Freddie Owens - Then Like the Blind Man - Orbie's Story

Old Man Harlan didn’t like the idea. “Ya’ll can’t run a farm this way. Why don’t ya’ll move into town and let me handle things? I’ll loan you the money.”

“Yeah and what about the tobacco crop?” Granny said.

“I’ll take care of that. Give you your share when I get mine.”

“You crazier’n you look, you think I’d do that,” Granny said.

Old Man Harlan’s face soured over. “Bad enough you going t’at nigger church. You got to hire out the congregation too?”

“That don’t concern you,” Granny said.

A red grin opened one corner of Old Man Harlan’s mouth.

“Reckon they’s niggers in heaven, Mattie?”

“I don’t have to listen to this.” Granny turned to go back in the house.

“Or you reckon niggers got they own heaven?”

A mangy brown dog laid out next to the porch where we were eating. I threw it a piece of sandwich. “Let’s go see Moses.”

“Mo not say,” Willis said. “He got to sssay first.”

“He isn’t ever going to say. I been down here all this time he hasn’t.”

Willis took another bite off his sandwich. “Ca-cain’t go dare ‘less he say. Dey mmmagic in dem wood. Snake.”

“I ain’t scared of no magic,” I said.

“Make you crazy, boy. Dem wood will.”

“Don’t call me ‘boy’,” I said. “We can run away, can’t we? If we get in trouble we can.”

“Na uh,” Willis said.

“Moses might could help me, Willis. I had a dream about Moses.” I told Willis the dream I had when we were playing the ‘pass out’ game, about the fire pouring on Daddy, about Moses. I threw another piece of sandwich to the dog. “I think he did it Willis. I think Victor killed Daddy.”

Willis looked at the ground.

After while I said, “You reckon if Moses was to fight Victor he’d win? I bet he could knock Victor’s block off!”

Willis took another bite off his sandwich. He closed his eyes and chewed. Then he looked at me. “We go, you ca-cain’t tell Miss Mattie. Yo Mammy neither.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Cross my heart.”

“Cross my heart don’t mean shit,” Willis said.

I was cocky then. Now, with the wind blowing through the poplars and the sun playing peek-a-boo, I wasn’t so sure. I kept looking on the ground all around Chester, checking to see if there were any snakes under the gooseberry bushes. Granny’s butcher knife blade was fixed inside my belt. I had wrapped it in newspaper and put it in an old sock. Every now and then I’d feel of the handle to make sure it was there.

Chester stopped short of a big tree root. One of his ears went around to the front. The other stayed.

“Come up dare, Chestah!” Willis yelled. Chester backed off instead. “Come up! Come up!” Willis yelled. Chester went ahead, stopped, then stepped over the tree root and out onto an old roadbed that was partially hidden under wild bluegrass and dandelions and white dandelion-puffballs.

“Use be da train run here,” Willis said.

I could see what was left of the railroad tracks under the grass. They ran in both directions over the bulge of the hill. On the other side of the tracks dark green trees — Christmas trees, they looked like — crowded against one another, making a wall that ended at the side of a giant fist of rock. The rock shot straight up out of the ground and was covered in thick vines. The hill we’d been climbing continued up behind it, hidden under a bumpy green carpet of Christmas trees. White pine, Willis said they were, bald cypress and cedar too.

Willis pointed to the wall of trees. “Mo in dare. Pa-Place I told you ‘bout.”

I slid off Chester. Willis got his walking stick from the rope tied around Chester’s neck and slid off too. I walked across the tracks and up to the trees. They made a solid wall so thick you couldn’t see through to the other side.

“You goes in dare!” Willis called. “Behind dem trees!”

“There’s no way!” I got down on my hands and knees and tried to look under, but the branches were too close to the ground. I stepped back away from the trees and looked upward, up the hill. It was all green forest under a clear blue sky. “There ain’t no way,” I said.

That’s when I heard something big — a bull maybe or a bear — snapping limbs, crashing down through the trees. Suddenly the tree-wall bulged and spat out the man I knew to be Moses except he was all strange and smoky looking, not like I’d ever seen before. He had the same long blue-black hair and it was under the same dusty black cowboy hat, but his face was like a piece of burned wood, all smoky and gray around the edges.

Chester started back on his hind legs.

Moses looked at me, his voice going like a seesaw. “you COME! Boy!”

I pressed my hand against the sock with the butcher knife.

Moses nodded. “BRING it!”

Chester went all wall-eyed and danced backwards.

“Whoa Chester! Whoa!” Willis yelled.

Moses was over there in a second. He got the rope from Willis, reached up and grabbed the strap around Chester’s mouth. Chester went even more wall-eyed. He pulled Moses back into the poplar trees, kicked and snorted and showed his teeth. Moses put his hand flat between Chester’s eyes. Then he rose up and whispered something in his ear. Something good it must have been because Chester quieted right down, just like that, stood nice and peaceful like there’d never been anything to worry about.

Moses led Chester out from the trees and gave the rope back to Willis. He walked back over to my side of the tracks, gestured for me to follow and slid back inside the wall of trees. What he did with Chester, the way he moved, so quick and springy like a cat, had spooked me.

“It okay now,” Willis called. “Go on.”

I looked again at the wall of trees. “I can’t see how!”

“It easy,” Willis said. “Go!”

“You do it, if it’s so easy,” I said.

“Na uh,” Willis said. “I gots to stay.”

A dandelion puffball twirled on the wind in front of me. I closed my eyes, pushed hard against the wall of trees and slid slick as butter, falling almost, right through to the other side. A field of long white boulders leaned together there, stone fingers, all pointing upward along the slope of the hill. The woods continued up there, and there was Moses standing bow-legged and balanced atop one of the boulders. I couldn’t tell if he was watching me or looking off through the trees.

I was wearing only my Davy Crockett tee shirt and red shorts but no shoes, nothing to protect against the hard grainy stones. I had to pick my way, crawling, stepping, sometimes jumping one stone finger to another. When I came to the end of the field, I saw there was a path through the trees and that Moses had gone up it a ways. He motioned for me to follow and stepped off the path into the woods.

“Moses! Wait!” I ran up to where I thought he’d gone in. A giant pine sailed up there taller than all the others. One of its huge bottom limbs was growing right out of the ground on the side the path was on. I heard thunder and looked up to see rain clouds moving in where a minute ago it had been clear. The trees were so still I could almost see the quiet. It was hot too, hot as a room in ninety-degree weather with all the windows closed. I stood listening to the quiet. A drop of sweat made a crooked path from under my eye down along the side of my nose.

A tree branch cracked in the distance and I saw a shadow or the flicker of something, disappearing over a rise. “Moses!” I yelled and ran after the shadow, slipping and sliding in my bare feet on the prickly pine needles. I climbed down a place where the hill had washed out, jumped a stream at the bottom and started head first up the other side. A giant crab creature rose up in front of me. I yelled and tried to duck away but slipped on the pine needles face down. Then I saw the crab creature was just the mess of a dead tree, black bony-legged branches poking up from the ground. I got to my feet and looked up the hill. Nothing there, just more trees, the sky now full of dark purple rain clouds.