The Bottoms (9 page)

“I’m Constable Collins. Your husband is expecting me.”

“Yes suh, he is. Come on in.”

Inside, the house smelled pleasantly of pinto beans cooking. It was neat with simple furniture, some of it store-bought, most of it handmade from rough lumber and apple crates. There
was a shelf of books on the wall. The most books I had ever seen collected together at one time, and perhaps the most I had seen in my life. Some were fiction, but most were books on philosophy and psychology. I didn’t know that at the time, but many of the titles stayed with me, and years later I realized what they were.

The wood slat floor looked to have been freshly scrubbed and smelled faintly of oil. There was a painting on the wall. It was of a blue vase of yellow flowers sitting on a table near a window that showed the moon hung in the sky next to a dark cloud.

The house looked a lot nicer than our place. I guessed doctoring, even for a colored doctor, wasn’t such a bad way to make a living.

“Jes ’scuse me for a moment so I can see I can find him,” the lady said, and went away.

Daddy was looking the place over too, and I saw something move in his throat, a sadness cross over his face, then the lady came back and said: “Doctor Tinn’s out back. He’s waitin’ on you, Constable. This yo boy?”

Daddy said I was.

“Ain’t he just the best-lookin’ little snapper. How’re you, Little Man?”

That was the same thing Miss Maggie called me, Little Man. “Fine, ma’am.”

“Oh, and he’s got such good manners. Come on back, will y’all?”

She led us through the back door and down some steps. There was a clean white building out back of the house, and we went inside. We stood in a stark white room with a large desk and smelled some kind of pine oil disinfectant. There was a maple wood chair behind it with a suit coat draped over it. There were some wooden file cabinets, another shelf of books, this one half the size of the one in the house, and a row of
sturdy chairs. There was a painting similar to the one in the house on the wall. It was of a riverbank, rich with dark soil and shadowed by trees, and between the trees a long thin shadow over the river.

The lady called out, “Doctor Tinn.”

A door opened and out came a large colored man, older than Daddy, wiping his hands on a towel. He wore black suit pants, a white shirt, and a black tie. “Mister Constable,” he said. But he didn’t offer to shake hands. You didn’t see that much, a colored man and a white man shaking hands.

Daddy stuck out his hand, and Dr. Tinn, surprised, slung the towel over his shoulder, and they shook.

“I suppose you know why I’m here?” Daddy said.

“I do,” Dr. Tinn said.

Standing next to him, I realized just how large Dr. Tinn was. He must have been six four, and very wide-shouldered. He had his hair cut short and had a mustache faint as the edge of a straight razor. You had to really pay attention to see he had it.

“I see y’all met my wife,” Dr. Tinn said.

“Well, not formally,” Daddy said.

“This here’s Mrs. Tinn,” Dr. Tinn said.

Mrs. Tinn smiled and went away.

Daddy and Mama called each other by their first names, but it wasn’t unusual then for husband and wife to use formal address to one another, at least in front of folks. Still, since it wasn’t something I was accustomed to, it seemed odd to me.

“Have you looked at the body?” Daddy asked.

“No. I was waitin’ on you. I thought instead of totin’ her, we’d go on over to the icehouse for a look. Do what we gonna do there. I got some things I need, then we’ll go. And I’ll need you to tell me where the body was found. Give me some of the background.”

“All right,” Daddy said.

Dr. Tinn paused. “What about the boy?”

“He’s gonna be on his own for a while,” Daddy said.

My heart sunk.

“Well then,” Doc Tinn said, taking his dark suit coat off the back of the chair. “Let’s go.”

T
he icehouse was a big worn-out-looking barn of a place with peeling paint that had once been white but was now gray. It had a narrow front porch of new lumber, the only new lumber on the building.

I knew that inside the icehouse would be lined with sawdust. Big blocks of ice would be stacked about. There would be a table for cutting up slabs of ice with a saw, and a scale to weigh it, and a chute to send it down into wagon or truck beds. The ice would be so cold if you put your hand on it, it would burn you, and cause the flesh to stick.

