The Home Visit

Flash Fiction: "The Home Visit" published by The Ravens Perch

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What you feel here is how it happened there. The grown son was in the garage tinkering with a car. He pretended not to notice me. The father was at the door to let me inside. He was not smiling. It was hot and a fan stood in the corner whirring. The child sat on the floor beneath the fan and seemed to be enjoying the breeze. We sat down. He offered me water. Or a Coke? He asked. I gave him the introductory information about how I was a child advocate appointed by the court and he nodded. We both knew he knew why I was there. The child came closer to listen. She had a soft plastic toy in her hand, something too young for her. I asked to see where she sleeps. There were boys’ voices I could hear in the back of the house. He gestured with his entire arm toward the side of the house and remained seated. I took the little girl’s hand and she led the way. The boys were shouting louder now, in a way that let me know they knew I was there. One tossed a frisbee from the top bunk of a bed through the doorway and into the hall. It almost hit me. The taller one jumped down and seemed to hiss, and the shorter one hid behind the door. Then the showing off ruckus began again and for a moment I was enraptured by their capture of my attention. Then the girl tugged on my hand, and I peeked in the boys’ room which was clean, orderly even, as boys continued shouting, playful but aggressive too, only pretending I was not there. I felt afraid to enter their room and instead followed the tugging child to a small room across the hall. It had a little bed, a doll, a bear. The boys’ noise increased and it was hard to hear the girl. She was trying to say something but was whispering. I leaned closer and she looked away. “Take me with you”, she pleaded with her little voice. “Take me home.”

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Mississippi Goddam

"Mississippi Goddam" was published in Valley Voices, a literary review of the HBCU, Mississippi Valley State University, in its special issue “A Sense of Place,” Spring 2022.

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In Spring 1927, when Sol Bryson was seventeen, the sky opened up, thunder cracked and the rains poured all the water from heaven into the Ohio River, the Allegheny, the Wabash, the Tennessee, all the tributaries that emptied into the Mississippi as it ran narrow in the Delta, and mud channels pushed back, creating one moving monster of water and all that it carried with it—houses and trees, bodies and parts of all those things and more.  Sol heard the cries and saw the red mud rising like the terror inside him. The water was rising so fast that their cotton field was becoming just a spit of land surrounded by water, a long finger pointing east.  They all ran from it, they had to.

“We go now and we go on foot!” Virgil shouted.  Nobody knows how to swim, he thought, but the wagon will just slow us down. “Leave everything,” he called to Lizzie who had climbed onto the horse that was slowly sinking into the mud.  

While the others rushed to join the lines of people heading east away from the rising tide, carrying whatever they could, Sol ran directly for the shed and jumped up for the highest nail where he’d hidden his slide whistle from his father.  He’d made it himself from an old bicycle pump, fashioning it on a picture he’d seen in a magazine.  Someday he would play the slide in his own band, but his father thought the slide was nonsense and talk of a band was even worse.  He thought singing should be confined to church.

Sol felt the river seeping into his shoes. The floorboards were turning red.  It was coming to get him!  He stuck the slide whistle into his shirt and splashed his way out.  The water soaked his legs, the slosh and grit of it, the sweat of it in the swelter of day, the cold and chill of it at night.  Added to that was everyone’s abiding terror that the white people might do anything at all in their panic.  They were never safe when white people were scared.

He spied his mother and grabbed her hand to calm the panic expanding inside him, higher in his body with a faster heartbeat, each time it rose.  “Sol-o-mon!” Lizzie sang out, tugging his arm to pull him to one side of her with Virgil on the other. “Stay close. That beast is fast and it is deep.”  

They joined the line with the others, holding onto each other, trudging the flat land east, away from the river with its creeping, rising tide, slipping on mud banks, climbing levees, whatever high ground they could find, and always watching where the birds flew to follow and rest with them on a roof or in a treetop.  Stories passed among them about black men in Greenville being taken at gunpoint to the levees, forced to dig, to pile sand, to be back enslaved to the white man’s will, shot dead if they refused, drowned if they faltered, and to survive if they were lucky. 

Sol was silent.  His heartbeat began to slow to an even rhythm, from knowing his mother was there.  He didn’t have to be touching her or even see her to feel her presence.  He’d learned from an early age, even when he was left alone in the shade, lying in an old crate stuffed with cotton while Lizzie was pumping at the washboard or spreading cotton sheets across clotheslines.   He could hear her breathing hard and it comforted him.  He could smell the sweat of her body, the bite of milk that had soured on her apron.  His tongue would begin to suck his cheeks and his lips would quiver just from her nearness.  Sol learned to whimper instead of crying out for his mother.  He knew early in his life that she would always come to him.  If not at once when he wanted her to, then eventually.  As a young boy, Sol never minded his mother kissing him, even in front of other boys who would scrunch their noses and turn away, mocking him.  Lizzie’s hands were as big as a man’s, but they were hands that had never struck him.  As Sol grew into a man he began to appreciate his mother’s beauty hiding in all that Mississippi dirt and sweat.  When she relaxed in the evening under a tree or dressed herself for church, he felt a stiff, reliable kind of pride-- her face framed by a straw hat, her teeth large and strong, her arms smooth and her step steady.  Who wouldn’t love a mother like that? he thought.  I’ll find me a wife just like Lizzie.

On that first day Solomon, Lizzie and Virgil clung to each other like mud on shoe bottoms.  Linked together through their arms and hands, the three of them were like one silky machine humming along with the others.  Virgil led the singing with his enormous voice, but first he said those special words to everybody:  “I dedicate this song to my son, Solomon.” And then everybody sang into the night air.

Walk together children

Don't you get weary

Walk together children 

Don't you get weary

Oh, talk together children

Don't you get weary

There's a great camp meeting in the promised land

 Sol Later they liked to brag about how they outwalked the Mississippi, how they found dry land and kind, generous people along the way who offered a cup of clean water, or a roasted potato, maybe a dry place to sleep.   They were even happy then, when Lizzie shaded her eyes with her hand, pointing to the thin line of pink along the horizon at sunset—“God’s paintbrush,” she said reverently, and Sol searched for anything that would burn so they could have a fire.  Then Virgil’s enormous voice filled the air as night drew closer, and Sol felt the comfort, singing along quietly under his breath.

There was a time, before Sol’s voice changed to a man’s, father and son used to harmonize.  Virgil was the bass and Sol was the tenor then. Then Sol’s voice began to change, at first cracking and unable to find its steady course, then settling into a baritone, until finally, as the boy reached his late teens, it fell into the bass range.  No longer did Virgil want to sing with Sol since their sounds were no longer unique or harmonious.  Virgil said they sounded like two pigs in heat.  Once Sol tried to fake a higher voice just so Virgil would sing with him.  He missed his father’s attention.  There was nothing he wished for more than to sing as they had.  Virgil said that Sol sounded like a weasel in heat.  Sol walked away from his father’s taunting with a bitterness and blame that spoiled the harmonious sweetness they had shared.  And a competition ensued with tense, unwritten rules.  One never sang when the other was singing.  One never admired or praised the other for their singing.  They never spoke of it.   The competition included both singing and Lizzie. 

Many days later Sol, Virgil and Lizzie found their way to her family—the Moores—where, farm outside of Starkville, at last they could rest.  Maybe they would stay there or maybe they would go on up to New Albany where Virgil’s people, the Brysons, lived.  One thing for sure, they knew they were not returning to the Delta.

