mayor’s office, with the doors closed. Swope said he’d decided to put a lid on
the whole thing. Said it might be a fang or it might be a fraud, but it wasn’t
worth gettin’ folks upset over.” He took the pierced wood chunk back from my
father’s hands. “I said, ‘Luther Swope, don’t you think people would want to
see real evidence that there’s a monster in the Tecumseh River?’ And he looked
at me with that damn pipe in his mouth and he says, ‘People already know it.
Evidence would just scare ’em. Anyway,’ Swope says, ‘if there’s a monster in
the river, it’s our monster, and we don’t want to share it with nobody.’ And
that’s how it ended up.” Mr. Sculley offered it to me. “Want to touch it,
Cory? Just so you can say you did?”
I did, with a tentative index finger. The fang was cool, as I imagined
the muddy bottom of the river must be.
Mr. Sculley put the piece of wood and the fang back up on the closet
shelf, and he closed the door. The rain was coming down hard again outside,
banging on the metal roof. “All this water pourin’ down,” Mr. Sculley said,
“must make Old Moses mighty happy.”
“I still think you ought to show somebody else,” Dad told him. “Like
somebody from the newspaper in Birmingham.”
“I would, Tom, but maybe Swope’s got a point. Maybe Old Moses is our
monster. Maybe if we let everybody else know about him, they’d come try to
take him away from us. Catch him up in a net, put him in a big glass tank
somewhere like an overgrown mudcat.” Mr. Sculley frowned and shook his head.
“Nah, I wouldn’t want that to happen. Neither would the Lady, I reckon. She’s
been feedin’ him on Good Friday for as long as I can remember. This was the
first year he didn’t like his food.”
“Didn’t like his food?” Dad asked. “Meanin’ what?”
“Didn’t you see the parade this year?” Mr. Sculley waited for Dad to say
no, and then he went on. “This was the first year Old Moses didn’t give the
bridge a smack with his tail, same to say Thanks for the grub.’ It’s a quick
thing, it passes fast, but you get to know the sound of it when you’ve heard
it so many years. This year it didn’t happen.”
I recalled how troubled the Lady looked when she left the gargoyle bridge
that day, and how the whole procession had been so somber on the march back to
Bruton. That must have been because the Lady hadn’t heard Old Moses smack the
bridge with his tail. But what did such a lack of table manners mean?
“Hard to say what it means,” Mr. Sculley said as if reading my mind. “The
Lady didn’t like it, that’s for sure.”
It was starting to get dark outside. Dad said we’d better be getting
home, and he thanked Mr. Sculley for taking the time to show us where the bike
had gone. “Wasn’t your fault,” Dad said as Mr. Sculley limped in front of us
to show us the way out. “You were just doin’ your job.”
“Yep. Waitin’ for one more bike, I was. Like I said, that bike couldn’t
have been fixed anyhow.”
I could’ve told my dad that. In fact, I did tell him, but one sorry thing
about being a kid is that grown-ups listen to you with half an ear.
“Heard about the car in the lake,” Mr. Sculley said as we neared the
doorway. His voice echoed in the cavernous room, and I sensed my father
tightening up. “Bad way for a man to die, without a Christian burial,” Mr.
Sculley continued. “Sheriff Amory got any clues?”
“None that I know of.” My father’s voice was a little shaky. I was sure
that he saw that sinking car and the body handcuffed to the wheel every time
he lay down in bed and closed his eyes.
“Got my own ideas about who it was, and who killed him,” Mr. Sculley
offered. We reached the way out, but the rain was still falling hard onto the
mountains of old dead things and the last of the sunlight had turned green.
Mr. Sculley looked at my father and leaned against the door frame. “It was
somebody who’d crossed the Blaylock clan. Must’ve been a fella who wasn’t from
around here, ’cause everybody else in their right mind knows Wade, Bodean, and
Donny Blaylock are meaner’n horny rattlers. They got stills hidden all up in
the woods around here. And that daddy of theirs, Biggun, could teach the devil
some tricks. Yessir, the Blaylocks are the cause of that fella bein’ down at
the bottom of the lake, and you can count on it.”
“I figure the sheriff thought of that already.”
“Probably did. Only trouble is, nobody knows where the Blaylocks hide
out. They show up now and again, on some errand of meanness, but trackin’ ’em
to their snakehole is another thing entirely.” Mr. Sculley looked out the
door. “Rain’s easin’ up some. Reckon you don’t mind gettin’ wet.”
