I was covered in dust and almost dead. I didn’t have a plan, and I’ve come to find out since then that not having a plan has led me to most of the trouble I’ve seen in my life. I picked a direction and went in it, that’s all. I rode the mule that Pa had named Mule, and Preacher David had renamed “Samson” because he thought it was funny, and I’d renamed Mule.
He took me South for a day when I saw what I found out later was Carson City. I saw that town and got so scared that someone would recognize me and take me back to Preacher David that I went a long way around it. I figured at that point I started heading west. I went a day through the scrub and the brush before I came on what I thought was a road, but it didn’t look heavily travelled.
We trudged, if Mules could trudge, down the road until I head hoof beats behind me. Again, I was terrified. I figured here was someone to take me back to Preacher David. I was a fool to think that I could escape. I was a fool to think I could be anything other than someone else’s toy.
I pulled Mule over to the side of the road and looked at my soon to be captor. He was a gruff looking fellow, with a few days beard over a wrinkled face. His eyes were closed to slits against the bright light of day. His hat was a dusty brown. Bits of red peeked through the tan dust that covered his shirt, and his chaps looked well worn.
He rode right past me and my heart left my throat and took up residence once again in my chest, right until he wheeled that horse around and looked right at me. Though, it felt more like he looked through me. I lowered my eyes, not meeting his, because I didn’t like the glint I saw in them.
“Hey!” he called out, his voice rough and parched. “Hey, little nigger. What’choo doin’ out here on the road all by yerself?”
He slowly brought his horse my way. “You alright, little nigger? You ain’t lost, is ya?”
“No sir,” I said, hearing the concern in his voice. Maybe this was a man I’d misjudged.
“Well, where you goin’ all alone?”
I didn’t know. I didn’t know and I wasn’t used to lying, so my mind raced to come up with a story.
“Look here, where’d you come from? You come from Carson?” He asked as he approached even closer on his horse, which I could see was not in the best shape. I could see her ribs under his saddle, which looked like it didn’t fit well.
I didn’t know where he meant, but I assumed (correctly) that it was the city I’d just passed. I looked over my shoulder and felt a blinding pain in the side of my face.
I fell right off of Mule and right onto the ground, my last breath taking in mouthful of dust. I stayed conscious long enough to see him hop off his horse and start going through my bag.
Blackness took me.
I saw Pa at that moment. Saw him look at me with sad eyes and say, “This is a nigger’s life. I told you the world would be out to get you, and here you are. It got you.”
My head swirled with visions, knowing death was coming for me, and I was happy. I knew when I died I’d be waiting for Preacher David in Hell when he got there. I would welcome him in and watch his suffering. Hell, maybe if I was the smartest of the damned, I’d figure a way for the Devil to give me a job.
But that didn’t happen. Instead, I woke up when a bucket of water was dumped on me. After getting my first few breaths I started sucking the water out of my clothes and licking it off my arms. I don’t know how long I was out, but the sun was hot, and it must have drawn out all my water and salt. It took me a while to realize someone had set another bucket next to me and when I did I started drinking out of that.
That first drink made my heart race and my head go funny. My eyes weren’t working right, so all I saw was a big, bright blur. It was like being woke out of a dead sleep, that couple of seconds when you adjust to being awake, except it seemed like it lasted hours.
I could hear some laughing, some talking, some arguing, and some sounds I was completely unfamiliar with. A loud buzzing noise, like a hive of angry wasps, if the wasps were four feet tall.
When my eyes finally adjusted, I saw I was on the back of a big old wagon loaded with goods. There was flour, salt, tubs of lard, cloth, boots, and all sorts of things. It was like someone walked into a mercantile and said, “I’ll take a little of everything.”
There was a surly looking fella staring at me. He had on a tall black hat which looked very fine, but it looked funny next to his dirty white shirt, which was held tight to a paunchy belly by suspenders that pulled up his too big pants. He was chewing on an unlit cigar like he was gonna eat it.
Next to him was a younger man, curly yellow hair under a cloth cap. He was dressed nicer than I ever seen a wagon driver dressed, and had a big, wide smile on him that could turn the clouds away. One strong arm supported him as he leaned on the wagon.
“What the fuck am I supposed to do with that?” said the surly man. “I didn’t order one, sure as hell ain’t gonna pay for one.”
