Cy in Chains Read online

  Rosalee disappeared and came back with a pair of uniform pants. They were dirt-stained and too big for Billy, but he wouldn’t have to wear wet pants all day or go half naked.

  As the boys finished in the outhouse, they lined up in their two gangs, Jess’s boys facing Jack’s across the small patch of red clay in the middle of the camp.

  Jack strutted down the line of “his” boys, poking and threatening, trying to act like a big man. Prescott and Stryker didn’t mind letting Jack do some of their dirty work, but Cy had seen him get cuffed when the white men thought he was being too big for his britches. That just made him meaner.

  Prescott and Stryker stood by the cookhouse door, sipping coffee from tin cups. The aroma made Cy’s mouth water. Of all the many things he missed about Aunt Dorcas’s kitchen, her strong coffee was first. Inside the cookhouse, Rosalee was finishing getting breakfast. The smell of baking cornpone was in the air, and that made Cy think of Aunt Dorcas, too. Of home. But he blotted out those thoughts. If you let them get hold of you, you’d go crazy. Cy had seen it happen.

  Rosalee appeared at the door of the cookhouse, Pook with her. He grabbed at her skirt with one hand while he chewed on the other. He looked even whiter than his mama did, with pasty skin, his gray eyes crusty at the corners, and his wispy hair uncombed. Pook never talked much, and some of the boys said he was simple-minded.

  Rosalee folded her arms, waiting, frowning. Pook yanked her skirt. “Hungry, Mama.”

  “Shush. Can’t do nothin’ till Mist’ Cain get here.”

  Cain made everyone wait to eat until he showed up. Sometimes that meant half an hour. It made Stryker and Prescott mad, but at least they had hot coffee. This morning he didn’t take long. He came through the door of his cabin, his clothes buttoned up right and hair brushed back. West whispered that he must have run out of whiskey. The boys knew that was what made him late some mornings, sleeping off a bad drunk.

  Cain took his place between the two lines. He was dressed like usual: riding boots, leather belt with a Confederate army buckle, worn-out gentleman’s coat. Wide-brimmed hat stained dark with sweat. Clean and polished holster holding a Colt revolver.

  “Good morning, boys,” Cain said to Prescott and Stryker.

  “Morning, Mr. Cain.”

  “Any problems?”

  “Nothin’ but the usual, sir,” Prescott said. “Boys who pee their britches, lie to you for no reason.”

  “Stryker?”

  “I got somethin’ more serious than that, Cap’n. Seems like we still got thieves.”

  “What’s missin’ this time?”

  “Rosalee says a slab of fatback’s gone—’bout three pounds—plus a bottle of cane syrup, a bread knife, and some flour.”

  Cy knew Rosalee hadn’t given those things to West. She wouldn’t do that and then call attention to it. Besides, West would have shared anything he’d gotten. There was another thief in camp—or more than one.

  Stuff was always going missing—food, tools, uniform shirts and pants, anything else Rosalee hung out to dry, even a little ball she managed to get for Pook. Just about whatever wasn’t nailed down would disappear sooner or later.

  “Damn it, Dawson! Ain’t there anything you can do to keep these niggers from stealing us blind? Don’t I pay you to keep an eye out?”

  “With all due respect, Onnie and me keep careful watch, but you know how it is! Reckon some of them old-time niggers taught ’em. Back in the day, darkies’d steal a fried chicken leg out of a white man’s mouth if he didn’t watch out. Niggers used to think they had a right to anything they could lay their hands on. Nothin’s changed.”

  “This will stop!” Cain cried. “Unless someone identifies the thief, I can make it plenty hot for all of you. They need miners over in Alabama. You boys wouldn’t want to get sent over there, now, would you?”

  He stopped right in front of Cy. “Would you?”

  “Naw, sir, Mr. Cain. I’s happy to be right here.” Cy almost smiled at how sincere he sounded. He’d learned how to lie a long time ago, lie like he meant every word he said. Telling the truth—well, that was risky. Especially when the truth went something like this: “Naw, you dumbass cracker, I ain’t happy to be here. Fact is, I wish I was in yo’ place and you in mine. Then I’d lash you so long and hard you’d wish you was dead a hour ’fore I got through with you.”