We trudged through the mud toward my dad’s truck. I looked again at the
mound of bikes as we passed, and I saw something I hadn’t noticed before:
honeysuckle vines were growing in the midst of the tangled metal, and the
little sweet white cups were sprouting amid the rust.
My father’s attention was snagged by something else that lay over beyond
the bikes, something we had not seen on the way in. He stopped, staring at it,
and I stopped, too, and Mr. Sculley, limping ahead, sensed our stopping and
turned around.
“I wondered where they brought it,” Dad said.
“Yeah, gonna haul it off one of these days. Gotta make room for more
stuff, y’know.”
You couldn’t tell much about it, really. It was just a rusted mass of
crumpled metal, but some of the metal still held the original black paint. The
windshield was gone, the roof smashed flat. Part of the hood remained, though,
and on it was a ripple of painted flames.
This one had suffered.
Dad turned away from it, and I followed him to the pickup. Real close, I
might add.
“Come back anytime!” Mr. Sculley told us. The hound dogs bayed and Mrs.
Sculley came out on the porch, this time without her rifle, and Dad and I
drove home along the haunted road.
6
Old Moses Comes to Call
MOM HAD PICKED UP THE PHONE WHEN IT RANG, PAST TEN o’clock at night about a
week after our visit to Mr. Sculley’s place.
“Tom!” she said, and her voice carried a frantic edge. “J.T. says the
dam’s burst at Lake Holman! They’re callin’ everybody together at the
courthouse!”
“Oh, Lord!” Dad sprang up from the sofa, where he’d been watching the
news on television, and he slid his feet into his shoes. “It’ll be a flood for
sure! Cory!” he called. “Get your clothes on!”
I knew from his tone that I’d better move quick. I put aside the story I
was trying to write about a black dragster with a ghost at the wheel and I
fairly jumped into my jeans. When your parents get scared, your heart starts
pounding ninety miles a minute. I had heard Dad use the word flood. The last
one had been when I was five, and it hadn’t done a whole lot of damage except
stir up the swamp snakes. I knew, though, from my reading about Zephyr that in
1938 the river had flooded the streets to the depth of four feet, and in 1930
the spring flood had risen almost to the rooftops of some of the houses in
Bruton. So my town had a history of being waterlogged, and with all the rain
we and the rest of the South had been getting since the beginning of April,
there was no telling what might happen this year.
The Tecumseh River fed out of Lake Holman, which lay about forty miles
north of us. So, being as it is that all rivers flow to the sea, we were in
for it.
I made sure Rebel would be all right in his dog run behind the house, and
then my mom, dad, and I jammed into the pickup truck and headed for the
courthouse, an old gothic structure that stood at the terminus of Merchants
Street. Most everybody’s lights were on; the message network was in full
operation. It was just drizzling right now, but the water was up to the
pickup’s wheel rims because of the overloaded drainpipes and some people’s
basements had already flooded. My friend Johnny Wilson and his folks had had
to go live with relatives in Union Town for that very reason.
Cars and pickup trucks were filling up the courthouse’s parking lot. Off
in the distance, lightning streaked across the heavens and the low clouds lit
up. People were being herded into the courthouse’s main meeting room, a large
chamber with a mural painted on the ceiling that showed angels flying around
carrying bales of cotton; it was a holdover from when cotton crop auctions
used to be held here, twenty years ago, before the cotton gin and warehouse
were moved to floodproof Union Town. We found seats on one of the splintery
bleachers, which was fortunate because the way other folks were coming in,
there soon wasn’t going to be room enough to breathe. Somebody had the good
sense to turn on the fans, but the hot air emanating from people’s mouths
seemed inexhaustible. Mrs. Kattie Yarbrough, one of the biggest chatterboxes
in town, squeezed in next to Mom and started jabbering excitedly while her
husband, who was also a milkman at Green Meadows, trapped my father. I saw Ben
come in with Mr. and Mrs. Sears, but they sat down across the room from us.
The Demon, whose hair looked as if it had just been combed with grease,
entered trailing her monstrous mother and spindly pop. They found places near
us, and I shuddered when the Demon caught my repulsed gaze and grinned at me.
Reverend Lovoy came in with his family, Sheriff Amory and his wife and
daughters entered, the Branlins came in, and so did Mr. Parlowe, Mr. Dollar,
Davy Ray and his folks, Miss Blue Glass and Miss Green Glass, and plenty more
people I didn’t know so well. The place got jammed.
