Post Facto Page 2

  The old tensions that used to play out between blacks and whites is reconstituted now between native crackers and immigrants from Mexico or farther south. Drop by Koon’s Coffeehouse & Café most any morning and you’ll hear some farmer or businessman loudly condemning those damned illegals even as an undocumented family huddles outside in the bed of some farmer’s pickup on their way to crop his tobacco, stack his hay, load his melons, or rake his straw.

  This was the labor that I used to do, that damn near every white kid was expected to do, frequently in company with black adults. You don’t see that anymore. An influx of cheaply hired and easily exploited labor has freed the sons and daughters of Laureate for milder pursuits, football or basketball or a Jet Ski along the amber waters of the Suwannee. Maybe a run for booze to Taylor or Dixie Counties.

  You can bet that neither Trent nor Danny Lamb ever cropped a single leaf of tobacco off their daddy’s field or threw a watermelon. The only thing Trent ever threw was a football, and in fairness he’s good at it. Both of the Lamb boys are ferocious athletes, but Trent is a special joy to watch, towheaded and tall and liquid as mercury on a football field. The Laureate Hornets had already won a pair of titles with Trent taking the snaps, his brother, Danny, running interference like a berserk, as barreled and dark as Trent is lithe and blond.

  Freed from Helots’ labor, Trent and Danny toil on friendly fields of strife to the approbation of a community desperate for any hero with blue eyes and white skin. A white kid who can throw or run or tackle can still have just about anything he wants in Lafayette County, but there’s the rub, because there are only a handful of folks in the county can give you anything worth having and chief amongst these is the superjocks’ deacon daddy.

  Hiram Lamb inherited over six hundred acres of river-bottom land from his own father along with a twenty-thousand-pound allotment of tobacco, and from that base went on to acquire a construction company, a cement plant, and a fleet of trucks that ship fertilizer and agricultural equipment all over the southeast. It was Hiram’s company built the new prison. What he didn’t own, Lamb ran or influenced, stacking the school board and city council and the commissioner’s office with candidates of his choosing, and running roughshod over anyone brooking opposition.

  No challenge was too trivial. A wheel-chaired teacher once called Hiram from the school to complain that his dark-haired son had parked a Dodge Ram in her disabled slot.

  “He’ll be gone by noon,” the elder’s reply was widely reported. “You can have it back then.”

  On the morning of Jenny O’Steen’s adventure, Trent and Danny were amusing themselves by courting fights with Hispanic students. Edgar Uribe came from Gonzales, Texas, with his family to harvest tobacco and rake straw for the Jackson family. On this noon recess, the undocumented teenager was escorting his much younger sister Isabel to Butch’s store. Jenny O’Steen had just let Isabel and her brother take a place in line when the Lamb brothers came swaggering across the street, the quarterback and his brother garbed despite the oppressive heat in the livery of lettermen, fists stuffed inside the pockets of their woolen jackets.

  “Out of the way, wetbacks,” Trent ordered. “We got a bus waitin’.”

  Edgar replied by placing a hand on his sister’s shoulder.

  “Goddammit, move,” Danny complained. “We got a game in Cross City and we’re runnin’ late.”

  “Then you should haf come earlier,” Edgar replied.

  Imagine a Hispanic boy of seventeen or so. Baggy jeans. A plaid shirt untucked. Probably one hundred and thirty pounds wet with a limp that testified to a childhood scrape with a front-end loader. This is Edgar Uribe.

  Danny freed his fists from the pockets of his jacket.

  “Get the fuck out of the way.”

  “That’s not nice!” little Jenny protested.

  “Hear that, Trent? Jenny’s sticking up for the wetbacks.”

  “Careful where yer standin’, Freckles.” Trent spat his words carefully. “You don’ wanta pick the wrong company.”

  At which point Butch leaned over the counter.

  “Why, Mr. Trent, whassa trouble?”

  “No, trouble, Butch. We got a schedule is all.”

  Butch’s smile vague beneath the bib of his cap.

  “Well, I ’spect you better come on up then.”

  “I feel sick,” Jenny complained as the Lambs shouldered by.

  “You’re always sick,” Danny said, snorting.