  “I know you’re happy to be here,” Cain replied.

  Could the man really be such a damn fool?

  Cain looked over both lines. “I know y’all are, and you don’t want to go to the coal mines, now, do you?”

  “No, sir!”

  “Then I better get the name of this thief—or thieves—before this day is over!”

  No one said a thing. That was one of the boys’ most important rules: no snitching. If any boy did snitch, he would pay. And when you were chained to other boys a lot of the time, you couldn’t escape.

  “You understand me?” Cain said.

  “Yes, sir!” That would be the end of it. Cain was too lazy to do more.

  “Let ’em eat,” he told Stryker and Prescott. “But don’t let ’em dawdle. We got a lot of work today.”

  Seven

  STRYKER AND PRESCOTT FOLLOWED CAIN INTO the cookhouse. Then Jack and his boys went in. Today was Jess’s guys’ turn to go last, so they waited outside.

  Mouse was in an ugly mood.

  “What’s a matter?” Jess asked him.

  “Nothin’.”

  “That ain’t what yo’ face be tellin’ me.”

  “That stupid beetle,” Cy suggested. “The one Prescott squashed, right?”

  “I gon’ kill that son’bitch one day,” Mouse muttered. “Just you wait. I gon’ kill him!”

  “Don’t you talk that way,” Jess warned. “If Prescott ever find out, he kill you first.”

  “What I care? Dead be better’n this.”

  “It was only a beetle,” Jess said. “You can find ’nother one.”

  “I don’t want no other!” Mouse snapped. “’Sides, anything I get, he kill.”

  “Then don’t get no more,” Cy said. “Leave things alone if you wants ’em to live.” He’d learned that the hard way, and paid for it every day.

  “Shut up!”

  Cy pushed him. “You shut up. You spend half the day pokin’ ’round under logs and rocks ’stead o’ workin’. I’s sick of it.”

  “He do good as he can,” Jess said. “You know that, Cy.”

  “Naw, I don’t. When he gonna start doin’ his share? He ain’t nothin’ but a baby.”

  “You got that right,” Ring put in. He flicked Mouse on the ear.

  “Quit it!” Mouse cried. “I ain’t no baby!”

  “Then quit actin’ like one,” Cy told him. “Forget about yo’ damn lizards and frogs and do yo’ job.”

  “Don’t try an’ tell me what to do!”

  “Somebody got to,” Ring said.

  “Y’all quit,” Jess warned. “You want ’em to hear you fussin’?”

  Inside, they picked up tin cups, plates, and spoons. Rosalee and her helper, Sudie, a slovenly black girl, served up grits, fatback, and pone. There was water to drink—that was all there ever was. At the end of the room, Cain and his men sat at their own table, enjoying fried eggs and potatoes, real bacon with meat on it, and biscuits with honey.

  To Cy, of all the thousand large and small punishments of this life, having to see and smell decent food he couldn’t have himself was one of the worst. The grits on his own plate were watery, the chunks of fatback flabby, half cooked. He’d eat everything, though. Dinner was a long ways off.

  Mouse wouldn’t touch his food, and neither would Billy. Mouse was too angry, and Billy couldn’t get anything down. He tried with the grits—gagged—and all he could do with the fatback was push it around with his spoon. West jumped on the cold grits before Davy could get at them, and Oscar wrestled the fatback from Darius. They’d learned you always ate anything you could get, no matter ho
w nasty. Jess made Billy put his cornpone in his pocket, promising he’d be hungry later.

  When breakfast was over, the boys loaded the wagons. Stryker and Prescott chained them in two long lines, and the trek to the work site began. It was a long hike, and while the leg irons were mostly an annoyance to the bigger boys, they tormented the smaller ones like Darius and Mouse. Today, Billy was the one having a bad time. He was trying, but he tripped and went down more than once. That stopped the line and brought a round of cussing from Prescott, who got in Billy’s face and tried to make him cry, but this time Billy kept still.

  Finally they got to the place—an open pine wood with lots of saw palmetto under the tall trees. A road would soon be built through there, and the brush had to be cleared out. Cain’s boys were moving fallen pine branches, taking down small trees, and chopping saw palmetto.

