Jordan County Read online

  The sun was past the overhead. Pauly rose abruptly and went to the old man’s bench. From closer he saw that he was poor as well as old. His shoes were broken and there were holes in the ankles of his cotton socks. The cuffs of his shirt were badly frayed, as was the collar, and where the button was missing the points bunched forward, overlapping the knot of his tie, which had been tied and re-tied so often in the same place that the knot looked as tight and hard as a little piece of gravel. His coat, loose-fitting and almost as rumpled as Pauly’s own, gave him a scarecrow aspect. When he turned his head Pauly saw that the pain was old, like the rest of him; he had lived with it for years. “How do,” he said.

  “Hello. Could I sit down and talk?”

  “All right.”

  Pauly sat beside him on the bench, and again that stiff-lipped expression came onto his face. “Ive been trying to figure,” he said. He paused and the old man watched him, unsurprised. “I came back from the war and all, back here where I was born and raised, and people dont even know me on the street. I see things all around me and it tears me up inside. A letter on the sidewalk, say, from a teen-age girl reaching out for love and already knowing she wont find it … Sad things, terrible things happen to people! Do you realize that right this minute there are people all over the world crying, weeping, lying awake in their beds at night, smoking cigarettes till their gums are sore, and looking up at the ceiling like they thought theyd find the answer written there? Kicked in the teeth, insulted, full of misery the way a glass can get so full it bulges at the brim with surface tension — what does it mean? What does it mean? It’s got to mean something, all that suffering.”

  “It’s just people, the way they are,” the old man said. For a moment he was quiet. Then he added: “They got away from God.”

  “God? Whats God got to do with it? What does He care?”

  “Maybe they just werent meant to be happy, then.”

  “No! Thats not true!” Pauly jerked his hands as he spoke, clenching and unclenching his fists. “I want to live in the world but I dont understand, and until I can understand I cant live. Why wont people be happy? Not cant: wont.”

  “I dont know,” the old man said. He looked away, across the park. “Ive been here going on eighty-seven years and I dont know. My wife died of a cancer until finally all that was left was teeth and eyes and yelling, like some animal. I asked myself all those things: ‘What does it mean? What does it mean?’ Then she died. She’d been a beautiful woman in her day, and she wound up like a run-over cat. I asked myself, again and again: ‘What does it mean? What does it mean?’ And you know, I finally found the answer; one answer, anyhow. It dont mean a thing. Nothing. Why should it mean anything? I stopped thinking about it is what I finally did. It’s what you better do, too. Dont think about it. Theyll lock you up, you keep at it too long. They wanted to lock me up, down at Whitfield, but I quit thinking about it and they let me alone. Now they say I’m harmless. And I am.”

  The stiff-lipped expression had turned to horror; Pauly jumped up. He was about to speak, but then instead he turned and walked away. Near the entrance he looked back. The old man was just sitting there, his hands on the crook of the cane; he looked out across the park, the graveled paths glittering in the sunlight; he sat there, empty-eyed, and the young man might never have spoken to him at all. Pauly went under the wrought-iron arch. He walked three blocks fast, then three blocks slow, and by that time he was back in front of the courthouse, looking up at the Confederate, the blank stone eyeballs under the wide-brimmed hat. Within the next three blocks he passed the depot and was within sight of the post office. He went past it, walking fast again, and re-entered the café.

  He took a booth this time, one in back. The same waitress came with a glass of water as before, still wearing the detachable-looking nails and the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. “Hello,” he said.

  “What will it be?”

  “Look: I’m sorry about all that other. I meant it, but I’m sorry I bothered you with it’s what I mean. I was lonesome.”

  “I’m real busy. What will it be?”

  This was not true. There were only a few people in the place, three men drinking beer in a booth across the way and three others seated singly on the stools along the counter. It was two oclock, the postlunch lull. “O.K. Whats good?” he asked. She was about to speak but he held up one hand, pontifical. “It’s all good,” he said mournfully. “Bring me liver and onions. Coffee. Apple pie. Can you do that?”

  “All right,” she said.

