Animal Crackers

ALL CHARACTERS ARE ADULTS.

*

They raced through the forest, across the fall of dead leaves, grass, and pine needles, the aroma of pine needles filling their nostrils. The black convict ran first, his face burnished with sweat; the other convict, white, cast furtive glances over his shoulder. They wore the wet flannel stripes of convicts.

"How far to the river?" the black shouted to his companion.

"Shut up and run!" The white shouted back.

Their racket, crashing through palmetto shrubs, shattered the forest's tranquility. They sensed something pursuing them, like an avalanche sliding down an alpine mountain side. Danger stalked them: silent, close, and lethal.

Running the whole time, they reached the river in another hour. Sweat coated their bodies and glued their striped shirts to their backs; the white convict lost a shoe on the trail, serrated palmetto stalks cut and frayed the black convict's trousers, and muck from the swamp they waded across coated both of them.

Night hid the river's black water from view though the convicts heard it clearly when they came to it. Here they stopped, breathed hard, and rested. They ran the entire twelve miles from camp without pause.

"When we get cross the river, we home free!" The white convict said.

The black convict smiled, bent over at the waist, and pressed his hands against his thighs to catch his breath and rest his legs.

"Lemme cross first, to check things out; if it okay I'll whistle and you come over," the black convict proposed.

"Sure," said the white, and concealed himself off the trail to wait for the signal. The black convict stepped into the water and waded across. Halfway to the other side he stumbled over a limestone rock and an idea hatched in his head. He lifted the rock from the water and carried it to where the water was chest deep, halted, turned around, and signaled his companion, 'C'mon!"

The black listened for his companion's splashing in the water, and when the man was close enough, he lifted the rock high and crushed the man's head; the skull cracked like paper. The companion groaned, collapsed, and blood, brains, and corpse drifted away on the current.

Both convicts returned to the prison camp within a few days. The white man, fished from the river by loggers at a saw mill down stream; the black man, found buried in a gopher hole excavated into the side of a sand bank, dead from suffocation when the sand cave collapsed on him. Wild hogs found him first and had a meal.

The prison camp buried them without a funeral. Two inmates sewed them inside blankets, dumped them into wood boxes, nailed the lids down, set them into shallow graves, covered them, and left. Crude stakes located the graves, but no markers identified the bodies.

Earlier in the week the men complained about working on a Sunday, refused to go to the woods with their crews, and threatened to escape. They received no money for working on Sunday because Sunday work violated state law. The warden, Captain Fleming, argued, "You eat on Sunday, don't you!" Then told them plainly, "Leave now, if you want, I won't waste a minute chasing you or wondering where you went; go! You won't get far, and you'll be easy to find after the Crackers are done with you. Few prisoners escape here alive." Fleming spit a stream of tobacco juice at their feet, turned, signaled the guard to open the gate, and walked back to his house.

The guard smirked at them and opened the gate.

The two convicts walked out the gate and fled into the woods.

Mary Taliaferro was the only white woman traveling in the caravan going to Fleming's prison camp. The trip to the camp took three days and two nights on the crude roads and wilderness trails. Along the way she ate cold, greasy corn pone, drank creek water, slept in the caged wagon sitting up, and used the woods for a comfort station. When it rained, she got wet.

On one occasion, at night, after nine o'clock, while rolling along a level road, she became queerly intermingled with the other passengers in her wagon when their teamster fell asleep and a wagon wheel hit a stump, overturning the wagon and passengers, ass over teacup. The younger, male prisoners, chained together and walking ahead of the wagon, unhitched the mules and righted the wagon.

A day-long tramp, the next day, brought the caravan to the camp at twilight. The rustic camp was built atop the white sand of a wilderness location where convicts harvested turpentine from the pine forest. From a distance, the camp looked to Mary like crude barns and stables surrounded by a high board fence.

A fifteen-foot, rough-hewn, plank stockade surrounded the camp. At the corners of the stockade crude platforms made of pine lumber served as sentry posts. Young men with rifles sat on the crude platforms smoking cigarettes.

The camp contained several buildings. The largest building contained the dining hall and kitchen, another building was a warehouse for tools and supplies, several barns stored barrels of turpentine. One building was the men's barracks, a smaller building was the women's sleeping quarters; a stable for the mules and horses, and the camp headquarters completed the scene.

