Madewell Brown Read online

  “Sweet Lupita,” her mother said, and she turned around and looked at her daughter. She was a thin woman with dull skin and hollowed-out eyes. The dress she wore hung slack on her body. From inside the bedroom, Lupita could hear the stick swung again and again. It reminded her of how the wind would blow through tree branches at night.

  “Don’t believe what you hear, hija,” her mother went on, her voice soft and calm. “The people in this village are full of lies. You know that. The truth is that the black man took Rufino away from us. He came here from nowhere and took my little boy away from me. Do you understand, hija?”

  “Yes, Mama,” Lupita said.

  “Tell me,” her mother said.

  “The black man took Rufino away,” she said, beginning to cry.

  “That’s right, hija. And we will never talk about this again.”

  “I know, Mama,” Lupita said. As if from a distance, she heard her brother cry out and then the harsh voice of her father. Lupita picked up a crayon and bent over her sheet of paper. And in the sky above the valley, with her hands trembling, she drew a misshapen sun.

  “Tia,” Cipriano said. His aunt’s eyes were half closed, her breath so slight that Cipriano thought she might have fainted. He reached across the table, spilling his coffee, and touched her hand. “Tia,” he said, louder this time.

  “No,” she said, jerking her head back. Her eyes moved about the room and then settled on Cipriano. She pulled her hand away from him and laid it in her lap. “This village is full of lies,” she said.

  “I know that,” Cipriano said, not sure what she was talking about.

  “No, you don’t.” And what struck Cipriano at that moment was how calm and precise her voice was, as if she had waited all her life to say those three words to him. “I know stories about my neighbors,” she went on, “and their neighbors and their neighbors’ neighbors. I know the story about what Tranquilino’s father did to him when he was a small boy. I’ve heard the gossip about the men Genoveva has known and who Martin’s father might be. And not a word, hijo, would I ever repeat.”

  “Tia,” Cipriano said, “I just asked a question.”

  “No. It was more than that.”

  “I was asking about my father.”

  Lupita leaned forward over the table. “He was never your father,” she said. “You of all people should know that. How could you believe anything he would say?”

  Cipriano wasn’t sure if it was the tone in Lupita’s voice or how rigid her face was, but suddenly he felt as though he was talking to Rufino in those moments when the old man would rage. He held up both his hands. “You’re right, Tia,” he said, wanting an end to all this. “I shouldn’t have brought this here.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have. And we’ll never have to talk about this again, will we?”

  “No, Tia,” Cipriano said.

  Lupita took in a deep breath and closed her eyes. And then she folded her hands and placed them back on the table. “Hijo,” she said, and her face softened. She became the woman who had raised and cared for him. “Let me make you some breakfast. I have eggs and a pot of fresh chile.”

  Obie Poole

  It been raining now for six days. Raining so long every joint in my body aches and even Rachael dont come by. The damn rivers so high it lapping up against the posts that hold up my porch. And if that goes I dont know what Ill do. Some people came by today saying it time to get out but itll take more than them to get Obie Poole to leave home. Id rather go floating down the river than end up in some South Cairo Home for Old Men. But six days of rain is enough for me. Its dripping through my roof and swelling up the damn floorboards. The sky is setting low and gray and everything but the tops of the cattails been swallowed up by water. But I tell you a thing. Its the damn mist that bothers me the most. The way it rises out of the ground and threads through the trees down by the river. Yes sir its the mist more than the rain that makes me think of the hanged man.

  We were driving a back road in Arkansas when we came across him. It was raining then too and the mist was rising out of the tall grass that stretched away from us on both sides. The road was lined with tall oak trees and there he was hanging from a limb like hed been left there for us to see. He wasnt much more than a boy really. His pants were pulled up high and his feet were bare. The grass all around that tree was beat down and trampled like a crowd had been there not so long ago. Sodie pop bottles lying here and there and cloth diapers stuck on a bush.

