The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard
Читать онлайн книгу.
start, only it’s difficult to pin down just what it was. Smith hissef wrote that he had took sick down on the lower end of the Yazoo, but even he never said what it was.
Anyhow, he did a lot of crazy stuff. For instance, after that prick army engineer, Lieutenant-Colonel James Wilson, who hated Smith, got the Pass cleared and the boats could pass the Pass, so to speak, that po’ sumbich Smith had to stop the whole fukkin show from chuggin’ along every day just to have lunch. It was behavior like that that really got under the skin of a dikhed like Wilson, who was in fact the chief engineer and one of the up-at-the-front honchos in the whole in-sane thing. He’s the one who blew the levee and got the show on the road after Grant said do it. Plus, he, Wilson, said he now knew how the Egyptians built the fukkin pyramids, because when he and his men was clearin’ the channel of them huge-ass sycamores and chestnut oaks—which the planters and the niggas had th’owed across the Pass to block it—after he’d done got em off to the side and out of the way, he said that was when he realized bygod that if you put enough men on a rope, you could do just about anything.
Anyway, this coksukka Wilson figured out something was not right with the naval commander even while they was hangin’ around Moon Lake waitin’ to go through the Pass once it got cleared. It was more like Smith just was not in touch with what was goin’ on. And Wilson said he saw “constantly, a far-away look” in the coksukka’s eyes. That’s a gotdam re-search fact. I got a z-rocks on it.
Accordin’ to Mr. Brainsong, it was that very fukkin far-away look that nailed Smith’s ass by bein’ one of the reasons the hero in blue got involved with the daughter of a local planter. It was the lost stare that let her know he was, if not no spring chicken, definitely a pigeon. More important, she could tell right off the bat that his brain was gooberized.
For the sake of the game, Anguilla made a big to-do about not wantin’ to be attracted to a Yankee, sayin’ she would never have nothin’ to do with a man who had not lost an arm or a leg for the South, but, in the fukkin end, so she advertised, love would win out, whatever the fuk that meant. It was just a crock of jibber-jabber. Anguilla wuddn studyin’ no love.
She was a cold-hearted spy, and it was her—and a gun—that finally put the screws to the Yankees’ Yazoo Pass Expedition. In the end didn none of it make no difference, cause Vicksburg fell in July just a few months after all this I’m talkin’ about occurred. But . . . it did make a difference, if you look at it in a larger sense. Them Confederates wuddn gonna win the war, and they knew it, but they were determined, any time they could, to make monkeys outta the Yanks. And, with the help of General Use-less Ass Grant and the Yazoo Pass Expedition, bygod, they done just that.
Mr. Brainsong said that he knew he might be goin’ out on a limb, but neverthe-fukkin-less he “felt he had ample reason to believe Anguilla did give Lieutenant-Commander Watson Smith some kind of a drug that really fukked him up. So Mr. Brainsong ast me one day, “Junior Ray, as a law enforcement professional, you’ve heard of LSD, haven’t you?”
“Is it anything like LSU?” I said. I think I had heard something about LSfukkinD back then, but I wuddn too sure what it was.
Anyway, he said he wuddn really talkin’ about LSD nohow; what he truly believed she used on him was some kinda dope called pay-otey, which he said come from cactuses out West and down in Mexico, and that for centuries the muthafukkas of that region have used it in their religions. That may not be exactly his words, but it’s close.
More important, he said she carried a funny lookin’ sumbich around with her as a personal servant, named Chiwiddywee. He wuddn no nigga nor no greaser, nor no Choctaw neither, and he never said nothin’—plus, it was known he always toted a small satchel over his shoulder full of dried-up, woody-lookin’ stuff, which Mr. Brainsong said had to be the pay-otey and that, apart from his own experience on a trip he took once to Arizona, he drew most of his conclusions from readin’ the personal papers of old Colonel Benoit, which are in the Colonel Duncan Sherard Benoit Public Library down at Lushkachitto. Now, in those papers of his, the Colonel said two things about the woody-lookin’ stuff. One was that he “. . . understood from little Anguilla it was a bit of the soil of [Chiwiddywee’s] mountain homeland, far above the great canyons of Mexico’s mysterious Sierra Madre Occidental, whence this dark, ephemeral Aztec—with my beloved daughter Anguilla and her devoted African slave, Kitty Dean—plans to return once this terrible conflict is resolved.”
