Cy in Chains Page 5

  The way Jess babied the little guys got on Cy’s nerves. Last night, it was all about Billy. He’d been brought to the camp after dark and sent into the kitchen where Cy, Jess, and a couple of other boys from their bunkhouse were scrubbing the pots. Billy was jabbering with fear, the way all the new ones did. Rosalee, the cook, got him some cold beans and cornpone, but Billy wouldn’t eat. He couldn’t do a thing except stand there, trembling.

  “I get him calmed down, Mr. Cain, sir,” Jess had said. “He be all right.”

  Don’t bother, Cy thought.

  “Do it, then,” Cain told Jess. “He can sleep next to you tonight.” He turned to Prescott. “Chain him. Sooner it’s done, the better. Nigger looks like he’s about to have a fit.”

  Prescott moved toward Billy, who backed away and bumped into Jess.

  “It be all right,” Jess assured him, his huge paw on the kid’s shoulder. “He just got to chain you. It don’t hurt.”

  Prescott brought out a set of leg irons. “Come here, you.”

  Billy didn’t move.

  “Go on,” Jess said.

  Billy took one step—stopped.

  “I ain’t got all night,” Prescott growled.

  “He too scared to move, sir.”

  “His feelings ain’t my problem! Come on. Move!”

  Do it! Cy yelled in his head. Hangin’ back ain’t gonna get you nothin’ but trouble. And, Jess, mind you own business. Let the boy find out for hisself what he got to look forward to. Sooner he understand how it is, the better.

  Jess nudged Billy toward the white man. Billy went, feet dragging across the wooden floor. Prescott squatted in front of him and snapped an iron ring on each ankle. A chain joined the two rings. Fixed to the middle was another piece of chain with a ring at the end. Billy would learn to tuck that into his belt so he wouldn’t trip over it. But if he used his belt to try and hang himself, they’d take it away, and then he’d have to manage his chains as best he could. And he’d learn to shuffle. Playing tag, climbing a tree, walking somewhere in a hurry—no more of that stuff, not for a long time. Maybe never.

  It all depended on how long Cain said you had to serve. Some of the boys claimed they’d been sentenced to a certain number of months or years by judges who’d tried them for stealing or other offenses. Other boys hadn’t ever had a trial. Local sheriffs had picked them up as runaways or vagrants and delivered them to Cain without any kind of charges or formal hearing. Still others, like Cy, had been kidnapped. No trial, no sentence, no stated amount of time to serve.

  In the three and a half years he’d been in Cain’s camp, Cy had seen only a few boys leave. Some said if you were there more than five years, you wouldn’t make it. No one could last more than five. By then, the boss men would have worked you to death, or starved you, or beaten the life out of you.

  Prescott stood up, looking satisfied. “See, nigger? Nothin’ to it.”

  That’s when Billy puked all over Prescott’s boots.

  “God damn it!” Prescott cried. “Stupid little son of a bitch!”

  Cain and Stryker laughed.

  Cy wanted to laugh too—he hated Prescott worse than anyone else in his world—but he didn’t want to risk having his face slapped or getting a whipping. Cain didn’t put up with any crap from his “boys.”

  “What’s so goddamn funny?” Prescott fumed.

  “Stuff always happens to you, don’t it?” Cain said dryly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Seems like the world got it out for you, that’s all.”

  “He didn’t mean to do it, sir,” Jess told Prescott.

  “Shut up, you. My best boots! Damn it all to hell.”

  “We clean ’em up for you, sir.”

  Not me, Cy thought.

  “You mean he’s gonna clean ’em up. I don’t care if it takes him all night to do it, either.”

  “Deal with it,” Cain told him. “I got no more time for this mess.”

  Prescott ordered them to their bunkhouse, where he made Billy wash off his boots and polish them until they looked decent. The kid started crying in an annoying, whiny way once he began, and he didn’t stop all the time he put on the black polish and buffed the boots with a rag. Cy felt like choking him, anything to make him shut up. Billy got quiet only when Prescott was satisfied and chained everyone for the night.

  A raindrop hit Cy on the face, and then another. Damn! Couldn’t the world leave him alone, for once? He wanted to pull the blanket over his face, but even doing that was difficult, what with Jess and Mouse lying so close by.

