For the years that young Jim was growing up, his tribal enemy left him alone. Perhaps old Ranee regarded the lank sapling of a boy as being not worth even the attention of an insult. Probably in crowds they had rubbed elbows a dozen times with no engendering of friction. But when young Jim had passed his twentieth birthday and was almost a man grown, then all without warning Ranee Fleming set to work, with malice aforethought, to pick a quarrel with him. It was as deliberate and as brutal as anything could be. Of a sudden, it seemed, the torrents of long-submerged hate came spuming up from some deep back eddy in his muddied, fuddled old mind, making an evil whirlpool of passion.
It was on a Saturday afternoon in November that old Ranee came, boiling with his venom, to spew it out on the son of his dead and gone enemy. It happened on the market, and if old Ranee aimed to add brim measure to the humiliation of the boy, not in a year of choosing could he have picked fitter time and place. The green grocer wasn’t known then; everybody went to market in person on week day mornings and particularly everybody went of a Saturday afternoon. In the market square, town aristocrat and town commoner met on the same footing, a market basket over every arm, with this distinction only: – that ordinary folk toted their loaded baskets back home and the well-to-do paid to have theirs sent. There were at least twenty darkies who picked up a living by packing market baskets home. They all had their regular patrons and regarded them with jealous, proprietary eyes. You took a customer away from a basket darky and you had him to fight.
There is a new market house now on the site of the old one, a pretentious affair of brick with concrete floors and screened window openings and provision for steam heat in the winter; but then, and for many years before that, the market was a decrepit shed-like thing, closed in the middle and open at the ends, with a shingled roof that sagged in on itself and had hollows in it like the sunken jaws of a toothless old hag; and there were cracks in the side walls that you could throw a dog through, almost. In the middle, under half-way shelter, were the stalls of the butchers, which were handed down from father to son so that one stall would remain in a family for generations; and here one bought the beef steaks of the period – long bib-shaped segments of pale red meat, cut miraculously long and marvelously thin, almost like apron patterns. This thinness facilitated the beating process – the cooks would pound them with tools devised for that purpose – and then they were fried through and through and drenched with a thick flour gravy. Such was the accustomed way of treating a beef steak. Persons with good teeth could eat them so, and for the others the brown flour gravy provided a sustenance. But the spring chickens were marvels for plumpness and freshness and cheapness; and in the early spring the smoked hog jowls hung in rows, fairly begging people to carry them off and boil them with salad greens; and in the fall when the hog killing season was at hand, the country sausage and the chines and backbones and spare ribs made racks of richness upon the worn marble slabs.
Up at the far end of the square beyond the shed eaves stood the public scales, and around it hay growers and cord wood choppers and Old Man Brimm, the official charcoal burner of the county, waited for trade alongside their highpiled wagons. Next to them was the appointed place of the fish hucksters, which was an odorous place, where channel cats and river perch and lake crappies were piled on the benches, some still alive and feebly flapping. The darkies were sure to be thickest here. There was an unsung but none the less authentic affinity existing between a fresh-caught catfish and an old negro man.
Down at the other end was the domain of the gardeners and the truck patch people – an unwritten law as old as the market itself ordained these apportionments of space – and here you might find in their seasons all manner of edibles, wild and tame. The country boys and girls ranged the woods and the fields for sellable things, to go along with the product of orchard and garden and berry patch. In the spring, when herb teas and home-brewed tonics were needed for the thinning of the blood, there would be yellow-red sassafras root tied up in fragrant, pungent bunches, all ready for steeping; and strings of fresh-shot robins for pot-pies were displayed side by side with clumps of turnip-greens and mustard greens. And in summer there would be all manner of wild berries and heaps of the sickish-smelling May apples; and later, after the first light frost, ripe pawpaws and baskets of wild fox grapes, like blue shoe buttons; and then later on, scaly-bark hickory nuts and fresh-brewed persimmon beer in kegs, and piggins and crocks of the real lye hominy, with the big blue grains of the corn all asmoke like slaking lime, and birds – which meant quail always – and rabbits, stretched out stark and stiff, and the native red-skinned yams, and often possums, alive and “suiting” in small wooden cages, or else dead and dressed, with the dark kidney-fat coating their immodestly exposed interiors.
As I was saying, it was on a Saturday in November and getting along toward Thanksgiving when old Ranee Fleming came to the market to shame young Jim Faxon before the crowd. And when he came, you could tell by his look and by the way he shouldered through the press of people between the double rows of stands that all the soured animosities of his nature had swelled to bursting under the yeasty ferment of an unstable, hair-triggered temper.
The liquor he had drunk might have had something to do with it too. He came up with a barely perceptible lurch in his gait and stopped at the Faxon stall, which was the third from the lower end of the shed. With his head down between his shoulders and his legs spraddled he began staring into the face of young Jim.
Deadly offense can be carried just as well in a look as in the spoken word, if you only know how to do it – and Ranee Fleming knew.
There was outright obscenity in his glower.
Instantly it seemed, everybody in that whole end of the market square sensed what was impending. Sellers and buyers ceased trafficking and faced all the same way. Those in the rear were standing on tiptoe the better to see over the heads of those nearer to these two blood enemies. Some climbed upon the wheel hubs of the wagons that were backed up in rows alongside the open shed and balanced themselves there. The silence grew electric and tingled with the feeling of a coming clash.
Young Jim wanted no trouble, that was plain enough to be seen. The first darting realization that his tribal foe had forced a meeting on him seemed to leave him dazed, and at a loss for the proper course to follow. He bent his face away from the blasphemous insistent – glare of the old man and made a poor pretense at straightening up his wares upon the bench in front of him; but his hands trembled so he overturned a little wooden measure that held a nickel’s worth of dried lady-peas. The little round peas rolled along a sunken place in the wood and began spattering off in a steady stream, like buck-shot spilling from a canister. A dark red flush came up the back of the boy’s neck. He was only twenty, anyhow, and those who looked on were sorry for him and for his youth and helplessness and glad that little Emmy Hardin, his sweetheart, wasn’t there.
It was a long half minute that old Ranee, without speaking, stood there, soaking his soul in the sight of a Faxon’s discomfiture, and when he spoke he grated the words as though he had grit in his mouth.
“Looky here you,” he ordered, and the boy, as though forced to obey by a will stronger than his own, lifted his head and looked at him.
“Mister Fleming,” he answered, “what – what is it you want with me – Mister Fleming?”
“Mister Fleming – Mister Fleming,” mimicked the older man, catching at his words, “Mister Fleming, huh? Well, you know mighty good and well, I reckin,