The camp well stood in the middle of the sandy yard. It collected surface water and the drainage of a swamp. Scalding sand and a few stumps took the place of grass of trees.

Mary was tall and pale, with long red hair, gray eyes, and freckles. Compared to the others, she looked intelligent, genteel, healthy, and unmarked by vices; a lady, isolated in a wilderness camp, populated by society's dregs with their rotting teeth, scars, and lice. And she brought along nothing to fortify herself for the ordeal.

The convict caravan halted in the yard, the stockade gate was shut behind it, and the boy guards chambered rounds, aiming their weapons at the new prisoners.

A low ranking camp officer appeared, yelling at the convicts to 'shut up' and 'line up'. When they were in ranks, he walked the lines looking at each prisoner and made notes on the roster with his pencil. When he got to Mary he stopped, looked at her, smirked, and said, "I can't wait to hear your story." His eyes expressed brief amusement, and then he moved on to the next convict in the line.

After inspecting the inmates, the officer read the camp rules to the group and dismissed them to join the other prisoners in the barracks and eat supper.

Supper was corn pone, and navy beans boiled with salted white bacon. Convicts ate the food with their fingers. Out in the woods the guards killed squirrels, opossums, and raccoons to add to the convict's diet of beans and bacon. Convicts with money bought sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and tobacco from the guards.

The women shared a crude barracks filled with rusted iron beds and urine stained mattresses. The floor was bare and clean, and the entire room reeked of formaldehyde and other disinfectants.

Mary walked inside, looked around at the austere scene, and found an empty bed. Six black females chattered, using a dialect alien to Mary's ears. The toothless senior matron handed Mary a striped cotton gown, two blankets, and jabbered something incomprehensible. Mary guessed the woman wanted her to change clothes and surrender the civilian frock but the woman nudged Mary to a separate room apart from the black women.

At eight o'clock the night guard came in, set a fire in the heating stove, and took his seat beside the entry; the women went to bed.

Outside the barracks a full moon rode at its zenith, swimming through high clouds, and filled the barracks with silvery light. Mary wasn't alone, and awoke during the night, sensing a presence close by.

His face was round and looked dead, like a barren moon strayed from a strange solar system. He stood at the foot of her bed, partly bathed in the moon light. His eyes radiated muted white light, and his mouth seemed frozen in a smirk. The guard ignored him or couldn't see him.

"You're new here," he said, "and different from the others." His lips did not move when he spoke.

Mary felt frightened and confused about who or what this was.

"You have no money, no friends, and no family to help you."

"What does my situation have to do with you?" She asked.

"I'm a friend to the friendless, you might say," he said, "I help people with their mortal burdens."

"Like a guardian angel?" She guessed.

He paused briefly before speaking, "No, not like an angel."

"Then who are you?" she asked.

"I trade better lives in this world for souls in the next," he said.

"Like Satan?" she guessed.

"I'm known by many names," he replied.

"You want my soul for favors here?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"You'll furnish me better food, or, what exactly do I get for my soul?" she asked.

"A pardon, if you want it," he said.

"No!"

"You'll have a difficult ordeal here without my help," he suggested.

"And you'll do your part to make if difficult, right?"

"I'll do what I can to harvest a soul, nothing more," he answered.

"It doesn't look to me that you've had much success here in the camp," she observed.

"The others, you mean?"

"Yes," she said.

"Some souls are worth more than others," he said. "Most people here won't benefit from a pardon because they'll be back here almost as soon as they're released. Most are doomed to death and Hell already. There's no profit in bothering with them."

"I'm still not interested," she said.

"You might be here for a long time," he reminded her.

"No," she said. Mary responded by closing her eyes and reciting a prayer silently, petitioning God to rescue her. When she opened her eyes again, she saw him smirk before he vanished into the moonlight. He said nothing more and dissipated after a few moments.

Startled and stunned, she remained awake until 3 o'clock when she was sent to work in the kitchen.

When Mary walked in the kitchen she saw a woman seated on a table swinging her bare feet, humming softly, and nibbling at a carrot; an old white man ground coffee close by. Another man raised the lid of a caldron to stir the great chunks of white bacon, tumbling about in the yellow, frothing water.

