Read The Bottoms for Free Online Page B

driven into the wall, and her black hat hung up next to it. She sat across from me and ate, then said, “I think I’m gonna fry me some salt pork. You want some?”
    “Yes’m.”
    She opened the oven’s warmer, took out some salt pork. It was smoked already and could have just been warmed, but she put a little lard in a pan and stoked up the wood in the stove and set to frying it. It wasn’t long before it was ready. We ate the pork and more biscuits. She said, “I can tell you’re just ’bout to burst, dyin’ to tell me somethin’.”
    “I don’t know I’m supposed to,” I said.
    “Well then you don’t need to tell it.”
    “But I ain’t exactly been told not to tell it.”
    She grinned at me. She had two good teeth in the top of her mouth and four on the bottom, and one of them didn’t look so good. Still, they managed to chew biscuits and tear salt pork.
    I figured whatever I told Miss Maggie didn’t matter. She wasn’t gonna get back to Daddy with it, so I told her about finding the colored woman down in the bottoms and about there being something in the woods following me and Tom.
    When I finished she shook her head. “That a shame. Ain’t no one gonna do nothin’ about it. It just another dead nigger.”
    “Daddy will,” I said.
    “Well, he only one might, but he probably ain’t neither. He just one man. They’ll ride him down, boy. Best thing can happen ’bout all this is be gone on and forgot.”
    “Don’t you want them to catch who done it?”
    “It ain’t gonna be. You can rest on that. My people, they like chaff, boy. They blow away in the breeze and ain’t no one cares. Whoever done this have to kill a white person if he gonna get the big law on him.”
    “That ain’t right,” I said.
    “You better not be sayin’ that too loud, or them Kluxers be comin’ to see you.”
    “My Daddy would run them off.”
    She cackled. “He might at that.” She studied me for a long moment. “You best stay out of them woods, boy. Man do something like that, he ain’t got nothin’ ’gainst hurtin’ chil’ren. You hear me?”
    “Why would someone do something like that, Miss Maggie?”
    “Ain’t no one but Gawd knows reason ’hind that. I think what we got there is a Travelin’ Man.”
    “Travelin’ Man?”
    “That’s what they calls a man like that, does them kind of things to womens. Anyways, what my Daddy called ’em.”
    “What’s a Traveling Man?”
    Miss Maggie eased out of her chair, walked over to the cabinet, took out a little green tin and brought it to the table. She opened the tin, removed a pinch of snuff and poked it between cheek and gum.
    I knew she was about to tell me a story. The snuff, the comfortable position, it was her way. It was how she had first told me tales about the tar baby and the big snake of the bottoms that was killed in nineteen and ten. It was said to be a water moccasin forty-five feet long, and when it was split open a child was found inside. When I told my Daddy that one, he just snorted.
    Outside a cloud moved over the sun and darkened the greasy windows and the light through the screen door. I watched as the flies regrouped on the screen, lighting slowly, clustering together in a dusky wad, as if they too wanted to hear Miss Maggie’s story; their accumulation made a shadow on the floor and across the table, like a rain cloud.
    Off in the distance I heard a wagon clatter, followed by the sound of a car. It was a hot day and even warmer in the shack because of the stove and the tight space. I felt cozy and almost sleepy.
    “Dat ole Travelin’ Man, he someone you don’t want no truck with, boy. They’s folks wants to have anything at any ole price. Wants it so bad, they makes ’em a deal.”
    “What kind of deal?”
    “With the debil.”
    “Uh uh. No one would do that.”
    “Would too. They was this colored man named Dandy back in the time the numbers turned to nineteen and ought. It was the year that big ole hur’a’cun