Fiction Friday: Here's the first part of a longer piece I wrote when I was trying to fictionalize some stories my late father-in-law, Julius Cole used to tell about WWII, the Depression, and the Arkansas Delta.
The Last Cotton Boll - Part One
By Jimmie von Tungeln
© 2005
You asked
about Ferd Starling and, though it breaks my heart to even say the name, I will
tell you what I know of that sad and gentle man. I will tell you first to keep
his name alive, but then for personal solace too. Who knows what good might
come from praising saintly men?
I did him some small favors once.
So I can say that I knew him, probably as well as anyone around here did—not in
a personal sense, but from trying to help him, as Christians should, one to
another. That includes trying to do something about what happened and I tried
hard, considering my position, which is not one involving a great deal of power.
Most likely, though, you will want to know how I came to know him and what I
know about the events that led to that awful day. Perhaps you can make some
sense of it. I can’t.
It was a
quiet time, shortly before so many of our young men were to perish in Europe and in the South Pacific. Good times, you might
say—the farms around Armistead,
Arkansas were productive and
hiring again. There seemed to be jobs for everyone who wanted to work. So it
was that I met the man you asked about.
Ferd—his Christian name was
Ferdinand—worked for Thomas Easter. Mr. Easter always had a goodly number of
hired hands but Ferd was, I think, more or less in charge of the others. I understand
that he was a good and dependable worker, one of the reasons why Mr. Easter
took it so hard—as anyone with a soul would have.
But, as to what I know:
Mr. Easter and I attended the same
church and in passing some small talk one Sunday, I commented that I had been
busy all summer getting the library ready. Some people think I just sit there
all day, day after day and watch the children come through. They don’t consider
the work involved, but I am used to it.
Anyway, I
mentioned having a pile of junk that needed to be hauled to the dumping pit and
how it was too much for me to carry.
“What does it
consist of?” he asked.
“Just trash,
and some worn-out books,” I said, “Too worn out even for the colored school.”
Then I added “You can’t believe what children do to books that are paid for with
tax money.” I wanted to make sure that he knew I understood my responsibilities.
“I have a hired
hand,” he said. Then he told me that this man seemed a little better than most
and that he had come down from north of here and he ― Mr. Easter ― had heard
that the new man could lay brick and had put him on for the summer several
years back.
Then he said,
“Turned out he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, lay brick. I never quite knew which. He
just told me, ‘I can’t do that any more.’ And that was that. I taken a chance on
him anyway and it worked out fine. Good worker, and respectful. He can talk like a white man when he wants to, which ain't very often.” He finished by
saying he would send him by with a wagon later that week.
So that was how Ferd happened to
come to the library some days later to pick up trash. Otherwise I would have
never known him, even as casually as I did. He drew up in one of Mr. Easter’s
wagons while I was on the porch of the library and at first I couldn’t imagine
who he might be. He was tall and sat straight as a light-pole on that wagon seat—didn’t
have that slumped-over look that so many of them have. Then I realized that he
was here for the trash.
When he stopped at the back door, I
waited for a decent interval and then asked what he wanted.
“Mr. Easter told me to come,” he
said.
It provoked me, the way he said it.
I mean he said it like I should have expected him—like he was in on some
conversation that had passed between me and Mr. Easter. I let it pass, but not
completely. People should show respect.
“Did he say why?”
“Something about some junk to be
hauled away.”
It still wasn’t completely
satisfactory but I moved on. I said “There are some boxes of trash and
discarded books that need to go.”
He turned sharply, almost frightening
me. I have never seen eyes that could take a person in the way his did. I was
close to taking offense when he said, very politely, “Missus, could I ask what
kind of books they is?’
“What an odd question,” I thought.
“Why just some old books with broken binders that the children have
mistreated,” I said, adding “And there are some that nobody has ever touched
all these years that were just taking up space.”
"I see,” was all he said as he
descended from the wagon.
While he was tying the horses, I
propped the back door open and then I walked to the edge of the porch. I stood and
waited.
