Not Too Late This Summer

by Larry W. Chavis

I was glum as I washed my face and dressed in my old, everyday denims and striped shirt. My ribs hurt something bad when I bent down to tie my shoes, because just yesterday, my once-best friend, Sam Littlefield, used them like punching bag. I gritted my teeth, holding back the groan that might tip off Poppa to the scuffle. Poppa didn’t hold with fighting and I didn’t want to disappoint him. Outside, the early-morning July sun promised a scorcher of a day to come.

Poppa moved about the kitchen, rattling dishes and clattering pots. Since Momma passed away last Halloween, leaving Poppa alone to juggle our sixteen-acre farm and his part-time job as a mechanic over in Searcy, he took extra pains to make sure I was well-fed and taken care of. I plopped down at the kitchen table while Poppa buttered up a stack of hotcakes. He slid the plate across to me and pulled a jar of sorghum molasses from the cupboard, dropping just a dollop into his ancient, stained coffee mug before passing it to me.

“Mind you don’t use too much,” Poppa said. “It’ll make you sick and you’ll miss the parade.” He stirred his coffee to dissolve the sorghum. Because of yesterday’s tussle with Sam, I didn’t want to go to the parade any more. Hickory Home’s Fourth of July festival was the biggest holiday celebration in our area of Arkansas, even in 1931. I wouldn’t go now, though—not for a shiny four-bit piece. Didn’t much mind missing it, either.

 “Before you head out, get your chores done,” Poppa said. “And don’t forget to empty out that drip-pan under the icebox.” The big ice-block in the top lasted a few days, but the pan filled up regular. Sometimes I forgot about emptying it.

I poured molasses on my hotcakes and let the thick, dark liquid spread across them, running to the edges and dripping down, dragging along little yellow swirls of melted butter. “I’m not going to the parade.”

“That right?” He took a gulp from the steaming cup, but it didn’t seem to faze him none. “I thought you was looking forward to it, you and Sam. Ain’t he riding old Barney in it?”

Barney was Sam’s brown-and-white paint horse. He’d be riding him and waving his stupid cowboy hat like he was Tom Mix and that nag was Tony the Wonder Horse. “Yeah,” I said. “I changed my mind, I reckon.”

“Changed your mind, huh?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, then, you can help me out with something. Old Mr. Broadus—you remember him? Lives out yonder by Miller’s sorghum mill? He asked me a few days back to help him clean brush off his back lot. Wants it cleared for a fall garden, I reckon. I promised him I would when I got time. Thought I might do it today, but yesterday Mr. Branch asked me if I’d come in today and work at least half-a-day. We can use that extra money. So, I reckon you can run over there and give him a hand.”

Shoot! I didn’t want to clear no brush in the hot sun. That’s about the hottest work there is—except for climbing up on a roof to re-shingle it. I helped Poppa fix our roof and I knew something about that, but I couldn’t think of no way out of it. I kinda liked Mr. Broadus, though. Sometimes, down in front of Chandler’s Drug Store where the old men congregate, he’d talk about the Yankee War—he was in it, he claimed—and us kids’d hang around on the fringes and listen. So, I just nodded and said, “Yes, sir.”

Poppa grinned. “You’ll be doing most of the work, I expect. That old man’s getting plenty feeble.” He took another swig from his coffee cup. “He might offer to pay you a little bit. Now, if he does, that’ll be fine. You can take it, and you thank him for it. But don’t you dare ask him for nothing.” That was Poppa’s way—he helped folks out however he could and never did ask for anything back, especially old folks and widows. It surprised me he said I could accept money if Mr. Broadus offered. I guess it was because it was me doing it, not him.

Poppa smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ll be at the shop until after dinner. I ought to be home around two o’clock.” Grabbing his dinner bucket, he left out for Branch’s Auto Repair. His red Model A pickup, engine chattering away, left behind a thin, gray feather of smoke as it bounced out to the road.

