Galloping Away from Grady

A story about racial tension in a southern town.

Galloping Away from Grady                                   

 

            US Highway 270 ran through the craggy mountains of Arkansas from southeast to northwest and back. The two-lane road was lined with cracks and holes while weeds strained to poke up through the pavement. There were no rails to fend off a car or truck from rolling into the precarious canyons to the river below, just posts to stop those vehicles lucky enough to plow into them. Travelling northwest into the Ouachitas, one of the higher ranges of the Ozark Mountains covered with trees and enormous boulders so characteristic of the area, the road climbed steadily up to a pass with a panoramic view of the peaks in the area. Then the steep road dropped down into the lazy little town of Grady. It was small town of brick and wood houses, numerous concrete parking lots where many of front windows of shops and businesses bore “out of business” and “for sale” signs. Melissa des Bois had returned after over eight years of avoiding this Godforsaken place; the year was 1956.

            It was here that she’d fallen in love with a man named Lester Haskell. He was a Negro blues-man with light brown skin, broad shoulders, and a friendly smile with white, polished teeth. He only got to play one night at Lou’s Tavern, one of the few businesses in town not up for sale, and that contained the one and only piano in Grady. He was happy to escort Melissa to her motel after singing several songs and showing Melissa how to mix gin and tonic; Lester took his time making love to her. What always vexed Melissa’s mind was the way a man named Jeffery Brown and the rest of the Klansmen of this Christian community chased “that womanizing Negro man” down the next morning, stretching Lester’s neck an extra two inches from an ancient oak a mile or so out of town. Apparently word had spread of how well Lester and Melissa had gotten along at the bar piano, and a small crowd of men were waiting outside Melissa’s door as Lester stepped out of Melissa’s motel room the next morning. Lester was quick on his feet, but not so fast as to outrun a brand new 1934 Ford pickup. The poor man was left hanging just out of eyeshot from the highway.

It seems that when Melissa caught a glimpse of men in white sheets driving by in the back of the black pickup truck with Lester bound and gagged, the terror erupted from Lester’s eyes to Melissa’s.  She was painfully aware of what was about to happen to him, and quite aware the same thing could happen to her. Melissa started to cry, first in fear for her life, then in utter sadness for the man she’d just fallen deeply in love with, and finally in a ruse of self preservation as she lied, yelling out that she’d been raped. The good, God fearing ladies of the Grady Baptist Church took Melissa by the hand and prayed for her, comforted her state of shock from her “ordeal with that terrible man.” The concept that her fabrication was just going to make things worse for Lester forced the tears out even more readily, and Melissa wept for the piano player who’d made her so happy just short hours beforehand. Her tale worked, and several local women embraced her, saying everything was going to be alright. The more that she was told that the worse her pain became, and her deception compelled the ladies to take her to the city church where a prayer meeting was held for Melissa’s benefit. All the prayer and tears in the world from Grady’s ladies and their traditional Christian husbands could not change Lester’s baby from being, or from growing, in Melissa’s body.

You see she was not from the area; she was just passing through at the time and merely waitressing at the county diner until she could earn enough to head on to Memphis to find her dream of becoming a country singer. Melissa stood just over five feet tall and weighed a little over a hundred twenty pounds. She had thick, light brown hair that flowed over her shoulders and down her back. Her dark blue eyes and low cheekbones made the dimples around the corners of her mouth stand out when she smiled, adding to her youthful beauty. Her thin figure lent her the appearance of being frail, but she was buxom, and her arms and legs were strong and firm.

As she’d grown up in one of the outer parishes of New Orleans, Lester was not the first man to take her body or the first Mulatto boy to charm her with music. She certainly wasn’t going to reveal that to the women of this one horse jalopy of a burg, let alone to the Grand Wizard of the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Melissa had seen how people ended up lynched, those whom had the temerity to go against the prejudice of the “white race,” and for Melissa it was specifically for white women with an affinity for black men.

            Melissa was also hiding a talent that tended to bring unwanted attention from religious lunatics. She was a psychic clairvoyant, in close touch with the spirit world, especially when she’d been drinking. The ability to tell people what the spirits of their late loved ones had to say could be profitable, but it could also be dangerous. For example when the bereaved wife was being told that the nest egg hidden by the loving and sadly late husband had long been squandered in the red light district of the French Quarter, Melissa had to flee for her life as she was understood in such a way that the large woman who, in her grief, placed all her husband’s transgressions onto the shoulders of the psychic lady who delivered the bad news. She was lucky enough to outrun the fat old woman and hitch a ride with a truck driver heading for Little Rock. He wanted just a tad too much for the ride, and when Melissa refused to let him take her sexually, he kicked her out onto the highway in the darkness with no moon or no stars to see by. The next morning Melissa walked into the tiny little town of Grady - hungry, cold, and tired.