I can’t imagine nobody wantn to run off down there to Mexico in that day and time with no roads, no telephones, no TVs, nor nothin’ else, just to live with a buncha fukkin Pepper Bellies. ’Course, I ain’t never been there, and I guess it was somewhat different with her uncle bein’ a Mexican millionaire and all, but a hot-tamale is just a dogmeat sandwich as far as I’m concerned, unless of course it’s made from a dog in the Delta.
Well, she never did go back there, cause the Mexicans was busy with their own squabblin’ durin’ that time. And her uncle got shot with a Frenchman who had been runnin’ the country. Anyway, things sort of fell apart for her, for a while at least, and then she married a man from Meffis, a real prominent sumbich at the time, very successful in the cotton business, called by his nickname, “Snake” Frontstreet—but I think his real name was Baley Banks Frontstreet. They lived down in the Delta back then on a big-ass plantation, called Goree,[3] and had a buncha chillun, and her descendants—and, of course, his, mostly anyway—are scattered all over and up and down the Delta to this very day, so that it’s hard to find any sumbich between Hard Cash and Walls, whose family’s been around for a long time, that don’t claim kin to her, and to him, too, one way or another.
Chiwiddywee disappeared. Accidentally or on purpose. “It is thought,” Mr. Brainsong said, “that he returned to his native land.” And he added, “With, I believe, the blessings of the Benoits.” More-fukkin-over, Mr. Brainsong claimed they was some of them Indians in Mexico that could run fifty miles a day, and ol’ Chiwiddywee mighta been one of em. If that was true, the sumbich woulda got outta here and all the way across Texas faster’n a fukkin Ohzee-Moh, which is what, way back yonder when I first started workin’ as a deputy for Sheriff Holston, that worthless nigga Ezell, who lived in his own special cell at the jail and went in and out whenever the fuk he wanted to, used to call a Ohzmobile. Truth is, that situation with Ezell wuddn all that unusual back in nem days. The Delta was full of things like that. Later, though, when the gotdam Civil Rights fell on our ass, the sheriff and nem made Ezell go free. Hell, they kicked his no’count se’f outta jail. Then the triflin’ sumbich carried on sumpn awful and wouldn speak to nobody for a fukkin month, but finally he got used to bein’ out, and now I think he likes it. He’s damn-near old as I am. But, you know, ways are hard to change. Which is why I ain’t never changed none of mine.
The second thing old Colonel Benoit wrote about the dried up, barky-like bitter stuff was long, so here it is, straight off my z-rocks:
On one occasion I saw upon a small table a few fragments of a substance which I took to be the same that little Anguilla’s manservant seemed always to keep in a sack of some sort on his person. Without thinking I reached and picked up several pieces of the unknown matter and put them into my mouth. I chewed them and swallowed them. Shortly thereafter I became nauseated and vomited in the rose garden. I seemed to be quite well until about half an hour or three-quarters thereof later when I noticed an unaccustomed acuteness in my hearing. Some of the slaves were singing, and I could hear the very origin—and the precise and minutely detailed formation—of every note, whereupon I perceived a multitude of harmonies I had never before encountered. The sensation was fascinating; yet, I failed to connect the phenomenon in any way with the bitter bark I had ingested earlier.
Shortly before the end of supper I was forced to quietly excuse myself from the table. I did not offer an explanation for my departure as, indeed, I would not have known how to phrase it, but the reason was this: as I attempted to serve myself a helping of butter beans, those delectable flat leguminous seeds seemed to be moving as though they were alive, swarming like blind, mindless grubs. I said nothing, fearing I should be thought to have gone mad, and, certainly, I felt that I might in fact be just that. In any case, I went to my room, the door of which widened and yawned, audibly,