  Saw palmetto was nasty stuff. Its roots were so dense and iron hard that they seemed to dare anyone to tear them out of the ground. The leaves spread out from thick stems like large ladies’ fans. They got in your face as you worked, but the real problem was the stems, edged with needle-sharp teeth just the way a saw blade is, so even the hungriest animals avoided them. Unprotected by work gloves, the boys’ hands stayed raw from trying to root up the palmetto.

  They were unchained and put into groups. Cy was with Mouse, Jess, Billy, Ring, and West. Jess was boss.

  Stryker and Prescott handed out the tools, which were nearly worthless. The hoe and shovel edges were dull, and the blades didn’t fit the handles, which were always coming off. That got to Cy worse than anything else. All day long, Cain and his men complained that the work wasn’t going fast enough, but they wouldn’t come up with new, decent tools or pay to have these repaired.

  Jess’s group started where they had finished the day before, at the end of a cleared space about two wagons wide, cut right through the woods. The palmetto came up on either side of the boys like walls.

  If the living palmettos weren’t bad enough, their dead stems and leaves carpeting the ground were bad news, too. Most of the boys were wearing tattered boots, and a couple were barefoot. Cain had been promising replacements, what with cold weather coming on, but so far, he’d done nothing. So while their hands got cut up by the live stems, their feet got the same punishment from the dead ones. Even worse, snakes loved the dense underbrush. Any step might land you on a copperhead or a pygmy rattler.

  Prescott came up to Mouse. “Let me know if you find anything good today,” he said. “I reckon they’s lots of critters hiding in this brush.”

  “I gonna fix him one day,” Mouse said after Prescott went away. “He be lyin’ sleep under a tree, way he do, ugly mouth hangin’ open, and I cut his throat!”

  “Shut up with that talk,” Cy warned. “That cracker hear you, we all gonna get it.”

  “Cy right,” Jess said. “We can’t afford to be fightin’ each other. We’s all we got.”

  Which is why we all gonna end up dead, Cy thought bitterly.

  “Son’bitch Prescott,” Mouse muttered.

  Cain shot his rifle, the signal for the workday to begin. Square in front of Cy was a palmetto as tall as his shoulders. He wanted to dig it out without having to grab any of the stems, but the mass of leaves kept him from getting close enough to dig. A machete was what he needed—cut the stems down to the ground and then attack the roots—but naturally Cain wasn’t going to hand out machetes.

  Cy pushed a big stem away so he could move in with his dull-edged shovel, and right away, its teeth raked across his palm. “God damn it!” he cried.

  “Takin’ the Lord name in vain ain’t gonna help you,” Jess said.

  “I can say what I want!”

  “Jus’ be careful ’bout what you ask the Lord to damn. That some serious business.”

  Cy was sick of such preacher talk, but there was no point answering back.

  “Lemme see it,” Jess said. “It deep?”

  “Naw. Just sting like hell.”

  Jess reached into his jacket pocket and came up with a strip of rag. “Here. Use this.”

  “Where you get that?”

  “West.”

  West looked their way, grinned, and went back to work. If anyone could lay his hands on anything useful, it was West. Maybe getting things from Rosalee didn’t satisfy him. Maybe he was the thief who made things disappear. Cy thought about West having those three pounds of fatback all to himself and wondered if he had other goods he kept secret.

  Jess wrapped the rag around Cy’s hand and tied it. “Now, you be careful,” he told Billy. “See what happen when you don’t watch what you doin’?”

  “I was bein’ careful,” Cy said.

  “I see that.”

  Billy just stood there. He hadn’t even picked up his shovel.

  “I show you,” Jess said. “It ain’t hard. But we gotta get goin’ ’fore Prescott notice.” He grabbed the shovel and made Billy take it. “Come on, now.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Neither do any o’ the rest of us. But they ain’t no choice.”

  Eight

  WORK THAT MORNING WAS JUST LIKE ALWAYS: difficult, dirty, and dull. Occasional cussing meant the palmetto had bloodied another hand or foot. A cry of pain meant that Stryker or Prescott had decided someone wasn’t working hard enough and needed a taste of the whip.

  The trick was not to attract attention to yourself. If you did get cut, you tried not to shout “Son of a bitch!” or “Damn it all to hell!” If you were so beat you felt like dropping your shovel and falling to the ground, you kept on going. Anything to keep the boss men from messing with you.

