Читать книгу The Bernice L. McFadden Collection - Bernice L. McFadden - Страница 31

Chapter Twenty-One

He had been such a sweet child, but after he died and came back again, he was different. J.W. was suddenly fond of torturing living things: cats, puppies, and fledglings. His own baby sister couldn’t escape his cruelty—one afternoon he bound her ankles and wrists with rope, propped her up against a tree, arranged wood and dried corn husks at her feet, and set it ablaze. Thank goodness a passerby saw the smoke and heard the boy whooping like an Indian, or else the girl would have burned to cinders.

His mother, Eula, made up all types of excuses for his devious behavior: He don’t mean no harm. Boys are mischievous by nature.

She coddled him, dubbed him extraordinary because he had died and come back to life. She called him “my little Jesus boy.”

The people around town called him the devil.

When the senior Milam died, Eula married a man named Charles Bryant. He wasn’t a sharecropper like her previous husband, but a businessman who owned two trucks and had purchased the grocery store from Cole Payne.

J.W. gave Charles Bryant the chills. One day he told Eula, “Something ain’t right with that boy.”

Eula rubbed her pregnant belly and retorted nas-tily, “Well, let’s see what your seed produces.”

Charles was hoping and praying for a girl, but Eula gave birth to a son, who they named Roy.

In 1942, J.W. was twenty-three years old and went down and enlisted himself in the army. He was deployed overseas where he could actively and openly pursue his burgeoning passion—murder.

He did it so well that he was awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.

J.W. had departed Mississippi a scraggly specimen of a man, and returned a six-foot-two, 235-pound war hero.

“My Jesus boy!” Eula cried, and burst into tears, when he stepped out of the checkered cab.

His stepfather gave him a job as a truck driver and J.W. bedded every willing female who lived along his delivery route, which snaked through three states.

He eventually married a thick-legged girl named Juanita and the two settled into a small house on the outskirts of this place that I am.

When they made love, J.W. set the .45 he’d brought back from Europe on the nightstand. He enjoyed having it in his sights as he rammed himself mercilessly into his wife.

Juanita knew about the gun, but not the round metal tin which once held snuff, but was now filled with teeth. Teeth from the dead Germans he’d shot and killed in the war. He’d dislodged the teeth by holding the corpse by the hair and slamming the butt of the gun into its dead mouth.

In Mississippi, J.W. tried to feed his passion by hunting deer, possum, and wild Russian boar—but killing animals didn’t offer the same thrill as slaying a living, breathing human being.

When the Korean War began, J.W. went to the recruiting office and tried to enlist. By then, though, his affection for whiskey and cigars had taken its toll. The army declared him ineligible to serve and the morose J.W. went back home and drank whiskey until his eyes blurred.

Juanita had given birth to two sons at that point, and she made the sad mistake of saying, “I’m glad they ain’t take you, ’cause our boys need their daddy.”

J.W. flew at her, wrapped his hands around her throat, and choked her until the capillaries in her eyes exploded.