Play Pretty Blues. Snowden Wright

Although the month of September was in its descendant, days still reached high into the nineties and nights offered little if any relief. The approaching fall would be an Indian summer. Charles grew flush with exertion and wet with perspiration as he placed three wicker chairs, one wicker table, two wicker footstools, and one wicker chaise onto the wagon bed. Each piece was his own special design. He would soak hundreds of cornhusks in sealed vats of dye and weave the husks throughout the furniture’s crosshatch of reeds and cane, creating complex patterns with variegated shades of red, green, yellow, and blue. A Choctaw tribesman had taught him the technique during the tobacco hornworm outbreak of 1895.

      Charles hitched the harness and stowed a saddlebag. He palmed the reins and nickered the horses. At the start of his trip, a trail of crimson dirt in front, a sheet of overcast above, a hill of shaggy pasturage on either side, Charles resituated his position atop the wagon seat in order to glimpse his home fading in perspective. We can imagine his thoughts. He mentally prioritized the necessary house repairs between the most urgent and the least, including the weathervane that had bent in last month’s high winds and the clothesline wire that had snapped in this month’s high heat. He decided to stake an area of the backyard for a sunflower garden. He planned to fertilize the vegetable patch by Christmas. He hoped with all of his being, as he studied a wisp of smoke seeping from the clinker-brick chimney on the tin roof, as he watched his wife in stark relief crossing the dogtrot of their clapboard farmhouse, he hoped on his life he would be able to stay true to the solemn vows he’d made to Julia on the day of their nuptials. He also resolved to fix the slop bucket in the livestock corral.

      The Tallyho Plantation, 12,000 acres of cotton farmland and pine forest owned by the Marchetti family, lay in the northwest corner of Copiah County. The trip took Charles four hours. On a hummock of fertile soil, the house seat of the plantation was situated facing eastward, its back turned on a tupelo cypress gum brake in the dale below. Every member of the Marchetti family lived in a Greek revival mansion with pale Corinthian columns, and every servant of the household lived in a cluster of ramshackle tenants hidden way back in the marshy woods. Charles brought his wagon to a halt at the livery stable, knocked on the back door of the main house, removed his slouch hat from his sweaty mop, and waited with his hands crossed at the button of his breeches. A houseboy Charles had never met opened the door. One of the young man’s eyes looked to have been kicked by a mule.

      “Which of the misters you want?”

      “Mister Franklin.”

      “I’ll get him. You stay waiting outside.”

      Charles promptly slipped into the kitchen when the houseboy was gone from sight. On a butcher block near the sink sat a plucked chicken and a bowl of cornmeal. A frying pan simmered on the stove. Around the foot of the icebox lay a carpet of feathers and down. Charles walked to a door that led into a long hallway, but he chose not to explore the house any further. It would be unnecessary. At the end of the hall on the right was an antechamber with a cut-glass chandelier overlooking a twin staircase. The second step from the bottom, Charles knew, creaked loud enough to wake a light sleeper. At the end of the hall on the left was a parlor with a velveteen couch sitting next to a grandfather clock. The pendulum encased in mahogany, Charles knew, chimed the turn of an hour four minutes fast.

      “What you doing in here?” the houseboy with the misshapen eye said from the door on the other side of the kitchen. “Thought I told you to keep yourself outside.”

      “I know, but the—”

      “Never you mind the matter. Mister Franklin’s on the front porch, wants to talk with you. No, no. Go back outside and walk around the house.”

      According to townsfolk who knew him, Franklin Marchetti, younger brother of Anthony Jr. and Terrence, youngest son of Anthony Sr. and Bettina, stood five-foot-four in Jodhpur boots and weighed a hundred twenty pounds after a big lunch. He waxed his moustache with Hungarian pomade made special by his mother. His defining characteristic was a comical propensity to grab his sex during moments of confusion or pride. He was famous for his wit, which was all but nonexistent. On the afternoon of Charles’s delivery, Franklin suffered through the heat by putting himself in position to take the breeze, even lighting a special blend of cigar his oldest brother claimed mitigated overactive sweat glands. Charles waited in the front yard ’til he was invited onto the porch. Days later, we know from his official statement made to the county sheriff, Franklin Marchetti would be surprisingly forthright about his conversation with Charles Dodds prior to the incident that evening.

      “Come on up here, boy,” Franklin said, his words visualized by syrupy tobacco smoke. “Heard you had a goodly yield on your place this year.”

      “We did all right this year, yessuh.”

      “Any conjectures on the next?”

      “I got a feeling we’ll have a dry spell in June, but we’ll pull through what with July around the corner.” The smoke tickled Charles’s nostrils. “July’ll be drippy.”

      “No droughts or floods in our days?”

      Farmers only talk of bad fortune when times are good, and farmers only talk of good fortune when times are bad. 1910 was a good year. Franklin could not resist the urge to list all the possible disasters that might befall his cotton crop in the coming months. He mentioned every known disease: wet weather blight, nematodes, fusarium wilt, root rot, black arm, yellow arm, rust, spot blotch, the dread boll weevil. Charles refuted each one.

      “You bring that renown Dodds wicker with you?”

      “Yessuh. Back the wagon.”

      “I’ll have my new nigger help you unload it.”

      “Thank you kindly.”

      It was at that moment the door to the front porch opened to reveal one of the Marchetti family’s young servants, Mary Thorne. She wore a summer frock despite the time of year. Her face and figure were beautiful, delicate, and inevitable. She gave a childish impression of concurrent servility and defiance. On her departure from the porch, after she had refilled Franklin’s sipping whiskey and after he had thanked her with a pat on the fanny, Mary Thorne caught Charles’s gaze in her own, held it steady, and allowed him to wink at her. Charles didn’t have to look in her eyes to know they were the color of chicory.

      Julia Dodds spent the day making house. Along about eight in the morning, her children had emerged from their room, taken breakfast, and begun their daily chores on the farm. The two oldest rode to the commissary for fatback and sugar, the four middle children tended the lower twenty, and the three youngest scattered feed to the chickens and pigs. Julia shelled butter beans on the porch. She boiled coffee for red-eye gravy and retrieved a ham hock from the smokehouse. She scrubbed salt from the meat and let it simmer stovetop for hours. She doused hot biscuits with blackstrap molasses. Along about two in the afternoon, her children had eaten lunch on the picnic table in the backyard, collected their writing tablets, gathered their script utensils, and taken seats cross-legged in a circle around Julia on the porch. It was time for school.

      During her own childhood, Julia had been given the alphabet by one Theodore Stahl, her mother’s former owner, who professed the transformative powers of language, especially amongst the “mongrel races.” That was why Julia was so steadfast in her children’s education. That was also why her journals were such a find for us. On the afternoon in question, Julia taught her youngest arithmetic, her middle children grammar, and her oldest literature. She gave rewards for right answers. Bessie and Sally, fraternal twins, got dress patterns for “Setting means time and place both.” Samuel got rose oil for “I before E except after C.” Natalie, slow in the head and given of lenience, got gumdrops for “Two plus two equals yellow.”

      We have often wondered how a woman as clever as Julia Dodds could have not put together the truth about her husband. How could she have not seen through his sweet, sweet talk? Her twin daughters, Sally and Bessie, their older selves acquiescent to our questions, described her as oblivious, oblivious, oblivious. “Momma had no idea whatever,” they told us, “not even after what happen.” They were mistaken. Even though Julia most certainly suspected her husband, all of us have come to admit, she simply could