10 - The Case of the Sharecropper's Daughter

"There are farmhouses, in this county, over a century old. Soil that has soaked up blood. Scythes that hang in toolsheds which have a history so dark and traumatic that sometimes it casts echoes into the present," Roberta said, as she picked up a candle. "Once, I was called out to hear about such a farmhouse, and such a scythe. I call it...

THE CASE OF THE SHARECROPPER'S DAUGHTER

She was almost white. Even the jury agreed on that.

Mercy Robinson had come north with her people, the scars of chains still on their necks and limbs. Texas had gotten word of emancipation, but had dragged its feet on letting the Black people know. When they found out, some left the state for good. They had no money for farmland, so they sharecropped. Built their homes, worked the soil.

Some habits died hard. The Saxon family owned the fields the sharecroppers worked. When the men and boys went out to work the fields, they left wives at home. If a Saxon man stopped by for a drink of water, and left a Black woman sobbing on the floor, hot dribbles of shame running down her thighs—they thought no more of it than they did of the curly-haired, red-headed children that cropped up sometimes in the families.

Sixty years. Four generations. The Sharecropper's Union promised to raise wages. Then the Klan came in. The four Saxon brothers of that generation, William, John, Corin, and Isaiah, were among the first to pay their dues, to buy the clean white hoods from the factory in Atlanta.

The people in Dagon's Hollow could see the flames of the sharecropper's cabins. Four of them caught Mercy Robinson, as she sought to hide her younger siblings in the barn.

They took their turns with her, the Saxon brothers. There was talk that William, the oldest at 42, was her father. Others said she was their half-sister, or at least a blood-cousin. To her, she was a colored girl on their land, to do with as they pleased. The nearest white neighbors, the McCoys, remembered the screams long into the night. Their oldest boy, David, snuck out and as that the Saxons had nailed Mercy's right hand to a post.

"They torn her dress all off, and you could see she was nearly white in the moonlight," David said. "And they had their hoods off, takin' turns. Jokin' whose bastard it would be. The barn was burning' and I could hear the kids inside screamin' for a bit, and Mercy was clawin' at the ground with her left hand, tryin' to get to them. Then the roof collapsed, and the fight seemed to go out of her. When they left, I went to fetch pa, and he came back with a pair of pliers, but Mercy weren't there. Only her hand, still nailed to that post, cut off at the wrist."

The fires burned down. The union broken. Some families rebuilt. The seasons turned. Near the end of the harvest system, when the grass was brittle and the air grew chill.

They found Isaiah first, out by the old well. Someone had torn open his abdomen, tied his intestines around the winch, and filled the bucket with stones. The well was only forty feet deep. Fifty yards from the house. Isaiah had to crawl, his guts unspooling, through the dirt. He made it to the telephone before he died. His brothers on the party line heard one word:

"Mercy."

Corin took to carrying a pistol on him at his younger brother's ****. He had been a soldier for a while. Hard-drinking, hard-whoring. One of the few Saxons to leave Dagon's Hollow and come back. They didn't hear his screams, began of the gag **** into his mouth. Arms and legs tied to the posts of his bed with the sheets. The doctor later said he had been gutted like a trout, crotch to sternum, but that he hadn't died immediately. He had bled out. His genitals were found in what remained of the fire.

William and John shared the big house; William with his family, John a bachelor. A Pinkerton came in on the train the following week; William's wife and children went East, never to return. They say William went mad, when he woke up with his brother's head on the pillow next to his, and they never did find that Pinkerton man. William's servants clearly saw him lit out on his Model T toward Mercy Robinson's cabin. The one that had been rebuilt, though it was little more than a shack.

No one saw what happened in that cabin. There was an agreement that a shot had gone off; the window of the shack had been blown out. The jury later declared it must have been self-defense. They couldn't see how a woman six months pregnant could have killed four grown men—and she, with a right arm that was missing a hand.

They say Mercy died in childbirth. Or maybe she left. I've never found any gravemarker. In her cabin, they found a curious device, made from a scythe-blade, but the handle had loops of metal, so it could be fixed to something—an arm, maybe. It was the scythe that drew me to the old shed on the McCoy farm, where it is kept, where it has been kept, all these long years.

I stepped toward it, in that dusty and forgotten shed, whose door is always locked....and there on the blade, which has been kept free of rust for so many decades, a tiny dark dot of liquid ran along the edge of the blade, and hung on the tip. It fell, with a bright red spatter. Then another ran along it, and another. Drip. Drip. Drip. I felt then a presence, as if someone had slid that blade between my thighs—and I took no step closer, but left the shack right away. Other researchers have gone there, and seen nothing, though they saw the dark drops on the floor where something had dripped.

Whether Mercy is done killing, or if blood still calls to blood, I do not know. What I do know is, William Saxon was my great-grandfather—and I will not step into that shack again, for as long as I live.

So saying, Roberta blew out the tenth candle.