  He went back to the men’s room, the walls of which were penciled with obscenities so crowded that the later entries had had to be squeezed into the margins and even between the lines of the earlier ones. Pauly tried to close his eyes to them, pictures and text, just as he tried to close his nostrils against the stench of creosote and urine, but the two attempts were equally unsuccessful. Kilroy was here was scrawled in several places, opposite one of which someone had written: A good place for him.

  When Pauly returned to the booth he saw through the front window that the rain had come on again, no drizzle now, but true rain, big drops pattering hard against the glass. Outside, the street was darkened and the buildings were hidden across the way.

  “Say, thats rain,” he said to the waitress as she set the food in front of him.

  “Yes,” she said, and left.

  While he ate he heard one of the beer drinkers in the adjoining booth tell the other two a story. He was a young businessman but he broadened his accent, pretending to be more country than he was. “There was this scratch farmer, a white man working about sixty acres. But it was a wet year and the weeds began to get out of control, so he brought in some help, a dozen hoe-hands, and went down to the field to work alongside them. One of the women was brown-skinned, not yet middle aged, and he took him a notion. So he called her aside where the cotton was high, and the two of them lay down between the rows. Well, his wife came to the field about this time, bringing a pail of water, and she walked right up on them in the act. When he saw her he jumped up and began to run. She yelled after him: ‘You, Ephraim! It aint no use to run. You know I caught you!’ ‘Yessum,’ he said, ‘I know you did. But I believe I’ll run a little ways anyhow.’ ”

  There was laughter, including the laughter of the man who told the story, and when it died down, one of the other beer drinkers said, “I can see how that might help.” They laughed again.

  Pauly frowned. He motioned to the waitress and she came over, still with the mistrustful look. “Bring me another cup of coffee with that,” he told her, pointing at the pie. She brought it, and as she set it down in front of him he said, “I was wrong, baby, wrong and never wronger. It’s not love they need. I know what they need. And I’m the one can give it to them, too. Wait till I drink this.” He put three big spoonfuls of sugar into the coffee and stirred in the jug of cream. The waitress went away but he did not notice. His face was not stiff-lipped now. He looked happy, with a peculiar glint to his eyes.

  When he had finished the coffee he rose from the booth and went up front, where the Greek stood looking into the register. “Hand me my suitcase, will you, bud?”

  “Here,” the Greek said, and held the swing door ajar.

  “Thanks.” Pauly leaned inside and took up the suitcase.

  He came back to the booth with it. The waitress was still there, removing the dishes, all except the uneaten pie, but he did not look at her. He set the suitcase on the floor and opened it. From the jumbled disorder of faded khaki and books and shaving gear he took out an Army .45 and four loaded clips. He set them on the table, then turned back to close the bag. “Wait,” he said. “Lets do this right.” He rooted in the suitcase until he found what he was looking for — an Expert marksmanship badge, the maltese cross inclosed in a silver wreath, with three bars suspended beneath it like a ladder; Pistol, Pistol, Pistol, it said on the rungs. He pinned the badge to the rumpled lapel of his coat, and took up the pistol, drawing bac
k the slide. It went back with a dry, thick, deadly sound, then forward with a snick, the hammer cocked. “Now,” he said. He was talking to himself by then, for the waitress was nowhere in sight.

  The first shot hit the coffee urn dead center and a half-inch amber stream came spouting from the hole the bullet made. He swung on to the right where the Greek stood round-eyed, his hands on the open drawer, looking toward the sound of the explosion. “You and your goddam money,” Pauly said. “You wouldnt even hand a man a suitcase.” He took careful aim and shot him in the head. As the Greek went down he pushed with both hands, closing the cash drawer. So Pauly took two shots at the register. The second hit something vital and the drawer ran out again, ringing a bell. “Cigar!” he cried, and turned to look for other targets.