The kitchen was dark and dingy with a dirt floor. Mary smelled hoecakes baking in the oven. Outside, a man chopped firewood.

Two zinc-covered tables to the right of the entrance formed the kitchen work tables; boxes and chairs served as seats. In a corner of the room stood a sink and basin for washing dishes.

In the same room, at the corner farthest from the door, sat two cracked porcelain-lined tubs set in a space not screened off but merely surrounded by torn wire netting. At one corner of the kitchen was a rude stove of bricks with a metal strip across the top, a barrel of flour stood in another corner, plus a bread-board and a chest containing supplies.

Later two Berkshire hogs strolled into the kitchen but no one got upset about it.

The dining room joined the front of the kitchen. The convicts ate their meals in the barracks, chained to their beds; the guards used the dining room.

The convicts started work at four o'clock, just at the black margin between night and day, when the moon had set, and not a single star relieved the deep gloom of the skies. Mary served the men their breakfast, which she carried to their barracks.

They handed their plates to her, which she filled with pork, beans, and hoecakes. This done, she passed among them again, filling their steel cups with coffee. Their fingers were thickly calloused and immune to the heat in the cup. They drank heartily. The sugar was brown and sticky, but sweet.

Captain Fleming watched her work.

The convicts slept on wooden platforms that ran the length of the barracks on each side. At night a long chain was stretched down the middle of the barracks between the sleeping platforms to which the men were attached by means of smaller chains fastened to their leg irons. These latter chains were called "waist chains," and were attached in turn to "stride chains," which passed from shackle to shackle, with enough play to enable a man to shuffle along in short steps.

Both stride and waist chains were riveted on, and it appeared impossible for a man to remove his pants with his ankles fastened together. Convicts initially wore their pants buttoned down the outside of the leg, like Mexican cowboys, but over time they learned to draw their pants down between the ankle and the iron, and then up and out; a simple and clever trick that made slashing the sides unnecessary.

All the men went barefoot and their feet were swollen and badly misshapen: spread out, broken down, cut, gouged, blistered and scratched, and the toenails of many were missing.

"Men's dat fust comes heah," said Caesar the wood-cutter, "what ain't use' to bein' on dey feet, gits fagged easy an' hit mek dey feet swell up sumptin' awful. Dat's why dey all goes barefoot in de stockade an' roun' camp. Dey shoes ain't big enough foh dey feet."

After breakfast, the men assembled outside in the yard, each carried a torch, and filed slowly out of the camp, wending their way through the inky forest, looking like a troop of goblins who would evaporate into thin air at dawn. Then the blacks in the gang struck up one of their strange, wailing, unintelligible chants that are borne in the heart of every real African, and their echoes caught the weird melody and moaned it back and forth for miles.

After breakfast Mary washed the convicts' uniforms. Hiram Fleming, the warden's father, wandered over to monitor her about mid-morning and commenced a monologue about convict grooming.

"Sunday mornin' the men spend cleanin' up, takin' a bath, and changin' clothes," he drawled. "They odor ain't very pleasant," he added, "but it's more the smell of disinfectant than anything else." Fleming barely got into the rest of his tale before a guard appeared to summon Mary to the warden's office.

When she arrived, Captain Fleming sat cleaning his fingernails with a knife. She approached him and stopped.

"Sit down," he said.

"Am I in some kind of trouble?" She asked.

"How are you getting along so far?" He asked.

"I can't sleep for the fleas," she complained.

"I understand that you were convicted of vagrancy, perjury, and attempting unnatural carnal knowledge. Care to explain this?" he asked.

"I met a girl in New York who invited me to travel with her to her home in Florida, and I awoke one night with her in my bed. I made her leave. And when I collected my things to go, I discovered that my funds were missing, and complained to her father. He became angry and summoned the constable, complaining that I was a vagrant and lied about his daughter. Did I mention that this man is the judge in that county? Well, he signed the conviction order and the sheriff sent me here."

"I summoned you to let you know that you'll be my house-keeper while you're here, and to warn you about degrading yourself while you're an inmate in this camp. The company you keep will try to corrupt you if they can," he said.

