There Won't Be War

Since then, the family had branded maybe five hundred. There were men and women in Chicago, New York, St. Louis and Kansas City who bore the cicatrice of the Lewis family plantation. No matter where they went, if things turned around, Doc would send out his Night Hawks to round them up. Many of those branded hadn’t even been his workers. They’d been drifters, the homeless and directionless, passing through Mound City on their way to perdition. In other towns all across the south, they hanged those niggers. But his brand was known widely, so in a sense he was protecting them. He had worked this out long ago. Daddy was a man of vision, of foresight. Even those he’d branded couldn’t have foretold otherwise.

2. The Homestead

How Doc got his name was a mystery that went to the grave with his father. Daddy Lewis had been a young captain in the Confederacy and so naturally they’d all called him Captain out of respect. Doc wasn’t a medical practitioner, nor a vet, nor even a snake-oil salesman.

Somewhere before he turned ten, he got called Doc by the Captain and the name stuck. Maybe Daddy Lewis had had the percipience to know that his successor would need a nom de guerre to set him above the rest. Mystical power in names—a fact to which Doc could well attest.

He would happily have conjured something similar for Bubba, but that childish label had already malformed the boy’s behavior well past the threshold of manhood. In fact, in moments of reflection Doc wondered if Bubba had ever really crossed that threshold. His desire to take pride in his son’s actions had been endlessly frustrated, mostly by his wife, Sally.

Doc and she had two daughters as well: Debra and Psalmody. This latter name was the least likely thing Doc had ever heard, but the indomitable Sally had thought it a “beautiful, delicate, liquid word” and would not bend. Like the Captain, perhaps, she’d sensed something metaphysical about her child. At the same time, she couldn’t tell you where she’d heard or what exactly was meant by the word, although it obviously referred to the Psalms. The solid biblical link carried the day. Sally could work Doc like a pump handle back then. Even now she could get under his skin with three or four well-placed words. She ought to—she was his cousin, had known him since childhood. This might also have accounted for a good deal regarding Bubba. His given name was Ezekiel. Biblically, he resembled the wheel, maybe a small ark or the fish that ate Jonah. Nobody was looking for anything metaphysical from him.

Psalmody had revealed her uniqueness early. At five, she’d asked her daddy what radiography was. Dutifully, Doc had looked the word up in a book and still didn’t know to this day what it had told him. At six, Psalmody had wanted to know about positive rays, and at seven it had been genetics, but Doc had stopped researching by then. He didn’t know what a father was supposed to do who couldn’t offer his child the answers she sought. And, besides, he’d had a plantation to run.

It was 1925 now and Doc employed near eighty “workers.” Curly and Ed Rose watched over the work force, same as they did everything else for him. He couldn’t have imagined how he’d have gotten along without them.

Doc sensed that Curly had become enamored of Debra, his quieter daughter, his pale and delicate angel. Curly was a respectful young man, maybe a bit too fond of his sour mash but not so’s it interfered with his work. Doc hoped they would marry and take over the farm. As for Psalmody, it was Bubba who seemed to have designs on her. Just looking at her, he could break out in a lustful sweat. The boy was troubling in his unceasing obtuseness. How could the two girls be such smart and lovely pastries and Bubba such a lump of dough? Surely never before in the family’s long and proud history had there been so utterly beef-witted a child.

3. Intimations of Doom

The morning after the branding, Doc heaved himself out of bed, and went shuffling down the hall, scratching at his butt, toward the back stairs and the door leading to the outhouse. But, halfway down, he found his way blocked.