  He found plenty of them — the light fixtures, the mirror behind the counter, the glasses racked along the wall, even the little cream jugs arranged on a tray beside a spigot. Each gave off its particular brand of fireworks when hit. The cream jugs were especially amusing, for they flew in all directions. He had thirty-five shots and he took his time, replacing the empty clips methodically. “This is doing me a lot of good,” he said at one point, and indeed it seemed to be true; he appeared to enjoy the whole display, from start to finish. The beer drinkers had disappeared, along with the three men who had sat at the counter. He had the place to himself. It was very quiet between shots. Between the sharp, popping explosions of cartridges he heard the rain murmur against the plate glass window and the low moans of the Greek proprietor from somewhere down behind the open register.

  Though it seemed considerably longer to those who crouched beneath the tables and behind the counter, the whole affair took less than five minutes by the clock. The thing that frightened them most, they said when they told about it later, was the way the shooter kept laughing between shots. He was sitting there eating the pie, quite happy, with the empty pistol and the four empty clips on the table in front of him, when the police arrived. He even smiled when they shook him, roughed him up. “Do your duty, men,” he said, “just like I did mine.”

  Next day it was in all the papers, how he shot up the place for no reason at all. The Greek proprietor, whose injury had been more bloody than serious — all he lost was the lobe from one of his ears — used that day to date things from, the way old people once spoke of falling stars. The waitress was quoted too: “I knew it was something wrong with that one from the minute I laid eyes on him.” DERANGED VETERAN the headlines called him, and the stories gave a list of the various institutions he had been in and out of since the war. Everyone agreed that that was what he was, all right, deranged.

  RIDE OUT

  The state executioner had set up the portable electric chair in a cell on the lower floor; now he was testing his circuits. Whenever the switch clicked there was a pulsing hum and an odor of heated copper. The turnkey, who had helped with the installation, watched the rubber-insulated cable that ran like a long dusty blacksnake from a connection at the back, through the window bars, to the generator in a truck parked in the cool predawn darkness of the jailyard. He watched as if he expected it to writhe like a pressure hose with every surge of current — as if any force with that much power must have body, too — but it lay in loose coils without motion. Low and wide, with heavy arms and legs, the chair had an unfinished look; the workman, a clumsy copyist of Louis Seize pieces, might have dropped his tools, dissatisfied, and walked away. It had been invented and built six months before, on order from the Mississippi legislature, by a New Orleans electrician who stipulated that he was to receive no profit from the job. Luke Jeffcoat, the executioner, was not so squeamish. He called it “my old shocking chair.”

  Deep creases extended from the wings of his nose to the corners of his mouth. Under the glare from the unshaded bulb, they appeared to have been carved there, exaggerated like the lines on a tragedy mask. Tall and thin, about forty, he worked in a sleeveless undershirt. Tattooed snakes ran down his arms and spread their heads on the backs of his hands. Other, more intimate designs were hidden under his clothes — a three-bladed marine propeller on each cheek of his fundament, for instance, and a bee in a particular place, which he called “my old stingaree.” He hummed as he worked. It was low and within a narrow range, curiously like the hum of the generator.

  Presently three men came into the cell. The first two, the sheriff and myself — I am county physician — were required by law to be there. But the third, the district attorney, came of his own accord: “to see this thing I’ll be sending them to,” he had said that afternoon, for he was young and recently elected; this had been his first death-penalty conviction. Entering, the sheriff jerked his thumb toward the window. “Who’s that out there?” he asked the turnkey. We had seen them as we came in, a man and a woman on the seat of a wagon under a bug-swirled arc light fifty yards down the alley, both of them hunched with waiting. Two mules dozed in the traces, knees locked, ears slanted forward, and a long box of unpainted pine lay like a pale six-sided shadow in the bed of the wagon.

  “It’s his mamma,” the turnkey said. His name was Jeffcoat too; he and the executioner were cousins. “She rented a dray and bought herself a box to carry him home in. I told her the county would furnish him one, but she said she wanted her own. Yair. They been there since before midnight, sitting like that; theyve got so they dont even slap at the bugs. Just after they got here I went up and took the horn away from him.”

  “How is he?”

  “I think he’s sleeping. Anyhow he’s quiet. Hoskins is up there with him.”