And there was the body. The body I’d found.

As we came to the icehouse, Daddy said, “I’ll be damned.”

Sitting on the porch, dressed in a dusty white suit with mud splashed on his shoes and pants legs, fanning himself with his straw hat, was Doc Stephenson.

There was a flat bottle of dark liquid on the porch beside him, and when he saw Daddy he took a swig of it and put it down. Doc Stephenson had a mouth that looked as if it did not want to open wide, lest tacks and nails fall out. His eyes made
you uncomfortable, like they were looking for a place to stick a knife.

“What’s he doin’ here?” Daddy asked Dr. Tinn.

“Can’t say as I know, suh,” Dr. Tinn said.

“You don’t need to sir me,” Daddy said. “I won’t sir you, you don’t sir me.”

“Yes suh … Very well, Constable.”

At that moment, Doc Taylor came walking toward the icehouse. He was carrying a Dr Pepper and some sort of candy from Pappy’s place. He looked sharp in his clothes, which were a little more special than we were used to seeing. Very-well-made slacks, the cuffs of which he had somehow managed to keep clear of mud, though with the shoes he had not succeeded. He wore a clean white shirt that was so soft-looking it seemed to be made of angel wings. He had on a thin black tie that glistened like the wet back of a water snake, and his soft black felt hat was cocked at a jaunty angle that made him look more like he was going to a dance than to examine a mutilated body. I wondered if he had on his chain with the dented coin attached.

“That there’s Doc Taylor,” Daddy said to Doc Tinn. “He’s what I think they call an intern. He’s with Stephenson ’cause he’s thinkin’ about retirin’, and he thought he’d get to know folks so he could take his place. He’s a little dandy, but he seems all right to me.”

“I doubt he wants to know us folks,” Doc Tinn said.

“I suppose you’re right,” Daddy said. “Let’s get this over with, then.”

Daddy turned to me, gave me a pat on the head, said, “See you later, Harry.”

Dejected, I wandered up the street a ways, turned, looked back at the icehouse, watched Daddy and Doc Tinn go inside with Doc Stephenson.

It was confusing to me. I had heard Daddy say the doctor
didn’t want anything to do with the body because it was colored, but here he was, away from his office, down in colored town for a looksee. And he had Doc Taylor with him.

I was thinking on all this when I heard a squeaking behind me, turned to see an ancient, legless, colored man in a cart covered by a willow stick and tarp roof, drawn by a big glossy white hog fastened up in a leather harness. The old man was bald and his scalp was wrinkled like a leather bag that had been wadded up and smoothed out by hand. He could have hidden a pencil in the wrinkles on his face. There wasn’t a tooth in his head. He looked much older than Miss Maggie. In fact, she was a girl compared to him.

He carried a thin green willow stick he was using to tap the hog on the hind quarters. The hog was grunting, trundling along at a pretty good gate. Walking beside the old man and his cart were two boys about my age, one colored, one white. Their clothes were even more worn-looking than mine. The colored boy’s pants were gone at the knee and there wasn’t any attempt there to hold patches. The white kid’s pants were gone at one knee, and there was a cotton sack patch there that had been multidyed by life, most likely the dye consisting of grass stains, clay roads, dirty riverbanks, and berry stains.

I noticed folks that had been standing around were edging toward the icehouse, congregating outside of it like a bunch of blackbirds on a limb. I realized then the body in the icehouse wasn’t much of a secret.

The old man in the hog-drawn cart pulled up beside me. He looked at me with his rheumy eyes and opened his toothless mouth to say: “How’re you, little white boy?”

“I’m fine, sir.”

The truth of the matter was he scared me. I had never seen anyone that looked that old, and certainly no one in that circumstance, minus legs and drawn about in a cart by a hog.

The white boy who had been walking along with him said, “I’m Richard Dale. I live on down the bottoms.”

Richard Dale was a little older than me, I think. Thin of jaw, ripe of lips, with a nose that we used to call Roman. Some smart alecks used to say, “Yeah. It roams all over his face.”