  Even now I dont know what to say about that. That boy he came and he left us in a second. And it wouldnt have mattered one bit if we’d laid him down on the ground in the wet grass or just drove on by like we hadnt seen him. Nothing would have changed one bit. But I think about that poor boy sometimes when its raining or the mist is hanging low. He was alone in a place no one should be. Just a boy all alone by himself in a cold rain with mist all around.

  Seven

  Rachael found the Guadalupe post office off on a dirt road in the middle of the valley. It was a small building with thick plastered walls that sat in a wash of high weeds. The lot in front was hard-packed dirt, potholed and lined on one side with thin, listless aspen trees. A pickup was parked off by itself, and beside it was a Guadalupe police car. As Rachael stood sipping from a can of warm soda pop, she realized that after this she would have no idea what to do next.

  She’d spent all morning and some of the day before walking up and down the highway, stopping at the lumberyard and the tavern and the café and the two gas stations, and even going out into a field where an old man was irrigating. Whenever she asked if they’d known a man named Madewell Brown, every one of them had said the same thing, their eyes shifting off somewhere else. “I lived here my whole life and I never heard of him.”

  “Do you know who I might ask?”

  “I don’t know that, either,” they’d say, turning away like she was already gone, like she wasn’t any better than that homeless man in the trees back in South Cairo.

  It was early afternoon by now, the sky was a pure blue and too bright. The back of Rachael’s neck was tight from the sun beating on it, her eyes raw from so much light. The soles of her feet felt blistered from walking. She finished her soda pop and set the can beneath the aspen. And then she left what shade the tree had given and stepped out into the sun.

  A middle-aged woman was behind the front counter. She was talking to a police officer who was leaning against the wall. Between them was a rubber-banded stack of envelopes. The woman’s eyes moved to the door as it swung open and a second later the officer glanced over. He was a tall man, thick in the chest, his face dark. Just below his hairline was a swathe of pale skin.

  “Excuse me,” Rachael said. She walked up to the counter, keeping space between her and the policeman. “Maybe you could help me.” She pulled Madewell Brown’s letter out of her back pocket and laid it on the table. “I was hoping you could tell me who sent this.”

  The woman looked down at the envelope, at the postmark that read, “Guadalupe, New Mexico.” “No,” she said. “I don’t have any idea who sent that.”

  “Well, I got this letter and I’m trying to find out who sent it to me.” Beside her, the police officer pushed off the wall and stood up straight. “It’s so old,” Rachael went on, “I thought you might remember.”

  “No,” the woman said, shaking her head. “I don’t look at the letters that go through here.”

  “Maybe you’ve got the wrong Guadalupe,” the officer said. “I know two or three other villages down south with the same name.”

  “No,” Rachael said. “I looked up the zip code.” He was close enough for her to see the pores that ran across his face and over the bridge of his nose. She could smell the sweat coming from his body. Pinned to his shirt was a name tag that said he was Donald Lucero.

  “What’s your name?” Lucero asked.

  “My name’s Rachael Parish,” she said, not even trying to keep the lilt out of her voice. “And I’m looking for my gr
anddaddy.”

  “I’ve heard who you’re looking for.” The man’s eyes were small and black with a flat look to them that reminded Rachael of the carp that fed up close to the riverbank back home. Like those fish, she thought, this man didn’t care one bit about her or what she wanted. He just wanted to feed quietly somewhere and not be bothered. “This is a small village,” he said. “If your grandfather had lived here, people would remember.”

  “That’s what I think, too,” Rachael said. “That’s why it’s so strange no one can remember.”

  Lucero’s eyes grew even smaller and he shifted from one foot to the other. Then he picked up the letter from the counter and handed it to her. “How many times do you have to hear ‘no’ before you leave?”

  Rachael slid the letter back into her pocket. From outside came the sound of a vehicle driving up and then the slamming of a car door. “My granddaddy was a ballplayer,” she said. “And when he was done with that, he came here. I know that.”

