The Yazoo Blues. John Pritchard
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he was almost as official a law officer as I was, but not quite. Anyway, I picked him up in his yard and seen Sunflower peekin’ out the window. She’d done pushed the shade to the side, and I just barely made her out. But I spied her. And I knew she was sayin’, “Junior Ray, you gotdam muthafukka,” under her bad-ass-big-thinga-bobbakew-before-she-went-to-bed breath.
I can’t help it, but I always think about Sunflower and the crap she’s pulled on Voyd like the time he didn’t know where she was until a deputy up in Meffis called his house and told him Sunflower was in jail for bein’ “intoxicated in a public place.” The public place turned out to be a lover’s lane out on the east outskirts of the city, where she was settin’ in the back seat of a brand-new used Lincoln Mark VIII with a Meffis Cadillac salesman, who I guess was givin’ her a test drive.
It was after dark, and a Shelby County sheriff’s officer come up on em and shined his light inside the vehicle. And there they was, both of em, her and the salesman, bolt upright and ram-rod straight, drunker’n jaybirds eatin’ hackberries, and it wuddn just that neither of em could walk a straight line—what it was was that Sunflower had both her legs jammed down in just one leg of her Capri pants.
Po’ ol’ Voyd. I truly do feel sorry for the sumbich. Hell, he’s my friend.
Anyhow, we scratched off with the blue and red lights blappin’, hit 61, and drove south and then, not far below the bridge at Broke Pot Mound, we turned straight east toward what folks called Slab Town, which was not no town at all, just one lillo country store built on a slab—instead of up off the ground like most things down here are—and another slab, with nothin’ built on it, right next to the store, both of em facin’ a gravel road that runs east and west, from Askew to where it hit the levee at Yookaloosa[2] Brake, and vice-versa. Of course, there wuddn much at Askew neither, and even today there ain’t nothing to see a-tall when you get to the levee. Shoot, the gravel don’t even go up onto the levee, the whole thing just turns into a rutty little dirt road at the base of it, from which, if it ain’t too wet, you can go up on top of the levee and ride north till you come to Austin or south till you get to a blacktop road that’ll take you back to 61 by way of Dundee. Either way, you ain’t been nowhere.
But at Slab Town, there wuddn but about six houses and an old caboose fixed up to be a fukkin Sunday school. The houses, if you wanted to call em houses, was strung out along the north and south sides of the gravel road, goin’ east, between the piss-ant store and the caboose, which wuddn no more’n three-tenths of a mile total.
Now, don’t get me wrong. These raggedy sumbiches livin’ out there wuddn no niggas. They was white.
Anyway, Voyd and me come roarin’ up and seen Sheriff Holston’s big-ass Ford parked on the side of the road on the other end of the bridge, with his lights all goin’ so there we all was, out in the middle of nowhere with our lights and all, makin’ quite a sight. And Voyd and me still didn’t know what we come there for. But as we slid on up beside Sheriff Holston’s official vehicle, we knew something was mighty wrong.
“What the fuk!” Voyd said. And when we got out of the patrol car and walked up to where Sheriff Holston was standin’ in the middle of the gravel, we got the picture: There wuddn no Slab Town there.
Over in a little field knee-high in dry grass and cuckaburrs, across from where the store had been, we seen Preacher Flickett. He lived in St. Leo and was one nem Piscob’ls. Anyway, he was standin’ in the weeds with his face turned up toward the sky and his arms helt up like he was fixin’ to catch something.
“He’s not going anywhere, Junior Ray,” Sheriff Holston said, “but why don’t you walk out there and see if the minister would like to come on over here and rest for a while inside your patrol car.” I done what the sheriff ast me to, and Reverend Flickett didn say a word or do nothin’ impolite whatsoever. He just walked beside me back to the car. Voyd, who was standin’ there by it, lookin’ like he’d been hit in the head with a REA[3] light pole, blinked two or three times, closed his mouth, and opened the back door. Brother Flickett got in, and that was all there was to it.
The long and the short of it was that the Shepherd had blowed up his flock and had wiped out the whole so-called town. He done it with dynamite, which it turns out he had collected over a period of time from one planter’s commissary here and from another’s pickup there. It was a wonder he didn’t blow hissef up months before that night.
What it was, he had been goin’ out in the county to some of the wilder places and preachin’ and teachin’ his Piscob’l shit, which I am told is mostly sort of quiet and dignified and not rockin’ and rollin’ like what some of them other stump-jumpin’, Bible-thumpin’, more holy-rollerish sumbiches would th’ow out back then to them beat-down po’ whites who lived half-out in the middle of the gotdam woods and who musta thought, somehow, their pitiful-ass souls had a chance of goin’ somewhere besides Hell—which, frankly, compared with how they lived, woulda looked like a stroke of good luck and mighta seemed no worse than a day choppin’ cotton.
It was the same with Elvis. He thought that house of his was a mansion. It ain’t. It’s just a house.
Anyway, Reverend Flickett, the Piscob’l sumbich, felt like he wuddn gettin’ nowhere with the clientele. He’d tell em they better shape up, and they’d just set there and yawn. But then he seen the light, even if they didn’t. He was gon’ have to scare the shit out of em to get em to take his Piscob’l ass seriously, even though, somebody said, he didn’t really want none of them cootie-bit muthafukkas ever to decide to join up and become Piscob’ls. And the more he tried to do the right thing but, you might say, with the wrong objective in mind, the more confused that pitiful muthafukka become. Personally, I’ll lay money he meant well, but you know yoursef, whenever anybody says some sumbich “tried to do the right thing,” it normally means he was dumber’n shit and had fukked up real bad.
The story come out bit by bit. He had begun to tell those transplanted hillbilly muthafukkas that the end of the gotdam world was comin’, and just to th’ow em into high gear, the sumbich put a date on it: December 22nd, 1964.
So the coksukka kept on warnin’ em: “The world is goin’ to end—on December the twenty-second in this the year of Our Lord, nineteen hunnuhd and sixty-fukkin-four!” And then, the word was, even though the Reverend Flickett was a Piscob’l, he neverthe-fukkin-less tried his hand at shoutin’, and they say the sumbich would drill his beady eyes into them pekkawoods and holler, “Repent! You sorry sonzabitches!”
People all said that for a Piscob’l, he was more like a Baptist. The Baptists, natchaly, said, “Bullshit,” that he wuddn no such a thing. Personally I don’t give a fishfuk. I’m just tellin’ you what happened and what I heard.
Anyhow, apparently late—late—in the middle of the night, the one that was gonna come up the morning of December 22nd, 19 and 64—he got a coil of electrical wire, some blasting caps, and all the dynamite he had collected and hid away underneath the Piscob’l Church in St. Leo, and very syste-fukkin-matically made nine bundles of nine sticks each. He later told the doctor at the state insane asylum down at Whitfield he called em his “Triple Trinities.” After he stuck the blasting caps in em, he attached thirty-five to forty-foot wires. Then, in the dark, without no lights, he drove slowly down the gravel road, stoppin’ in front of each lillo shotgun, where he’d dismount and ever so tippy-toe cast one nem bundles of dynamite up underneath the house, leavin’ one end of the long wire next to the road—or off in the ditch beside it. And since the store was built on a slab—instead of up off the ground like the houses was—he couldn th’ow nothin’ under it, so he broke the glass in the front door and lobbed the package inside; after the blast there was gotdam baloney and potted meat and and vy-eena sausages and them real red, strung-together weenies all strowed out fifty fukkin yards in ever’ direction.
Anyway, when he had done th’owed the dynamite inside the store, he drove back down the road and hooked all the wires from the bundles to one long-ass, main wire, one end