I told him I lived in the bottoms too, explained my part of the country. His part of the bottoms was on the other side from me. His section was called the Sandy Bottoms, because there was more white sand there than where we lived, which was rich with red clay and brown dirt.

The colored boy with him introduced himself as Abraham. He looked very energetic, as if he had been drinking lots of coffee and was expecting something big to happen, like a tornado, a flood, or tripping over a boxful of money.

Being all of the same general age, quick to bore, and a little tired of adults, we were immediate friends.

Abraham said, “Me and Ricky got some cards with nekkid women on ’em.”

“But we ain’t got ’em with us,” Richard hastened to add, lest I might ask for him to lay them out for examination.

“Yeah,” Abraham said, disappointed. “They in the tree house, and it ain’t nowhere near here. We got nigger shooters too. I can shoot a tin can at maybe thirty feet.”

A “nigger shooter” was a word for a slingshot made of shoe tongue, tire rubber, and a forked stick. The name was common, and Abraham had said it without shame or consideration.

“We hear they’s a body in there,” Abraham added. “A woman got murdered.”

I couldn’t contain myself. “I found the body.”

“Say you did,” Abraham said. “Naw. Naw you didn’t. You pullin’ our leg.”

“Did too. That’s my Daddy in there. He’s the constable over our parts.”

“This ain’t his constablin’ here,” the old man in the hog cart said. He could hear right good. I figured he’d heard us talking about those cards with naked women on them, and I was embarrassed.

Richard Dale said, “That’s Uncle Pharaoh. He got his legs torn up and cut off ’cause of a wild hog. Hog is Pig Jesse. That ain’t the wild hog. That’s a tame one.”

“I’m sorry,” I said to the old man.

He looked at me like I was some sort of strange vegetable he had never seen before. “Sorry ’bout what?” he said.

“Your legs.”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, don’t be. Didn’t happen yesterd’y. I done got over it.”

“Where’d you find that body?” Abraham asked, and I told all three of them the story. I finished with: “I thought since I found it and done seen it, Daddy might let me look again and hear what the doctor’s got to say about it, but he wouldn’t do it.”

“That’s the way it always is,” Richard said. “Adults think they got to know everything and we ain’t supposed to know or see nothin’. Hey, you want to go off and play?”

“No,” I said. “I think I’ll wait here.”

Richard winked at me. “Let’s play.”

Abraham was smiling, and I wondered what it was they were after. I hoped they didn’t want to smoke grapevine, or even tobacco, ’cause I never liked either a bit. Times I had tried they had made my stomach sick.

Richard leaned over close and said, “Me and Abraham know somethin’ you might like to know about that body. Come with us.”

I thought on that, but only for a second. They told Uncle Pharaoh goodbye, and I went running with them, away from the crowd, toward the creek. They led me along the edge of the
creek and up behind the icehouse to where the big chinaberry tree grew.

Richard whispered: “Me and Abraham we know everything there is to know about over here. There’s a big hole in the roof up there, right over the front room, where they bring the ice out. There’s a piece of tin over it, but it’ll twist aside and you can see in. If you don’t twist it too much, they won’t notice ’cause the tree shades that spot. Won’t be a bunch of sunlight slippin’ in. ’Sides, there’s all sorts of cracks in that roof anyway. Little sunlight here and there won’t be noticed none.”

“What if they ain’t in that room?” I said.

“Then they ain’t,” Abraham said. “But what if they is?”

Richard led the way up the chinaberry tree, Abraham after him, and me following up last. The chinaberry was a big one, and several of the limbs branched over the top of the icehouse. We climbed out on those and onto the roof. Richard moved along the roof to a spot in the shingles with a tin patch. He used his hand to push the patch back. Cold air came up from the icehouse and hit us in the face, and it felt good. Above us, the clouds had turned dark, as if filling up with shadow to aid our cause.

We looked out at the crowd. Most of them could see us. Some of them waved. I thought: Boy, am I gonna be in for it. But it was worth the gamble. These folks had no reason to tell my Daddy anything. They didn’t even know him. And like most colored, they pretty much minded their own business when it came to whites.