly eyes with one another all the time.”

“He’s a lie.”

He spooned up a mouthful of stew. “Rich man didn’t buy me. Paid my debt. Don’t mean he owns me.”

“One’s the same as the other.”

“Stop your sass, boy.” He shoveled the stew down his gullet.

“Leg healed?”

“Mostly. Gives me an ache now and again. Nearly lost it. Would’ve if them state guard fellas didn’t haul me off. Daddy weren’t gonna do nothing about it.” More stew. “He still alive?”

“Daddy?” I give a shrug.

“Last I heard he was to go before a judge. Mr. Stockton won’t give up nothing on him. I figured he was hung for Galtville.”

“He didn’t get hung. Mr. Miller’s lawyers got him freed.”

“Let me guess, then Mr. Miller locked him up. Same as me.”

“Went through a bout of this and that before it come to that, but yeah. That’s basically what happened.”

He give a shake of his head. “That’s what rich men do, little brother. They buy up what they can’t pin down. So, daddy ain’t here?”

“No.”

“And you don’t know if he’s alive or dead?”

“I don’t. Sheriff come to take him back to Charleston.”

“What fer?”

“On account daddy robbed a whore house and killed a stable manager on King Street.”

A laugh come. “Well, if that ain’t the least surprising news I’ve ever heard. So, he’s back in the jail in Charleston?”

“Nah. He killed the sheriff in their travels.”

Another laugh let loose. “Even less surprising. When?”

“Couple three-five weeks back now.”

“Then he ain’t dead.”

“Could be. He’s down to one eye, and he was in sorry shape when he left here.”

“One eye? What happened?”

“Momma. She happened.”

Douglas give pause. “That ain’t that surprising neither. I ain’t got much use for that momma of yours, but she’s got gumption. I’ll give her that. I know’d her a lot of years, and I seen the turn in her over that time. She ain’t like my ma’ in the least. Only had so many beatings she was gonna take before the spring inside of her sprung. I s’pose daddy’s lucky all he lost was an eye.”

He sopped up some stew with the bread and jammed it in his mouth. “What of the farm?”

I give a shrug. “Can’t say. Got hit by a hurricane. We got brought here straight after.”

“Harvest?”

“Lost in the storm.”

“How you and Charles spend your days here? They got you doing housework? In the fields? Shining fat Kenneth’s tiny pecker?”

“Schooling.”

“Schooling?”

“Mr. Miller built a school. Momma’s has us deep in books. She’s the teacher.”

Douglas give a mulling to this news. “That don’t add up.”

“We do army drills and such after class. Mr. Miller, he runs us through them. But he’s employed a real life general to take over on account Mr. Miller has business travels out to Kansas and other here and there’s to conduct.”

“Drills? Just the three of you?”

“Nah, a couple of other boys’re joining in, and Mr. Miller, he says more boys are coming. He’s got associates and such shipping their young’uns this way. Miller men, they call us.”

A laugh.

“What’s so funny?”

“You.”

“What about me?”

“You grow’d a good inch since the last I saw you, but you’re about as far from a man as I’ve ever seen. Don’t know what your Mr. Miller is up to, but he’s got plans for you boys that I guarantee you ain’t gonna like.”

“Never cared for the plans daddy had for us, so I ain’t no worse off. Better, you wanna know the truth of it. I ain’t busting my ass in no rice paddies here. I set in a classroom studying books and practicing soldiering after that. I’ll take that any day over how I used to spend my days.”

“I’ll give you that, I suppose. Still, don’t get too comfortable. Mr. Miller, he sees you as a cracker and nothing more. He’ll squeeze what he needs out you, and then kick you aside. I can promise you that.”

“What about you?”

“What about me?”

“How do you spend your days with Mr. Stockton?”

“Ain’t gearing me up to be no Miller man, I can tell you that.”

“What’s that mean?”

“Means they’s got ideas I’m to direct their livestock. Slaving. Foremen work and the like.”

A booming voice come from the stall door. “Where you supposed to be, Augustus Tennyson?” The advance man stepped inside and took up more space than the Tennyson boys combined.

“Here, sir. It’s my day to bring Douglas food.”

“Looks like the food’s been delivered.”

“It has, sir. Yes, sir.”

“Then your part is done. My guess is Mrs. Tennyson is ready to resume your studies for the day.”

I took a step back from Douglas. “I reckon you’re right about that.”

A beat passed. “How am I to be addressed?”

I give consideration to the question and then corrected my mistake. “Sir?”

“Is that a question?”

“No. I mean to say, you are to be addressed as sir. Sir.”

“Better. Now get.”

I turnt, scrambled out the stall, and slow run to the schoolhouse. The smell of manure chased after me, but the air had a crisp, sweet taste to it. Slaves was on the roofs of one building and then the next, making repairs, scrambling up ladders, hauling buckets of nails –shingles. Foremen set in watch over it all – rifles cradled in their arms. Keeping watch. Making menace.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was being trained up to be the same. Menace.