Читать книгу The Yazoo Blues - John Pritchard - Страница 13

The fact is there was one more historian besides that feller in Meffis that Ottis could have put faith in. And it was Mr. Brainsong. He had done retired from bein’ the school superintendent by the time Voyd and me met up with Ottis on the bridge over the Pass at Moon Lake, but he was still doin’ just fine, dependin’ on how you looked at it . . . considerin’ one or two things . . . that had happened to him, then.

As you may remember, he was the one who confirmed to Miss Florence that me and Voyd had in fukkin fact done found a German submarine outchonda across the levee, near Hawk Lake. So, I always liked the hell out of him. First, because I just fukkin did; second, because I just fukkin did, and, third, because he seemed to like me and didn’t hold it against me that I was a rough-ass redneck sumbich. He even liked Voyd, and that made him pretty gotdam exceptional, if you want to know the truth. He treated Voyd like he was a human being, which is an honor that little piss-ant never deserved.

One thing, though, about Mr. Brainsong I never understood was he was always talkin’ about “waitin’ for Guhdoh.” He said there was two guys once that was supposed to meet up with a fellow named Guhdoh, but he never showed up. I said, hell, I’da just gone out after the sumbich, but Mr. Brainsong said it wouldna been no use because there wuddn no such coksukka in the first place, and then I was really confused because I couldn figure why anybody would want to wait around for him. But that’s the kinda of stuff people with a lot of education think about. Personally, I can’t see why they’d pay good money to go learn about some muthafukka that don’t exist—much less wait around for his ass—unless of course they was some kind of a preacher.

Mr. Brainsong was gettin’ way on up in years. So it was fortunate I got to talk to him about the stuff I had learned from Ottis about the Pass, but I don’t know why he didn’t just move out of town a long time ago. Looks to me like he coulda been happier, although I did talk with him before, well, before I couldn no more, and I have to say that, in the end, I think I mighta known him better than anybody else.

Anyway, fuk that. The point is Mr. Brainsong also knew all about the Yazoo Pass Expedition. I think he knew more about the real details of it than any coksukka, present company excepted. Hell, he was the first person I thought of after I had been listenin’ to Ottis. Ottis said he wouldn have nothin’ to do with Mr. Brainsong, but then Ottis was a narrow muthafukka who never cut nobody-who-didn’t-go-to-his-church no slack a-tall. Him and that bunch was so strict they’da made Jesus wash up, cut his hair, and go to Ole Miss before they’da let him in. And if they’da found out he was a Jew, well, sir, it’da been all over! You know them Baptists, scared all their boys is gon’ marry a Ko-rean and that ever’ coksukkin lillo thing is gon’ lead to dancin’.

And it does, too. Fukkum. Plus, you know they always turned up their noses at the Holy Rollers.

Other’n all that, Ottis is okay, and even though he didn’t care for Mr. Brainsong, I was high on both of em, because Ottis’s hard feelings toward Mr. Brainsong really didn’t have nothing to do with what I had become so interested in, namely, history—and the Yazoo Pass Expedition. It was like pussy: I could not stop thinkin’ about it. But that’s what it takes if you want to become a historian.

Now, apart from how un-gotdam-believable it all musta looked, the thing that caught my attention the most, concernin’ the Yankees’ Yazoo Pass Expedition, was what the fuk happened to Lieutenant-Commander Watson Smith, who was the head of the navy’s end of the operation. Accordin’ to Ottis, nobody seems real clear about what was actually wrong with him. It coulda been anything from syph’lus to the flu—and I tend to want to go with syph’lus—although Mr. Brainsong had what he called an interesting theory, which made sense to me, even if it didn’t to the fukkin experts. Plus, I know Ottis didn’t think much of it, even if he did like to listen to me tell about it.

Mr. Brainsong said it was just plain ol’ love, in a manner of speakin’, that fukked up the Commander and kilt him. He believed Smith was in love, but the girl he was in love with (if in fukkin fact he was), Anguilla Benoit,[1] who had close relatives in Mexico, was a spy.

She was the youngest daughter of old Colonel Benoit, whose sister was married to some kind of half-French Mexican millionaire back then, and so Anguilla had spent a good deal of time down in Mexico with her auntee in a place called Guanacevi. And she, accordin’ to Mr. Brainsong, mojoed Watson Smith’s ass in an unusual way. As you know, Mr. Brainsong was a student of unusual shit, so I expect there is a lot to it—even though later I come to realize Smith was too sick in another way to be in love with Anguilla or anybody else.

Anyhow, Lieutenant-Commander Watson Smith was sort of the darlin’ of the Yankee admiral, Rear-ass Admiral Porter. And when Grant decided to put on this fukked up backdoor maneuver to get in behind Vicksburg, or to the side of it, anyway, Admiral Porter selected Watson Smith, who he had a lot of respect for as a sailor, to be the head of the thirty-two-boat flotilla.[2]

This was a big fukkin mistake. And Smith did not want the job, but there wuddn nothin’ he could say or do except shuffle his feet and say yassuh. Something was definitely wrong with the commander from the 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, as I approached it. After entering, I lay upon my bed and was suddenly frightened by the appearance of my chamber pot, which, as I looked at it, was actually where it always was, there beside my bed. But that was the peculiarity of the incident. I found that, all during the night, as I huddled on my unturned counterpane, ordinary objects assailed me and terrified me with their sudden imposition on my senses. I knew not the nature of my illness, but I was determined to hold onto my sanity as best I could until dawn.

I survived the night, and, when morning came, I went outside. Ordinary objects no longer flew at me and made me afraid. Instead, there was a quietness and a singularity of moment I thought was exceedingly odd, and what seemed best to define this part of the experience was that the crocuses, just beginning to emerge and to bloom, appeared to be more animal than plant. The branches and the leaves of trees and those of shrubs seemed warm and, in some fashion, what I might describe as personable—much as an affectionate dog might seem to a kind master.

In addition, the azaleas were also beginning to bloom, and their colors were so luminous as to be almost iridescent in their brilliance. It was as though the flowers were infused with a radiance more supernatural than natural. And I felt that all the plant-world and I were in close, personal correspondence.