  “Polla.” Edgar offered that maliciondes at which point reports begin to conflict, some saying it was Danny Lamb started the fracas when he shoved the Latino’s sister, others present saying that the “wetback” triggered the donnybrook when he took a swing at Trent.

  The only point not contested is that somewhere in the melee that followed Jenny O’Steen disappeared.

  She was found on the playground just east of Butch’s store beneath an arbor of needled pines. A small girl limp as a rag on a carpet of Saint Augustine. There is some dispute as to whether Jenny actually went into insulin shock, that determination complicated by the second grader’s own report.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have skipped a meal,” she would tell Doc Trotter. “And it was hot. And then Trent and Danny were mean, and I started feeling sick and woozy, like sometimes before, and next thing I know I was in the playground with a pine cone stickin’ my bottom and there’s this little man holding my hand.”

  A little man? What little man? Did she mean Butch McCray?

  “No.” Jenny seemed positive in that denial. “It wasn’t Mr. Butch. He was old though. And he had a kind of fur all over. Like grass. But not winter grass. Grass like when it’s nice outside and I told him he better dress or he’d catch cold and he told me not to worry. ‘Just relax,’ he said. He had a funny tin-can kind of voice. ‘Close your eyes.’ And I did and then I felt better and then I felt real funny. And then I felt cold, like I’d jumped into a spring. Or like somebody poured iced tea all through me and then I opened my eyes . . .

  “And he was gone.”

  Was that when the Mexican girl found you?

  “Isabel, yessir. She’s in the same grade as me an’ she ran to Mr. Butch and he brought me a Pepsi Cola and made me drink some of it and then Miss Hicks come running from the cafeteria, but by then I was awright.”

  Better than all right as it turned out. A prick to the finger gave the doctor all he needed to determine levels of sugar and insulin and the results were reassuring.

  “The numbers for both her insulin and C-peptides were better than I expected,” Doc Trotter reported with some surprise. “Thank the Lord for Butch and Pepsi Cola.”

  Even so, and in an abundance of caution, the doctor went on to recommend that the O’Steens keep Jenny under close observation for the next week or two. Of course, nobody took the account of a nude and benignant dwarf seriously. Jenny had suffered from diabetes for years, as everyone knew. The little green man was the product of a brain starved of glucose, was the accepted explanation. Entirely understandable.

  But the child continued to insist that her encounter was real.

  “I saw him,” she declared with the obdurate certainty of the born again.

  “He was nice. And he made me better too.”

  It would make for a cute story, I decided, and headlined little Jenny’s account with Barbara Stanton’s, not imagining the chaos to come.

  Or the visions to follow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Federal Funds Stimulate Local Contractors

  The Clarion

  Most folks my age remember Monk Folsom’s auto shop, a Butler building erected on a concrete slab on the exact axis of Butch McCray’s candy store, but on the far side of the school’s generous playground. For years, maybe decades, Monk’s was the watering hole for the movers and shakers of Laureate’s insular community. I should be clear that this population did not include those elusive people of color. If you were black or the very rare Hispanic in those years, you were relegated to a ta
ble out back of Shirley’s Café on the other side of town.

  Monk’s patrons were local, white, and exclusively male. Habitués included virtually every elected official in the county. You wanted to run for office, you tested the waters at Monk’s. You needed a favor, you were bound to see the mayor, or the sheriff, or, more important, the moneybags of Lafayette County, all convened over a Mr. Coffee on bench seats salvaged from some wreck or another to negotiate in torrid heat or freezing-ass cold beside the altar of Monk’s hydraulic lift.

  Kissing ass. Sucking up. Wheelin’ and dealin’.

  Of course, the conversations were not all serious. There was room for recreation, of a sort. Sometimes customers would wander in a gaggle out to the pasture behind Monk’s shop, pile paddies of cow dung on top of five-gallon buckets and blow that offal to pieces with shotguns or handguns or, on one occasion, a scattershot of ten-penny nails cherry-bombed from a steel pipe.

  Which makes it fair to report that at least a few of Monk’s regulars were only there to shoot the shit.

