Gone South

Mr. Cherrybooks

  By

  Darrel (River) Bird

  Copyright © 2011 by Darrel (River) Bird River Bend Publishing

  All rights reserved.

  No part of the work may be reproduced without the written consent of the author.

 

  Mr. Cherrybooks

  Jerry Brooks stood weeping silently beside the mess of charred wood and ashes that was once his church. His eyes stared past the chimney left standing in the smoldering heap, to the field of stunted corn that stood baking in the July heat of Madison Parish, Louisiana, and on to the woods at the edge of the cornfield. He thought about how he had come to be in this little Black community called The Island.

  Jerry had earned his Master of Education at the University of Washington, and it was about that time that God had called him into the ministry. He told his parents, and they helped him through the Dallas Theological Seminary, or as he liked to call it, the Dallas Theological Cemetery. He was the campus rebel all the way through seminary, and he challenged the theology instructors at every opportunity. In return, the church gave him an assignment to get him out of their hair, and that’s how he wound up in Louisiana.

  He was tall and rather good-looking, though his brown hair stuck out at all angles. No matter how much he combed it, it wouldn’t behave. In college they called him Electric Head after one student remarked that he looked like he had just been electrocuted. That is, they called him that when they didn’t need his help with their homework; academically, he had been about three steps ahead of most of his classmates.

  “We have just the place for you, since you have a degree in teaching,” they told Jerry upon his graduation. They piled him on a Greyhound bus and tossed his one suitcase on after him. He arrived in Mound, Louisiana, not much the worse for wear, and walked to the address of the parish school superintendent’s office on West Main Street. He entered the old, but well-kept bookcase-lined room, to find a homely secretary pecking away on an old Underwood typewriter. The secretary, who looked to be middle-aged, was wearing a flowered dress and horn-rimmed glasses. She let him wait about fifteen minutes in her office before she even knocked on the superintendent’s door.

  At length she did knock. She entered the office, and Jerry heard her mumble something. She returned to the front office, and, glaring at him over her glasses, said, “Mr. Farnsworth will see you now,” as if she couldn’t believe Mr. Farnsworth had agreed to meet him.

  Mr. Farnsworth was short and skinny, balding, but with bushy eyebrows that made Jerry want to take a pair of scissors to them. He had on a white shirt with his tie loosened at the neck, and suspenders. He looked up, glared at Jerry, and bade him sit, where he waited another twenty minutes. Jerry sat and listened to the only sound in the room, an old ceiling fan that gave out a soft “whop” each time it made a round. It seemed to be whopping in a futile effort to direct some fresh air on Mr. Farnsworth’s bald, sweating pate.

  Jerry’s mind had just drifted to an ice-cold bottle of Coke®, when the man finally raised his eyes and looked him over. “Who you?” he asked, pointing his bony finger at Jerry like a cocked pistol. Jerry half expected his finger to go off and blow him to smithereens.

  “I’m Jerry Brooks, you know, the school teacher?”

  “Well, no, I don’t know, young man,” Farnsworth said tersely. He riffled through the files on his desk, and at length he seemed to find one he favored over the others. He studied the file for a full five minutes.

  “Says here you graduated from seminary school. Son, we got no job for a preacher here.”

  “Sir, if you will look through the file again, I am sure you will find a copy of my Master’s and my transcripts.”

  Farnsworth riffled through the file again, and finally said, “Oh yes, says here you graduated from the University of Washington. What you doing way up there, Boy?”

  “Sir, my parents live in Portland, Oregon.”

 

  “Oh yes. What you doin’ way down heah, Boy?”

  “Sir, I came to teach school.”

 

  “Well, what you doin’ studying to be a preacher for, Boy? Don’t you even know what it is you want to do? You’ awful mixed up, Boy.”

  “No Sir, I can switch hit!” Jerry said, raising his voice slightly.