Lizzie’s family stayed on the farm--Sol’s grandfather, Dick (everybody called him Granddaddy) and grandmother Emma (everybody called her Big Mama), plus his aunties—Mollie, Lelia and Lucy--all except the oldest, Julia, who had disappeared the previous year.   Nobody knew where she was.  They had stopped looking, stopped asking.  

Dick Moore had fought with the Union Colored Troops during the Civil War, and still, sixty years later, visitors respectfully referred to him as Corporal.  He carried himself like a soldier, straight- backed and grim.  He didn’t say much but he didn’t have to--he had made much of his life, and everyone could see that.  After the war,  in January 1868, Emma Parham had married Dick Moore on a warm day, years after they had met when Dick escaped the Alabama planation during the war that ripped open the land, the people, everything, after the old man in Washington emancipated them, and after Dick fled to the Union Army and enlisted for two and a half years, mustering in at Corinth in 1863 and mustering out at Baton Rouge on the last day of 1865.  Eventually Dick and Emma harnessed a mule and rode for days to Starkville where Dick claimed the acres Lincoln had promised freedmen for their service to the Union.

It was beautiful, rolling farmland.   There was a creek full of sunfish at the bottom of a hill, and there were six houses—a larger cabin that Granddaddy and Big Mama lived in and five identical small ones, all in a row, leading downhill to the creek.  The cabin sat across from a straight row of daughters’ houses and a bit up the hill from them, “so we can keep an eye on you,” Dick had said when he finished the last one.  He’d built them one by one in the girls’ age order, with Julia’s first, then Lizzie’s, and so on.  “That way,” he told Emma at the time, “maybe they’ll stay.”

There was one called “Lizzie’s House,” where Lizzie and Virgil and Sol stayed, two rooms and a front porch with a view of the woodland, the ducks, the sunset. To Sol, Granddaddy meant safety and Big Mama meant plenty.  Pale rhododendrons and bright azaleas bloomed wild, bits of cotton floated through the warm air, and even the mosquitoes were kind and left him alone. To Sol this place was a bit of heaven.  Big Mama kept chickens, so he could have an egg every day if he wanted one, and he and Lizzie could bake cornbread together.  Granddaddy gave the blessing at every meal, just like a pastor, which he was not. 

On that first morning home, even though each sister had her own little house, they all came to Big Mama’s kitchen to eat.  Lizzie was up early with her mother, rolling out the dough and patting the biscuits.  Soon the cousins, Ernest, Suda and Corene pushed open the screen door, letting it slam, and busying themselves with pumping water, clattering pans, passing biscuits and eggs.  Uncle J.D. and aunties Lelia and Lucy were there, too, all the females in aprons, all the males in denim, all hands washed as Big Mama required at her table.  The men announced they were hungry and Suda could not find her doll and Corene needed someone to tie her bow.  

Lizzie laughed at the sudden and unfamiliar commotion, the warmth of her family rising inside her like liquid.  She wiped her hands to embrace them one by one, to look each one in the eye, as it was her way to do.  She tied Corene’s bow and sat at the long oak table.

“Been way too long,” J.D. started.

“Brother, yes,” she said, whispering, “Anybody heard from Julia?”

The two younger sisters shook their heads and rolled their eyes to let Lizzie know there was more to the story than could be told at the table.

“I hear you’re planning a wedding,” she said to Lelia, who was about ten years her younger.  “Make it like mine, Lelia.  You were just a kid, probably don’t remember when Virgil and I were hitched.”

“Tell us,” said Lelia, “tell us.”  She had both girls’ attention and J.D. was listening too.

“Well, it’s not that it was such a big wedding.  More that it was true love—meant to be,” she began and the girls swooned.  “We met here in Starkville when Virgil was laying tracks and cross ties.”

“Pounding spikes and hammering the timbers, Virgil used to brag,” said her sister, Lucy.  “I remember that like it was yesterday.”

“Well, Big Mama invited the whole railroad crew to supper after church one Sunday to meet her daughters.”  At the sound of her name, Big Mama came to the table, a bowl on her hip and a wooden spoon in her hand, and they turned their eyes to watch her.

“And Virgil, he liked Emma and Mollie and Lizzie, but Lizzie was the one we wanted married next,” said Big Mama.  “Uh huh.  She was fourteen already.”  Big Mama nodded and nobody said a word.  “And Virgil knew there was an order to such things,” she added, catching each listener’s eye and turning her back.   Lizzie broke the silence.

“Solomon was born the next year,” she explained.

“And you never had another child after that?” asked Corene, and J.D. felt mortified by the question.  He cleared his throat to change the subject when Lizzie responded.

“The Lord never saw His way to making that happen,” Lizzie said.  “Or maybe it’s on account of my “woman problems.”  And she didn’t tell it to them, but she had to agree with her husband who had told her he always wondered if there was something wrong with his seed, and if God was punishing him for spilling it in too many wrong places.  As God-fearing a man as he was, he had his weakness—women.  The screen door slammed shut and Virgil came inside.

“Morning, everybody,” he said, cheerful as a chipmunk.  The girls replied all around and Big Mama bought Virgil a cup of coffee.  Big Mama was a dark-skinned woman with hair straighter than the others, on account of some Chickasaw blood, she said, and she pulled it back and tied it in the back to keep it from falling into her face and their food.

“Thank you, M’am,” he said, smiling, bringing the hot, black liquid and its sweet steam right under his nose.

“I was trying to remember,” began J.D.  “When was it you all left here for the Delta anyway?” Lizzie waited for Virgil to reply because he had been the one who wanted to get away from her family, especially from the tension between him and her parents.  

“Well, it was when Solomon was old enough to do his share,” said Virgil in a light voice, not wanting to complain about the backbreaking work they’d done in those hot, buzzy fields, plowing and planting cotton in one season, chopping the next, and picking the last.   “I didn’t mind the work.  Honed the edge of my hoe splinter thin and iron strong,” he said proudly. Yep.  One year, in my rush to get the most cotton bolls into the machine, I lost three fingers,” he said, holding up his right hand.  They all knew the story—the whizzing saws inside the cotton gin.  How he was unable to pick cotton that fall, so Lizzie and Sol picked his share and their own, too. 

When the Moore sisters began to fight, the fighting infested the others, too.   “The girls are at it again,” Big Mama said, “and only a week since Lizzie’s been back.” “Every time a new man comes onto this land, Mollie starts.   It’s a shame.” 

Over the years Lizzie had gotten used to the fact that Virgil was a pretty man and women liked him.  He wasn’t a big man or a fancy man, but he was a charmer with a dimple in one cheek and an easy smile.  His eyes had a way of talking that his mouth lacked.  So this time Lizzie didn’t say a word to him, but when she saw Mollie leaning into him, making herself and her little house open to Virgil, she warned her younger sister.

“You stay away from him. I’ll kill you, I will.” 

“I’ll kill you, I will,” Mollie taunted back. 

Something in Sol liked to hear his mother fight like that, to see a fire explode in her, make her not just his mama, but something more.  Silently he took her side, but he didn’t believe she’d kill anybody--why, her heart was so big she had trouble wringing the necks of chickens when it needed doing.  