  Somewhere down at the far end, in the gray gloom, cloth started to rustle. Someone playing with himself. All the boys who were old enough did it. Nobody minded, or at least nobody said anything. They all did whatever they could to feel good even for a few seconds, all without privacy. Everything without privacy. You pretended that no one saw you shitting in the five-hole outhouse or heard you crying for your mama in the night or playing with yourself when your body wouldn’t give you any peace.

  When he had first come to Cain’s camp, Cy complained to Jess about having to do his business in the outhouse in front of other guys. “Pretend they ain’t nobody there,” Jess had told him, and Cy had learned to do just that. It didn’t always work, of course, but you had to try. Otherwise you’d go loony, chained at night to the others, chained during the long marches to the woods, swamps, and fields where you worked—every day like the ones that went before it and no different from the ones that would come after it. For Cy, it had been three and a half years of those kinds of days, close as he could figure. Sooner or later, he’d die or get sent to the coal mines in Alabama. He couldn’t make up his mind which would be worse. Maybe there wasn’t much difference between the two.

  Six

  BANGA-BANGA-BANGA-BANG! THE SOUND OF the wake-up gong shattered the silence. Cy knew he’d fallen asleep again, because daylight was filtering through the cracks in the doors. The rain had stopped, but he was still shivering. Another damn day, and still alive. He’d taken to hoping, halfheartedly, that he’d die in his sleep and be done with everything.

  Mouse roused just enough to pull up his knees and burrow farther under his thin blanket. Cold weather hurt him because there wasn’t a pinch of fat on him. His feet suffered the worst. When they touched Cy at night, they felt like fish pulled from a pond in January. The kid was no bigger than a child—no bigger than Travis—although Mouse swore he was thirteen. His arms and legs were little more than bones, and his voice hadn’t begun to get deep. One night, Cy caught him sucking on his fist, just like a pup at its mama’s tit, sound asleep.

  Cy didn’t move. Nobody did. Cain didn’t mean that first call. He complained that his boys were too lazy to get up when the gong sounded, and he’d have to get real tough on them one day soon unless they changed their ways. Cain hired out the boys in his camp to anyone who needed their labor. He made his money that way. It wasn’t much, to hear Cain talk. He was always moaning how he was going broke running the camp when he could do much better up in Atlanta.

  Cy closed his eyes again, and his mind went straight to where he didn’t want it to go: visiting day. A visiting day was scheduled every three months, but it was a bad joke: nobody ever showed up. Many of the boys didn’t have any family they remembered or wanted to remember. If they did have families, maybe their folks stayed too far away to make the trip or were glad to be rid of another mouth to feed. Maybe they just didn’t care.

  An image of Pete Williams, sweaty in work shirt and overalls, sloppy from too much moonshine, flashed into Cy’s mind and stirred up the black hatred in his gut. Pete Williams had never come for his son. That was too much to forgive.

  He dozed again. The second gong sounded. Now it was time to move. Jess opened his eyes, stretched, and said, like he always did, “Good day, gentlemen.”

  Cy poked Mouse. “Come on. We gotta go.”

  Mouse curled up even tighter.

  Down the row, boys came awake. Groa
ns, complaints, sounds of “Move it!” and “Wake up!” and “Lemme alone!”—all the usual morning noise.

  “Mouse!” Cy shook him. “It time.”

  “Unnhh.”

  “Now. They gonna unlock us any minute.”

  Sure enough, from outside came the sound of Prescott opening the lock. At night, the chains with the ring at the end, the ones attached to the chain between the boys’ ankles, were put down by their feet. Then Prescott and Stryker took another chain and passed it through the rings. This chain was pulled through a small hole in the far wall of the bunkhouse and attached to a post outside. After all the boys were secured, one of the white men fed the chain through a similar hole in the wall by the door and fastened it around another post. Any boy trying to escape would first have had to unlock the chain outside—but that was impossible. Cy sometimes worried what would happen should there be a fire at night. He and the others would be trapped unless someone from outside rescued them.

  “Time to wake up, Billy,” Jess said. “We got to get ready.”