  Monk has been dead for years, and good riddance, too, but his legacy is at least partially reprised in Koon’s Coffeehouse & Café, a meeting place still devoid of color with air-conditioning ducts snaking over a mélange of tables and stools and chairs crowding the same concrete floor that used to support hydraulic lifts and broken transmissions.

  In a metal shed once utilized for the repair of trucks and tractors, espresso steams from beans raised organically in Guatemala, and locals accustomed to ordering grits and eggs call out for doppios of espresso or café au lait in an interior cold as a footlocker with Carl’s wife their brown-haired barista, a one-time cheerleader and mother of twins still inviting attention in short shorts and halter.

  A scoop of navel over legs tanned all coffee and cream.

  “That damn Connie is hotter than a fresh fucked fox in a forest fire,” Roscoe Lamb announced.

  Making sure her husband could hear.

  Roscoe is three years younger than Hiram, which at sixty-nine makes him effectively a century older than Connie Koon, but if Roscoe has not the charms of youth, he brings other inducements. Roscoe backed the loan allowing Carl and Connie to open their business while Hiram shoved a zoning change through the city council to allow a “restaurant” on the site. That double-barreled assistance guaranteed the brothers Lamb free refills on their coffee, and other services.

  The elder Hiram and his younger brother cooperated where mutual advantage was served but were otherwise as mismatched as a thoroughbred and a mule. If you didn’t already know the two men, you’d never guess they were related, Roscoe idling in soiled jeans and brogans, usually with some T-shirt salvaged from a Garth Brooks concert, Hiram favoring pleated slacks in summer wool, usually Kenneth Cole, and Versini shirts. Roscoe is never guilty of more than random hygiene. Hiram kept his fingernails clean as a surgeon’s. Roscoe is bald as a cue ball while Hiram boasted a mane of hair to rival Bono’s, though whatever panache might accrue from that blessing was diminished by a birthmark that ran like the sign of Cain from the elder’s ear to his jaw.

  An independent observer might say that Roscoe looked like a drunk who crawled out of a pig sty and Hiram like a banker bitch-slapped at a brothel, but if you had a mortgage in trouble or needed some credit to fertilize your tobacco or fix your combine or place a thousand dollars’ worth of ads every month in your struggling newspaper, you might be inclined to see the Lamb brothers through a more charitable lens.

  Beauty, as it turns out, owes to the banker as well as to the beholder.

  Hiram and Roscoe Lamb were the alpha males in Laureate’s ingrown society—persons less puissant could be ridiculed without penalty. Butch McCray, not surprisingly, was a reliable target.

  “If I was ugly as that sumbitch, I’d paint a smile on my ass and walk backward,” Roscoe Lamb loved to remark.

  Or—

  “That boy fell off the ugly tree and hit ever’ limb on the way down.”

  Not the kindest words for an adopted brother. Have I mentioned that Butch McCray was adopted by Hiram and Roscoe’s father? Perhaps “adopted” is not technically accu-rate. In circumstances either unsettling or tragic, Butch’s mother, Annette, was widowed when her first husband, Harold McCray, got himself killed. “Hunting Accident Takes Local” read the Clarion’s banner. Hiram and Roscoe Lamb had already lost their own mother to influenza; the boys’ father, old man Kelly Lamb, took Butch under his roof when he married Harold McCray’s widow. Wasn’t three months after those vows that Annette Lamb née McCray was found hanging by her neck in a smokehouse.

  A bad run of luck, locals clucked.

  Just terrible.

  Terrible for Butch too. Both Roscoe and Hiram resented having a youngster they regularly derided as a retard in their home and took every opportunity to let him know it. Butch endured that arrangement until he was well into his twenties. Then old man Lamb died leaving the major portion of his estate evenly divided, Hiram and Roscoe each receiving one section of land, roughly 640 acres apiece.

  The thing is, every square foot of Hiram’s property was taken from the McCray homestead. Butch McCray’s father, Harold McCray, worked hard to acquire more than 640 acres of bottom land and pasture west of the Suwannee River. It was a beautiful piece of land, fed with artesian springs and running creeks and bordered with cypress trees and water oak. Was common to see ten-point bucks and red-tailed foxes on that tract. I’ve seen turkeys roosting in loblolly pines forty feet high and a squirrel could run for an hour in those oaks and never touch the same limb twice.