At night Sol fell asleep on the floor beside his parents, where he could feel their silent coldness.  He was used to feelings coming and going, crossing like trains on the tracks.  But when he woke in the night and his daddy’s side of the bed was empty, and he saw a lamp in Mollie’s window and his mama sliding a shotgun underneath the bed, then Sol knew then that this bit of heaven was ending and they would have to move on.  

He got up to use the outhouse. Low sounds came from the cabin window of Mollie’s house.   On his way back he could hear his father and his aunt talking. Sol tiptoed to the spot beneath the window to listen.  He heard his father say to Mollie, “Well, the boy never could carry a tune anyway.”  Sol didn’t cry or whimper, but ran back to Lizzie’s house.

The next morning Sol grabbed an apron and boiled coffee, adding a beaten egg and crushed shells to the grounds to make it smooth.  Virgil sat at the table devouring blackberry jam and biscuits like he’d swallowed so much Mississippi dirt that he needed something sweet to go with it.   Sol saw Granddaddy coming from the bedroom and he poured a steaming cup of coffee for him, too.   Granddaddy dropped a metal strongbox on the table right by where Sol stood.  It looked like something he might have salvaged from a Confederate garrison during the war.  Inside was a roll of ten dollar bills the size of Big Mama’s fist.  Granddaddy counted out some of the money slowly, like he knew just how much things cost.

“Here you go, little man,” he said, putting a pile of bills in the pocket of Sol’s apron.  “It’s time you began taking care of your mama.”  Virgil glanced at the roll of bills.  “Now, “ Granddaddy continued, “you go to town and get two tickets on the Illinois Central so you and your Mama can ride all the way to New Albany.”  He stared at Virgil who did not look up from his plate.   “Your daddy here,” he nodded at Virgil, “looks like he’s got more energy than one man needs.  Why he can just walk to New Albany. The road will do him good.”  Sol knew that Virgil had heard what Dick said, but he also knew his father would not react to being shamed in front of his own son.  Maybe he’d walk to New Albany and maybe he wouldn’t, thought Sol, but he wouldn’t let them know.  That’s for sure.

That night Virgil visited Mollie’s cabin again and the whole farm knew it, what with the windows open and Mollie singing Bessie Smith and Virgil backing up a chord in bass harmony—announcing their dirty stuff for everybody to hear.Sol saw Lizzie softly close the door to her house up the hill and he felt that sharp cut in his gut again.   “You hurting my mama!” he cried outside of Mollie’s house.  He knew he couldn’t out-fight the man, but maybe he could out-sing him.   He started with the “St. Louis Blues.”

The door to Mollie’s cabin popped open and Virgil appeared on the porch, pulling his suspenders up around his small shoulders and scanning the yard.  He stepped down to the grass and circled the cabin, slowly, deliberately, looking for Solomon.  Leila and Lucy raced to get Lizzie and they all three hurried to the big porch to where Dick and Big Mama were sitting in their rocking chairs.  

“I’m gonna go stop those two now,” Dick said reaching forward for the railing to pull himself up.   His body teetered as he rose.  

“No, Daddy!” shouted Lizzie. “This is something Solomon’s going to do for himself at last.”  Her words surprised them.

Unlike his usual pattern of repenting to the Lord and of begging Lizzie for forgiveness, Virgil returned to Mollie’s cabin and closed the door without a sound.  Soon the kerosene lamp glowed in the window behind the curtains.  Then the singing began.  The family listened in the dark as Mollie’s high notes and Virgil’s low notes strained to be heard, then turned to full-throated tones that seemed to rumble down the hill past Lizzie’s house.  Sol was in the yard, still circling, then standing still, putting all of his life into his voice, deep and dark, he sang “I hate to see that evening sun go down,” like he was the one making it go down against his own will, and the other voices soon faded and Sol’s was the only one in the night.  That was when he reached inside his shirt between the buttons that Lizzie had sewed on the front, wrapped his fingers around the slide whistle and pulled it out into the air.  He wet the reed that he had shaved thin until it fit perfectly into the mouthpiece at the top of the tube.  He brought clean saliva from the back of his throat, let it fall lazily in whatever pattern it made, and wet his lips inside and out, pulling the reed through them over and over until it was just the right mix of soft and stiff.  Then he began to blow into the whistle, softly at first, until he had the slide arm in place;  then he filled his chest with air and softened his wet mouth again, blowing with all might so the sound would carry back to the Delta.  He pulled the whistle’s slide slowly so that its taunting would rise and fall in a mocking rebuke, announcing to the world that his father was a mean-talking, hypocritical SOB.  Sol did not have to say a disrespectful word.   The shadows fell over him and slipped past Leila’s house into the foundation of Lucy’s house at the bottom.  Julia’s house stood empty at the top of the hill.  Mollie’s shadow stood by the window to her cabin as she closed the windows and Sol’s last clear note sounded in the damp Mississippi air.   It wasn’t long before the farm was so silent that only the crickets and the frogs had anything to say.

In the cooling night air, Sol turned toward his mother’s house.  There was a kerosene lamp shining in the window but the wick was burning low.  Could Lizzie be asleep? he wondered.  He needed her strong arms around him and climbed the two wooden steps to the little porch.  He was worried about entering the house.  How would his mother feel about his shaming his father?  He was her husband and she was  a loyal wife, after all.  Afraid to know and afraid not to know, he sat on the old bench and leaned back against the house.  There was no pleasure in this victory, if it was a victory, and he could only find that out from Lizzie.  He got up and tiptoed to the door.  He turned the knob and stepped inside.  He looked around.  Was she there?  He went to the table to turn up the lamp.  His pallet was tidy on the floor.  His parents’ bed covers were messy and nobody was there.  He looked out the window—maybe she was out there looking for him—but there was not a sound or a sight to be had.  Just dark and quiet.  He could not sense Lizzie anywhere and he began to panic.  Had his father killed her?  Taken her away?  There were no big hands to hold his, no arms to comfort, no approving kiss.  Sol was too old to cry and too tired to go searching for her, but he would not stay in that place of No Lizzie.  He ran outside, slamming the door, cracking the night’s silence as he went. 

In the morning, when Big Mama stepped out in the damp grass and growing light, she thanked the Lord for the day He’d given them.  She found her grandson leaning against the outhouse, humming to himself.  Solomon’s a man now, she thought. That little boy is gone, dammit, he’s a goddam man.   

“Come on now,” she said gently and brought him in.  

Granddaddy was only partially dressed, still in the long johns he wore year round.  He was pulling up his overalls when Sol stepped inside the cabin and sat at the table. “Well, young man,” Granddaddy said.  “You sure gave your Daddy your own brand of a what for.” He looked up at his smirking grandson. 

An emotion stuck in Sol’s throat and Dick recognized it—the moment before a grown man breaks into tears. The old sofa creaked as Dick leaned against a pillow and pulled his grandson’s body up against his own, holding him firmly in both arms like he did frightened, homesick soldiers during the war.   Sol’s fists opened slowly then and rested gently on the folded quilt that lay across the sofa’s back.  His breathing quickened as hurt rolled down his cheeks in thick lines and fell wet and heavy onto the cloth of Dick’s overalls. 

“Well, well, well,” said Dick, like it was just another day.  Sol looked up at him.  “Unfortunately, you had to be the one to teach your daddy not to take what is not given.  The seventh’s commandment, you know. And the sixth,” he added.  “It’s the Lord’s Word.”  The old man drew a deep breath. “Solomon, where’s that money I gave you for train tickets you so you and your mama can ride to New Albany?  Did your daddy take it from you?”