  “Don’t you go raising your voice at me, Boy!” Farnsworth said, and raised his own about three notches above Jerry’s. He pored over the file again and then looked up.

  “Anyway, I like a little spunk, and you gonna’ need it out on The Island. Heh heh heh!” He laughed, slapped his leg, coughed up a lung, and turned beet red.

  The man went on, “My name is Dave Farnsworth (pronouncing it Fawnswuth). I run this parish. You jump when I say frog. And I don’t want you preachin’ to my Negras out there, do you understand? I want’em taught, not preached.”

  “Yes Sir,” Jerry said.

  “Goooud, goooud, we understand each other then,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “The parish school system has a house for you to stay in out there, and that’s where you’ll stay so I can find you if I take a notion.”

  “Yes Sir.”

  “Now you go on down to the ferry. You go down West Main till you come to the end, and tell Mr. Glendening I sent you. He has a boat; he’ll take you out there.”

  “Yes Sir. Would there be anything else?”

  “No, that’s it. You just go on out there and teach.” He glared over his spectacles as if he had just killed a bug and was examining its innards. Jerry picked up his suitcase and walked back through the secretary’s office. She never looked up from her typing.

  Out on West Main he hooked a left and walked about a quarter of a mile until he came to the end of the street, to a small dock. It was four o’clock in the afternoon. He walked out onto the dock and sat down tiredly to wait for the ferry, wiping the sweat off his face.

  There was what looked to be about a twenty foot motorized skiff, with a small pilot’s cabin built onto the front and two board seats running down the sides. It had a dirty brown and black streak where the engine exhaust exited through the bright yellow painted sides. An older fellow walked out the front door of a nearby house and came over to the docks.

  “You goin’ somewhere, young man?” the older man asked.

  “I’m waiting for the ferry to go out to The Island.”

  The man gave him a peculiar look, and said, “Well, you settin’ by it, Boy.”

  “Oh… I was to tell you Mr. Farnsworth sent me.”

  “Oh yeah, the new school teacher.”

  “How did you know?” Jerry asked.

  “Why, Boy, it’s all over town that they’s a new school teacher goin’ out there. You just hop in the boat and we’ll shove off.”

  Shove off they did, the little inboard diesel puffing along and stirring up the egrets as it went. The boat wound its way through the narrow channel between the cypresses, out across a lake and back into more narrow channels. In no time Jerry had completely lost all sense of direction.

  As the little boat slid through the water it met an alligator coming the other way. The ’gator paid them no attention as it passed to starboard, on its way to do whatever it is ’gators do in Louisiana.

 

  After about an hour of winding through channels, the boat pulled up to a rickety dock that extended out to the water from a narrow dirt road. Mr. Glendening cut the engine, and Jerry staggered a little as he stepped ashore.

  “I’ll show you up to the house.” Mr. Glendening waved him forward. They walked up the road, which meand
ered around the lake, to a small house. It had been painted white at one time, but the peeling paint hung off it in tatters, as if its weight had finally submitted to gravity, and, losing its hold on the wood, it had finally given up, curled, and died. There was a screened-in porch, which had no screen, and Jerry could see the mosquitoes hanging in the air like a curtain of tiny wings.

  “This is it; good luck, Son.” And Mr. Glendening turned to walk back to the boat, slapping a mosquito on his neck as he went.

  Jerry looked up the road where a square, unadorned building sat with paint peeling, and further up to another house, also in need of paint. The trees ran up to both buildings, and the area behind the houses was choked with vegetation. The vines and briars had completely taken over whatever yards had ever existed.

  He walked across the creaking wood floor of the porch to the door and took out the old fashioned key he had been given. He rattled it in the lock a few times until the lock finally gave. He opened the door, and walked inside. The single room had a stove and an old Westinghouse refrigerator, with the coil on the top and the door hanging open. There was a single bed and an old desk in the corner. Dust hung over everything, and his shoes made tracks on the floor.

  “How long has it been since