“Found the little shit on the side of the road, half dead. Looked like someone took everything, left only a ratty old bible. Don’t know what came over me. I couldn’t just pass by, could I?”
That hit me, and I started to grope around and found that I had, indeed, been left only with the clothes on my back and Tom’s old bible. I guess thieves didn’t cotton to the good book.
The surly man grunted and looked at me, “You got any money?”
I shook my head.
“Well, how the fuck you reckon you’re gonna get out of my camp?”
I hadn’t found my voice, so I just shrugged. The surly man looked even surlier and started to ignore me, going back to his argument with the handsome man.
“Where’s Skeeter?” said the handsome man.
“Ran him out. Bastard was skimmin’. Why the fuck I would trust a man named Skeeter to not bleed me dry I won’t ever know.”
“Maybe because he was the only one ‘round here that had a brain for numbers? How’d you find out he was skimming?” The handsome man chuckled.
“You know that whore in VC? The one with the two teeth?”
“I know of her, but I don’t know her professionally.”
“Well I do. I keep hearing about the things she can do ‘cause she only got two teeth and figured I’d give it a shot myself. Well, she was askin’ all sorts of questions, where’d I work, why didn’t I look like a miner. Hell if I’m gonna tell her I run the operation. I know her fee’d go through the roof, so I just tells her I work here at the mill. Tell her I look after the flume. She gets all excited talking about how good we get paid. Says she’s got a skinny little regular with a long nose who cooks the books, and mentions he gets ten dollars a week. Funny that, since I only pay him five.”
The handsome man laughed, and the surly man got more sour. The handsome man’s smile slipped just a little, like Preacher David’s when he was going to change tack in a sermon. I lived in a church, I know how to tell when someone’s cooking up a lie.
“Well, this is all you asked for from the mercantile. If Skeeter ain’t here, you gonna settle up?”
The surly man had a pained expression on his face and said, “Yeah. What do I owe you?”
The handsome man pulled out a paper and showed it to the surly man. “Well, your bill was two hundred and three dollars, fifty eight-cents. The lumber you sent didn’t cover all of it.”
“We sent twenty unmilled logs, that’s what you asked for.”
The handsome man put on a look of concern and said, “Yeah, but they was only sellin’ for nine dollars, thirty-two cents apiece. That’s one sixty-six and forty. So you owe me another thirty-nine and eighteen.”
The surly man’s forehead crinkled like he was getting a headache, and his shoulders raised up and dropped down in defeat as he went into his back pocket to get his pocketbook.
I didn’t even know I said it. I surely didn’t hear myself say it, but they both did. The surly man looked at me and said, “Say that again?”
And even though I didn’t hear or know what I said the first time, I knew I said the same thing again. “One eighty-six and forty.”
The surly man’s eyebrows shot up and he said, “What’s that supposed to mean?” I was so tired, I didn’t really want to get in the middle of what they had going. I should have been thinking about how I was going to survive, or how I was going to make it out of what I realized now was a logging camp. I should have been thinking about anything other than talking back to two white men, especially as one just saved my life.
But that’s not what I do.
“Twenty logs, at nine dollars and thirty-two cents a piece is one hundred eighty-six and forty, not one hundred sixty-six and forty.”
The surly man suddenly looked a lot less surly, and the handsome man suddenly looked a lot less handsome.
“Also,” I said, because I never did know when to stop (and Preacher David wasn’t ever able to teach me). “Even if it was, one sixty-six and forty taken from two oh three fifty-eight is thirty seven and eighteen, not thirty-nine and eighteen.”
The surly man still looked confused, and the handsome man looked like he was ready to put his hands on my throat. “What are you saying?”
I sighed, which I think the surly man took as sass, but really I was just tired. “All told, you owe him seventeen dollars and eighteen cents.”
The surly man gave the handsome man, now an angry man, a look of poison. “What the fuck are you trying to do?” he demanded.
“You gonna trust this sun baked nigger with numbers like that? I’m no Skeeter, but I know my numbers are right.”
“Give me paper and I can show you the numbers,” I said. The Devil’s shadow crossed the angry man’s face, but the surly man pulled a piece of scrap out of his billfold and found a pencil so I could scratch out the numbers. My numbers worked, even though the angry man tried to trip me up a few times by telling me things were wrong. I proved it to the surly man and he turned to the angry man and damn near gave him what for.