I set about doing my chores, which mostly consisted of cleaning up after myself. I washed the breakfast dishes and straightened up the kitchen, not forgetting the half-full drip-pan, then picked up my room and made my bed. Poppa’s room was perfectly straight, as always. I stopped in just to look at the photograph of Momma he kept on the table by his bed, the one where her face still looked young and smooth, instead of bony and hollow-cheeked with sickness. A lump swelled in my throat as I gazed at her for a time before backing out and closing the door. Less than an hour after I started working, I headed for Mr. Broadus’s place.

It wasn’t far, two miles or a little more, over good, gravel road. The sky was bright, clean and blue, and I breathed in deep the sweet smell of honeysuckle growing along the fence lines at the road-edge. The land switched between level farmland—pastures scattered with grazing cows, slapping their tails at insects, or planted fields, tall with corn and sorghum cane stretching up to the sky—and hills and hollers dressed out in pine and hardwood trees. Some of the hollers fell off into steep ravines, where little streams gurgled along the bottom. A few you might even call creeks after a big rain, and the biggest of these eventually emptied into the Little Red River. Us boys, all friends from town or the surrounding countryside, played here, fighting imaginary battles using sticks for rifles and springing from the thickets in ambush of each other; or we slid on boards down slick, sloped, pine-needle carpets; or else just ran through the woods, whooping and hollering. Ambling along, I thought about how Sam and me always partnered up for these games, and how much fun it was, and how it wouldn’t be no more. That took some shine off the day and stirred up my gloom again. I shook my head and stepped up my pace. Momma was fond of saying, “Spilt milk just lays there and sours. Wipe it up and move on.” Her words made more sense now.

Mr. Miller’s sorghum mill sat up ahead on the west side of the road, and in early fall, folks hereabouts brought their cane over. He’d hitch up Beauregard, his old mule, and they’d mash out the cane, Beauregard turning the mill round and round, and then they’d light up the fire pit and cook down the sweet juice into heavy syrup you could sweeten your coffee with, pour on hotcakes, or mix with butter in your plate and drag a hot biscuit through. It also made the best cookies you’d ever want to wrap your tongue around.

Mr. Broadus lived just past the mill, across the road. His unpainted house, with its weathered and gray clapboards, stood in the shade of a line of hickory and oak trees, and the plot to be cleared, almost an acre in extent, lay caddy-cornered from the house. It was fair hid in scrub brush—tangled blackberry bushes, trailing vines, and near every other kind of trash-weed you could think of. Half-rotted limbs lay scattered here and there, buried up in the vines and brush, along with a couple of fallen, crumbling tree-trunks. Oh, this was looking better all the time. Just seeing that mess made my sore ribs ache.

 I climbed three warped, wooden steps to Mr. Broadus’s porch and knocked on the screen door. An metal chair scraped on the floor in the back of the house, then footsteps. Whistling without tune, I backed away from the door a pace and glanced around the porch. Wasn’t nothing much on it: a deer-hide-bottomed rocking chair with most of the hair rubbed off and a table holding a well-thumbed, leather-backed Bible. An old lard can Mr. Broadus must have used as a spit-bucket for tobacco rested near the chair, and on the far side was an unvarnished chest made from pine boards, about three feet by two feet by two feet. On the rocker’s back hung a threadbare, gray cap stained with sweat spots, flat-topped, with a leather visor, and a faded yellow band circling its bottom. I knew what that was—it was a Confederate cavalry cap, a kepi.

The door creaked open and Mr. Broadus shuffled out onto the porch. “Well, hidy, young feller! What brings you out this way?” His voice sounded as old as the house, and he must have choked on that last word, for he commenced a coughing fit so hard I feared he might bark up a lung. By and by, though, he got control, and, waving me out of the way, he flopped down in the rocking chair, pressing one hand to his chest while the last spasms petered out. He sank back against the chair, gasping and blowing, waving his other hand before his face. He finally spoke again, in half-gasps. “Ain’t you Tobias Woodson’s boy?”

“Yes, sir, I’m Jesse, and Tobias is my poppa. I been here before.”

“I remember. You and your Ma come by sometimes, ‘fore she got so sick. Always come bringin’ a fine apple pie.” His mouth smacked a little as if tasting the pie again. “Terrible misfortune that happened to your Ma. She was a sweet and thoughtful Christian woman, ain’t no two ways about it.” He shook his head, still thick with long hair turned cotton-white. “Dreaded disease, bless her heart. Your Pa’s a fine man, too. Fine and decent a man as they is.”

