plump and wide like his daddy and never once had I caught Mama looking at him with anything else but sweet love, maybe a little sadness for the man she’d loved and lost too soon.
So because I knew it so well, I didn’t waste much time thinking on the bad mood that came up on Mama when she looked too hard at me as I trotted towards the crossroads. Instead, my attention went to the wide field surrounding the Simoneaux property and the stalks of sugarcane that rose up taller than a grown man.
When we were little things, me and Dempsey would run out in that field, hiding and laughing like fools, chasing each other with the scratch of the tall grass and the thick stalks slapping against our knees, the sweet residue from the sugarcane making Dempsey’s britches and my thin cotton dresses sticky with dirt. Sometimes Sylv would play with us, tapping the tips of the stalks just to prove his stretch could reach, that he was bigger and braver than us.
Once, when we were twelve, Dempsey gathered several stalks and took the pocket knife Uncle Aron had given him for his birthday to the skins, cutting away the surface until only the meaty insides, sweet and satisfying, came dripping out in a slow, delicious trickle. We made ourselves sick that day and Dempsey’s daddy whipped him good for coming home in such a mess.
The memory stuck with me then, as I cleared the north corner of the field. I’d just about forgotten how that field, empty and still despite the spring wind coming up to push around the stalks and drying grass, and had come closer toward the end of the gravel road. I could make out the street sign ahead and glanced over my shoulder at Bastie’s little cottage that looked like a dollhouse silhouetted against the lowering light. It was Dempsey and that sweet juice that took away the fear that always came to me when I walked away from the farm, from the protection of my sometimes home. From Dempsey, too. Good sense told me I should have remembered. Remembering, minding what you knew, good and bad, tended to keep you far from trouble.
It didn’t that day.
I smelled Joe Andres before I saw him. It was the bourbon-thick scent of his bottle along with the dirty odor of his sweaty body that rose up to spoil the sweet sugarcane perfume in the air.
“Hey gal… you come here a minute.”
They always called us gal, no matter how grown we were. Bastie was pushing upwards of seventy and every white man that came across her still called her “gal” and my grown-ass Uncle Aron got called “boy”.
I might not have been grown-assed myself, but I knew better than to let some piss drunk white man get his hands on me if I could help it.
Pretending not to hear him as he came out of the field worked for just about a minute. To my side, I caught the stumble of his shadow when he tried to keep up. It was a stupid wobble of a step broken something fierce by how many times he brought that sloshing bottle up to his mouth.
“Hey gal, I said come see me.”
That shadow got bigger the closer he came no matter that I was almost jogging. Joe Andres had a fat, jiggling belly and one shot of a look over my shoulder told me he had his dingy white button up shirt open to show the dirty undershirt underneath. But he was a full grown man and could move a pace when he wanted to.
He wore a tan hat with the brim pushed up and his sweaty brown hair curled up to wet the fabric making a damp line form against his forehead. When I didn't stop, he took a sip, stopping for a second to guzzle the brown liquid in his bottle before he threw it to the ground. Then, he came at me.
“Get over here, you little bitch.”
I didn’t wait to hear what else that nasty man would call me. I took off running, moving closer and closer to the cross ways, praying like a nun that God would keep me out of this old man’s grip. I was so scared that it felt like someone had turned up the speed of my heart and started burning my insides.
There were a handful of steps between me and Andres, a few more that I kept adding to it, counting