The Sharecropper Prodigy (6 page)

             
“That’s exactly what I believe,” Ben said. “I just wanted to hear it from one more person. I feel bad for Mr. Higgins family, if he has any, and I regret that it happened. But I’m not gonna allow myself to feel guilty when me and Manny were only trying to save our lives. It was an accident anyway. Manny was just tryin’ to get the knife away from him. Now there are four of us who know about it.” Ben sat silent for a minute and then a half smile came across his lips as if he were trying to lighten the mood. “You know what Benjamin Franklin said. Three people can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”

*****

              I was sitting at Manuel’s little café, eating one of his famous burritos and some Spanish style rice. My Aunt Mary Kate was a wonderful cook, famous at every church gathering for her fried chicken, but eating the tasty, spicy food that Manuel prepared was a nice change of pace.

             
It had taken him a week to get around to it, but the sheriff happened to pick the day I was there to come and question Manuel about Ned Higgins’ disappearance. Having the information about Ned’s fate myself, I got nervous when he walked in and asked Manuel if he had time for a few questions. He spoke to me, but I’m not sure if he knew who I was or not. He knew my Uncle Lee and I assumed he’d seen me with him from time to time.

             
“Mr. Cruz,” the sheriff said, “could I talk to you a minute. I know you don’t need to leave your café, but maybe if we could step outside or in the back somewhere.”

             
“Sure, Sheriff. We can talk in the kitchen if you don’t mind the heat and all the different smells.”

             
“Well, I think the smells are pretty good,” the sheriff chuckled, as if he were trying to put Manuel at ease.

             
The two men stepped into the kitchen and closed the door. Luckily for me, it was a swinging door that left a narrow space between the door and jamb when it was shut. Perfect for eaves dropping. I got up off my stool and tiptoed around the corner, where I couldn’t be seen between the counter and the wall. The sheriff started with some idle chit-chat about how business was going and how he liked Manuel’s food. Then he finally got to his real purpose for being there.

             
“Mr. Cruz, I guess you heard about Ned Higgins missin’.”

             
“Yes sir. I have heard talk from some of my customers about it. They say he left town in Mr. Winston’s truck.”

             
“Yeah, well, that’s the talk that’s goin’ around,” the sheriff said. “But I talked to George Winston and he said he couldn’t figure it out. Said as far as he knew, Ned liked his job and was happy. You know he’d been with Mr. Winston six years.”

             
“I don’t know,” Manuel responded, “maybe somebody offered him something better and he just didn’t want to tell Mr. Winston about it.”

             
“But why would he steal his truck? He’s got a pretty nice old car of his own. It just don’t make no sense. No sense a-tall.”

             
“I don’t know what to tell you, Sheriff. Maybe for some reason he just needed a truck. Maybe he was in some kind of trouble and didn’t want to be seen in
his
car. Who knows why some people do the things they do.”

             
“Well, accordin’ to Mr. Winston, you may have been the last person to have seen him last Friday night. Mr. Winston said y’all were at his cotton gin and he was gonna give you a ride home in his truck. Did you happen to notice which direction he went in after he let you out? Was he actin’ strange in any way?”

             
“He never gave me a ride, Sheriff. I walked home.”

             
The sheriff was silent for a minute, then said with a sigh, “Well, it just seems strange, that’s all. Did you and him have any kind of argument after Mr. Winston and his daughter left the gin?”

             
“I wouldn’t call it an argument. He made some remarks about me being a Mexican, and he let me know he didn’t particularly like Mexicans, or negroes. But I have gotten used to that kind of talk. I’ve heard it so many times I no longer pay attention to it.”

             
Manuel was as cool as a cucumber. If the sheriff was trying to rattle him, he was having no success whatsoever. I supposed an educated man like Manuel, who had traveled and worked with some rough characters and spent a lot of nights in the hobo jungles had pretty much seen it all. Especially when you consider that a lot of the men were prejudiced white men, some who had come from places devastated by the dust bowl and had lost the farms that had been in their families for generations.

             
“Well, Mr. Cruz I appreciate your time, and if you do hear anything…..”

             
That was my cue. I quickly tiptoed back around the counter and sat back down on my stool. When the two men came out of the kitchen, I pretended to be looking at the newspaper that was laying on the counter. The sheriff nodded to me once again as he started toward the door. As he opened the door to go out, he turned as if he were going to say something, but changed his mind and closed the door.

*****

              I asked Ben if the sheriff had been to talk to him yet. Cotton picking had started and I knew it would be difficult to see him except late in the evenings for several days. He told me the sheriff came by and asked him if he’d seen Manuel leave with Ned Higgins in Mr. Winston’s truck. Ben told him that he hadn’t. Then he asked if Manuel and Ned had had an argument of any kind. Ben said the same thing Manuel had said. That Ned made some derogatory remarks about Mexicans in general, but that was about it. I believe the sheriff had come to the conclusion that Ned Higgins had just simply run off. Men who had no wife or children to tie them down were known to do that. As far as that goes, men who
did
have wives and children ran off. This Depression had caused men to do a lot of things they wouldn’t have normally done.

             
The sheriff may have concluded that no foul play was involved, but the hard core bigots of the county weren’t about to let it go. They kept pressure on the sheriff, reminding him of  who was responsible for putting him in office. The sheriff told them he was doing all he could do and that he couldn’t just go out and arrest a man just because they thought he might have possibly been responsible for Ned’s disappearance.