Sol grinned.  “Oh, no, Granddaddy.  I bought the tickets and buried them in a box by the henhouse.”  

No one ever spoke of the victory Sol had over his father, because Virgil had started it, because two wrongs don’t make a right, because it is a confusing thing to defeat your own father and, strangely, Sol thought, pride is not a part of it.  Sol knew what he liked and arguing was not one of those things.  He’d been shocked by the intensity of what had happened.   He kept quiet about it.  Big Mama brought Sol some buttermilk and they left him on the sofa to sleep. 

Out on the porch of Lizzie’s House, Virgil was whimpering, begging Lizzie for forgiveness.  

“Your pride is hurt,” Lizzie said. “That’s natural.   Solomon out-sung you and you couldn’t enjoy the night the way you’d planned it. “ 

“But darlin’, you know it’s only you.  You and me.  We should take those tickets back home ourselves.  Leave Solomon here.  He likes it here, you can tell.  And the country would be good for him.”  He tried to catch her eye, but Lizzie wasn’t letting him.  She poured the last bit of whiskey she could find into him and let Virgil lie in her lap one more time. 

“I know, honey, I know,” she said, stroking his foolish head, sighing, thinking that they’d run away from one nightmare in the Delta right into another.  

“And it’s a long, long walk to New Albany.  I just don’t think I could walk that far.”  Virgil smiled and settled into her lap, finding his place again, like he always did.

“Oh, it is a long way, isn’t it?” she replied.

Virgil woke to the fading sound of a train whistle, crazy from not being in his own charge, and without his wife and unable to speak.  He thought of Mollie and knew that for Lizzie’s sake, he had deserved what he got.  He forgave himself, but could he ever forgive Solomon?   That day he sought everywhere the comforting heat of the sun on his face while he sipped Big Mama’s sweet tea through a straw.  Days later, Virgil decided to follow the railroad tracks to New Albany instead of taking the road through Tupelo.  The day he left the Moore farm, Mollie stayed out of sight all day, moving aside the curtain on her window only one time to peek.  She had her own shame to work out.   Big Mama and Leila and Lucy were in the kitchen while Dick just kept rocking on the front porch, keeping his eye on Virgil’s back until he saw it disappear up and over the hill.   

Along the way Virgil met hobos in their camps and joined them in a careful, but friendly way, sharing the food Big Mama had packed for the trip, turning his pockets inside out to show himself penniless, not worth robbing.  There were five men and they all seemed to be loners, but they shared their smokes and their campfire.  They took turns keeping watch for wolves and worse while the others slept. In the morning, the men showed Virgil how to hop a freight train, how to judge its speed and measure your own, avoid the railroad guards, stay away from the coupling, find the open door, a steady handle, locate the right-size mound next to the track to take off from.  It involved complicated maneuvers and it took Virgil all of one day and most of the next before he gave up and decided to walk. He laughed.  His farming days were over, he knew.  He would try to get his old railroad job back. He could hardly wait to get home to tell Lizzie and to see his parents.  But he didn’t care if he ever saw Solomon again. 

Over the next few years, as Sol grew into a New Albany Bryson, he stayed out of his father’s way and spent most of his time at the local colored school trying to catch up with what his cousins had already learned.  In the Delta, he’d been unable to attend school most of the time because of crop schedules, and the fearsome distances he’d have had to walk not knowing if white people would bother him, and because his parents couldn’t pay the heating fee that was required by the colored schools in winter.  When he wasn’t doing reading and writing lessons, he sometimes hauled water and peeled vegetables with Lizzie in white people’s kitchens. On Sundays they attended church together at Hall’s Chapel on the corner.  Although Virgil stayed home, Virgil’s father, called Daddy Bob, his brother, called Uncle Henry, his mother, Granny Siller, and all the others gathered outside to walk down the dirt road together, meeting other families along the way, making small talk.  The women and girls in the family committed the sin of pride on Sundays when they adorned their natural beauty in layers of pastel cotton that Granny Siller had dyed herself.  They wrapped soft sashes around their slim waists and tied woven bonnets with ribbons to keep the sun off their faces.  They flirted with Sol who wore a blue suit and sang a solo in the Sunday choir.

Sol liked to brag to his cousins about the juke joints in the Delta, acting like he’d frequented them.  He hadn’t.  Lizzie never would have allowed that kind of devil’s work, but that hadn’t kept Sol from standing outside and listening.  When they all sat around in summer after sunset, if someone else started an evening blues tune or a work song, he’d add his bass to it, and some workhouse song gutteral, “a note or two, here and there, to taste,” he’d say, “the way a good cook adds pepper.”   

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain, ( Uh!)

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain (Uh!)

Take this hammer, (Uh!) carry it to the captain (Uh!)

Tell him I’m gone, tell him I’m gone. 

Virgil never joined the singing, but Lizzie could tell he wanted to.

“Tell that boy to get himself into trade school,” Virgil told Lizzie one day, right in front of Sol, not speaking to him directly.  Sol wasn’t interested in learning a trade.  He had a natural talent he intended to use—his voice, a round tone, smooth as sunflower oil rolling down the throat.  Daddy Bob had bought a radio for the house—they were the first Negroes in New Albany to own one.  The cousins would come over in the evenings to listen to music coming out of Chicago and Harlem.   They danced to Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey’s tunes to get the music out of them and into their limbs, into their feet, but when Paul Robeson’s voice came over the airwaves, everybody stood completely still to let the mood soak deeper inside.  Paul Robeson, Sol thought— football player, Broadway star, the man with the voice, another singer from Harlem.  “That’s what I want,” he said.  That’s where I’ll go.  That’s who I’ll be.”

“Chicago,” they insisted to Sol.  “Not New York.  We know people in Chicago.  We don’t know anybody in Harlem.  Why that’s another country.”  

“Harlem!” Sol smiled.  Everybody could see the stars in his eyes.  “I’ll find Paul Robeson, I’ll sing spirituals.  I’ll be on Broadway like him.”  Sol’s mind was made up and they could respect that—the boy was a man now and everybody knew he had real talent—if he had a chance, he should take it.

Virgil was working out of town the day Sol said goodbye to Mississippi, and the rest of the family, Uncle Henry and the cousins all came to the station to see him off.  They’d seen lots of young men leave New Albany, and the scene was a common one.  A boy might have to travel alone, but no one left without family seeing them off.  They even pooled their money for Sol’s ticket, but they came up short.

“That’s alright,” he said, upbeat.  “It’s enough to get me to Washington, D.C.  Why that’s almost next door to New York.  I’ll find a job and get the rest of the way on my own.  Much obliged.”  

At the platform by the colored car, he turned to face Lizzie.  His mother had worn her Sunday best, even the straw hat he’d once found, cleaned up and given to her one Easter.  There they stood, their arms around each other, their eyes drinking in a long last look.  

Suddenly, Lizzie pushed Sol away.  “You go on now,” she said.  She took a deep breath then and exhaled a hum as strong and long as the train he was about to board.  “You come back,” she sang out to him, but Sol did not hear.

On the train Sol took an aisle seat and looked around at the crowded car that had come up all the way from New Orleans.  By the door at one end of the car he saw a Pullman porter in a dark suit with shiny buttons down the front.  The porter straightened his cap and eyed Sol, approaching him with a broad smile and a crisp ten-dollar bill, folded lengthwise.  He held it between his fingers as if paying for something. He leaned in, whispering to Sol.

