The Children Bob Moses Led. William Heath

Cock of the walk, he strutted his stuff with his bloodred crown on high when he wasn’t scratching the packed dirt, pecking kernels of corn, or doing his seignorial duty by his covey of clucking consorts. But each dawn I wanted to grab the rifle Eddie Mays kept by my bed and blast that strident bastard into eternal silence.

      After a week in Mississippi I was learning to live with the heat and the fear. A year before I arrived there had been an attempt to firebomb the farmhouse where I was staying, and the Mays family still proudly pointed out a bullet hole in their living room as evidence of that encounter. Lucky for them, the bomb was a dud. And lucky for the Klansman who threw it that Ella Mays had unloaded Eddie’s shotgun (worried that Buster, their seven-year-old grandson, might play with it) because Eddie had him in his sights. “Next time somebody come up in my yard and squat,” Eddie vowed, “they gonna get wiped with buckshot.” Since then the neighborhood had set up a self-defense system. The five or six black families that lived along that stretch of rutted country road had strategically enlarged its potholes and worked out a code whereby friendly cars could signal at night. Nevertheless, sitting on the porch in the dark, all of us would tense and fall into an uneasy silence whenever we heard the sound of tires spattering gravel and rocks whacking the underside of a chassis. Then the car would flash its lights, and we could relax and start talking again. The worst scares came when I was alone in my tiny room after everyone had gone to bed. It was too hot to sleep; my body was soaked with sweat; mosquitoes cruised in through the screenless window. Outside, a light breeze rattled the corn shucks; a mule snorted in its shed; crickets sang in the weeds; frogs croaked by the cow pond. If I pressed my ear to the wall, I could hear Jasmine, the Mays’s teenage granddaughter, breathing in her sleep. Then I heard the unmistakable crunch of a footstep, and the dogs started to bark. Whoever it was took off running, with the dogs yowling in hot pursuit.

      The blood pounded in my ears as I stood trembling at the window, straining to discern darker shapes in dark shadows. Bats swooping through the night seemed to herald the onset of some ultimate outer darkness. In spite of a full moon, I couldn’t see anything. Somebody went crashing through the cornfield with the dogs yelping at his heels. Then it was quiet again. I took a deep breath. We are not afraid.

      “Someone was prowling around last night,” I informed Eddie the next morning.

      “Hog.”

      “How could you tell?”

      “They short, fat, got hooves,” Jasmine added, putting a hand over her mouth to hide her smile.

      “It sounded like a person to me. But when I looked out the window, I didn’t see anybody.”

      “They short . . .”

      “So I’ve heard.”

      “I bet that hog was lookin’ for snakes,” Buster said.

      “You have a lot of snakes here?” I asked. Somehow the homebaked biscuit in my hand never made it to my mouth.

      “Right smart,” Eddie said. “We got some dandies.”

      “What kind?”

      “What kind do you want? We got all kinds. Mostly moccasins and copperheads.”

      “Snakes like farms,” Jasmine said.

      “We keeps the ground clear around the house,” Ella said.

      “One lives in the outhouse,” Buster announced.

      “It don’t live there,” Ella corrected. “We just seen it a few times.”

      “One what?” My throat was so dry my voice cracked.

      “A cottonmouth water moccasin,” Jasmine said.

      “How big is it?”

      “I reckon that one will run you ’bout three or four feet,” Eddie said.

      “Now don’t you go scarin’ Mr. Morton . . .”

      “Tom. You can call me Tom.”

      “Don’t scare Mr. Tom,” Ella continued. “That snake won’t bother you if you don’t bother him.”

      “I’m gonna kill it with a stick.”

      “Buster, you leave that snake be, you hear?” Ella looked at him hard to make sure he understood.

      “Yes’m,” Buster mumbled with lowered eyes.

      There was a cottonmouth in the outhouse. A snake that moved like water and stung like fire. The place had been bad enough before, standing like a lone sentry box in the tall weeds at the edge of the backyard, with wasps and flies hovering around its splintery seat. The daily walks out there were an ordeal. One night, when a sudden fright wrenched me to the guts, I was in torment: should I foul the bed or face the snake? Finally, shame proved stronger than terror, and I made my hasty way to the jakes, trying not to imagine what might be slithering at my feet.

      I soon learned the degrees of fear: the uncontrollable shakes; the cold sweats; the clattering teeth; even the “pucker factor,” where your anus gets a notion to shrivel back to the amoeba state and migrate elsewhere. But I was also growing accustomed to barnyard noises: that metal clinking sound wasn’t a redneck cocking his gun but the pony shaking its chain; that rustling sound wasn’t stealthy footsteps but the cow munching grass. I had been accepted by the family and by the horde of mongrel dogs who prowled the neighborhood. At first they swarmed around me showing their fangs, so that I had to stop at the top of the street and shout for somebody to come quick and rescue me. But after a week I was part of the scenery—barely an eyelid twitched as I walked by.