  For a few seconds, nobody said a word. And then Lucero grinned and shook his head. He turned to the woman, who was staring down at the counter, and spoke in Spanish. “Quien es esto mujer?” he said.

  “No sé, Donald,” the woman answered, shrugging her thin shoulders. Behind the three of them, the door opened and a woman with two small children came in. They stopped at the entrance as if not sure what to do.

  “Doris,” the post office lady said, motioning with her hand, “venga. This lady is done here.”

  As soon as Rachael pushed out the post office door, she began walking quickly without any thought of where she was going. She followed the dirt road, staring straight ahead, her strides long, her arms swinging. Fields of stunted alfalfa lay on each side of her, and scattered throughout were old homes and dilapidated trailers propped up on cement blocks. A dry ditch weeded over ran alongside the road.

  She kept on until she came to where the road ended and, instead of turning right or left, went straight ahead on a rutted-out trail that wound through scrub oak and large juniper trees. She moved in and out of shadows now. The air was not so hot. After a little while the ground began to slope upward, and she found herself scrambling up a foothill. She climbed it a ways, using her hands to help, and then, breathing heavily, sat down to rest.

  The ground beneath her legs was loose rock and dried tufts of grass, the dirt beneath it soft and powdery. She scooted up a few feet into the shade of an old, twisted piñon and leaned back against the trunk. From where she sat, she could see almost the entire valley. The café, the lumberyard, the roof of the church and the highway she’d walked up and down. She could see the little cabin where she’d spent the night and the post office where Lucero had asked her whether she ought to be heading home. And though the man had made her angry, she couldn’t help but wonder if he was right. How was it possible, she thought, that a black man had ever found this place so long ago, let alone moved in and lived here? And if he had, why didn’t anyone remember him?

  “All this way for nothing,” she whispered. Down on the dirt road a pickup loaded with trash was driving slowly toward the highway. She watched it go along for a while and then put her head back against the tree.

  I should blame you for this, old man, she thought. And then she remembered a day long before.

  “What you got there?” Obie asked. He was sitting in his chair, fanning himself with a piece of cardboard. Rachael, who had just turned eleven years old, was up on the railing over by the steps. It was late on a summer afternoon. The air was heavy with heat and the sun hung flat and dull overhead.

  “I got a baseball,” Rachael said. It was a beat-up old ball she’d found the day before in a mess of weeds near the South Cairo Home. The cover was browned and stained, and some of the stitching was frayed.

  “What the hell do you want with a baseball?” Obie asked.

  “I don’t want nothing with a baseball,” she said. “I brought it for you.”

  Obie let out a grunt. He leaned back in his chair and looked out at the river lying still and calm. “The last thing I need is a baseball,” he said. “I seen enough damn baseballs.” He sat quiet for a little while and then looked over at Rachael. Her skinny legs were sticking out of a pair of shorts and she was hunched over peering up at him.

  “Let me see it,” he said. She gave it a toss and the old man caught it with one hand. He dropped both hands down to his lap and started working the ball leather with his thumbs. “This here is a boy’s ball,” he mumbled. “Stained with grass and left out in the sun.” He tossed it up and down. “The weight feels right, though,” and he tossed it over to Rachael. She caught it with two hands up against her chest, her feet spilling up so high that she nearly fell backward into the flat grass.

  “Ha,” Obie said, shaking his head. He leaned forward and spat out a stream of tobacco juice between his legs. “Well,” he said, wiping at his mouth, “you going to throw it back or keep it?” Rachael jumped down off the railing and dropped her arm.

  “No,” the old man said. “Not like that. What they teach you at that Home? You going to throw a ball, then throw the damn thing. What your granddaddy say if he see you?”

  Obie sat back and watched her start to grin. Slowly she cocked her arm back behind her head. “That’s right,” he said softly, and the ball came at him the same way a soda-pop bottle would a few years later. He stuck up his hand and felt the ball burn his palm. “Yes sir,” he said. “That’s better,” and he threw it back to her.