“I used to work with your daddy.  He asked me to give this to you.”  

Sol Bryson joined the great migration north, taking a train from Union County, Mississippi and arriving at Union Station, Washington, D.C. where he found a white marble city full of black people--with a respected university, a vibrant community, and a spirit of freedom and insistence that became his own.  Sol rented a room for ten dollars per month at 726 Second Street N. W., and he looked for a job.  Two things he knew for sure--how to cook and how to sing.   Everybody needs to eat, he thought.  And everybody needs a song. 

Author’s Note:  Sol Brtyson was my father-in-law who was blessed with a beautiful baritone voice. The dates, places, and characters in this story are real, but the facts are imagined.  I call this form “family fiction.”

If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful

Nominated for Best of the Net 2020

BLAST, The Missouri Review’s online-only prose anthology, features fiction and nonfiction too lively to be confined between the covers of a print journal. Jacqueline St. Joan’s story “If It’s True, It Must Also Be Beautiful” is infused with rich historical detail drawn from the author’s research into her own family’s history–research that has inspired a collection in process.

———————

Glenties, County Donegal, Ireland 1819 

I pray I’m not breaking the sacred seal of the confessional to tell you that the townspeople think Nancy Boyle is a bit strange—but lovely. Of course, they don’t say so to her face, as she already has pride aplenty and doesn’t need a drop more. The general opinion is that Nancy’s vanity is due to the sad fact that she is an only child, which is her mother’s sorrow—and now that sorrow is turning to shame, what with Nancy being with child, but unmarried. When Richard Moore confessed to me his willingness to wed Nancy Boyle and take her to America, I asked her parents, Peter and Margaret Boyle, and Nancy herself, to meet me at the rectory. And, later, to join Richard Moore in a cup of tea at their house so we could discuss what was to be done. As the town’s only priest, I knew it was my duty, even though this kind of thing should be the Lord’s doing and not mine.

I plan to say little or nothing at our meeting, and I am a bit late, snapping the horse’s reins as we ride through County Donegal, a vast landscape of stubbly fields where stumps and roots from the old forests are scattered here and there. Cloud formations broad as the fields reflect off frosty lakes, run pink to red in the late winter sunsets; and just before evening, all the colors fade like dried blood. The Boyles’ home at Glenties is more than a hovel but less than a farmhouse. Once inside, I feel a bit trapped with curtains of gray rain closing in, and for a moment I long for a sight into the distance, but the few windows are foggy. Before I take a seat, I make the sign of the cross and bless the house.

“May the Good Lord bless the four corners of this house. Bless the door that opens wide to stranger and to kin. And bless them all who come within.”

“Amen,” says Margaret, getting up from her knees, leaning on her husband’s arm.

The house is a thatched, modest place improved largely by Margaret’s sense of organization and her insistence on cleanliness, as well as Nancy’s pencil sketches that adorn one corner. Peter Boyle, in his fresh white shirt, sits with the young couple, Richard and Nancy, lighting his little clay pipe. Margaret, with her unwashed hair pulled back tightly into a bun the size of a biscuit, stays behind her husband. Nancy is silent in what must be her best dress, moss green and modest, around her neck, a tiny cross from St. Patrick’s Day. Richard, in his common linen shirt, waistcoat, and heavy black boots, is telling Peter about Europe where, four year earlier, he fought with the Irish 44th Regiment in the British Army at Waterloo and then joined the occupation of Paris. Peter interrupts Richard and looks my way.

“Something for a rainy weather, Father?” he asks, already starting to pour from the old jug. Recently Peter has become an old man crippled by life. “Will ya take another drop?” Peter asks Richard. Richard squeezes his lips together and shakes his head. Peter leans forward, craning his thick neck toward the window, wiping the glass with his fingers. His face makes a shadowy reflection, the chair rocks, and he fumbles. “Looking for me hound,” he says. “Did ya see her out the door, Father?”

“I didn’t,” I say.

“That dirty dog is not coming into my house,” insists Margaret, sniffing in Nancy’s direction.

Peter looks at Margaret, who refuses to return his gaze. “Well, it looks like rain, so she’d best be coming in.” He strains to stand, and Richard reaches to steady the old man. Don’t bother,” he says, slapping Richard’s hand away, making light of his injury and its unending pain. “Ox got the best of me . . . long time ago now.”

Margaret sits behind her husband with her needles and patches in her lap. She runs her palm across the handiwork and relaxes back into the chair. Her nose is red from a head cold or from crying, or maybe both. She takes a white handkerchief from her dress pocket and blows her nose. Margaret’s political opinions are well known, and she is not at all sure about this Richard Moore. She does not cater to Irishmen who take up arms for the Protestants to fight Catholics—even Catholics who are French.

“Sure and it must be a mortal sin, Father,” she said to me at the rectory when I mentioned Richard Moore as a husband for Nancy. Margaret is old enough to remember when it used to be hunting season for priests in Donegal and the Holy Mass could only be celebrated in hiding. Once, the English arrested her own kin for not paying their taxes and their tithes. “They were screaming for help to us—we were also the helpless—as they carted them away.” Whenever she tells that story, she cries like the child she was when it happened. Margaret cheered with the others when a landlord was shot after evicting a dozen families. She said it did her heart good to know there were those who opposed the tyrants. And she still can speak what was our own Irish tongue, before it was outlawed by the English and forgotten by the people.

Now Nancy—her only surviving child—first raped by a stranger while she was salmon fishing at Lough Anna and now having to make the devil’s choice—bear a child unwed or marry a traitor like Richard Moore. That’s how Margaret sees it. “God forgive me,” she pleaded to me, “but I pray He takes that child back, so I may have my only daughter again, or I’ll raise that baby for her! Who knows where this fellow might take her—India or Canada or some wild place called Ohio?” Margaret does not want Nancy going away at all, especially not so far away. It will be a kind of death for her, another endless ache. Still, she is a practical woman and knows there is a big problem and a task at hand: to nab a good one for Nancy—quick, before her star fades.

Richard Moore sits, wicker chair by wicker chair, next to Nancy Boyle and the glowing fire. He holds out his cup so Peter can pour the whiskey. Maybe the drink will help with the talking. We say what we do know how to say:

Take another drop?
That’s a fine hound ya got out there. 

Oh, it’s not worth a cuckoo’s spittle. 

Richard is a tall man, lean and straight-backed with ruddy skin, sandy hair, and soft, lidded, pleading eyes. He is the kind of man who lives in the future—planning, dreaming, saving today for tomorrow, restrained—like a real man should be. He’s a bit of a snob, bragging to me that he understood the “peasant mentality” and all; but, to be fair, Richard’s had lots of experience with it since his return from the British Army—mean looks, challenges to fistfights, dirty names and curses that follow him on the street. It’s another reason he plans to get away—plus the intoxicating idea of being landed. The look he’s giving Nancy says to me it’s more than land he craves. And not just her beauty, he told me in private, but it’s something else in her that he needs.

“Not the way a drunk needs a drink, Father,” he explained, “or the way a child needs a mother, more like a sinner needs a priest.” We laughed about it then. Still, we all agreed that everybody in the room must consent to a marriage and a voyage to America. Richard knows he has the advantage, given Nancy’s condition, but he senses Nancy’s uncertainty and her mother’s outright disdain.

