Walter Mosley - The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

“Is that you, L’il Pea?” the old man asked.

“Yeah, Uncle Coy. Yes, sir.”

“You come all the way back here just to see me?”

“I’ont know,” said the old man who was no longer an old man. “I just saw a white nurse from somewhere around Venice an’ she gimme some shots an’ then I woke up on the rise ovah on t’other side’a the hill.”

“I only got one pole,” Coy McCann said in apology.

“That’s okay. I could just sit next to ya if you ain’t just wanna be alone.”

“Hell no. I been waitin’ for ya.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah. You owe me a debt, and I been waitin’ till I get released.”

Ptolemy knew what the old man meant. This knowledge made him silent and so he sat down next to the fisherman and peered into the water.

The sun was bright but not bright enough to illuminate the shadows that lay between and underneath the large stones in the river. Catfish and crawfish and other creatures hid down under there in darkness, where bears and cougars and coyotes couldn’t get at them; where even the long-necked, elegant gray herons’ beaks could not go.

But Ptolemy’s mind could climb down there with the fishes and algae. The darkness was cold like night, black and deep . . . sleep . . .

Wake up, boy, wake up,” he said in a whisper that was both soft and sharp.

Little Ptolemy opened his eyes and squinted from the pain. He could tell that it was the early hours of the morning, even before the time that his father and mother got out of bed to work in the fields. His brother and sisters were sound asleep as only children could be, and his parents were asleep in the front room of their two-room shack.

“Daddy?”

“Shh!” Coy commanded, putting his fingers to the boy’s lips. “Come with me.”

Coy pulled the boy out of bed and through a flap in the tarpaper wall and all Ptolemy had on was a nightshirt.

The moon was crescent and an owl passed above them. Crickets chattered and tree frogs chirped. Ptolemy had rarely seen the depth of night. He had never been outside this late, moving along the path behind his family’s shack.

“Where we goin’, Coydog?”

The old man stopped and turned, putting his face very close to the boy’s.

“Shet your mouth or we both be dead. You unnerstand me, boy?”

And with that he clutched Li’l Pea’s right forearm and dragged him deep into the woods. They traveled for a long time, until they came to Hangman’s Knoll, and climbed up past there through a deep wood until they reached Mourners’ Falls. Ptolemy wouldn’t have been able to find the falls on his own, even in daylight, but Coy’s steps were sure and certain, quick and desperate.

The falls were forty feet high and constant because all the water that came down from the hills drained here. Coy took Pity on a winding path of big stones that led up to the cascades and then around to the cave hidden behind the blind of water that was barely visible in the weak moonlight.

Ptolemy’s nightshirt was soaked by the time they got inside the cave. Coy let go of his arm and the boy went to his knees on the stone floor, shivering from cold.

Coy lit an oil-soaked torch, illuminating a stone space that was about the size of the worship hall at Liberty Baptist.

“I’m cold,” the boy complained.

“Come back here,” Coy replied, stalking to the far end of the huge shale and granite chamber.

Something in the old man’s voice, something that the child had never heard before, made him obey in spite of his own suffering.

All along the back of the cave were big flat rocks that had fallen from the roof, broken or shattered.

“This one up next to the north corner,” Coy McCann said, waving his torch over a big flat stone that was black except for a white swath at the right side. “Under here is where I hid the treasure. Under here is what I want you to take just as soon as you strong enough to lift it. Go on now, try an’ lift it away from the wall.”

Ptolemy grasped the edge of the rock, which was much larger than him, and strained to push it away from the wall. But he couldn’t budge it at all.

“Good,” Coy said, smiling for the first time that night. “You too young, and this is too soon for you to get at it. But later on, when you get to be a young man, I want you to move that stone or break it and take that treasure and make a difference for poor black folks treated like they do us.”

Later on they were out under the threads of moonlight that wavered between the branches of pines and oaks.

“I got to go to my place before I run,” Coy told Ptolemy. “But I’m ascared to do it.”

“Why you scared, Uncle Coy?”

The old man knelt down and brought his leathery hands to the sides of the boy’s face.

“You know Jersey Manheim?”

Ptolemy knew and hated and feared the evil white man. He was one of the wealthiest men in their whole community and he treated black people like slaves. He owned the land that Ptolemy’s parents worked and kept them so far in debt with his community store and loans for their tools and supplies that they couldn’t ever leave or save one thin dime.

“One time when he was drunk as a skunk he told me,” Coy said, “that he had a pot’a gold. That him and his fathers before him had put away a gold coin for every week since thirty years before the Civil War. I did my numbers and figgered he had to have nearly five thousand coins. Now, that’s some money right there. You know I been thinkin’ on them coins for years. And finally, just a few hours before I got to you I went in his house and lugged ’em out to his wagon. I brung ’em up here, heaved ’em under that rock I showed ya.”

“How come he didn’t wake up when you went in his house?” the child asked.

“’Cause when I came by earlier to give him your daddy’s rent I poured some laudanum in his gin when he wasn’t lookin’. You know he drink that gin ev’ry night. An’ when I was sure that he was paralyzed, I come on in an’ searched the house until I fount the treasure chest under a trapdo’ under his bed.”

“An’ he was sleep?” Ptolemy asked.

“Yeah.”

“So he don’t know you took it.”

“That don’t mattah to the white man. He don’t have to know. All he got to do is remembah that I was the last niggah he saw. I was the last he saw and so I’ma be the first he go to.”

“So you gonna run?”

“Damn right I’ma run. I’ma run all the way to New York City with the twenty coins I took for myself. I’ma go up there an’ I won’t see another cotton plant ever again in my life.”

At these words Li’l Pea Grey started to cry. Coy was his closest friend.

“Sometimes we got to make a sacrifice, Pity,” the old man said. “Now, come go wit’ me to my house so I could get my things and make it outta the county before sunup.”

They moved on back-road paths through the night headed for the lean-to shelter that Coy McCann had called home since the barber took over his room for his new wife and child. Ptolemy didn’t think anymore about his feet or the cold. He didn’t worry about the white people that might be after him or his uncle. He felt as if he were a soldier now, fighting on enemy ground, like in the stories he and Coy read down by the Tickle when the fish weren’t biting.

“Stay here,” Coy told Ptolemy at a stand of live oaks on a rise that looked down on the old man’s shelter.

“How come?”

“I wanna see you every minute I can before I’m gone forever,” Coy replied, “but this is my most dangerous moment. I got all my things in a bag in the house. I couldn’t take it with me because of how heavy the gold was gonna be. And I had to get you and show you where the gold was before I left. So now I just got to hope that old Jersey drunk enough drug to keep him sleepin’ through the night. But if it don’t, I don’t want him to find you down there wit’ me.”