﻿Christmas Mourning by Janice Daugharty Smashwords Edition Copyright 2010 Janice Daugharty Good daylight and Hoss Rose had been driving the wagon, moving slow toward the old tram road through the woods to Fargo under a sheet of iron clouds threatening sleet. Little Merry Gay was bundled up in a sweet red wool coat that her mama had cut down and sewn from a coat that some woman had given her to wear herself, and on Merry Gay’s lap a quilt with scraps from one of her old indigo dresses. She imagined she could smell pee on the quilt because one of the Negro women had told Bernice that the way to set the dye in cloth was to dip it in ammonia and if she didn’t have any ammonia a chamber pot of pee would do the trick. She dropped the quilt to the floor and kneeled on the bench, waving back at Bernice and Tommy watching from the yard across the tracks. Bernice looked worried. The Great Hoss Rose looked worried. But Merry Gay wasn’t because she knew the pine box in back would hold up fine, her daddy had been two days building it with his own sturdy square hands and it would hold up fine. As soon as they hit the tram road and the woods had closed the path created by logs snaked out by oxen and mules, she crawled over into the bed of the wagon and climbed up on the yellow pine box. It was long, man-sized, and smooth but cold, the perfect stage for her to sing on if not for Redbone needing it. “You rip that pretty coat now,” Hoss called back laughing, “and your mammy’s gonna have both our hides.” He always said that and sounded like he meant it, even though he would make two of Bernice and feared no man regardless of strength, temper or size. Usually he drove the wagon loose, lead-lines in one hand and letting it roll, but this morning he was slumped forward driving with both hands. Rifle stood on the floor at his right side, he stared ahead through the woods as if searching for something he might shoot. “I’m fixing to sing for you, Daddy,” she said. “All the way to Fargo.” “Well, ain’t nothing I’d ruther hear and that’s the truth, baby. But you better save it for old Redbone’s funeral. You get the sorethroat, you won’t be able to sing, hear?” His voice boomed out over the frosty green pines and palmettos. In clearings of shed scrub trees and bushes, like smoke, drab green curds of reindeer moss put down shallow roots in the hard ground. They looked like sea sponge washed ashore and dried in the sun till brittle and stiff, out of place in the hardy woods but magical and mysterious for that very reason. She sat swinging her legs and kicking the box with her the heels of her button-up black high-top shoes. His smoked brown banjo lay on the bed of the wagon at her feet. Between songs she asked, “You sad, Daddy?” “I am, baby. I reckon I am. Me and old Redbone goes a long way back.” She sang in her shaky trilling tenor all the songs she knew. Sang ‘Jingle Bells’ twice because it was almost Christmas. Maybe on the way home they would find a Christmas tree. “It’ll hold up fine, Daddy,” she said when she was done. “I hope so, baby. I hope so.” Happening up out of the thick woods were sawdust piles like yellow mountains, the sawmill crews gone on to other locations for their saw lumber. They came upon a massive timber car so high above the tram rails that Merry Gay had to sit on her daddy’s shoulders to see inside—tree bark and pine straw. Somebody had left a rectangular metal scrape bucket and a square-hooked iron and Hoss guessed that one of the hands had quit and moved on, having found the scabbed tar, the cheapest grade of resin, too stubborn and bothersome to scrape from the cat-faces of the pines. “You have to take the bad with the good,” he told the little red-faced girl in the red coat. By the time they got to the Suwannee River, about a half mile south of Fargo, it was midday and the sky had brightened only slightly. Still those iron clouds but they had been forged into thick rods and stacked. A faint tang of tannic water and a hint of wood-smoke were in the air. At the wooden bridge the horse’s hooves changed from their familiar thudding on the ground to hollow clacking and echoes of clacking as if from the sudden void of dense woods, the open space of sliding pewter light, the vibration of the rushing black water below surging against the bridge pilings. Whorls sucking the light under and spewing it up as foam to collect with the sticks and dead leaves in the eddies along the banks, wringing willow and towering cypress trees with flat tops and rusty needles, their knees sticking up from the shallow patches of sand. Streamers of moss looked iced. “Is that Fargo, Daddy?” From her perch on the box behind him, Merry Gay sat almost as tall as the Great Hoss Rose, high on the wagon moving toward the break in the road. “Far as you can go,” he chuckled. “Daddy!” She laughed. “Well, trains