“Look, like I said, I ain’t Skeeter. I ain’t trying to skim you, I was just wrong is all” he said, as the mill workers started to unload the wagon. The surly man paid the angry man with a piece of paper that he wrote some things on. It was the first time I’d seen something like that. I guess that’s the way business folk do business with each other. Regular folk just use cash.
I wasn’t so tired that I wasn’t aware of the stares from the mill workers. Don’t know if it was because I was new, or half dead, or because I smelled like something that should be dead, or if it was because I was the only black in a sea of white, light brown, and pink. The pink men, I’d find out later, were from places where the sun don’t shine so hard. Some of the men barely looked at me at all. Some were just curious. Some, though, looked at me with so much hate I thought I must have sprouted horns and a tail out in the desert.
The surly man, who I had named in my head rightly, was called Surly Bill, and he did indeed run the logging camp. Oh, he didn’t own it, but he had free run of it. After the angry man, who I heard was named Frankie, left. Surly Bill looked at me and said, “How’d you do that?”
“How’d I do what, sir?”
“The numbers. The costs. In your head like that?”
“I learned it, sir. Long time ago. Had a knack for it. I can do my additions and subtractions in my head, and I can do smaller multiplications and divisions in my head, and there ain’t a sum or a total I can’t figure if I got paper to figure it on.”
He chewed his cigar again and said, “I need someone can do that, but I can’t take you.”
“Why not?” I said, a little too loud because I was letting some hope fill my chest for the first time in a long, long time.
“Look,” he said, uncomfortably, “I got nothing against Negroes. I was on the right side of the war, you know. But some of these boys... well, they wore the grey.”
“War’s over, sir. Ain’t we all just folk now?”
Surly Bill smirked at that. It was strange how even a half smile could make someone go from looking fierce to looking kind. “War’s over. The hurt ain’t.”
“Well,” I said, taking my chance, “I reckon Skeeter was costin’ you forty dollars a month, and I just saved you over twenty. I won’t ask twenty a month or even ten. I’ll be happy with a roof to sleep under and enough to eat so I don’t go hungry.”
Surly Bill looked surly and sour again. “That’s slave wage. What’s the matter with you? You get used to being owned and wanna be owned again?”
That lit a fire in me. “I ain’t never been owned and never will.” I told him, a little too loud, and a little too hot for my own good. I noticed some of the workers were looking in my direction.
I figured I just blew my chance and was going to ask for food and water, and to be pointed in the direction where I could find work when Surly Bill said, “You obviously can’t bunk with the fellas, no telling what they’d do. You can’t eat with ‘em, neither, but I’ll make sure you get fed proper. And you’ll get paid.” He raised his hand to stop me objecting and said, “That ain’t no damned kindness, that’s to keep the government off my ass. Five dollars a month until I reckon you’re worth ten, and that’s what you’ll get.”
I spat in my hand and offered it to Surly Bill, as I’d seen my Pa do on occasion. Surly Bill spat in his and slapped it to mine, sealing the deal. Bill told me to follow him so I could get some clean clothes (all much too big for me at the time but I’d grow into them) and I took a long, hard look around what was probably going to be my new home.
That’s how I met Jim “Jimbo” Brown. He couldn’t take his eyes off me. He had an axe to a grindstone and he was showering the place in sparks. If I was a believer, I’d say it was an omen. But no, it was Jimbo being a dark hearted asshole. It isn’t hard to read people.
Jimbo looked at me with so much hate I could feel it in my stomach. The way he looked at me made me want to run and throw up at the same time. “That man,” I thought, “doesn’t need a reason to kill me. He needs an opportunity.”
Then I saw another boy who couldn’t take his eyes off me. He was carrying a large crosscut saw in from the forest. Gold hair and a natural smile, just a little bit of downy fuzz on his cheeks. He looked at me with kindness and, maybe, just a little bit of wonder. It made me feel strange. I knew he shouldn’t be looking at me like that, but it was nice not to be hated.
I had no idea what that look meant at the time. Now, of course, I know to avoid that look, because all it causes is heartache, pain, and sometimes, even death.