Nancy pours for her mother and herself from a china teapot—chipped and cracked in several places but repaired and painted with delicate bluebells and catmint. Her long black hair is tied up with hemmed strips of cloth she saved from her mother’s old dresses. Several long wavy strands refuse to be confined.

“Our Nancy brewed that tea from chamomile she picked herself,” Peter says, pausing, pointing up at the tied bunches of dried wild plants suspended from the rafters—nettle leaves, dandelion root, calendula flowers, and thyme. “Not a lazy bone in that girl’s body.” He smiles, then looks away, grimacing. The mention of Nancy’s body causes the embarrassing memory of its condition to rise in all our minds. Margaret blushes, but Nancy does not. It is not clear whether Nancy will accept Richard, but her dark eyes shine when she looks into his. It is a bold step for a young woman—to let a man know she will look that directly and deeply.

Peter is at the window with his cane, acting like he’s checking for weather, but we all know knows he’s hoping to catch sight of the dog. He has a chicken bone in his hand.

“That hound ought to be catching her own birds,” Margaret shouts to Peter, which starts her coughing fit. Nancy turns away from her parents’ squabble and faces the raindrops catching on the windowpane and offering their soothing soft sound.

Richard is nodding too much, talking too fast, as he makes his case to Peter, when it’s Margaret he should be convincing.

“Our sergeant saw the broadsheets outside the American Land Office in London, and he told us all about it,” Richard is saying. “Best financial opportunity in history—lots of land for very little money, rich land with water and forests full of deer and game of all sorts. They are wanting people along the Ohio River.” Now his hands and arms spread open and his eyes include us all. “You only have to put a quarter down and build a small cabin within two years, they give you a loan, and it’s yours, on the installment plan. ‘Land is freedom,’” he quotes the land company brochure. To Richard, America is a giant step away from being an Irish cottier and a tiny step closer to becoming gentry.

“I hear there are savages in Ohio,” Peter comments, leaning forward, placing his elbows on his knees for balance, and getting just that much closer to Richard. He is asking the questions he thinks Nancy must be mulling.

“Savages are everywhere,” Richard responds quietly, “like what happened to Nancy.” Everybody knows it was rape, and as it was a stranger who’d done it, and the officials caught him, too, and jailed him quick. The man rushed to confess like a sinner on Good Friday, so they don’t fault Nancy. Still, there is some unwarranted shame, plus nobody knows what will happen to a bastard child like that, God love him. “But you don’t have to worry,” Richard is explaining, “the Americans have fought off most and made treaties with the others. They’re only selling land where the Indians have moved far away.” He pauses, uncertain whether Peter is convinced. Margaret signals to Nancy to pour her another cup and clears her throat to be heard. She does not look up or speak to anyone in particular.

“God punishes those who take land from the ones it truly belongs to—the ones who had it first,” she says. We know she is talking, not about America, but about Ireland.

“I hear there’s a Petition to the British Parliament for Catholic Emancipation,” Richard says, changing the subject.

“Pray God,” she replies, and we all mutter agreement.

“But there’s lots of Irish in America already, so we’ll stick together,” Richard laughs. “They say that’s why they call it O’Hio.” Peter and I chuckle, as expected, but the joke falls flat. “Plus I’m pretty good with a pistol and a musket,” Richard adds, and thunder cracks. Nancy startles at the mix of it—the thunder, the pistol and the musket. She must want his promise of protection.

Richard is from nearby village of Ardara. He and Nancy were childhood sweethearts of a sort as youngsters in school at St. Brendan’s, and, when I asked her, she said she’s always carried what she called “a feeling” about Richard. She did not say just what the feeling was, and I did not ask. His family is respectable—good Catholics and hard workers; they even own cows, pigs, chickens, and goats. In the early days, before the incident with the ox, Peter cut turf with the Richard’s family for the church when it was being built and mixed the limestone too. Margaret tatted lace for the altar cloths and the curtains. Nancy was only three years old when they buried their firstborn son, taken by brain fever, in a tiny grave behind the church, so St. Brendan’s is a place precious to them. Nancy and Richard grew up, and he went away to war. Now Nancy is a grown woman, not one to fancy a man’s pity, but she must wonder who would marry her. What will happen to her? Will she remain a spinster at her wheel in her parents’ home? So when I told them that Richard asked to visit, to ask for her hand, her father said to her at the rectory out loud and clearly before God, “Nancy, I want ya to have a new and better life. Love him,” he said, “and let him love you.”

Peter opens the subject a bit. “Have ya saved enough money for the down payment and all that?”

“I have, sir. Plus enough for the voyage, and the carriage travel, plus the things we’ll need—a one-room cabin to start,” he adds, looking around their one-room cabin. Richard glances at Nancy, and she smiles, looking excited. “We’ll have to work hard and send crops to market to pay for the installments,” he says. Nancy nods her understanding of the hard labor he is asking of her. “But we’ll get land along the river, so we won’t have far to go to market.”

Peter interrupts. “I’d like ya to have all the money before ya go. If you’re wanting to take our girl all the way to Ohio, you’d best have all of it.” Peter’s words draw Richard’s eyes toward him. “I’m afraid there will be no dowry,” he says plainly. “Crops have been few.”

“And the landlord takes most,” adds Margaret, “and the King just keeps placing more and more debt on us.” She pauses when she sees Peter pour himself yet another one. She’s used to counting them, and lets him know it with a side glance. She brags, “Why, Peter used to make horse collars, but no more now that the English replaced ours with their own.” She told me she wonders what ideas Richard picked up from the English while he was in the Army? She wants him to know that her husband is not lazy. She gets up to put on the kettle, turning her back to the fellow who intends to take her Nancy away, and she reaches for a dishtowel so fresh she must have put it out just before he knocked on the door.

“Of course,” says Richard, pouring himself a small one. “None expected. Not in America. A dowry is an old-fashioned idea anyway. And there’s no rush to sail. We can live in Donegal and save for the rest, if that is your wish.”

Nancy is squirming in what Richard is weaving—I imagine her drawing the line of his profile down the center of a page, a kind of a heart-shaped face, a pouty mouth, always a little bit open, and shining light eyes. But what moves him inside, she wonders? She hungers for real contact, not an imitation of it, and she may be terrified, but she looks completely calm. Richard is a handsome, traveled, God-fearing man with some money in his pocket and big dreams. Nancy has dreams herself—to make a home, of course, but she also dreams—she told me—to cross the ocean and find a new place to be, new lakes and skies to draw with her colored pencils, new earth in which to plant seeds she would take with her to this Ohio. Is Richard the best opportunity in history or just another English speculation? Is she a fool to go with a man whose soul she does not know? Or is she the luckiest girl in the county to have Richard Moore at her parents’ hearth asking for her hand?

Nancy is a dreamer. Oh, she does her work—about half, anyway—and then she appears in the woods with her herb bag or by the river or the lake with her fishing net and the pencils and paper she must have. She scrubs floors at the manor and cleans shit houses for the shillings to buy them. But the pictures Nancy draws can break something open inside you. And Richard has not even seen any of them up close. Margaret silently rearranges the baskets and the pans near the stove. Nancy brings her the old teapot and stands close enough to her mother to listen to the rhythm of her breathing, and I realize that Nancy will be homesick for this old woman.