  At first, Cy worried that Billy would attract attention the way a lantern attracts moths. The kid couldn’t seem to figure out where he was or how he came to be there. When Jess first gave him the shovel, he acted like he didn’t know what it was for. But then Billy surprised them all. Once Jess got him started, he put his scrawny back into the work and gave Prescott no excuse to use his whip, not even to cuss him out for slacking off.

  At dinner, Prescott handed out the usual grub—cold sweet potatoes, cornpone, and water. Cain found a tree to lean against, took a long drink from his flask, pulled his hat down over his face, and fell asleep, just like he did every day.

  Mouse stuffed his cornpone into his mouth, cramming it down his gullet the way a hog goes at a mess of slop. That kind of behavior used to bother Cy, but it was nothing compared to some of the other boys’ nasty habits, so he didn’t give it a second thought anymore. After the pone, Mouse took his own good time with the sweet potato. First, he put it in his lap. Then he used a thumbnail to slice it open, longways. Next he pulled the potato apart and pinched out some of the stringy orange meat. One strand at a time, the sweet potato went into his mouth. There it got chewed to a pulp, like a cow’s cud. Mouse pulled pieces from the skin until it was empty. Then he tore the skin in pieces and put them in his jacket pocket.

  Billy had watched the whole thing like it was a circus sideshow act. “What you gon’ do with them peels?” he asked.

  “Eat ’em. What you think?”

  “He right,” West added. “You best eat anything you can get.”

  West lived by that creed, and he’d proved it time and again. He was always on the lookout for something to put in his belly—wild grapes, blackberries, dandelion greens, even minnows and crawdaddies, raw. And then there was the extra food he managed to get from Rosalee.

  Billy appeared to consider West’s valuable advice, then retrieved the skin of his own potato from the ground and put it in his pocket.

  It was time for the back-to-work gun to go off, but nothing happened. Cain was still asleep under his pine tree, and Prescott was nowhere to be seen. He often disappeared after he’d eaten: the boys figured it was to relieve himself. Stryker rolled a cigarette. He was never in a hurry to get back to work, if walking around making threats could be called work. All this meant some precious free time.

  The day had
faired off and gotten warmer. West found a sunny spot, lay down, and fell asleep almost instantly. That was an ability worth having. Cy often wished he could do the same, but getting his mind to stop racing was something he hadn’t managed yet. He’d shut his eyes, try to sleep, and then the memories would come flooding back. So would the fear that when he finally did sleep, the nightmares would return to torment him.

  Mouse started poking around in the brush and came up with a tiny orange lizard he called a salamander. He let it crawl over his fingers awhile, then popped it in his jacket pocket—right in with the sweet potato peel.

  Cy closed his eyes and let the November sunshine soothe his skin. Maybe sleep would come . . . He had nearly fallen into a doze when Ring’s voice roused him.

  “So, Billy. How old are you?”

  “Ten.”

  “And what you do to get sent here?”

  Cy opened his eyes. New guys’ stories were sometimes worth hearing.

  “I didn’t do nothin’!”

  “Didn’t think so. Nobody in here done nothin’ wrong. Ain’t that right, Cy?”

  That was a joke in camp: no one ever admitted to breaking the law—or doing one thing to deserve the mess he was in.

  “Right,” Cy said. “We all innocent.”

  “I ain’t done nothin’!” Billy repeated. “Honest.”

  “Course you ain’t,” said Ring patiently. “Cy and me is agreein’ with you. So what happen? You didn’t ask to come here.”

  “Mr. Talmadge Carter say I stole couple dollars from his store. Say I took it—all in silver—right off the counter.”

  “Why you get blamed?” Ring asked.

  “I be workin’ for Mr. Tal. Cleanin’—sweep the floor, empty the spittoons, slop his hogs. Stuff like that.”

  “And then you stole his money.”

  “No! How many times I got to say I didn’t? It was Jenny.”

  Cy started to lose interest. He knew this story by heart. The names were always different, the crimes, petty or serious, sometimes different, too, but the claim never changed: It wasn’t me. It wasn’t my fault. How many times had he heard those same words from his own mouth?