  Billy opened his eyes, and Cy could tell he didn’t know where he was. Then he remembered—and started to twitch.

  Not another boy prone to fits, Cy hoped. They didn’t need that mess.

  “Hey, now.” Jess put a gentle hand on Billy’s chest. “No need for that. Jus’ do what I do, and you be all right.”

  You be all right. Only Jess could make such a lie sound so true.

  Billy got quiet.

  “That better?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Don’t go callin’ me sir. I ain’t nobody special. Just ’nother dog like you.” Jess looked down the line. “Y’all ready?”

  The door was unlocked from the outside, and Prescott came in, tapping his straight stick against his palm, like he was itching to use it. The man was short, wiry, and bad-tempered as a cornered wildcat. Thick hair the color of dirt sprouted from his nostrils, crept up from his open shirt collar, and covered the backs of his hands. His teeth were brownish yellow from the chaw he worked all day long. More than one boy had gotten tobacco juice sprayed in his face when Prescott was mad about something, which was a lot of the time. He looked around to see that everything was in order, then called Stryker to pull the long chain. In a moment, the boys were free from one another, but it wasn’t time to stand up—not yet.

  Stryker came in. He was bigger and heavier than Prescott, with hair the color of coal. His right eye was blue, the left, milky white, the blind orb covered by some kind of thick film. Of the two men, Stryker was less vicious, the way a bigger dog is often calmer than the smaller one that’s always trying to prove something by its constant growling and snapping. But Stryker could be dangerous, too.

  “On yo’ feet,” Jess said.

  Everyone lined up, backs straight, eyes on the dirt floor. The boys who slept with their caps on took them off now.

  “Mornin’, boys,” Stryker said.

  “Mornin’, Mr. Stryker, sir!”

  “How’d y’all sleep?”

  “Fine, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  Prescott made his way down the line and came to a stop in front of Billy. “God damn! You done peed yourself last night, ain’t you? Yer pants is soaked. Phew! Can you smell yerself, boy?”

  Cy clenched his fist. Prescott was always on the prowl for someone to torment, and the new kid had given him more than enough excuse to have some fun.

  Billy didn’t look up.

  “Answer me when I speak to you! You stink, don’t you?”

  “Yes, sir,” Billy whispered.

  “Just like a baby,” Prescott declared. “See this, Dawson? Little baby Billy done peed hisself last night.”

  “What you expect, Onnie? They’re just animals. It makes me despair. Yessir, that’s what it makes me do: despair. Country give ’em their freedom, and see what happens without the forces of civilization to keep ’em in check? They go back to the animal state in less than one generation. That’s what I heard a preacher say: less than one generation.”

  Prescott nodded, like he understood what Stryker was saying. He moved away from Billy and stopped in front of Mouse.

  Not Mouse too! Cy thought. Don’t Prescott ever get tired o’ playin’ God?

  “Any critters on you this morning?” Prescott demanded. “Lizard in yer pocket? Little black snake in yer pants?” He laughed at his own bad joke.

  Mouse knew to keep his eyes down. “Naw, sir.”

  “Aw, come on. You always got somethin’ hid somewheres. You ain’t got even one little bug or nothin’? Better tell the truth. If I find out you’re lying to me, then—”

  Mouse sighed and unbuttoned his jacket pocket. He reached inside and came up with a big black beetle.

  “Glory be,” Prescott said. “Look at the size of him! Lemme see. Hold him up.”

  Mouse opened his hand. The beetle twitched a little.

  “I thought you said you didn’t have nothing on you. You ain’t nothing but a little liar.”

  Mouse was silent.

  “Ain’t you, boy?”

  “Yessir.”

  “That’s better. One thing I can’t stand is a liar.” Quick as a flash, he brought down his stick on Mouse’s hand. The beetle fell to the ground, and Prescott crushed it with his boot.

  Cy wished he could do that to Prescott.

  “Piss-pants and liars in this group,” he told Stryker. “That’s what we got here this mornin’.” He stepped in front of Jess. “Get these sorry niggers outta my sight. And try to get that baby’s britches cleaned up before he stinks up the whole place.”

  “Yessir.”