*****

              On Friday night, exactly two weeks after Ned vanished from the face of the earth, me, my Aunt Mary Kate and Uncle Lee were coming home from a revival meeting at Antioch Baptist Church. We were all singing hymns as we rode along. My Uncle Lee in his deep baritone, my aunt Mary Kate in her beautiful alto, and me in my off-key voice that had no particular name. I was the first to notice the orange glow in the night sky. I had seen that glow before only a couple of years earlier when Horace Wade’s barn had caught fire from some hay he’d put up that was too green. The hay had gone through a heat and eventually the older, dry hay caught up. The fire spread so quickly with all the dried hay that was scattered around, that the barn became an inferno in a matter of minutes. When I pointed the sight out to Uncle Lee, he immediately put his 1937 Ford, with the flathead V8 to the floor. Within minutes we were in downtown Collinwood. There were people gathered near where the old REO Speed Wagon fire truck was spraying water on Manuel’s café. The firemen’s only concern was to keep the flame from spreading to neighboring houses and buildings. There was no hope for the café.

             
Manuel, Maria, and their two small boys were standing in the middle of the street, watching hopelessly. Manuel had almost worked himself to death and had lived in an old, drafty barn. He hadn’t spent a dime on anything except enough cheap grub to keep him alive, to earn enough to start his little business that had become so popular for miles around. Now it was all gone. I walked over to where he was standing and put my hand on his shoulder. Other people were walking by, offering their condolences as if we were at a funeral and Manuel had just lost a close family member. I had a sudden thought. I started scanning the crowd, looking at the faces of the onlookers. They weren’t hard to recognize from the bright glow of the flames. I looked back and forth across the crowd several times and finally confirmed my suspicions. None of the redneck crowd who were either overt, or tried unsuccessfully to be
secret
members of the Klan were present. Some weren’t Klan members, but they were close to the ones who were and had the same sentiments. I knew almost all of them and I didn’t spot a single one.

             
I looked at Manuel. “You can rebuild,” I said. “Cotton pickin’ is over and me and Ben will help. I can get some more of my friends, too.”

             
Manuel smiled at me and shook my hand. “Yeah, I’m not worried,” he said.

CHAPTER SIX

              I left the house early, wanting to get a good start helping Manuel clean up the mess so he could get another building up in a hurry. I was trying to think of a place he might be able to rent until we could build a new structure. There had always been a couple of empty buildings in town, and now there were several since the depression had taken its toll.

             
When I got to Ben’s house, he was already dressed in his overalls and work boots. It was as if he knew what time I’d be there even though he didn‘t know I was coming. I wasn’t even sure if he’d heard yet, though news traveled pretty fast in Jones County, even out to the remote sharecropper shacks.

             
“Well, I guess you’ve heard already,” I said as soon as I got within earshot.

             
“Yeah, I saw the sky lit up last night, so I walked to Collinwood to see what it was. I thought it might be somebody’s house.”

             
“You walked all the way to Collinwood?”

             
“Yeah, what’s the big deal? Me and you walk to Collinwood sometimes. We’re fixin’ to do it right now.”

             
“Yeah, but it ain’t the middle of the night,” I said, as we started walking. “I must have already been gone by the time you got there last night.”

             
“They had the fire almost out by the time I got there,” Ben said. “I got to talk to Manuel, though. He didn’t seem any more concerned about it than somebody who’s cow had got out or something. He was actin’ kind of strange. He told me he’d talked to you and you said we were gonna help him rebuild. He said he didn’t need any help and that he might not rebuild anyway.”

             
As we walked along at a brisk pace, I thought about what Ben had just said. Manuel didn’t act like he was very distraught to me last night, either.

             
“I’ll bet you them rednecks threatened him,” I said. “Most of the town was there last night, but I didn’t see a single Klan asshole anywhere.”

             
It took us a little over an hour to get to Collinwood. It was still early, but the town was already alive and bustling with traffic and people going in and out of stores. It was Saturday, and that was the only day a lot of people who lived out on the farms got a chance to shop, or get haircuts, or just catch up on gossip.

             
We made our way through the crowded downtown area and up the little street where Manuel lived in a little rented house. He had made the little cottage into a showplace. He said he planned on buying it as soon as he came up with the money, and he started treating it like it was his own from the time he moved in. He had built a white picket fence along the front, with an arched gate that had locking hardware he’d made himself. There were flowerbeds along the base of the pecan and oak trees with rock borders in the yard, and rose bushes that climbed up ornate trellises he had built in front of the house. Manuel was as talented a man as I had ever seen. Not only was he educated, he was a master craftsman with his hands, and of course, an incredible chef.

             
Me and Ben walked up to the door and Ben started to knock. I held my hand up to stop him.

             
“They might still be asleep,” I told Ben. “I’m sure they were up late last night, and I don’t hear the kids runnin’ around like they usually are.”

             
We looked through the small opaque glass at the top of the door, but couldn’t see through it well enough to discern anything. Then we walked over to the window at the end of the porch. That was the first time I had noticed that the curtains were gone. The window was in the children’s bedroom. I cupped my hands on each side of my face and pressed my nose up to the glass. The bed and all the other furniture was gone. The room was totally bare. I walked back to the front door and tried the knob. The door opened with a tiny screech as I stuck my head inside. Everything down to the pictures on the wall had disappeared. Me and Ben walked through the door and back into Manuel and Maria’s bedroom. Nothing.