"My God! Captain! You talk of me degrading myself! You must be jesting. How can I degrade myself further more than I am? I am on the bottom now and I have quit caring what I become!"

Fleming smirked, and took a deep pull from his jug, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. He set down the jug, poked his case-knife at her ribs, and then pointed the blade towards his bedroom.

Mary looked at him and remained seated.

Fleming smiled and abruptly slapped her out of the chair.

Mary looked stunned but rose from the floor and walked to the bedroom; Fleming followed.

She sat on the side of the bed; Fleming stood beside her, took another swig from the jug, and set it on a table. The bed was wide with a high mosquito bar. Mary pulled the striped dress over her head and dropped it to the floor. Fleming undressed and climbed onto the bed. Mary lay on the bed and waited, resigned to her fate.

The apparition materialized in the room. Mary saw him and thought he looked like Death. Fleming took no notice of him.

Mary waited, but nothing happened.

After a while the blood in Fleming's head surged against his temples and his skin color turned red like old meat. His eyes were afire.

Mary looked at Fleming, and when she looked lower; he punched her face with his fist, then collected his clothes, went out, and closed the door behind him.

The apparition smiled at Mary but said nothing.

Mary lay on her stomach and cried into the pillow until it was damp with tears. Her jaw ached and her mouth trembled. When she stopped crying her face was white and her eyes were red and swollen. And in a while she arose from the bed and dressed. Fleming was gone when she returned to the parlor.

About noon Hiram Fleming re-appeared with three guards, and was carrying a strange looking object Mary had never seen before. The old man noticed her looking at it.

"It's what we call a 'black aunty," he said, smiling. "It's for discipline."

Mary studied it from where she stood. From its wood handle stretched a two-ply leather strap five feet long and four inches wide. Hiram smeared oil of some kind on the straps, then coated them with sand. "It's for discipline," he said and smiled at her.

"Golly! I remember a` big, brawny convict made his escape and disappeared completely. Trackers with dogs and guns couldn't find or catch him. He woulda made good his escape had he kept off the major roads and outta the larger towns, but at Palatka he showed his face and was recognized. We got word of it and brought him back to camp. He went back to work with a ball and chain attached to his legs.

"He was a bad man and his face was his misfortune. Well, this convict was booked for a whipping, and in order to make his whipping sure, he went on strike and refused to work.

"No man will ever whip me," he bragged, and said, "I'll kill the first man who tries to whip me."

"Oh! But he was a bad one, and I was afraid the guards would get the worst of it. They started for him, not a bit frightened by the threats, and he grabbed a shovel. He aimed a blow at one of the guards, and it barely missed the fellow's head. The convict was as strong as a heavyweight boxer. The guards closed in on him and put him on the ground in a few minutes, although he made a hard fight and was right game, too!

"They tied him to a post and stroked him with the Black Aunty until he stopped cussing. After they released him he was as gentle as a kitten. With tears in his eyes he promised that not only would he never run away again, he would do two men's work.

"On the following day I walked over to see him at work, and there he was, slaving away like a whole team. He was stiff and awkward, and I knew his bruises hurt. I sat down on a woodpile to fill my pipe, and as I did so I heard him call out to one of his mates, "Hey, Bill, bring me over the liniment?" and his voice had undergone a wonderful change. Honestly, it was as gentle as a lady's. All the brag and bluster was gone. One whipping had cured him of all his ugliness," he said and smiled again at Mary.

"What does that have to do with me?" She wondered.

Hiram removed his hat and rubbed his hand across his scalp. "It does appear that you've earned a dose of attitude improvement, too," he smiled.

Mary's mind raced, her thoughts, like a hooked trout, thrashed about beneath still water. The guards took her outside.

Mary's back was red and swollen after Hiram finished. She couldn't walk. The other women carried her back to the house and put her to bed. She awoke late that night. Satan stood at the foot of her bed watching her.

Mary looked at him. Without a word, he melted into the darkness.

In the morning, when she served the guards and officers breakfast, Captain Fleming ignored her. While the guards ate she sat at the end of the table nearest the fireplace, her hands folded in her lap, until the others should be done with their plates or wanted more.