            After the long and boring weekend, filled with prayer and meetings of lamentation of Melissa’s ordeal with the black man’s lust, Melissa finally sneaked out of town. She found poor Lester’s body still hanging from that tree north of town. All that she had to dig a hole with was a pointed rock after she cut the rope Lester was hung by. His lifeless shell fell to the ground like a slab of pork. The soil that covered the blues-man’s body was anointed with Melissa’s tears long after Lester was covered. Melissa marked the dirt in a manner that only she would recognize, a rough model of the layout of downtown New Orleans in the form of a rock arrangement over the tear anointed grave.

When she returned to town nobody said anything about her compromised soul anymore, nor of the lynched man at all, not even after Melissa gave birth to the cutest little boy anyone ever saw nine months later. The child had white skin and dark blue eyes. What made him particularly unique were the two additional legs that sprouted from his upper buttocks, legs just as healthy in form and muscle as the two front legs. His hands and torso were normal, so were his shoulders and his head, he just had an extra set of legs. He had five fingers on each of his hands and five toes on each of his feet (all four of them). Plus he had a smile as bewitching as any baby Melissa ever met. Mabel Brown, the wife of the town’s Baptist preacher (who was also the Grand Dragon of the Klan), wept and loudly prayed in church and on Main Street.

She said the deformed child was an omen, and abomination, a sign from God, that the community was responsible because of their sin and that the child should be dealt with immediately. Some women agreed, while other members of the town wanted nothing to do with putting the deformed baby out of its misery. Mabel wanted to take the burden of the freakish child from Melissa and see about having the extra limbs amputated in Littlerock, as she had ample funds from family wealth. Melissa would not hear of it, and by the grace of God, most of the population of Grady agreed with her.

Melissa named the boy Terry, short for Lester after the child’s father. The little boy prospered despite the extra gifts God and the people of Grady’s sin bestowed on him. Melissa continued to work in the diner, and to keep the KKK from focusing on her she attended the local Baptist services every Sunday; she and little Terry. Terry started to walk when he was eighteen months old, on all four legs right from the start. He was like a little horse with a body and arms, very similar the centaur of Greek mythology. Because of his origins and of the supposed omen or curse or reckoning from God, Melissa agreed to keep the child a secret “until God gave a sign to give little Terry to the world,” as Mabel insisted at just about every worship service when there were no outsiders in attendance. As time went by it was uncanny how the secret of the four-legged boy was kept so well.

Years passed and America went to war with Germany and Japan. Mabel’s husband, the Grand Dragon himself, went to war in Europe and was killed on D-day. Many of the men of Grady died in World War Two. Only one man returned. Stephen McGee came home shaking and grunting with shell shock; he eventually became the town drunk. By the time the war was over, Terry had grown to a healthy young fellow with inquisitive eyes and wide, strong shoulders.

His legs were strong too, and the kid could run like a greyhound could sprint. Terry’d lean his head and body forward, and just fly, sprinting wherever he went. He kept to the outskirts of town and in the alleys, but where he ran the best was in the countryside. He could climb like a mountain lion, and he could jump from rocky crag to cliff face to treetop like nothing anyone had ever seen. Nobody could control him except his mother, at least until Terry fell in love when he turned fifteen.

            Mabel Brown gave a birthday party with cake, ice cream, and gifts at the diner Melissa worked at for lovely Mary, Mabel’s niece who was visiting from Littlerock. There were people there from the town council and the church, and there were girls, one of whom caught young Terry’s eye. Mary approached Terry with a slab of birthday cake on a plate in her hand, fascinated with Grady’s big secret, this aberration of nature with four legs and such beautiful blue eyes. There was a question in her mind as to whether this gorgeous hunk of God’s creation could even speak, and if so what such a sublime creature would say.

            “Hello Terry.” Mary quietly said to him, ignoring her aunt’s orders to stay away from the deformed boy. “My name is Mary.” Terry trotted up to her like a dog would dash up for a treat in her hand, except this was different because it was a very attractive boy that stood before her.

            “Okay, you’re Mary.” Terry replied with a smile. “Happy Birthday! They said you were pretty, but I never thought that you’d be so beautiful. How old are you?” She had blonde hair and blue eyes, and the way she smiled made him feel strange inside.

            “I’m sixteen, turn seventeen in two months.” Her answer was filled with astonishment of the young man who was so different from anybody she’d ever met.

Their conversation was cut short by a brutal slap across Terry’s face by the matriarch of the party. Mabel slapped Terry so hard that he fell down to the ground, his face marked with the red imprint of Mabel’s hand.

            “You stay the hell away from my niece, you half breed freak!” Mabel roared with the rage of the ages. “Mary, I forbid you to even talk with that … thing! Don’t you remember?”