“Yes, sir. He sent me over here to help you clear your garden patch yonder.” I pointed toward the brushy lot, hidden beyond the house’s corner.

Mr. Broadus started to reply, but instead shook with another round of violent hacking. He snatched an old white rag from his back pocket and held it to his mouth through the worst. When the fit wore out, he wiped his mouth and stuffed the cloth back in the pocket of the bib-overalls he wore over a blue and red checkered shirt. I noticed some sections of the rag had gone red. “Well, now, I appreciate you and your daddy wantin’ to help and all, but they just ain’t no reason you need to be a-choppin’ and a-slashin’ weeds and such in the hot sun.” He cleared his throat and leaned over to spit in the lard-bucket. “Anyhow, it’s a grand day, the Fourth of July! Time was when this day woulda been a hateful one to me, but not no more. They’s a big parade in town and all the hooraw that goes with it. You ought to run along there and enjoy it with your little friends. All y’all be sure you stand up tall and straight when they come marchin’ past, totin’ that old flag.”

“What about your garden? If we don’t clear up a place to plant soon, it’ll be too late to make anything.”

“It’s always too late for some things in this world. It was likely more wishful thinkin’ when I spoke to Tobias about it than anything else. Whether that old lot gets cleaned or not, I’m thinkin’ it’s growin’ late for me to make a fall garden anyhow.” He coughed again. “It gets to be too late ‘fore you know it sometimes, Jesse.” He rested his head back against the chair, his watery brown eyes staring off into the blue sky.

“Mr. Broadus?” He just kept staring off, and it worried me a little. “Mr. Broadus?”

He turned his head. “Go to town, boy. I’ll tell your Pa you done what he asked. It was me that put paid to it.”

“Well, I wasn’t going into town, anyway,” I said.

“How come? You don’t like parades? They’ll have a band, and be sellin’ popcorn and peanuts, maybe fried pies, too, I ‘spect. Why ain’t you goin’?”

I shrugged, looking down at the unpainted floorboards. “Just ain’t.”

He sat up and peered at me under the shock of white hair that fell across his forehead. “Ain’t your buddies goin’? That Littlefield boy, I know you and him are thick as thieves. He goin’?”

“Oh, he’ll go, I reckon. He’ll be showing out on his horse.” I leaned to the side and spit off the porch.

“I see. Sounds like you and him had a fallin’ out, maybe. That right? You fussin’ with your friend, Jesse?”

“Used to be a friend. Not now. Not since he done what he done.”

The old man hacked up a glob of red-tinged phlegm and spit it in the bucket. “What’d he do?”

I just shook my head, staring at my feet. Mr. Broadus’s rhythmic rocking against the uneven floorboards was the only sound. When I glanced up at him, his eyes was still fixed on me. I noticed the kepi again, swinging with the chair’s motion.

“What was it like in the war?” I asked, changing the subject.

“What you want to hear about that for?” the old man said.

“Well, was you really a soldier? Did you shoot any Yankees?” If I got him talking maybe today would turn out better than I’d hoped. Who needed a parade? Mr. Broadus was a real Confederate soldier, and fought Yankees, he said. I gloated some when I thought about telling Sam. He was always bragging about his grandpap, who’d been in General Pat Cleburne’s division at Ringgold Gap. Now, he wouldn’t be the only one with stories from the war, and wouldn’t that stick in his craw? Then I remembered I wouldn’t be telling Sam anything anymore, and my grin faltered.

“Oh, I shot at Yankees. I surely did.  I reckon you’re thinkin’ that’s a great thing.” He rocked on, clearing his throat again.

“Well, uh, yes, sir. I suppose so. Must’ve been exciting.”

