The Outlaw Album: Stories

            The body fell within a shout, and surely those in the house must have heard something. Shouts, pleas, cries, or brute laughter carrying loudly on that summer night before the war, here in the town this was then, of lulled hearts and wincing spirits, a democratic mess of abashed citizenry hard to rouse toward anything but winked eyes and tut-tuts on “negro matters.” A Saturday in summer, the town square bunched with folks in for trading from the hills and hollers, hauling okra, tomatoes, chickens, goats, and alfalfa honey. Saturday crowds closed the streets around the square to traffic, and it became a huge veranda of massed amblers. Long hellos and nodded good-byes. Farmers in bib overalls with dirty seats, sporting dusted and crestfallen hats, raising pocket hankies already made stiff and angular with salt dried from sweat wiped during the hot wagon ride to town. In the shops and shade there were others, wearing creased town clothes, with the white hankies of gentlefolk folded to peak above breast pockets in a perfect suggestion of gentility and standing. The citizenry mingled—Howdy, Hello, Good gracious is that you? The hardware store was busy all day, and the bench seats outside became heavy with squatting men who spit brown splotches toward the gutter. Boys and girls hefted baskets of produce, ate penny candy, and screamed, begged nickels so they could catch the cowboy matinee at the Avenue Theater. Automobiles and trucks parked east of the square, wagons and mules rested north in the field below the stockyard pens. Toward evening the drinking and gambling men would gather to cheer or curse or wave weapons when local horses were raced on the flat, beaten track that circled the pens.

            It was a man named Blue who fell on a night that followed such a day, a man and a falling I knew only from whispers, and the whispering had it that Blue tended horses here and there and was the only jockey around who could get the very best from a spectacular dun gelding named Greenvoe.

            Mrs. E. H. Chambliss, in conversation outside Otto and Belle’s Barbecue, probably in June of 1976: “That horse had a grandeur like no man and few beasts. He’d fly if he wanted to go slow.”

            Mr. Todd Pilkington, smoking in the men’s room just before the funeral of a classmate he’d served beside at Anzio, spring 1984: “I’ve heard that horse mentioned—but wasn’t that from you? Askin’ me at some other funeral?”

            Mr. Edward H. Chambliss, during a phone call in winter of 1994: “That nigra Blue was the best rider and hand hereabouts in them days, and him’n your granddaddy trained that horse up together real well. Real well.”

            My father, as the whistling breaths from his oxygen tubes kept the cat scared, and after the dog had smelled the near future on his master and run into the woods, never to return, the week of his death, 1993: “Son, I heard the water pump squeakin’ in the yard late that night. That old pump, gushin’ water for quite a spell, so late, and voices.”

            Black families had been recruited in Oxford, Mississippi, and brought to town by Dr. Brumleigh in 1910. The doctor owned vast fruit orchards just east of town, several hundred acres, and brought fourteen complete families north to work them for him. A bare clutch of rudimentary houses were built for the families on a gullied slope out of view from the square in the still largely forsaken northeastern reaches of town. The orchard failed within a decade. The blacks remained in homes that were soon too small, unsnug, and uneven against the sky. New rooms were made of what was easily found—wood scraps from backyards and trash piles, sheets of crumpled metal blown free by storms, chicken wire, river stones, with foundation stumps of almost the right size tipping the floors slightly this way and that. There were no romantic entryways or cozy embellishments. Windows cracked at angles as the houses relaxed further into the dirt.

            Mr. Micah Kerr, beside Howl Creek, holding a cane pole while watching his bobber not bob, around 1969: “Them days, boy, furniture’d really start a-fallin’ of a Saturday night over on Nigger Hill, there. Somebody’d a-get to fussin’ with somebody else ’til furniture started flyin’ and a-fallin’, and that fussin’d go on and on ’til the makin’ up started, which was usually louder.”

            My oldest living relative, who had, with great single-mindedness, remarried in less than a year, at her spacious new home, late 1993: “Don’t write that. Why write that? There wasn’t any murder like that. Itnever happened. Never happened. And please listen good to me for once—they’re not all dead yet.”

            The horse was, in most versions of the story, a bangtail grown powerful from running the sand bottoms of the Jacks Fork. Sometimes the horse had been stolen out of Sallisaw by one of the Grieve brothers, or a sly stranger who gave a false name on sale day and promptly left town. The horse was always dun, a bitter gelding, with a crisp stride and endless stamina. A horse worth fighting over.