What will Richard say next, to sign off on this contract? He’s not hearing any objection from Margaret; if she feels one, she is keeping it to herself. And Peter is with him. Anyone can sense that. Richard turns to Nancy, who is moving away from her mother and stepping into the corner where her bonnet hangs on a ten-penny nail. There’s a small statue of the Virgin Mary, and Nancy’s sketches are tacked to the wall.

“Come,” Nancy says, gesturing for Richard to take her outstretched hand, and I can imagine her gesturing to him like that through the years, allowing him to be closer and closer. He draws himself up next to her. Margaret looks pleased. She tries to catch Peter’s eye to share their knowing of what Nancy is doing—she’s putting Richard to the test. They trust that Nancy knows how to get to the heart of the matter. Peter opens the door to let the hound in from the cold. There is a quick, electric scent in the air, and then the door shuts. She’s a skinny brown thing and she smells like a barnyard. The dog goes straight to Richard, sniffing his boots suspiciously. Peter upends his cup of whiskey, then limps to add a chunk of peat to the fire. When he stumbles, Margaret is there to catch his arm. There is a shift of light toward evening. Margaret reaches for candles while sheets of rain drench the fields of Donegal, the lake overflows its banks, and the young salmon hide in murky water under a darkened, colorless sky.

Nancy and Richard stand in front of her three drawings, their backs to her parents. Nancy points to her sketch of Lough Anna. It is a large drawing, the size of a side table, and it is tacked to the wall. It shines in silver shadings with such detail that I swear I can see wrens in the distant trees beyond the water’s edge, the flat hills at a distance, the burly cloudbanks of winter. Richard tilts his head, reading the corner date.

“You drew this recently?”

Nancy nods.

How can this drawing be so beautiful when something so terrible happened to her there? There is no trace of pain in it, but neither is it a pretense; it is more like a place that has held so much for so long that it has incorporated all of that into itself.

Nancy watches Richard’s confused response to her work and points to the second sketch. The thick paper is creamy and rectangular. It is a colored drawing of a faceless soldier. Richard’s eyes widen; obviously, he recognizes himself in it. There are no marching lines of young men in their bright stockings and red coats, no fifes and drums. No, none of that. It shows a lonely man sitting on the ground, his back to a wall, his bare head thick with reddish, matted hair and resting in his hands. Bones on bones, muscles on muscles. Against the wall is a musket, and on the ground, a three-cornered hat and an old rucksack. The soldier is crying; he is crippled by war, but will not let it show, and the artist is kind enough to respect that. Richard takes a sharp breath, and I know what he is remembering. He once described to me his pal, Paddy—how he’d abandoned Paddy on the field to die alone—and he is thinking of the stunned eyes of the French soldier who cried out to God, “Mon Dieu,” when Richard’s saber cut open the boy’s guts. Richard doesn’t look at Nancy, who must know all these things that are broken inside him.

Nancy reaches for the last drawing. She removes the slender nail and places the paper in Richard’s trembling hands. It is another black-and-white pencil sketch of a gray, shimmering graveyard where a little girl stands, looking up at her mother, whose face is soaked with tears and whose thin body is heavy with grief. What could be a worse sight for a child to see? And its weight is doubled by being recalled on the page and now tripled in the seeing of it. A single tear appears in the corner of Richard’s eye. Nancy’s gaze follows the tear as it reaches the peak of his cheekbone and falls onto his boot. She bends down, takes the drop with her finger. She places it on her tongue, and drinks his tear.

***Author’s note:

Richard and Nancy Moore were my great-great-grandparents. This story is part of a collection of short historical fiction I am writing—what I call “family fiction,” as it is based on deep research into my own and my former husband’s ancestry. Richard and Nancy arrived in New York in1825 from New Brunswick, Canada, on the schooner Lady Hunter, accompanying an unnamed girl. With my cousin’s help, we identified and visited the seventy acres in Salineville, Ohio, (about twelve miles west of the Ohio River) that Richard Moore purchased from the US Government as evidenced by a deed signed by President Andrew Jackson in 1831—one year after the Indian Removal Act forced the native people of that area to migrate west of the Mississippi River. Research for this story included a visit to Glenties and Ardara in County Donegal, as well as research in museums, churches, and other historical sites in Ireland. In writing this family fiction, I tried to rely on documented facts, and the rest I had to imagine.

Cough Drop Joe

This “family fiction,” won the 2019 Black Sheep Award of the Colorado Genealogical Society

In those days I’d take the train from Union Station in Denver, my home town, to Union Station in Washington, D.C., where the reporting work was.  It took a couple of days, but it gave me time to do some writing in the dining car that had a quiet bartender, and to watch the country roll by.  There were hobo camps along the rails--you could tell by the smoke.  I could take a close up look at them and then roll on by, settle back, open a book or pick up a pen. 

            I was working on a piece about one of Washington’s local characters—a kind of tramp himself, a tortured soul, but one that somebody must have loved.  His name was Joseph Ratto, an old Italian who was known around D.C as “Cough Drop Joe.”  He got his name from one of his many trades—selling those smelly Lewis’ cough drops to politicians returning to the Capitol from their martini lunches at the Old Ebbitt Grill or the Occidental.  He picked up a few cents that way and got to rub elbows with the high and mighty.  Everybody in D.C. knew Joe as the man who had held the horse of John Wilkes Booth outside the Ford Theatre on April 14, 1865.  . . Or did he?

            It was seventy years after the assassination, Joe Ratto was in his eighties, and I was determined to get the story before he passed from this earth.  Joe had a back room above a second-hand furniture store.  He was friends with the padre at Holy Rosary and I’d heard he went to late Mass on Sunday mornings, so that’s where I caught up with him. 

It was a warm autumn day, the kind that holds the sharp scent of boxwood in the air.  Joe was blessing himself with holy water when he came through the church door and he leaned his body against it, holding it for a few old women who followed. Joe was only about five feet tall and was wearing the double-breasted winter coat I’d seen him in for many years.  The coat almost reached the ground.  He had a brimmed felt hat in his hand.  That hat had seen better days.  He pulled it down to his ears and buttoned his vest.  His leather shoes were filthy and all his clothes were wrinkled.  As I approached, Joe looked up at me with his murky eyes, and he took my hand when I extended mine.  He didn’t quite smile, but his long white moustache curled a little around his mouth.

“Buongiorno,” I said, hoping my accent would please him.

“I speak English, young man” he said with a thick accent.  “Do you?”  Then he laughed and I laughed and I knew we were off to a great start despite my misstep.  I offered to take him to lunch—“wherever you want to go,” I promised him.  We were standing in the alley behind the church,  “The Willard,” he said right away.  “My niece married a cook at the Willard, you know—although the Casassas always called him a chef.  They were a bit high and mighty, you know, pearl necklaces and tinted photographs for all the daughters, stuff like that.”  We started out of the alley and he turned his head in my direction.   “You want to know what they all want to know… did I hold that getaway horse or didn’t I?”  He gave me an opening so I took it.

