The Unsettled (Final Chapter to: "Colored and White")

The Unsettled
(Independent missing chapter story, to: “Colored and White”





Sheriff Parker



1

“We went on that day, didn’t go all that fast, didn’t have to, Giaus and Fanny Lou Jackson were in a buggy, slow as turtles, so we figured we had more than enough time to kill them before they got to Montgomery, to tell the Governor whatever they were going to tell him. All that first day we didn’t even see them—matter-of-fact, we just followed their tracks, that’s all we did, morning to night. Sometimes we even walked our horses to cool them down, no hurry, we figured, no sense in killing ourselves; we’d catch up to them. After a while, the second day, we saw them on the road, they were slow moving, and we didn’t dare to pass them. After a good while everything was flat land, and then we heard Giaus say, like an echo—words being carried by the wind back to our ears, “Look out! There they are,” he said, and he was pointing to us, at us, and his wife was looking where he was pointing, as if they were somewhat expected, but they didn’t have a plan—niggers never do, had I been them, I would have turned off the road and aimed the buggy in the direction of the chimney that had smoke coming out of it, by godfrey. Then we moved fast in a gallop, made a cloud of dust, running straight towards them, and I saw them just looking at the dust, and their buggy had stopped, and the horses heads hung there looking for grass but there wasn’t any, and we overtook them, coming the last few feet slow, almost to a mans walk, our horses now panting, then to a sudden halt in front of their buggy.
“Yessum,” Fanny said to us, hesitantly, and then Giaus told us to “Get on away from here, leave us alone…” And Yancy and I looked about; saw some chimneys in the distance, above some trees, had noticed that smoke I was talking about. They were the only niggers on the road, no white folks either, never saw one that whole second day. Yancy was looking in back of us, sundown was due shortly, and we done shot them deader than a doornail right then and there, and went off and left them as they were on the road for the buzzards to eat, I don’t rightly know exactly what time it was, but it woke me up some, I could see her head wobble like a weak willow tree branch in the wind, or you know what I mean, and she fell off the buggy, and then Giaus, he had a little life in him yet, and you could tell he was silently saying inside his head, as he was dying, now quite sensible any longer, ‘Where is she, where are we…’ Then we found a place to rest for the night down the road some several miles, found an old buckboard in the field left for the cotton pickers, everything was full of shadows that night; we slept in the dark, after we found some grass to feed the horses. Around the field there was nothing but underbrush, thick gum, some trees, and those damn shadows. We had some bread and meat left, and we ate it right then and there,” said Sheriff Parker.
“Reckon they found the bodies the next day?” said Yancy, to Sheriff Parker, “not sure who buried them, and where…. We went on the next morning, as I look back at this time, aren’t no one ever saw us, the road in the morning was as empty as it was that evening.”

And there they were listening—Revered Hickman, and Jordon Jefferson, in the back of Mr. Hobby’s storeroom, and now Sheriff Parker, Pick Ritt, Clara Smiley—whom now Pick was dating, he had given up on Emma Hightower years ago, who seemed to have isolated herself on the Hightower plantation, from friend and foe—and Yancy Yankcavick, along with Mr. Hobby himself: they could hear the feet of Jordon and Hickman moving hurryingly, and a kind of panting murmur went along with that. They slammed the door as if to indicate they had just come in from outside, but they had already been inside, heard it all, all that was to be said that night with them listening.
“Whose back there?” asked Yancy, to Hobby?
“That nigger Jordon perhaps, I thought he was gone!” said Hobby.
“Yes, I can smell one or two,” said Pick Ritt, who now had been dating Clara for some twenty years or so, since the killing of the Jackson family, it was now 1890.
And then Jordon’s voice rose, “It’s me boss, me and the Revered, we just came in, eyes be down at the church some, hope You-all didn’t mind!”
All of a sudden, the visiting group in the front of the closed up store, gave a heavy sigh, a kind of gasping to their breathing, from holding it in for that one minute, that minute they didn’t “Sh-h-h-h,” but spoke freely, as they drank some moonshine, as often they did on Saturdays, after the store was closed. And then Jordon and the Revered left, and Yancy had something to say, as he heard them walking outside, alongside the store.


2

“We didn’t stop on our way back to Ozark, that following day, we just looked at chimneys and the smoke coming from them, and cotton fields, and when we reached town, you Pick, was the first one to ask, if you remember, ‘Well, did you or didn’t you?’ and if I recall right, you just looked at me,” said Yancy, “and I said, ‘Yes sir, Mr. Ritt, we done killed them, right good!’ and we ran off to the bar. That was the strangest thing I ever did do in my entire life, run off to the bar after killing someone, in the middle of the day, in full sunlight, thirsty as a sow on an empty stomach. But I’ll tell you again, as I told you then, and a hundred times thereafter, I shot Fanny clean and neat, not like Parker, who shot Giaus, three times, once in the head, and twice in the chest, he died slow, hard to kill I reckon.”
“I done compensated you both well for doing what the whole town wanted you to do,” said Ritt, “two-thousand a piece is not chickenfeed. Plus the first time you told the tale, one telling was enough, that first telling in particular, which is the same as the next or the one before, you keep telling it a little different maybe, but it all comes out the same at the end, like Adam and Eve and making the snake different colours, but at the end, they both get the axed. To be honest, we have had to listen to this story shabby tale, too many times, someone is going to overhear it like today, and we’ll be sorry for it.”
“Aren’t no one can hang a whole town,” said Hobby, “and it’s is all hearsay, and no proof—anyhow.”

Written in Lima, Peru: 6-7-2010