heading east, once upon a time, would run out of track. How come it's called Fargo, they say--far as you can go." "Far as heaven where Redbone is now?” “Ain’t no tellings, baby. Ain’t no tellings. Me nor him neither one wadn’t never much on religion.” “Mama says it’s that old white deer haunting y’all.” “She’s just jealous, baby. Mad cause I wouldn’t let her dress me up in my one good suit.” “Why?” “Redbone’s people don’t have no suits.” “No. Why is she jealous?” “You ask more questions than Tommy.” “Are you talking like that because Redbone’s people talk like that?” “I’m talking like I always talk.” He wasn’t. It was as if he were practicing for the funeral like they’d practiced the song. No, it was as if there were two sides to Hoss Rose, the smooth side for women and the rough side for men. She felt let in on something special, riding high behind him. Up ahead were dogs and horses and wagons and people in head rags and bonnets and hats. They looked big in their padded coats, like they were wearing all they owned. All were moving slow in the cold from one store to the other, from the heat of one wood stove to the next. The same tall longleaf pines as in Moniac formed a fortress around the little town, same railroad tracks bringing the outside in but seldom taking the inside out. No money so no reason to go anywhere. Men like the Great Hoss Rose and Redbone wouldn't have gone if they had been rich. Hell, they were rich! “You wanta quit kicking that box for me?” he snapped. She hadn’t noticed her shoe heels drumming on the box. Somehow the sound had grown into the horse clopping and the wagon rattling. But she knew it was the beat of the crazy song playing out in her head. She had hoped to pass among the people, show off her daddy’s fine box; maybe go in one of the stores for some ribbons for Tommy’s wild hair. But Hoss took the left fork running south along the railroad tracks, then right again along a row of facing run-down houses. Rooty hog smells and collard greens or cabbage and stringy boiled beef, grass-fed. Dogs sat scratching by the side of the lane and children played chase, bare pale ankles and legs shining like bone. Even the cats looked rough. Dead trees, dead-looking houses; except for the smoke spiriting up from the chimneys. All had congregated at the large roof-heavy house at the end of the lane. Women in bonnets were passing in and out the front porch with rag-tented pans and bowls. Men in drab hats and clothes, old clothes, like Hoss’s, were backed up to a yard fire built from a great lightered stump, giving off scorch and soot smells, rolling black smoke tangling with red flames. “Ho!” Hoss hauled on the lead-lines, though the horse was barely moving then. A cautious horse retired from saddle riding when he grew too tender in the flanks and wary of bear, wary now of all the commotion or fusing smells or maybe the men rotating fire who resembled bears, who smelled wild as bear. Smoke spread over Merry Gay on the pine box and stung her eyes, so that she had to cover them. Hoss swung down, springing the wagon. He strolled over to the fire and began shaking hands with each of the men, then hugging and slapping backs heartily. The Great Hoss Rose, the biggest bully, the one everybody came to fight from all over South Georgia and North Florida, trying to claim his title. Growing boys wanted to be like him and women wanted to catch his eye, but girls like Tommy and Merry Gay were scared to death that the sporting fights would turn mean and they’d be caught in the middle. She and Tommy had seen two grown women fight their way from the commissary porch to the yard, in pouring-down rain. Men on the porch and Hoss included, looking scared, hanging their heads, walking the floor, and mumbling. In the mud puddle between the porch steps and the tracks the women pulled hair and clawed and almost ripped each other’s frocks off. Bernice, from her front porch across the tracks, shook her head and said, “All that over some man!” “Which man?” Tommy asked. “You girls, go on back inside.” Bernice had shooed them away with one hand. “And if I ever hear tell of either one of y’all cutting the fool like that, I’ll take my tee-weed switch to you.” Merry Gay and Tommy, heading inside, thought at first she was mad with them. Then they heard her yelling out through her hands, “Hoss Rose, you started it, now you finish it.” Now, a fat woman on the wide sloping front porch of the lopsided house was crying into a handkerchief and a scrawny carrot-haired boy on the broken doorsteps was wheezing out a sad church tune on a harmonica. The men at the fire stepped in one accord to the end of the wagon while Hoss reached over the side and lifted Merry Gay down from the pine box he’d built for their mutual buddy. One man had flews under his chin like an old hound’s. Another had a wen on his neck. Next