            “Well, Mr. Ratto, did you?”  He burst out laughing

“Didja hold the horse, Old Joe?  Didja make some money on it, Joe?  Didja hold it long?  Did you hold it tight? Didja?  Didja? Didja?”  His voice was low as he shook his head and upper body.  I said nothing.  He was getting mad.  “Just like all those loafers and newspaper boys—the ones selling the Post in the morning, the Star in the evening.  They were a scary lot when I was younger, the way they’d follow me down the street with their newspaper sacks slung over their shoulders.  On each corner another one would join in.  “Didja hold Booth’s horse?  The man killed Lincoln!  Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!” All my life they’ve been circling me, pointing their inky fingers in my face, spitting out their ugly words.  ‘They can’t prove it!’ I’d yell back at them.  ‘A man’s innocent until they can prove it!’” 

“That’s the American way,” I agreed.  I’d heard that old Joe would chase his tormentors with a cue stick he carried for protection. Lots of people saw him coming and poked fun at him because the John Wilkes Booth horse rumor had become part of Washington lore and an immigrant like Joe was an easy target. 

We walked down F Street in silence.  He was strong and solid for an old man, but his steps were short.  At 11th Street I took his elbow at the curb and he jerked it away, giving me a look that told me he was insulted.  Then we walked slowly side by side.  I wondered why he was giving me this interview and just how much he would admit.  “Where are your people from?” I asked.

“Northern Italy,” he grumbled, then paused and looked up at me.  “Not southern. . . get that part right,” he insisted, gesturing with his fingers in the air.  “I was just a kid, but I remember a big sailing ship and all of us piled in together--parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, everybody starving from those freezing winters and the killing frost that ruined the early crops.  They were all peasants.  Everybody was—contadino—so there was no shame.  We grew God’s good food. Grazie Dio!”  He looked into the blue sky.  His eyes had a milky look; he probably was half blind.  I hailed a Diamond cab and it dropped us on Pennsylvania Avenue at the Willard Hotel catty corner from the White House. 

The uniformed doorman opened the cab door, appearing shocked to see a man in Joe’s dirty condition.  I rushed around to take Joe’s arm and we walked down the carpet under the arched awning together.  I knew the maître d’ who gave us a corner table in the back of the dining room.  He took Joe’s coat and hat, holding them with one extended finger.  Joe’s hair was oily and raggedy but still fairly thick.  He held onto the table as I put the chair behind him and then he plopped down.  He was tired from the walk.  His fingers soiled the white tablecloth.

“Cocktail?” I asked.

            “Vino,” he said, not looking up at the waiter.  “Vino rosso.  Italiano.”  Joe scanned the room—the delicate murals on the thick columns and ceiling, the wooden paneling, the tile floor.  A little smile appeared.  “And olives,” he added looking up at me with a wish on his face.  I ordered the olives and a Campari and I waited for Joe to open up.  I’d heard that over beer Joe had told one confidante that he never held Booth’s horse, but that he had confessed to another that he actually did.  Probably Father DeCarlo at Holy Rosary was the only one who really knew the truth. 

“You have family here?” I asked.

“Oh, the Rattos have pushed fruit carts and vegetable carts of all kinds on every side of every marble building in this town.  Probably some paisano pushed these olives right into this restaurant.”  He sipped wine from the crystal glass like a gentleman.  I downed my Compari and called for another. 

“And you?  Did you have a pushcart too?”

“I was a ragpicker for years,” he said with no shame.  “Trash cans, gum wrappers, tin foil, anything on the street.  Peddling old newspapers was my specialty.  Thank God for your monkey business or I’d have starved years ago.”   He jabbed his elbow in my direction.  “I had my own cart once.  I’d collect yesterday’s newspapers and take them to all the vendors, to wrap up the apples and oranges, the lettuce and tomatoes.  Then I knew all the vendors and had the muscles to push that cart.”  Soon he was slicing his filet into tiny pieces and taking bites of the buttered potatoes with fresh parsley.  He had ordered the best beef on the menu, so I was feeling entitled to ask what I wanted to know.

“So tell me about the Ford Theatre that night that in ’65.  Were you there?”  He chewed as he considered my question.

“You’re gonna tell it straight for once?” he asked, pointing his fork in my direction.

“Just like you tell it to me, Joe.  Just like you tell it to me.”  He buttered his Parker roll.

“Yes, I was there.”

“Ok.  You were there.  Tell me more.”

“Hold your horses, young man.  I’d like another vino, per favore.”  I signaled the waiter while Joe ate.  I wondered what would come next.  There were those who said he never told the truth about his role in the assassination, but that he traded on it—maybe like he was doing with me—for a hot meal or a little fame.

“I was an eleven years old twerp,” he began.  “Slogging for my uncle--my father died on the boat and my mother died in childbirth soon after the ship landed in Philadelphia.  Riposare in pace. My uncle took me in and we moved to D.C. when I was so young I don’t even recall when.  But my job in the family was to pick up money wherever I could and put it in the biscotti jar by the stove where we all put money for food.  I did odd jobs, and sometimes I did hold horses for people at the theatre.  It was hard work. Those were very big horses and I was a very small boy.  But it was one of the best ways to earn a nickel—those who came late didn’t have time to find a stable, so us boys would hang around outside hoping to get one.  They let us do it.  It was a service.”  Joe held his fork in abeyance and kept his eyes on his plate as he spoke.

“It was honest work,” I said.

“It was,” he agreed, and his voice choked up and a tear rolled down his cheek.  The waiter took away his empty plate.  Joe did not look up as he spoke.  “Booth was a famous actor.  Everybody knew him, they said, but I didn’t.  I was just a kid.  What did I know?  He needed somebody to hold his horse and I was there.  So yes, I did hold it.  Did I know about his getaway plan?  No.  Were we for the Union?  We were.  Did I love Old Abe.  Yes, I did. We all did.”  He looked up at me.   His eyes were wet.  His cheeks.  His moustache.   “And you see the penance I have had to pay for the past seventy years?”  He swallowed hard and then he spoke:  “Isn’t it enough, mister?  Isn’t it enough?”

There before me was a broken man with the soul of a boy who did wrong by trying to do right.  He was an eccentric, haunted by a memory that may or may not even have been truly his own. Joe believed the story, but I had to wonder.  Was his memory the result of his tormentors?  The rumor mongers?  The newsmen like me who wanted a story? 

Suddenly he smiled.

“They’ll never prove it,” he said, returning to his gelato.  “They’ll never prove it.”

***

Reports on “Cough Drop Joe,” published after his death, indicate he was buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery in Washington, D.C.  by a “distant relative,” who I know, because my mother told me and the cemetery records confirm, was our kind grandmother, Blanche Casassa Sheaffer.  She bought a casket and had a headstone carved for Joseph Ratto (1854-1946) where she is now buried along with our grandfather, our parents, aunt, and of course, Uncle Joe.  Our grandmother’s own mother’s birth name was Ratto, and although I’ve not yet been able to determine exactly how we are related to Cough Drop Joe, I believe we must be. I’ve visited the small town in Italy where the Casassas came from and noticed plenty of Rattos buried in the cemetery there.

My primary source for this fictional account is an interview conducted in the 1930s by Denver writer, Donald Bloch, who eventually wrote Joe’s story.Bloch returned to Denver and became proprietor of Collectors’ Center, 1640 Arapahoe Street, specializing in rare books and collections.In 1969 the story was published and filed in Lincoln Financial Foundation Collection.As recently as 2007, a Lincoln historian, in his book, Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President, identifies “Peanut” John Burroughs, Nathan Simms, and “Coughdrop” Joey Ratto, all of whom allegedly held Booth's getaway horse outside Ford's Theatre the night of the assassination.