Mary was ceremoniously dragged into her aunt’s house as if she were a three-year-old baby. Terry was left on the ground cake frosting on his clothes and a handprint on his cheek. He stood up onto his feet and dashed off into the Arkansas wilderness with Melissa calling after him.

Grady’s big secret with four legs and an incredible ability to dash from mountain to mountain became nowhere to be found, completely unheard from or of. Horace McGee, father of the town drunk and town sheriff, led a search party for young Terry with no results after a three-week search. There were some rumors that in the high country a strange looking person that ran and jumped was seen and suddenly disappeared into the woods.

Melissa eventually became the brunt of Grady’s embarrassment when her past finally caught up to her. Word came out of New Orleans of a woman who spoke to spirits, who was partial to Negro men, and who fit Melissa’s description perfectly. Mabel Brown, that matriarch of the church and of her precious Grady City Hall, stalked up to the diner Melissa was still waitressing at after so many years, and openly accosted Melissa as she was in the process of serving a man a hamburger and fries.

“So, lovely little Melissa; after all this information about you has finally come out into the open, why don’t you tell us where you’re really from and what really happened that night with that so called rapist we strung up in the woods back in ’34?”

Melissa stood there, staring at the door behind Mabel, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Well, we’re waiting Melissa,” Mabel spoke as if she were accusing her along with the rest of the council of judges from some kangaroo court. “… if that’s really your name.”

            “Why Mabel, you know Jeffrey feels terrible about that fight you two had on your wedding night.” Melissa replied as she removed the apron from her waist. “He says that that little Linda lady from Temperance Village never meant anything to him, that she was just a fling before you two got married.” Mabel’s eyes started to flare as Melissa spoke; one could imagine smoke drifting out of her ears. “But it seems that he saw her just about every Monday afternoon for years afterward, until somebody found the poor Negro woman in her little tar shack during the war with a butcher knife in her chest.”

            “How did you…” Mabel could not having seen this coming when she stomped into the diner. “You can’t prove …”

            “I don’t have to prove anything to you, Mabel.” Melissa said curtly as she stepped toward Mabel. Mabel towered over Melissa. Mabel’s secret about her wayward husband’s mistress and the unsolved murder in the tar-shack city thirty miles to the north was now brought out of hiding by this little woman of whom Mabel had just accused of being a fraud instead of a seer or witch. “Anymore than I have to remain in a town where the only man you haven’t shared your late husband’s bed with was too drunk to understand what you wanted from him.”

Melissa’s voice had raised to a shout as she reached down and picked up a wooden chair from one of the tables, lifted it up in the air with both hands, and struck it down on top of Mabel’s newly done up hairdo, cutting her cheek and lips. Mabel fell back into her girlfriends standing behind her as Melissa rushed in the opposite direction, fleeing out of the back door of the dining room. She disappeared from Grady, Arkansas as readily as her four legged son had. Mabel was left behind in the Grady diner, bleeding all over her girlfriends from the gashes on her face and living with the enigma of a murdered Negro during the war.

And now, after so much time, years of performing folk music all over the South, Melissa had returned to attend the personal funeral of her boy. She had patches of grey in her light brown hair and tears in her dark blue eyes. It seemed that a couple of hikers had found a strange skeleton behind some bushes near a wall on the outskirts of town. The sheriff thought it was the remains of two people until he realized that there were four legs attached to one hip. So Grady’s long kept secret came to light, contrasting Mabel Brown’s supposed act of homicide during the war.

As Melissa whispered the last prayer over the grave of her beautiful, beloved son almost a year after he’d been buried, two men took hold of her arms. She was led to a brand new Chrysler sedan that had a woman in the back seat with a very ugly scar on her cheek and forehead. Mabel still had her very nice hairdo with no grey at all, despite the ugly scar on her face; her chauffer was charming. The long two-toned car drove to a spot just outside of Grady, about two miles north, just as the sun was going down over the Ouachita Mountains. The person who opened the door for Melissa had a white, pointed mask on his face and he hid the rest of himself with a white sheet.

The good, God-fearing people of Grady certainly finished their activities in the darkness that night. The half clothed, mutilated body of Melissa finally fell to the ground three weeks later after the rope she was hung by disintegrated in the elements and parted. Her body fell to the ground onto some rocks that were arranged in a strange manner that only Melissa de Bois could recognize, similar to her childhood home.

The next spring there was an ignored skeleton revealed by the melting snow that lay on top of the oddly arranged rocks in the dirt. The collection of bones didn’t matter whatsoever to Melissa and her son Terry, nor to her beloved Lester. They had been walking the streets of her favorite parish in her hometown of New Orleans, hand in hand, for what seemed like ages. The memory of Grady, Arkansas was merely another dark shadow in one of the gutters of the French Quarter, a shadow that washed down the sewer every time it rained.

SR Urie