  The sheriff took out his watch, a big one in a silver hunting case. He opened it, then snapped it shut with a sound like a pistol shot. “Three thirty,” he said morosely. “Where’s Doc Benson?”

  I said, “He told me he’d be here by three fifteen. But it dont really matter, does it?”

  “The law says two doctors, we’ll have two doctors.” He shook his head, red-faced, with bulging eyes. This was Jordan County’s first electrocution and he didnt like it. “Damn these new-fangled inventions anyhow. The old rope and trapdoor method suited me fine.”

  We heard the sudden tearing sound of tires on gravel, an automobile door being slammed; then Dr Benson came in. He was rubbing his palms and his spectacles glinted fiery in the glare. “Sorry I’m late,” he said. “I got held up.”

  “We arent ready anyhow,” I told him.

  Just then, however, Jeffcoat threw the switch for the final test, and again there was that pulsing hum, almost a throb, and the faint odor of heated copper. He smiled, then went to the washstand in the corner, soaped his hands, rinsed them under the tap, and dried them carefully on his undershirt.

  “All right, sheriff,” he said: “I’m ready if he is.”

  It may be I had seen him before. It seems likely, even. But so far as I know — since, with his shaved head and slit trousers and the fear and sickness in his face, he probably did not resemble himself much anyhow — my first sight of him was when they brought him into the cell a few minutes later. During the past twelve years I have learned his story and I intend to set it down, from beginning to end. I saw only the closing scene, as I said, but four people who knew him well have given me particulars. These were his mother, Nora Conway, a cook here in Bristol; Oscar Bailey, called Blind Bailey, a pianist in a local Negro dancehall; Pearly Jefferson, the New Orleans jazz musician, and Harry Van, the New England composer. In many cases I have merely transcribed notes of conversations with these four, or letters from them, and I want to state my obligations at the outset. There was also a young woman, Julia Kinship, but I have been unable to find her; I understand she went North. At any rate, if ever this gets printed I hope she sees it.

  He was born in a time of high water, the stormy May of 1913, in a Red Cross tent on the levee at the foot of the main street of Bristol, Mississippi. His mother was fifteen the month before. The birth was not due until six weeks later, but in the excitement of being herded, along with three or four
hundred other Negroes, onto the only high ground within seventy miles, Nora became alarmed and the pains came on her. In a steady drizzle of rain, while water purled up the slope toward where she lay on a strip of salvaged awning, she moaned and bellered through five hours of labor. Between whiles she heard the rain murmur against the canvas, a spooky sound. When the flood reached the level of the river on the opposite side, and therefore ceased its advance up the levee, the child was born. Someone among the white refugee families in the adjoining camp sent her a paper sack of candy. The midwife swaddled the child and placed it beside her. She was content, holding her son against her breast and dissolving a lemon drop in her cheek; but she wished the father was there.

  His name was Boola Durfee; originally he was from the lower delta, down around Nitta Yuma, son of a freedwoman and a halfbreed Choctaw blacksmith. Nora was with him less than two weeks, in September of the year before, when the big warm moon of late summer glazed the fields and gilded the corrugated metal roofs of the churches and barrelhouses where he played engagements while she waited outside, too young to enter. A gaunt, high-cheekboned man, he had no home; he roamed the country, tall and flat-chested, with his guitar and his songs. He had warned her at the outset.

  “I got a itchy heel,” he said. “Some morning, doll baby, youll wake up and find me gone.”

  That was the way it turned out. The following week she woke with the sun in her eyes and found herself alone on the pallet bed. She had expected this; she had not needed the warning, but at the time she told herself it was worth it. Later she was not so sure. For the next ten years she would hear people mention having seen him, sometimes in far places, Arkansas and Alabama and up in Tennessee, sometimes nearby, Moorhead and Holly Knowe and Midnight, still playing for what he called sukey jumps. But Nora never saw him again. She made it a point never to ask about him or even show an interest when his name came up. At first this indifference was a pretense. Later it was a habit, and quite real. Then she heard that he had been killed in a cutting fight, over near Itta Bena, when some man got jealous.