Madewell Brown
Also by Rick Collignon
A Santo in the Image of Cristóbal García
Perdido
The Journal of Antonio Montoya
Madewell Brown
RICK COLLIGNON
Unbridled Books
Copyright © 2009
All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
ISBN 978-1-932961-65-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Collignon, Rick, 1948–
Madewell Brown / Rick Collignon.
p. cm.
1. African Americans—Fiction. 2. Spanish Americans—Fiction. 3. New Mexico—
Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3553.O474675M33 2009
813'.54—dc22
2008053137
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
BOOK DESIGN BY SH · CV
First Printing
This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
To all the men who played
Madewell Brown
South Cairo
Of all of them, Obie Poole was the only one who ever came back. At least that was what he would tell Rachael. But she had heard so many stories come from Obie’s mouth over the years that, even after he was dead, she was never quite sure what was the truth or what was a tangle of lies.
“By the summer of 1954,” he would tell her, his voice harsh from tobacco, his bald head nodding up and down, “we was all done in. By then Syville didn’t have no legs left to speak of. His knee bones had been broke so many times that they’d been ground to jelly. And his ankles, well, they’d got so swelled up that they looked like ankles on an old, fat lady. And some of them others, like Slip Marcelle and Ollie Swan, they weren’t much better. Their lungs so bad from all the dust they’d swallowed on those back roads that even the short run to first base would double them up with a hard fit of coughing.
“I tell you something,” Obie would go on, leaning back in his chair and folding his hands together. “To this day, I don’t know how it all fell apart on us. It seems like all those boys just drifted away until I was the only one left standing. I didn’t have much to choose from, so I did the only thing I could. I took up clown ball. Yes sir, that’s what I did. For five long, sorry years I stormed from one damn town to another. By then the coloreds had all moved on and left us behind. All that was stuck in their heads anyway was that Jackie Robinson. So the only ones who come out to watch us play the fool was white folks. They’d come out with their umbrellas and their sodie pops, dragging their little children along so they could have one last look-see. And there’d we be, grown men taking the game to a place it never ought to go.
“I tell you a thing, girl,” Obie would say, looking off at the river, his eyes half closed. “Where a man ends his life can make him think that nothing that come before it was a damn bit better.”
When Rachael was a young girl, she’d sit with Obie on his front porch and listen to his talk. He would sit in a wicker chair leaning back against the wall of his house, gazing out at the wide stretch of flat grass and cattails that ran all the way to the river’s edge. As he went on, he would fan away the bugs and the heat from his face. And all the while, Rachael would fidget along the porch railing.
Even back then, she was aware that the things the old man said had a way of changing. Sometimes it would be just the little things that changed, like names popping up where they hadn’t been before or dates moving years forward or backward. But at other times, it would be a thing so big that Rachael would think there must be storms blowing around the old man’s head. And all it would take to get things going was just one little breeze.
“Did I tell you,” Obie said one day, “that a rumor come to me?” He was hunched forward in his chair, a little more excited than usual. His hands were hanging down between his legs, his fingers twitching.
It had rained earlier that afternoon. The air was hot and muggy and water still dripped from the eaves. Sweat was running down both sides of the old man’s face and his shirt was undone so that you could see his hollowed-out chest. Rachael realized that, once again, Obie hadn’t bothered to mention where he had heard this rumor or who had told it. She wondered how a man who never went anywhere and who never had one visitor managed to hear so many things.
“What I heard,” Obie went on, rocking his body back and forth slightly, “was that those Pittman boys, James Lee and Earl, got themselves drunk and killed by a slow-moving freight train up north. Now, it don’t surprise me none that such a thing might happen to Earl. There never was one bit of sense in that head of his. In fact, he probably thought that standing on those tracks was a fine place to watch a train go by. But James Lee, now, he wasn’t like that. He was a cautious man and always took the time to look out for his little brother.”
Rachael was sitting up on the porch railing with her back to Obie. She was swinging her legs back and forth slowly and staring out past the swamp grass at the river. It was early evening and the surface of the water was flat and still. Not far from the shore, there were some white trash boys in a rowboat. They were fishing for carp up close to the riverbank.
“That’s not right,” she said softly.
“What’s not right?” Obie asked, scratching at a mess of mosquito welts on his arm.
“What you just said. You told me that James Lee and Earl got themselves killed playing ball in a lightning storm. You said that it happened in South Texas, down in dirt country.”
Obie dropped his arm and stared straight ahead. He stayed quiet for a moment, his head shaking slightly like it was a strain to hold it up. Then he let out a loud grunt. “I never told you no such thing,” he said. “I recall a white boy who once got struck, but that didn’t have nothing to do with the Pittman boys.”
“Well,” Rachael said, “I remember even if you don’t.” She was swinging her legs a little higher now. “You told me that Earl got himself blown fifty feet in the air like God yanked him up by his scalp. You said that when he hit the ground his shoes were dripping hot rubber and his hair was on fire.” Rachael watched the rowboat drift into the low-hanging branches of a sycamore tree. She could hear the sound of one boy yelling at the other. It made her want to laugh and yell out at them for being so dumb.
“You know something?” Obie said. He leaned forward and spat out a stream of tobacco juice. “You just like your damn granddaddy, you know that? Think you know so much. And if you going to talk to me, turn yourself around. I don’t want to be talking to your skinny backside.”
Rachael swung her legs up and swiveled around on the railing so that she was facing the old man. He was hunched forward, his knotted-up hands hanging loose between his thighs. He was looking up at her, his eyes wet and bloodshot. From out in the flat grass and the cattails came the deep-throated sounds of bullfrogs and the clatter of a million crickets.
For a few seconds, they just stared at each other. Then Obie shook his head slowly. “You just a little girl,” he said.