Page 38 of A Boy Called Lovesong

“Sorry that I snapped at the others. They were only trying to help. I guess I let the tension get to me. It’s… it’s damn hot down here.”

“My dear boy, welcome to the Deep South. It’s a pressure cooker alright. The trick is to let it simmer, ’cause you got no other choice. Just let things simmer without ever boiling over. When things boil over… that’s when the Devil takes hold.”

Through the open French doors, there came the sound of voices.

Busy chatter.

Laughing.

Calling.

Maybelle smiled. “That’s them. The cotton pickers. It’s quittin’ time.”

She made her way across the room and stepped out onto the balcony. I followed her, and there across the street, spilling out from behind Cybil’s general store, were half a dozen men and women, their loose-fitting clothes drenched and their hair matted. The women were wringing out the muddy hems of their long dresses. The men were peeling off their slick wet shirts,sodden and stained with patches and smears of dirt. Two of the men were older, perhaps in their forties, but one of them was almost half their age.

He caught my eye immediately.

His hair was short and sun-kissed blond.

His skin was brown, his body muscled.

And his hands, his fingers… were nimble.

Relaxed…

Assured…

Seeking something to touch, like the fingers of a pianist lost if they can’t find the keys of the nearest piano.

They fell upon the bare shoulders of one of his male co-workers, as his colleague poured the water out of his boot and they laughed.

The others watched and joined in the simple joy of being caught in the rain.

I remembered a day when I was six, when a summer downpour caught my mother and me by surprise on our way home from the park. I wanted to cry, but all my mother could do was laugh, so I laughed too… all the way home… where she poured the water out of my shoes.

I hadn’t thought about that day in thirty-two years.

How odd a handful of strangers in a faraway land could bring that back to me so suddenly. With such clarity.

On the street below, the half dozen cotton pickers made their way across the muddy road, springing between puddles with a grace and agility that reminded me of dancers in a Broadway production. All except the blond man, who splashed through the puddles like he didn’t give a damn.

The light was fading, the melting clouds now giving way to purple streaks of dusk.

Maybelle and I returned through the French doors, back into the room.

In the next moment I heard the thunder of footsteps up the grand staircase. They were irregular steps, yet swift. I could tell that the cotton pickers were leaping over the rotten steps on the stairs, doing it with such speed that it was clearly a fractured staircase they knew well.

“I hope y’all left those muddy boots at the door,” hollered Maybelle.

I froze as I heard steps bounding down the hallway, getting louder and louder until suddenly the shirtless blond man arrived in the doorway of the room, panting and grinning and hoisting his loose trousers up to the shin, revealing his wet bare feet. “You know we did, Maybelle. We ain’t a bunch of naughty children.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” Maybelle said.

Instantly Chet’s tail began to wag, and I had to hold him tighter, unable to take my eyes off the man in the doorway, no matter how much my chest tightened and my jaw clenched.

Part of me wanted to storm up to him and confront him right there and then.

Part of me wanted to scream… and wail… and weep.

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