“It’s all in boxes just inside the
door,” I said, and he just said “Yessum” and walked inside. I noticed that he
stopped and took a long, deep breath, touched his hand to his eye and moved
toward the boxes, but slowly. That didn’t seem strange in itself—they never
want to work too fast in front of you. But there was something dreamy about the
way he moved. If you ask me, I think he was trying to prolong the experience.
It was a late June day in the Delta,
if you know what that means. I had forgotten my hat but I couldn’t go back in
for it while he was in there. So I shielded my head from the sun with a
magazine that I had been about to file. When he walked by with the first box, I
noticed how strong he was. He wore a faded short-sleeved work shirt and a pair
of worn but clean, pressed trousers of some long-forgotten color. He picked up a
box of books like it had been a bouquet of flowers and walked out with it. I
had just barely been able to slide it across the room, but he picked it up as
if it were nothing.
Though he had just started to work,
his arms were already covered with perspiration and I couldn’t help notice the
muscles. He was a powerful man.
That’s when I realized just how hot
it was. I had just the faintest twinge of dizziness, and began fanning myself
with the magazine.
He must have noticed, for he
stopped on his way back in and asked me if I was alright. “I’m fine,” I said,
“You just load the trash,” and he said “Yessum.”
I would say he worked slowly but
efficiently. We spoke no more while he was loading the trash. I fanned myself
and looked toward Main Street.
It was mid-morning of a Saturday just before cotton-chopping and the street was
beginning to fill with folks from out in the county. Although it was
a slow time of year and few people had money, downtown Armistead was still the
place to be on Saturday. Whole families would unload from a wagon or pile out
of an old Ford, the men in pressed khakis and the women in their second-best clothes
licking a handkerchief and trying to clean some imaginary spot on the face of a
small boy whose face had already been polished to a high sheen under oiled and
roached-up hair. A sister would giggle and smirk. Then they would all trot off,
hoping that some new mystery had been added to Main Street since last Saturday. I tried
to appear absorbed by it all, but I kept an eye on Ferd’s progress.
In those days the library was in a
separate building behind the rest of the school. It doubled as a town library
for those few from town who wanted to use it. The porch where we were working
faced Main Street
and I was sure the folks there could see that I was taking care of public
business. Of course, some of them would say that it was a pity that I had
nothing better to do of a Saturday than to tend the library, but let them talk.
I didn’t care as long as they could see I was on duty.
I was imagining some of their
conversations when Ferd brought me back to the job at hand.
“Finished Missus,” he said. I
walked to the door and looked in just to be sure. I turned and, reaching in to
the pocket of my frock, produced a dime and tried to hand it to him with my arm
fully extended. I thanked him.
He ignored my hand and said, “Does
it have to happen, Missus?”
“Why what do you mean?” I said,
surprised. I thrust the dime toward him again. He looked past it and straight
at me.
“Must they be thrown away if a
person could use them?”
It puzzled me briefly. I returned
the twice-rejected dime to my pocket. Then I said, “Why, do you mean the
books?”
“Yessum.”
“What’s your name, boy?” I asked.
“Hit’s Ferd, Missus. Ferd Starling.”
“Well then, Ferd. What would you do
with all those books?”
“Not all, Missus, just some.”
“Can you read?”
“Just a little” Then he asked me
again, “Must it happen?”
“Well, they aren’t picture books,
you know. There are some math books that the boys defaced. And we finally
changed the history books—those old ones stop with the first Mr. Roosevelt and
here we are well into the second. I don’t have to tell you what a struggle it
has been to get these books in these hard times.”
“No Ma’am.”
I thought through the
possibilities. “You take what you might could use and don’t be strewing them
all over the county, understand?”
“I understand. Just some I might
use.” He had removed his hat and was twisting it as he stared toward his feet.
Neither of us spoke for what seemed a long time.
“That’s all, then” I said. He
started to turn and, surprisingly, I heard myself say: “And in that big box are
some nearly used-up writing tablets and pencil stubs that you can have if you won’t
scatter them all over the place.”
