Horrible Harvest

We could only push the horses 20 miles ‘fore we needed to put up for the night. Tate and Douglas settled around a campfire and et. I stretched out on the ground and slept. It was the best damn sleep I’d ever had. Don’t know if it was the air, the starry sky, or the mission ahead, but something calmed my mind like it’d never been calmed before. That big ole’ sky above just wrapped me up like a blanket and brought peace down on me.

That was the next 10 days or so. We traveled 20 to 25 miles at a clip and then we’d put down for the night. I didn’t mind it. I’d spent my boyhood on a small farm run by a daddy so big and mean, I felt bunched up near every minute of the day. Rex was more crowded than any city I’d been to or read about. The war was packed with fellas scared and unhappy, and riding with the Bunning Brothers firm put me in company with gobs of swindlers and the swindled day in and day out. The wide-open ranges of the Dakotas kept me far from the thing I liked least in this world, people.

The conversation the three of us shared was mostly about old times. I think that’s when we all realized that the hell we’d all been through managed to give way to a laugh or two over the years. Not a lot, mind you, but we come across a chuckle or two in our lifetimes. What we all remembered as non-stop torture wasn’t so non-stop. We all managed to find a smile along the way. More would have been preferable, but the ones we was gifted did provide some of that tranquility folks is always going on about.

Of course, we three travelers had us our dark stories to tell, too. I fount out more about Douglas’s mother in those 10 days than I had the ten years I lived on Daddy’s rice farm. She was a kind woman handled hard by Daddy. He treated her like he treated Momma. He owned her mind, spirit, and womb. She’d miscarried six times in her life, and Daddy jumped right back on her each time to plant another baby in her. Her body eventually just give out, and she passed after her sixth miscarriage. Daddy was so mad, he refused to bury her. He just left her corpse lying in the bed. It was a week ‘fore he got so pass-out drunk, Douglas could drag his mother out the bed and bury her just off the trail leading to their little unpainted house. The next morning, Daddy was so mad at Douglas for burying his mother, he threatened to make Douglas just as dead as she was, but Douglas convinced him that Daddy was the one who’d buried her. He got blind drunk and interned the body himself – Pissed on her grave when he got done. This fact give Daddy satisfaction enough to believe Douglas’ claim. She’d gotten the proper send off.

Douglas felt like he’d betrayed his mother. He lied about burying her. He pretended he didn’t love her – That he never thought of her or shed a tear for her. Every day he would wake and work his mind around the truth – That she was his everything – His ally and savior – He would corral his thoughts of her into a pen in his mind and keep them there just so he could survive the waking-day with Daddy.

Over time, he’d notice that there was fewer and fewer thoughts of her. His memories of  her, they just faded away. He mourned the loss of them as much as her until one day, he fount nothing left to mourn. They was all gone.

“Took Gladys to bring me back to them,” he said. “The Church. God. You wanna know the truth of it – And I hope he’ll forgive me for saying so, but I don’t seek the Lord to know his grace – I seek it so I can know my mother again. I’d forgotten how much I miss her. A man like Daddy – He can rob you of light.”

“That he can,” I said.

“It ever occur to you two that you’re going after the wrong Devil?” Tate asked.

“You’re going at this thing with the wrong equation,” I said.

“How so?”

“It’s not all the devils in one trip. It’s one devil at a time. Daddy will get his.”

“You’re going after Daddy?”

“I am,” I said. “Soon as this trip is done, I’m going to hunt him down, and I don’t have plans to kill him, not right away. He’s going to know suffering. I will undo the man, bone by bone.”

Douglas hesitated ‘fore saying, “I’m going with you.”

I chuckled. “Gladys will kill us both.”

“That’s where you’re wrong. She won’t kill us. She’ll spit fire and grumble like a bear, but killing isn’t her thing. She’ll pray for us instead.”

“What’re you boys going to tell your momma?”

“That it’s over,” I said after giving consideration to his question.

“You think all this killing will put an end to – What is it you’re trying to end?”

“Same thing you’re here to end. The bitter in my bones give to me by Daddy and Mr. Miller. Mr. Stockton, too.”

“You think killing Mr. Miller is going to shut down the bitter in my bones?” He laughed. “Son, I got a system to strike down. I got laws and politicians to unravel – I got a so-called superior race to hold accountable for their inferior beliefs – And I don’t have enough bullets to get all that done. There’s no way I can take them down and deliver justice upon them. My whole entire existence, my every ounce of freedom is and will be spent being nothing but a hurdle they can’t overcome. They are going to have to work around me to rule me with their hatred, and they will never rule me because I’ll just plant my feet in a new spot and force them to work around me again. My only weapon is resilience, and it will outlast me because you crackers are filled with hatred eternal. My children and my children’s children will carry on my struggle and the struggle of every negro of my generation. I hope a day will come when the system comes undone and is rebuilt in real equality, but it’s not going to happen in my lifetime or the next. Its roots are too deep. I’ve accepted my lot – My purpose. My success will be measured by the minutes I survive the injustice by which the system uses to keep me yoked to struggles and lack of opportunity. My race makes me a criminal for practicing choice. Killing Mr. Miller won’t make my life easier. That’s the difference between being black and white. You can see the top of the ladder you have to climb. I can’t even see the next damn rung.”

“Then why are you here? With us?”

“Because,” he said, “killing Mr. Miller, that’ll just plain make my heart sing.”

“I know where he is,” Douglas said, as if he didn’t know Tate was even speaking.

“Who?”

“Daddy.”

I stared at him in silence for a good long while. I wanted to know where, but at the same time, I didn’t want to know neither. Time would move too damn slow if’n I knew where to find Daddy, but curiosity got the better of me, and I asked, “Where?”

“Maryland. Baltimore. Crazy house – Asylum. Rumor is he took to the opium trade – Got himself hooked on it. He injects it, they say. With a doctor’s needle – Like for inoculations. Scrambled his mind, it did.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Who told you to say that?”

“Say what?”

“Did Bobby get to you? Did he fill your head with fucking lies?”

“I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

Tate and Douglas both looked to me. They was confused all to hell by the panic in my voice.

I was about to launch into a full-throated denial of taking up a habit neither’d accused me of taking up when an odor wafted in on a burst of wind. It captured the attention of us all. It was strong – sewage mixed with stale sweat.