“Excitin’!” He leaned over and spit again, but this time not from his cough. “Not so’s you’d notice. I rode with Marmaduke’s cavalry most of my time in. You think it’s excitin’, livin’ in a saddle day and night, and you ride ‘til your bee-hind is raw, then turn ‘round and ride some more, all the time watchin’ for a troop of devils in blue coats to ride out of the bushes and pour hot lead into your belly? Reckon that’d excite you, boy? You think it’s excitin’ to lay a bead along your carbine barrel to the face of a boy that didn’t look like he was scarce older’n you are right now, and put a ball smack between his eyes, ‘cause if you don’t, he’ll do it to you?” He rocked harder, shaking his head, the white mop flopping. “Warn’t nothing excitin’ about it. It was a dirty business, dangerous and mean. They’s personal tribulations, like what happened to your Ma. And then they’s calamities that eat up whole states, and turn kin against kin, and friend against friend. You say you had a fallin’ out with your friend, didja? What over? Who can throw a ball better? Which’un can outrun t’other? Maybe who the girl in the gingham dress is makin’ eyes at? I’ll tell you about a fallin’ out.”

He straightened up in the rocking chair, pulled a twist of tobacco leaf from his pocket, and gnawed off a hunk. Stuffing the wad ‘way back in his jaw, he offered me the twist, but I shook my head. I’d had all the tobacco I wanted when Sam and I once stole a plug from his Pa and hid in the woods back of his house to try it.

There he was again—Sam. Why’d I keep thinking about him, anyhow?

Working his tobacco into a chewy mass, Mr. Broadus leaned over to spit the brown juice into the lard-bucket and settled back in the rocking chair. “I had me a friend once, Jesse. We was close as brothers—closer, maybe. Sometimes, brothers get jealous of each other if one has somethin’ the other don’t. But it warn’t that way with me and Hiram. Hiram Coates, he was, and a truer friend I never knew. We did everything together, him and me. Hunted, fished, worked on our daddies’ farms—first one helping the other out, then turnabout when the time come. When we got older and began to notice that girls was more’n just frilly nuisances, well, we courted the girls together, too.”

The old man’s eyes took on that far-off stare, his voice growing soft and dream-like. “We had big plans, Hiram and me. We was goin’ to Little Rock, down to that Masonic College they had then, and get ourselves educated. Then we was gonna take the world by storm!”

“What was y’all gonna do?”

He shook his head, laughing. “Lord only knows, ‘cause we surely didn’t. Not beyond some outlandish fancies no more solid’n that cloud-puff you see off yonder. We may not have knowed what nor how, but we knowed for a fact we was gonna tromp big tracks across this land.” He stopped and gazed at me. It seemed he was looking right down into my insides. “You ever have a friend like that, Jesse?”

 I didn’t respond.

“Well, you’re just a young’un. I reckon you ain’t growed enough nor seen enough yet to know what I’m talkin’ about.” His chewing grew slow and deliberate, as if he were pondering his next words before letting them loose. “Hiram was my friend. Now, that’s the truth. It was in the time right before the War, that time when all the radicals and the fanatics, North and South both, somehow cast a wicked spell over the whole country and turned decent folks into crazy fools. They threatened and bragged, mocked and made fun—but you know the worst thing they done, Jesse? They spread their bile by turnin’ each other into hell-fire-lovin’, baby-killin’, flesh-eatin’ fiends. That’s just what they did! Go and read the newspapers from back then. See what the abolitionists said about the South, read what the southern fire-eaters and slave-holders said about the Yankees. They was vicious. For both of ‘em, they was demons from Hell on the other side, not men; savages, not human bein’s. And they was able to gin up such a gut-deep blood-hate that war just had to be. Hell, boy, if your enemy is a soulless, murderin’ devil straight from the Lake of Fire, then what use is they to talk to him? They ain’t nothin’ left but to kill him. That’s what they done to us. What we let ‘em do.

“It got worse when me and Hiram packed up, a-goin’ to Little Rock. Ever’ town we rode through was buzzin’ with war talk—what we’d do to the Yankees or what they’d do to us. By the time we got to Little Rock, the state troops had seized the Federal Arsenal, and the secession convention was about to take us out of the old union and into the new. Seemed like everybody in town, even the women with their tiny parasols and fancy hats, was drunk on war-brags and pride, spoutin’ prophecies of Yankees runnin’ like whipped curs. A fever of madness took the town. It took the whole damn state—whole damn country, I reckon. I got caught up in it like all the rest. Quick as they started takin’ enlistments, I joined up, and, like I told you, in due time I wound up riding with Marmaduke’s cavalry.”