  The white men went off to the other bunkhouse to unchain Jack and his gang. When they were out the door, everyone stirred. Jess had them line up, and they made their way outdoors.

  Cy knew every boy in the gang: Jess, West, Mouse, Ring, Oscar, Davy, High Boy, Darius, and all the rest. Knew their habits, the sound of their footsteps, the colors of their skin that ranged from darkest black and brown to copper, coffee and cream, yellow, all the way to near white. Ring was as white as any white man Cy had ever seen, but here he was anyway. He said one of his granddaddies was a light Negro, all his other grandparents white, but that one bit of Negro blood was all it took to land him here. That and threatening to hurt a white boy who’d stolen all of Ring’s mama’s chickens.

  The air was chilly—an early cold snap. Fog lay on the ground and hid the trees on the other side of the camp fence. Soon Cain would give out winter clothes, maybe before Sunday. The few decent things they got from Cain—clean uniforms, secondhand boots, a regular hot meal—somehow always came just before a visiting day.

  They marched toward the outhouse. Cy pushed his way to the front of the line, just behind Jess. No one dared try and stop him.

  The outhouse stank bad, but not like in summer. Cy yanked down his pants and sat. He pissed and tried to shit even though he didn’t feel the need. Sitting down was a lot better than squatting in the woods later on, like a lot of the boys did. One good thing about going outdoors, though: you could usually find some leaves. Better not use poison ivy, though, as West had done a while back. He never made that mistake again. Here in the outhouse there was nothing, not even corncobs.

  “You gon’ sit there all day?” Jess asked him. “Somethin’ on your mind?”

  “Naw. Just thinkin’. What’s it to you?”

  “Do yo’ thinkin’ somewhere else. They’s a long line waitin’ to get in.”

  Outside, boys were washing up by the pump. The boys from the other bunkhouse appeared, following Jack, their leader. They joined the line for the outhouse. Jess and Oscar poured water into a tub and stood by Billy while he stripped off his pants and started rinsing them, trying not to let anyone see his parts.

  “Cy, see if you can get some clean britches for Billy, okay?”

  It annoyed Cy when Jess asked him to do anything. Just because Jess was the head boy in their bunkhouse didn’t give him the right to give orders. Whenever Cy wa
s asked to do something, he told the next fellow to do it. He, in turn, would push the job off onto the next smaller boy. Everyone knew the order: Jess, Cy, Ring, Oscar, West, Davy, and so on all the way down to Mouse. Billy would quickly discover that his place was even below Mouse because he was the new kid. That’s where he would stay, unless he could fight his way up the ladder and bully or bribe younger or weaker boys to do his bidding.

  Cy cornered West, who had already found his place in the morning roll-call line and was standing, looking straight ahead at nothing in particular.

  Cy poked his shoulder. “Jess say for you to go get the new kid some britches.”

  “You mean he told you to do it, and now you passin’ it on to me.”

  “Could be. Don’t matter, though. I’s tellin’ you to go. See if Rosalee got any.”

  West shrugged Cy’s hand away and trudged toward the cookhouse, muttering to himself.

  “You best watch yo’ mouth,” Cy called after him.

  West knocked at the cookhouse door, and Rosalee answered. She looked annoyed—she didn’t like to be disturbed when she was cooking, if that’s what you’d call it. Like Ring, Rosalee was much more white than colored, but she too was doomed to live her life as a black person. She wasn’t pretty, and she wasn’t young. Sometimes she seemed in a fog, and certain mornings her speech was slurred and she was only half awake. “A drunk” was Oscar’s verdict.

  She might have been a drunk, but Rosalee wasn’t a prisoner, even though she lived at the camp. She and her little boy, Pook, had a room behind the kitchen, but she clearly spent some of her nights with Cain, because Pook looked just like him: the same thin, wavy hair, gray eyes, small ears, and stocky build. Even so, Cain never let on the boy was his.

  Sometimes Rosalee sneaked West some extra food when she thought no one was looking. Cy sometimes wondered why she would do that, but she had her favorites. No one minded West’s luck, because he shared whatever he got. That made him popular, that plus his sassy mouth, which could make anyone laugh.