  For some time they played catch out on Obie’s rickety front porch, and though the old man was quiet at first, after a while he began to talk about whatever came to mind.

  “Did I tell you,” he said, “when we was playing a game down in Knoxville?” And from there it went to how fast Hightop could cover the outfield to how a bone snapped in Bowman Crawford’s arm in midpitch like a dry limb to how Sully Greene was always messing with the women. Rachael barely listened. She’d heard the stories before and it didn’t matter to her if this time it was Bowman Crawford’s arm that got broke or Tessie Turner’s. She concentrated on the ball so it wouldn’t go flying off into the flat grass and then threw it straight back at Obie’s head. It wasn’t until the sun had dipped behind the trees across the river and a fine mist of gnats hung in the air that she began to pay attention to what he was saying.

  “Let me tell you a thing,” the old man said, holding the ball in his lap. “We did every damn thing right and, at the end, it still come out wrong. But even if I had to do it over, I expect I wouldn’t change one thing. Except maybe if I had my way, it would have been us instead of that Robinson boy. Yes sir, there we’d be, Madewell and Syville and Obie Poole, playing out on that green field in Brooklyn.” Obie was staring off now, Rachael long forgotten.

  “And all those white folks,” he said, “watching like we belonged. Now, wouldn’t that be a thing or two.”

  Rachael first saw the ball field as she was sliding her way back down the foothill. It was cradled up close to the north side of the hill and rimmed on three sides by a creek lined with large cottonwoods. The outfield was overgrown with weeds. The infield was hard dirt with patches of grass. The pitcher’s mound was almost entirely worn away, and where a batter would have stood had sunk so low that water would likely pool there when it rained. Behind the plate was a backstop. A flock of ravens sat up on the lip of it. The wire mesh below them was stained white from their droppings.

  Rachael stared down at the field, her legs spread wide, her feet dug in to keep her from sliding on the loose rock. With the trees crowding so close and the birds sitting so still, there was a sheltered and haunted feel to the place, as if one last game had been played here and when it was over no one had ever come back. Rachel stooped down, picked up a stone and threw it. It struck down low on the wire mesh and sent the ravens swooping off. When they had settled into the trees, she made her way down the slope to the field.

  The air was cooler there. Shadows from the cottonwoods were just beginning
to stretch across the field. She walked up to the backstop and paused for a moment. In the ground a few yards away were the rusted heads of spikes that had once held down home plate. The dirt around them was pocked with hoofprints and the base paths were rough and littered with stones.

  “This here a field for boys,” Obie said, standing beside her. “Or for grown men who don’t know no better.”

  “Maybe it was once,” Rachael answered him. “But it’s not anything at all now.” She walked around the corner of the backstop and out onto the field. When she stopped between home plate and the pitcher’s mound, she caught sight of a man standing in the shadows of a cottonwood.

  He took a few steps toward her. “What are you doing here?” he asked her. He was holding a rifle in his right hand, the barrel angled away from her.

  “I’m not doing much,” Rachael said, shrugging her shoulders. “I just came to see this old ball field.”

  He began to walk closer, his gait stiff-legged, and stopped only a few feet away from her. He was a dried-up old man who stood no taller than the top of her shoulder. His hair was gray and cut short. Deep lines dug into both sides of his face and ran down through his neck.

  “Are you going to shoot me?” Rachael asked.

  “Now, why would I do that?” he asked, jerking his head back a little. He motioned with the rifle out to left field. “But I am going to shoot those pendejo Martinez dogs if I see them.” His voice had a hollow, whistling sound, as if air was running over and under his false teeth. “They’ve been messing with my lambs. I don’t know what’s wrong with people these days. How hard is it to keep your damn dog tied up?” He looked back at Rachael and stared so long that she turned away and looked out at the field.

  “You’re not from here,” he said finally.

  “No,” she said, wondering at her luck with old men. “I came looking for someone who used to live here. He was a ballplayer.”