He turned back toward me and
smiled. “Much obliged,” he said. And then he left.
I thought no more about it and
spent the next few weeks straightening up the library from the last school year
and getting it ready for the next. I liked to have all that done by the time
the crops were laid by.
Those were busy weeks in the delta.
I don’t see how people survived. It would seem that every man, woman and child
would be laboring either in the fields or preparing for those who did from
sunup until sundown. They were hard times –backbreaking, spirit-killing times.
Trucks covered with canvas and fitted with rude benches would collect the
cotton-choppers of a morning and, after a quick stop at a grocery store to
purchase food for their dinner, spread them amongst the farms. In the evening
they would reverse the process with another stop for the purchase of supper and
breakfast. Then the process would repeat itself in the never-ending, slow
heartbeat of cotton country.
In families that could afford it, a
mother would remain home in a tin-roofed house, cooking and washing as the heat
poured mercilessly through the ceiling and wrapped around everything it could
reach, like a transparent snake that oozed steam from every scale. Babies would
suffer and cry from heat rash. Old people would sit just as still as they could
so as not to taunt the heat. Dust would settle in every corner—a gagging,
suffocating dust that a person couldn’t defeat. The very sun itself would seem
to stop of an afternoon to prolong the suffering. It was a time when folks
spoke very little to one another, just worked and hoped. And of course the really
poor—the coloreds I mean—had it even worse.
Then one day it would change. The
crops would be laid by and work would shift to cutting hay and wood for the
winter. This was the worrying time. From rain and hail to blight and boll
weevils, there was more than plenty to threaten the future as summer
lengthened, stifling day by stifling day into fall. Then the pace would quicken
and the morning trucks would reappear, this time to gather pickers for the
cotton crop.
With luck—no doubt nurtured by all
that worrying—the crops would be gathered and it would seem that everyone had a
little money to spend. Downtown Armistead would flourish, even on a weekday.
The County Fair would come and go and folks would settle in, hoping for a mild
winter. Those were the days I liked best. School would start and thus my busy
time of the year. Children whose family had turned a good crop or had stayed
employed all summer would fairly crackle with new clothes and shoes. Even the
students were bright and alert and ready for new experiences. And it lasted
such a short time. It was a rare period of transition in a world that usually changed
very little from one day to the next.
That’s when I saw Ferd for the
second time. You can imagine my surprise when he just appeared one Friday
afternoon. Knocking at the back door, standing as far from it as his reach
would allow, his hat twisted in one hand and his eyes directed toward the
floor.
I asked what and wasn’t he one of
Mr. Easter’s boys and he said “Yessum.” Then I said wasn’t he the one called
Ferd and he said “That’s right.”
“Did Mr. Easter send you?” I asked.
He told me no, that he had come on this own.
“What for?”
“Hoped there might be more,
Missus,” he said.
“More what?” I asked and then he
told me.
“Thought you might have some more
books to haul off and then I could be some help.” He said this while still
looking down, almost as if he were ashamed and was trying to see right through
the planks of the porch and to the ground below.
It all came perfectly clear to me
then. I thought for a moment. “I only clean them out once a year. I won’t throw
anymore away until next summer.”
“Yessum,” he said softly. He turned
to go and I heard myself speak, but like it really wasn’t myself —just someone
with my voice.
“I do have maybe one,” I said. “It
takes way too much space and I don’t think anyone has ever touched it. Then I
heard myself saying that I didn’t think anyone ever would and that it was full
of pictures. “Wait here,” I told him.
He waited on the porch while I
walked back into the coolness of the library. I retrieved the volume in
question and returned to where he was waiting. This time he wasn’t looking down
but staring straight at it. I knew he was trying to read the title.
“It’s called A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, by Sir
Bannister Fletcher, I said. “Someone left it here years ago and I’m afraid it’s
been wasted in Armistead.”
I handed him the book.