“What about Hiram? He join up, too?” I asked.

“Oh, he did. Yes, he surely did.” Mr. Broadus spit again. “But he didn’t join up with Marmaduke, nor any other state nor Confederate outfit. No, sir, Hiram went north and joined up with the Federals at St. Louis.”

“He was a Yankee? Didn’t you try to stop him?”

“For certain, I did! I talked to him. Argued with him for two days and nights. Hell, boy, I even fought with him.” A ghost of a smile touched his lips. “That was a mistake, though. Hiram, he whopped the livin’ tar out of me.” He shook his head again, a sad chuckle deep in his throat. “No, he was bound and determined to fight for the North—for the Union, as he put it. And that’s what he done. That’s what come between Hiram and me. Both of us bound to take up a rifle and shoot ‘em at folks who didn’t see things our way.” Mr. Broadus gave forth a deep sigh, as if feeling his friend’s betrayal all over again, the wound opening up, raw and bleeding.

“You musta hated him, then,” I said. I understood how friendship can turn to hate. Sam’s face flitted past my mind’s eye.

“Hate Hiram? No, I never hated Hiram. Didn’t I tell you we was more than brothers? I didn’t hate him then, don’t hate him now.”

“But, he was the enemy. He fought against you.”

“Hiram wasn’t my enemy, nor I his. Oh, we was on different sides, right enough. If we had ever come upon each other on the battlefield, I imagine the guns woulda’ done our talkin’, but we never met in a battle.” Here, his eyes clouded, then closed. “When I saw Hiram again, it was worse than battle. It was too late.”

He was quiet so long I thought he was done talking. I moved to get up off the pine-plank chest, but he stuck out his hand to stay me. “No, sit down. Let me get done.” He drew a deep breath and said, “I saw Hiram once more in that war. I was healin’ up in Little Rock, havin’ took a rifle ball in the meaty part of my left leg durin’ the Prairie Grove fight. One day, when I was beginnin’ to walk pretty good again, our camp adjutant rounded up some of us that wasn’t hurt too bad for a special detail. Bein’ able to walk, even if I did still limp some, I got picked. They was gonna execute a Yankee spy, he said, and needed some troops just to hold rifles and stand guard. Well, I had no taste for a mean job like that, but wearin’ a uniform means takin’ orders, even if they’s hateful. So, I borrowed a two-band Enfield rifle from a Texas boy who was still bedfast and formed up with the others.

“We marched off to a place on the far side of the camp where they had a wagon pulled up under a big old oak tree. They was a rope hangin’ down from a limb, just over the wagon’s tailgate, which they tied up to make a trap level with the wagon bed.” A tear welled up in his eye and crept down his thin, wrinkled face. “We could see the party with the condemned man comin’ from a distance. My legs ‘most give way when they got up close and I could see him clear.” He paused and stared off again. “I never got a chance to speak to Hiram before they put that rope around his neck and then dropped the wagon gate from under him. Never even a word. The last thing I ever said to him was back there in Little Rock, the day he left. I called him a vile name I won’t repeat front of you, boy, and I turned my back on him. When next I saw him, it was too late.”

He wilted down in the chair, and I suspected Mr. Broadus was finished this time, a suspicion he confirmed by waving his frail, bony arm toward town. “Run on, Jesse. Come see me next week, and maybe we’ll talk about that garden. If I’m still here to talk, that is.”

Another coughing fit shook him as I half-stumbled out to the road. Glancing back, I saw him bent over, trembling, coughing into his rag once more.

 Head down, walking out to the road to go back home, I kept thinking about Mr. Broadus’s story and how awful he must have felt—how awful he still felt, I supposed. When I finally looked up, it was the strangest thing—I was headed to town. The sun was climbing up toward the halfway mark in the sky and that parade was going to kick off at noon. If I hurried, I had time to get there.

I needed to talk to Sam.

About the Author

Larry W. Chavis is a retired physics and mathematics teacher living in south Mississippi, where he writes and lives with his wife, Sydnie Lynn, and domineering Shih-poo, Sadie.