“Quiet, everybody! Quiet!” Mr. Wynn Gillie, the assistant mayor, had
stepped up to the podium where the cotton auctioneer used to stand, and behind
him at a table sat Mayor Luther Swope and Fire Chief Jack Marchette, who was
also the head of Civil Defense. “Quiet!” Mr. Gillie hollered, the veins
standing out on his stringy neck. The talking died down, and Mayor Swope stood
up to speak. He was tall and slim, about fifty years old, and he had a
long-jawed, somber face and gray hair combed back from a widow’s peak. He was
always puffing on a briar pipe, like a locomotive burning coal up a long,
steep haul, and he wore perfectly creased trousers and shirts with his
initials on the breast pocket. He had the air of a successful businessman,
which he was: he owned both the Stagg Shop for Men and the Zephyr Ice House,
which had been in his family for years. His wife, Lana Jean, was sitting with
Dr. Curtis Parrish and the doctor’s wife, Brightie.
“Guess everybody’s heard the bad news by now,” Mayor Swope began. He had
a mayorly appearance, but he spoke as if his mouth was full of oatmeal mush.
“We ain’t got a whole lot of time, folks. Chief Marchette tells me the river’s
already at flood stage. When that water from Lake Holman gets here, we’re
gonna have us a real problem. Could be the worst flood we’ve ever had. Which
means Bruton’ll get swamped first, it bein’ closest to the river. Vandy, where
are you?” The mayor looked around, and Mr. Vandercamp Senior raised his
rickety hand. “Mr. Vandercamp is openin’ up the hardware store,” Mayor Swope
told us. “He’s got shovels and sandbags we can use to start buildin’ our own
dam between Bruton and the river, maybe we can hold the worst of the flood
back. Which means everybody’s gonna have to work: men, women, and children,
too. I’ve called Robbins Air Force Base, and they’re sendin’ some men to help
us. Folks are comin’ over from Union Town, too. So everybody who can work
oughta get over to Bruton and be ready to move some dirt.”
“Hold on just one damn minute, Luther!”
The man who’d spoken stood up. You couldn’t miss him. I think a book
about a white whale was named after him. Mr. Dick Moultry had a florid, puffed
face and wore his hair in a crew cut that resembled a brown pincushion. He had
on a tent-sized T-shirt and blue jeans that might’ve fit my dad, Chief
Marchette, and Mayor Swope all at the same time. He lifted a blubbery arm and
aimed his finger at the mayor. “What you’re tellin’ us to do, it seems to me,
is to forget about our own homes! Yessir! Forget about our own homes and go to
work to save a bunch of niggers!”
This comment was a crack in the common clay. Some hollered that Mr.
Moultry was wrong, and some hollered he was right.
“Dick,” Mayor Swope said as he pushed his pipe into his mouth, “you know
that if the river’s going to flood, it always starts in Bruton. That’s the
lowland. If we can hold it back there, we can—”
“So where are the Bruton people?” Mr. Moultry asked, and his big square
head ratcheted to right and left. “I don’t see no dark faces in here! Where
are they? How come they ain’t in here beggin’ us for help?”
“Because they never ask for help.” The mayor spouted a plume of blue
smoke; the locomotive’s engine was starting to stoke. “I guarantee you they’re
out on the riverbank right now, tryin’ to build a dam, but they wouldn’t ask
for help if the water came up to their roofs. The Lady wouldn’t stand for it.
But they do need our help, Dick. Just like last time.”
“If they had any sense, they’d move out of there!” Mr. Moultry insisted.
“Hell, I’m sick and tired of that damn Lady, too! Who does she think she is, a
damn queen?”
“Sit down, Dick,” Chief Marchette told him. The fire chief was a
big-boned man with a chiseled face and piercing blue eyes. “There’s no time to
argue this thing.”
“The hell you say!” Mr. Moultry had decided to be stubborn. His face was
getting as red as a fireplug. “Let the Lady come over here to white man’s land
and ask us for help!” That brought a storm of assenting and dissenting shouts.
Mr. Moultry’s wife, Feather, stood up beside him and hollered, “Hell, yes!”
She had platinum-blond hair and was more anvil than feather. Mr. Moultry
bellowed over the noise, “I ain’t breakin’ my ass for no niggers!”
“But, Dick,” Mayor Swope said in a bewildered way, “they’re our niggers.”
The shouting and hollering went on, some people saying it was the
Christian thing to keep Bruton from being flooded and others saying they hoped
the flood was a jimdandy so it would wash Bruton away once and for all. My