He took it and flipped through a
few pages. He closed it gently and held it to his chest and looked toward me. I
looked back, but I realized he was looking through me at something far, far
away. He closed his eyes, almost as if in prayer, still clutching the book. Then
he looked down and opened it toward the middle and flipped a few more pages. I
could see page after page of small drawings—buildings and parts of buildings.
There were also photographs of buildings. He turned them, one after another,
for a moment and then stopped. It was then that I saw his hands were shaking.
“Why Ferd,” I said. “Your hands
tremble so, are you ill?”
They stopped. He closed the book
reverently and smiled. “No, Missus. I’m fine. I'm just fine, thank you." He stopped, as if catching himself. "I'se fine," he said.
Whatever he
had must have been catching for I could imagine my hands trembling as well.
From then
on, I would see him on occasion—that is until it happened. It was odd, but I
even started to sense when he might show up. A student would drop a book into
the water while crossing the bayou, or one of the older boys would write
something vulgar and impossible to erase or I would find a partly used Big
Chief tablet left on a library table and a small stack of things would begin to
build up in the closet. That’s when I would start thinking he might come and I
would look out the window of a long summer day when the heat had broken for a
short spell. That’s when I would see him walking the long road leading to Main Street, or
driving Mr. Easter’s wagon into town on some errand. I would turn and go sit at
the check-out desk and pretend to be busy until he had knocked several times.
I always acted surprised to see
him.
“Why aren’t
you Mr. Easter’s boy?” I would ask
and he would say yes and tell me his name again and I would pretend to remember
and then would ask what he wanted although I knew and I knew that he knew by
now that I did. Rituals are important when you have so little.
I will go
ahead and tell it now that so much time has passed since it happened and dare
anyone to say a word about it. I probably slipped him a few books during that
time that hadn’t really reached the proper stage for discarding. But I had
discovered the kinds he liked and those were the very ones that were wasted in
the Armistead High School Library. When I would offer an old volume of paintings
or illustrated history, it would always produce that strange trembling in his
hand and I would derive a great deal of enjoyment from the act. Let a person
begrudge me that and I will invite them to have my job. I am weary now and
wouldn’t mind.
The last
time he came by was a year or so before Pearl Harbor,
if I remember correctly. It seemed that Mr. Roosevelt had maybe brought the
country through the worst of things and we didn’t yet know about the awful times
ahead. It was one of the happy times I recall. There have been so precious few
of them.
I asked him if Mr. Easter would
keep him on full-time during the winter and he said “No, the last boll is
picked. Just part-time work for the winter. I have some time now”
I had saved a partial set of John Stoddard’s Lectures, which
contained an extraordinary amount of photographs. He seemed particularly
pleased and said something rather odd about it filling in the missing pieces of
something or other. We were standing on the back porch and folks were filing
steadily by. The fair had just finished and people were still feeling festive.
I suppose I was, as well, for I suddenly asked him “Ferd, what do you do all
winter way out in that little house all by yourself? Do you ever feel lonesome
on those long, cold evenings with no family and nothing to do?”
He turned
to me and smiled.
“No,
Missus,” he said and stopped as if remembering something. “I keeps busy.”
He left and
I walked back into the library. It was dark there, and cool. I sat behind a
desk and thought about a person living alone in a shack in the middle of a
cotton field all winter. After awhile the image rose and expanded like smoke on
a clear autumn day and it didn’t seem so bad. I imagined the satisfaction of
knowing the last cotton boll had been picked, and the world was at rest outside
your door. I could almost smell the stirrings of a fire in an ancient iron
stove blending with the older smell of things a person truly loved. Contentment
has many faces, I think, including a solitary winter. One may look at it
however he chooses, either as a stifling loneliness or as a chance to prepare
for springtime in the world. It was nice to know that Ferd was at peace with it.
I can hear it now, so many years later, as if he had just this very second looked
at me and walked away smiling.
“I keeps
busy.” I think that was Ferd’s only dream.
To be continued …
