Mingo sniffed and slowly brought himself erect. He made a face and began stomping his feet. “I got needles all up and down my legs.”
“Watch it!” Sam T. cried as he jumped away from the puddled water that Mingo splashed. He stepped under the tree and gave Mingo a long, hard look. “Ain’t seen you for a few days. Where you been?”
Mingo’s face went dark. “Greenville,” he said with a wince.
“What were you doing in Greenville?”
“I got people there,” Mingo muttered, and then brightening a bit he said, “Hey, listen, man, you got any on you?”
Sam T. understood the any to mean whiskey. “Nah, sorry.”
“Oh,” Mingo said, and the light leaked from his face.
“So, uhm, did you leave Greenville in a hurry or something?”
Mingo’s eyes narrowed. “Why, what you hear?” he barked menacingly.
Sam T. raised a protective arm. “I ain’t heard nothing. It’s just that it’s raining and you ain’t got no jacket, no slicker, no nothing on your back but that wet shirt. I just figured you left in a hurry, that’s all.”
Mingo smirked, and then instinctively reached for the cigarette behind his ear. When he found that it wasn’t there, he patted down his shirt and dug into the pockets of his pants.
Still nothing.
Mingo gave Sam T. a hopeful look. “You got any smokes?”
Sam T. pulled out a pack of cigarettes and shook one free. It took three tries to get it lit.
Mingo took a few puffs and then pressed the tip against the bark of the tree, extinguishing it. He tucked the remainder behind his ear.
Sam T.’s eyes swung between Mingo and the road, which was beginning to look more and more like a stream.
“Me and my cousin Charlie was headed o’er to his mama’s house. We weren’t worrying nobody. The law just swooped down on us—guns drawn!” Mingo announced without warning.
Sam T. leaned in. “What now?”
Mingo’s right eyelid began to twitch. “The law come up behind us and stuck their guns in our backs. One man say, Can’t you see its raining, boys? Well, of course we could see that, wasn’t no getting around seeing it. We weren’t really understanding what point the man was trying to make. So me and Charlie said, Yes suh, we sees that. Turn around, the man say. And we do like he say. And then the next man raised his pistol high and brought the nozzle to rest square between my eyes, and he say: Then why ain’t you boys down by the river working? So then I says, Why would we be down by the river? And that’s when the first man hauled off and clobbered me upside my head with the butt of his gun.”
Mingo turned his head slightly to the left and pointed to the egg-sized knot above his temple.
Sam T. examined it and grimaced.
“When he hit me, I went down, I went down hard, and sent up a might amount of mud in the process. So the one that hit me say, First you sass me and now you dirty up my nice clean slicker? Get up, nigger!”
Mingo’s hands were shaking real hard when he snatched the butt from behind his ear and slipped it back between his quivering lips.
Sam T.’s eyes bulged. “They lock you and Charlie up?”
Mingo blew a stream of smoke from the corner of his mouth. “Nah, jail would have been a blessing. They walked us down to the river.”
Sam T. frowned. “The river? For what?”
“They got most of the colored men in Greenville down at the river.”
“What they got them doing down there?”
“Packing, hauling, and stacking sandbags.”
Sam T. scratched his chin. “What they paying?”
Mingo shot him an incredulous look. “Paying? Nigger, ain’t you heard me say the law plucked us right off the street and took us down to the river? The pay is you get to keep your goddamn life!”
Mingo sucked on the cigarette until the filter began to smoke; only then did he flick the butt out into the rain.
“Those niggers who refused to do the work were shot and thrown in the river.”
Sam T. shuddered.
Mingo spat a glob of phelgm into the mud. “They emptied out the jails too.”
“My God,” Sam T. murmured.
“It’s like a war zone up there. Men patroling both sides of the river with shotguns.”
“Why is that?”
“Don’t you know nothing, Sam T.?”
Sam T. shamefully shrugged his shoulders.
“If someone blow the levee closest to the north shore, the properties on the south shore might get spared. Someone blow the levee on the south shore, the property on the north shore might get spared.”
“Sure nuff?”
Mingo nodded his head. “While I was there a story come down the line said that some old boys from the north shore were caught with a box of dynamite on the wrong the side of the river.” He looked down at his battered shoes. “I believe they fish food now.”
The two men were quiet as they watched an old woman slosh slowly up the road.
“How long they had you?”
“Two days and two nights,” Mingo said in a trembling voice.
Thunder rolled across the sky and the rain began to fall in torrents. Sam T. and Mingo pressed their backs against the bark of the tree.
Mingo yelled over the din, “I finally got away—”
“Got away? They didn’t just let you go?”
“I had to run.”
“You run all the way from Greenville?”
“I believe so,” Mingo said as he reached up and felt behind his ear. Without asking, Sam T. offered him another cigarette.
“What happened to Charlie?”
Mingo looked off into the distance. “I don’t know.”
“You left him?”
“We weren’t together. They drop me at one end of the river, so I assumed they took him to the other end.”
Sam T. swiped rainwater from his face. When he looked at Mingo again, the man’s entire body was shaking. Sam. T. gripped his shoulder.
“Gotta get you outta of this weather,” Sam T. urged. “I’m headed over to the church. You wanna come? Church got plenty of room and it’s warm and dry inside.”
“Is today Sunday?”
“Nah, it’s Friday. Good Friday.”
“What so good about it?” Mingo cackled bitterly.
“God, that’s what’s good about it,” Sam T. retorted joyfully.
“Nah, Sam T., I don’t think I’d be welcome.”
Sam T. chuckled. “Sure you would. Everyone is welcomed in the house of the Lord.”
On that rain-drenched Good Friday, Hemmingway witnessed two very interesting things as she stood staring out of her bedroom window. The first was her mother hurrying across the bridge. Doll had claimed she was going to the church to assist August with any last-minute details before service.
After Hemmingway heard the front door slam, she crossed the floor