Read Online The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips - Free Book Online

complaining about short-weighing and needing more safety inspections and they just wave that slave in your face.
    Those men mostly done nothing more wrong than steal a sack of meal, maybe get too drunk and make noise walking home. And they got thrown underground with a whip to their back. Wasn’t much different from us, but at least no white man got a whip.
    I didn’t say none of that. I noticed we had a dirt dauber’s nest under the eave of the shed. Might have been an old one.
    “Awful good sunset,” Oscar said. “Makes you hate to see night.”
    “Sure does,” I said.
    “They’s just not the same as we are is all I’m sayin’,” Ban said, like he was hoping I’d agree as much as I agreed about the sunset.
    “Seem to recall Ben Barrett sayin’ somethin’ like that,” I said instead.
    Eleven years ago, during that same 1920 strike, a Negro union man threatened other Negroes about turning scab. The sheriff had words with him at the commissary about those threats. Then Hill—a white fellow and another union man—went after the sheriff and shot and killed him and his deputy. For the sheriff’s words to the colored fellow. ’Cause at that moment I guarantee Hill thought of him as a union fellow. I knew Hill, and he was a spittin’ snake of a man, all the time howling at the moon about something. Sometimes he was howling about the coloreds. Then he went and died for one.
    The sun was down so that all we could make out of one another without straining was the glow of our cigarettes. Still we rocked. Tess was in Leta’s lap getting her hair plaited. Virgie was playing bucking bronco with Jack in her lap, holding on to his hands while she swung her knees back and forth, making him whoop.
    “Mine were crazy about that one,” said Ban, waving the glow of his embers toward the kids and their horse game.
    “Only got to hit the ground once before they change their minds,” said Oscar. “My youngest one’s slippery as a crappe.”
    Ban and me didn’t even try to keep from laughing at him. “Only happened the once,” said Oscar.
    We got ourselves together finally. “Best be headin’ home,” Ban said, pulling out change from his shirt pocket. “Here’s my fifty cents for Pete.”
    Ban’s wife, she seemed to have a good head on her shoulders. But he had a daughter that was a little wild, had turned down three proposals. That didn’t mean nothing, really. I couldn’t get around that all I knew about any of the women was what they put in a lunch pail. Couldn’t think how a ham and biscuit would tell me anything about slaughtering a baby.

    Tess IT WASN’T UNTIL A COUPLE OF DAYS AFTER WE SAW Aunt Celia that we talked about what she’d said. And it wasn’t so much us talking as that Virgie up and announced her plan.
    We lived on the porch more than in the house through summer and fall. The steps had big concrete sides to them instead of rails, wide enough to sit on. While Mama and Papa rocked, Virgie and me sat on the concrete, me on the top one and Virgie on the bottom. She liked to lean against the L-shape where her slab met mine, and I liked to be taller than she was. It worked out good.
    Mainly we’d watch the lightning bugs, sometimes count their flashes, sometimes catch them in our hands. Papa would smoke, and as long as there was a smidgen of daylight, Mama would do the hand stitching that she couldn’t use the machine for. She’d finally quit working when she couldn’t see no more. People were always passing and saying hello, maybe coming up on the porch to chat; sometimes Virgie and I would walk down the street and say hello ourselves to the shadows on the other porches. She didn’t care for that as much as I did.
    But sitting there on the cold concrete that night, Virgie surprised me.
    “We should make a list,” she said, clear out of the blue.
    “What?”
    “Like Aunt Celia said. We should figure out who did it.”
    “Make a list of babies?”
    “Well, I s’pose of women who’s