  Some nice fishing holes too.

  When Harold was killed, Annette McCray inherited all of his property. Was not a month later that Annette produced a will of her own, and that instrument bequeathed all of Annette’s recently inherited homestead to Kelly Lamb. The relevant documents were notarized at the courthouse shortly before she and Kelly married. It’s clear from reports in the Clarion that Annette’s decision to make Lamb her beneficiary was not regarded by locals as unusual. First of all, women in those years and in that region rarely owned estates of any size independent of a male heir or husband. Then there was the matter of Annette’s health. Everyone knew that Butch’s mother was much too frail to work a section of land on her own. And then there was Butch. The one fact that everyone seemed to take for granted was that Butch McCray could not inherit his father’s property. You didn’t leave assets that valuable to a simpleton. Locals no doubt viewed the transaction as an amicable quid pro quo, the Lamb brothers’ father made heir to Annette’s property in return for his pledge to shelter her surviving son.

  So it was that decades later Hiram Lamb inherited Butch McCray’s birthright.

  To compare fortunes, Butch inherited from his foster father a half-acre lot in town where the candy store still remains, and you’d think from the way Hiram and Roscoe reacted that their daddy had robbed them of a gold mine. Hiram, in particular, resented his father’s token largesse and used every trick he could think of to ruin Butch’s modest business, embracing any pretext in that effort. About a year ago, after recalling the former president’s wife using her platform to push for healthier food in school cafeterias, Hiram came to realize that the former first lady had given him an idea which he could bend to his own ongoing campaign.

  I was present at the school board meeting when Hiram and his brother loudly proclaimed that it was the board’s duty to stamp out all manner of junk food on the school’s premises. “Our children deserve to eat healthy.” Hiram stood before the board in righteous indignation to deliver that message. “We don’t need our children spending their parents’ hard-earned money on Cokes and candy.”

  This from a man whose closest association with vegetables was ketchup.

  Butch McCray was not in attendance at the meeting. I’m sure Butch didn’t know what Hiram was up to, and even if he did, Butch was not capable of making any contribution. However, Ms. Sheryl Lee Pearson made a point to attend the meeting.

 
Sheryl Lee teaches chemistry at the high school, one of the few folks educated outside the county who came back to her hometown. About the size of a starling, with a skullcap of hair and thick, plastic-framed glasses, Sheryl Lee lives in a style vaguely bohemian to natives, ignoring the society of churchgoers, county sings, and men for a private vocation devoted to a blind and aging mother and an extended family of teenage students.

  “What precisely do we mean by ‘premises’?” Sheryl Lee pushed back those enormous spectacles on a long, narrow nose as though exploring the intricacies of valences and bonding, moving on to point out that Butch’s store, located on privately owned land, was not on the school’s premises at all. Sheryl Lee further established that Butch’s shrine to sugar and tooth decay was actually a couple of hundred yards farther from the elementary wing of the school than was Carl Koon’s coffee shop.

  “So if Hiram is truly motivated by a concern for our students’ health, I move we amend his motion to press for a city ordinance that forbids food of any kind being sold within, say, a quarter mile of the campus.”

  Hiram stalled briefly before retorting that it was Butch’s store selling to the children.

  “Butch is the problem,” Hiram declared with unintended candor. “Not Carl.”

  “But if you shut down Butch’s store, what’s to keep our children from going to Carl’s place?” Pearson objected. “Junk food is junk food, no matter who sells it. If we close Mr. Butch’s business, then Carl’s café has to go too.”

  That riposte got immediate support from the solitary black citizen at the meeting.

  “You tell ’em, Sheryl Lee. What’s good for the goose be good for the gander.”

  The Lamb brothers had not anticipated geese nor ganders nor, apparently, Sheryl Lee Pearson. They certainly had never entertained the possibility that a putsch on Butch could backfire, so in a bald volte face, and in rare defeat, the Lamb brothers withdrew their petition to close Butch’s store. Sheryl Lee’s proposed amendment was thus made moot and the board exhaled a collective sigh of relief.