time she saw the box it was being loaded onto the wagon bed again and she had to sit on the bench next to her daddy. He was sweating in the cold from helping load it. She scooted as close as she could get to him without disturbing his rifle and leaned into his cold padded coat. She knew Redbone was in the box now because the six men from the fire had almost buckled under its weight while carrying it from the house to the wagon. While Hoss drove the wagon back along the row of houses, she had to be quiet and think the song she would sing without kicking her shoe heels on the bench wall. At the little white church across the road they’d taken earlier at the fork, the people she’d seen eating at the house and wandering the yard and open hall were standing three-deep along the outside. The men who’d helped load and unload the pine box were riding in another wagon behind Hoss’s wagon. They hopped off, straightening their coats and hats, wiping tobacco from the corners of their lips, and walked over to Hoss’s wagon, pulled right up to the front of the church. He stepped down and lifted Merry Gay down and while he got his banjo from in back of the wagon she stood gazing up at all the big women and men and head-on with a girl about her own size. The little girl, Redbone’s girl, was squinch-eyed, blue-eyed, clinging to her fat mama’s dress tail. Merry Gay wanted to tell her not to worry, that her daddy was in heaven, but she figured after what her own daddy had said about that there was no sense getting the girl’s hopes up so that when she got to heaven someday and her daddy wasn’t there she wouldn’t be in for a disappointment. But really the girl didn’t look like the kind to be wasting time in church or worrying. She was blond and puny but growny looking, and her thin pale lips twitched like she was smirking or up to something. It could have been the snuff. Hoss took Merry Gay’s hand in his right, holding to the neck of the banjo with his left, and they followed the six men struggling with the pine box and Redbone in it. “Aye God, if he ain’t heavy!” one whispered. He looked like a tadpole. “Well, don’t shift him over here on me,” the man across from him whispered. “Hoss, catch hold of the foot will you?” Hoss handed his banjo to Merry Gay and lay hold to the end of the casket. “Easy, boys, easy. Ain’t no guarantees on this thing.” The banjo felt as heavy to Merry Gay as the pine box looked, but really it was awkward to handle without accidentally strumming the strings, which was happening right along every time she tried to brace it against her chest like her daddy. Merry Gay thought they were going inside the church where her hands might thaw and she could put the banjo down, but all the people straggled off around the south side of the church like they were in a hurry to be done with Redbone and get in out of the cold. The men with the pine box stumbled behind them, then Redbone’s fat wife in faded black and his little girl with a lump of snuff in her nether lip and Merry Gay with the banjo. Lots of crying, sobbing, weeping; even a wail or two, out of respect maybe, but Merry Gay couldn’t see who it was. She could see to her sides, plain headstones and mounded-dirt graves, one with a broken glass lamb and a rat tail of snuff spat by Redbone’s girl drying in on the dirt, but she couldn’t see ahead. Redbone’s fat wife and little girl stopped and Merry Gay stopped, but Hoss blocking the pine box from view kept walking forward like he was holding to the stocks of a plow being pulled by a mule. The gap he left soon closed in with people. Everybody smelled like smoke. Then the fat lady shoved through and Merry Gay and Redbone’s girl followed to see the pallbearers setting the pine box on a waist-high wood scaffold with thick spaced lengths of rope draped and swagged like a hammock end to end and trailing along the piles of raw dirt on either side. Beneath the scaffold and box was a long deep hole carved from the marled white clay and gray dirt. Redbone’s wife with a mole like a dog tick on her chin was crying into a dingy white handkerchief as she sat in a kitchen chair a few yards from the scaffold. Merry Gay tried to get close to the woman to get warm. But her little girl snuggled on her right and some church-lady types with hair balled on back of their heads like Redbone’s wife hovered on the other side. Most of the women were fat and looked self-satisfied. (Redbone always said that a woman puffed up on religion and food is right even when she’s wrong. Said their type would mistake Jesus Christ for Satan even with nail scars in His hands.) Merry Gay held the banjo by the neck, the body of it barely clear of the dirt, then she figured to rest it on the toe of her shoe and so let her arms relax. An old old preacher in a black suit stepped out of the crowd and strode over to the head of the casket. He was carrying a black Bible with his yellowed thumb stuck inside between the pages to mark his place. He opened the Bible with his thumb and mumbled a verse or two, then prayed, thumb in his Bible again. While he prayed the women hissed, “Yes, Jesus, thank you Jesus,” over and over and Redbone’s wife quit crying and joined in, filtering the chant through her handkerchief. Hoss, standing with the men on the other side of the pine box on the scaffold, stepped around to where Merry Gay was standing. He lifted the banjo off her toe and took her small cold hand in his and they walked over in the loose new dirt to the head of the box and the preacher with his head bowed, thumb marking his place in the Bible. He smelled stale with age, like old lace. Hoss strapped his banjo to his wall-like chest and strummed a few bars, whispering down at Merry Gay. “Now, sing it, baby, sing it for ole Redbone.” She was too cold. The song had frozen in her brain. Her teeth were chattering. He plucked the same bars over again—with his fingers and not a pick; it could have been any song she was about to sing. Everybody was watching her, even the preacher. “How sweet,” said one of the women standing next to Redbone’s wife and little girl. “Sing it, angel,” another said in a tweety voice. “Sing it, baby," Hoss said. "Sing it for ole Redbone." "Shy little thing, ain't she?" one of the women hissed. "Sign of a modest woman later on." She was shy but she didn't like people knowing it. She squeezed her eyes shut, picturing herself back on the wagon, on the pine box, singing and kicking her heels, until she recalled the start of the song and trusted that the rest would follow. “I’d as live die if ain’t no deerwoods, whiskey and women left to try I’d as live die if ain’t no dogs to run neath a starry sky Lord, take me on the fast train to gloryland, to gloryland, to glory land, take me on the fast train to gloryland and them deerwoods in the sky.” Nobody was smiling, nobody crying, except for the smoked men from the yard fire standing on the other side of the box. The women next to Redbone’s wife were crossing their arms and puffing up like toad-frogs, and the preacher’s mouth gaped wide, showing a brown coffee tongue. Hoss cut his eyes toward the pine box on the scaffold while he plucked the tune on the banjo. Behind her, as she sang the refrain, Merry Gay thought she heard one of the men fart, farting, but sounded more like a nail being yanked out of wood with a claw hammer. She glanced at the box on her left while singing the chorus again and saw it shift a little to one side and kind of bob up at the head. Everybody was whispering, pointing her way, enough to break her heart. And then she saw what they were really looking at –Redbone’s bare white feet and ankles hanging down over the hole from a rip in the floor at the foot of the casket. She saw him drop, all three- hundred pounds of flab and hair, dressed only in his brown plaid shirt, as the bottom fell out and the scaffold collapsed. Splintering wood and boards clapping together and a loud whump as Redbone hit home. ***It was almost dusk when Hoss and Merry Gay stopped along the tram road for him to chop down the white-pine sapling she’d picked out for a Christmas tree. In the sealed cold of the woods, they loaded the tree in the bed of the wagon where the pine box had been. “Sing to me, baby. Sing to me,” he said when they’d loaded up again. He still sat slumped but sounded cheery. She was on back of the wagon with the bristly pine tree, fresh tar smells and Christmas pine. “Can I sing ‘Jingle Bells’?” "Sing anything you want, long as it ain't about fast trains to gloryland," he called out. Almost home, almost dark, but a queer light hovered after so much gloom over a field of dry broom-sage and bushy green myrtle bushes. She was singing when she saw his right hand rise, his signal for her to be still and quiet. He hauled back on the reins and his great body rose out of its slump and he stepped easy from the wagon, not shaking it, not a sound. Reaching inside for his rifle, he positioned the stock on his right shoulder and peered down the barrel at some secret target on his left. There all the time, the sharp head and curved rack of a white deer, the albino, formed out of the wheat-like broom-sage, like a dream of a deer, like a ghost. Suddenly he reared up on his hind legs to see over the bushes it seemed and his rack contained too many points to count before he dropped from sight. When Merry Gay looked at her daddy again, the rifle was down by his side and he was grinning. Why didn’t he shoot? she wondered. “Next time,” he called out, laughing the put-on laugh of an adult who knows there is no Santa Claus. "I’ll get you next time. See if I don't." Scene from "Massacre at Moniac Crossing" http://smashwords.com/codaddy/profile/view