Set in the cotton fields, back roads and small towns of West Texas 1937, Cottonwood offers a moving look into a world where innocence, wisdom and evil collide in an entanglement of racial injustice. When a black cotton farmer purchases his second mule in an attempt to establish himself and his farm as competitive cotton producers, he ignites a stirring of dissonance and contempt within the usually quiet community. As animosity percolates through the dim lit bars and shacks, friendships are formed in the most unlikely of places. A beautiful acoustic soundtrack written by the author is included.

PROLOGUE

THE LEATHER STRETCHED AND creaked and tore slight little hair-fine tears along its edge like old stressed tendon slowly pulling away from bone. Two remaining nails long since rusted and near headless grabbed the wood tight and held fast. Thirty two inch by seven foot knotted pine framed in the screen that dangled and hung limp from the homemade hinge. Holes so big a small bird could fly through without even touching his feathers on the little rusty barbs that curled and gnarled and stuck out every which way, same as hair does when you burn it. A slight breeze stirred hot humid air and the door slowly danced and clacked against the jamb, the latch kissing and teasing the strike plate. A small, leather-covered bible lay open atop the flaking, crusted paint of the porch rail and the pages blew back and forth from Proverbs to Psalms. A fly landed on Proverbs11:22, rode the bucking page for a moment then flew off through a hole toward the kitchen. It was mid-August. Heat hung. A damp wool blanket rolling with vapors like gas fumes across fields of short brown brush speckled white with cotton.

A black speck pulled a caleechee cloud up the powdered, sunbaked strip full of ruts and rock that wound slightly back toward the highway before it crooked again and led up to the front yard of the house. The faint buzz grew to a struggling growl as the sedan bounced its way up on to the gravel drive and rocked hard forward and then back again before it slumped into its temporary resting place. The house, wood frame in its construction and perched atop a retaining wall formed from concrete and odd shapes and sizes of smooth, white river rock had begun to settle causing it to sag on the west side. A chalky auburn haze streaked the dull gray tin of the roof where it bent, waving in curls across the steep pitch. The front easement, jagged and sharp, jutted forward like a huge nose, broken, mended and broken again, its sides creased like giant laugh lines to form makeshift downspouts. A slight drizzle of sticky sap fell and covered the leaves that rustled through the limbs of a tree, tall and spindly thirty odd feet or so off the front porch. In rhythmic procession, bitter unripe pecans shrouded in green pods dropped and bounced off the ground to lie among dried, brittle and rotten hulls until they too would crack open from the heat and dry and rot and become undetectable among the waste.

The door of the sedan, rubbed and polished to a semiprecious onyx, swung open on an unoiled hinge and shot a reflected sunbeam up on to the porch, then squeaked and popped where the latch grabbed the pin and pulled it snugly back into the body. The porch again gray and drab and void of anything that shined. He stood quietly beside the car, took off his hat and ran his hands through his hair and loosened the matted strands at the top of his forehead. He pulled a folded white handkerchief from his back pocket and wiped the band inside the hat and mopped the cloth over his face and brow before crumpling it to a wad and forcing it back into his pocket. He pushed his hand in and out wedging the fabric deep into the pouch then mashed the hat snugly back into its place atop his head. A worn leather holster hung from the thick belt cinched tight around his waist. With his right thumb he unsnapped the leather strap and left it to lie loosely across the base of the hammer of a blued .38 revolver. The weight of the gun and the softness of the leather caused the holster to flop about slightly as his boots crunched across the front yard. Unsnapping the revolver had just become what he had called a ‘bad habit’ and he appeared more cautious and methodical than scared as he approached the porch. The rough-hewn planks of the dry, splintered steps strained under his weight as he stepped from the bottom up to the top without touching the middle for fear that it would give and snap out from under him. The fragile paper of the little bible rattled in the breeze. He walked to where it lay, closed the cover and moved it down from the rail and placed

it on the sill of the front window.

“Hypocrite,” he mumbled under his breath as he cupped his left hand over his brow and pushed his face as near to the window as he could without bending the brim of his hat. Dust particles filled the air and floated on the faint streaks of sun that pushed through the thin slits in the heavy draperies. From the window, he could see the front room and back through part of the kitchen. Lamps and lights glowed dim and golden and flickered slightly. A small wooden table sat uneven beside a tweed chair with wounds stitched and restitched, scarring its back and arms. A flat glass bottle with its label pointed toward the kitchen sat on the table behind a squatty jar that had the words Kerr SELF SEALING MASON blown three dimensional on its side. An oily faint-amber liquid puddled shallow in its well.

“Where the hell you at, you crazy bastard? Damn,” he talked to himself as he moved to the edge of the porch and leaned out and looked down the side of the house toward the back yard. A skinny dog with matted clumps for hair walked around the far side of the porch and squatted her haunches in the dense milkweed that filled an overgrown, rock-lined flower bed. The scuff of the man’s boot startled the dog and she flinched and snarled and barked loudly at the intruder. The man wheeled about with the revolver half drawn. He eased the pistol back into his holster and picked a hard, dry dirt clod from a potted plant that hung in macramé next to his head and slung it with the full force of his arm. It disintegrated popping like a firecracker off the edge of the

porch, peppering the dog’s muzzle. She let out a loud yelp and tucked her tail and ran.

“Damned old bitch dog! You scared the hell outta me!” He waved his arm as he yelled at the scalded dog disappearing back around the side of the house.

He walked back over to the front door and knocked heavy on the screen.

“ Walters, you in here? Walters?”

The bottom of the screen door dragged on the porch following a path well worn to a quarter circle. It was cool inside. Quiet and hollow. A small fan with three brass blades covered in greasy dust sat on the floor and pointed toward the bedroom at the end of the hall. As it hummed and oscillated it stirred the smells of stale whiskey and burnt coffee and mixed them with the putrid scent of urine and antiseptics that wafted from the bathroom. Patchwork quilts with pretty floral designs of textured denims and heavy twills, frayed from years of shielding out the cold, now hung from the bedroom window frames and swayed listless blocking out the cleansing rays of the afternoon sun.

The man once again removed the handkerchief and mashed it tightly to his nose.

“Hey, Guppy, you in here?” He turned and walked briskly back to the front door and stepped into the humid air of the West Texas afternoon. The black sedan once again pulling the caleechee cloud down the crooked road back toward the highway.

ESTHER

SHE INCHED ALONG THE SIDE of the road silhouetted in the burnt orange sky of the morning sun. It was a long walk and she had nearly covered half of it by the time the darkness had been pushed up off the sharp black line of the horizon. She was not a small woman, but she was a deliberate one and every step she placed onto the chalk-covered gravel of the road was careful and soft, almost choreographed into some fluid motion perfected through familiarity. She wore a robin’s egg blue cotton dress that hung to the middle of her shin, a thin piece of eyelet crimped around the hem. The fabric dark and moist in the cracks where her upper arms pressed into her torso and down the middle of her back where sweat followed the zipper and disappeared at the waist-line. The dress blossoming away from her body into the pleated skirt that moved and breathed and swished back and forth about her legs as she walked. She stopped and lifted her right foot and removed her shoe and turned it upside down. She bobbled on one leg in a careful attempt to keep the exposed stocking from touching the rough ground while she shook the shoe wildly, expelling tiny granules as she hopped about, her right arm extending and waving like an acrobat keeping his balance on a taut tightrope. She pushed the shoe back onto her foot and continued her course. As she neared the stone walk that led up to the front porch of the big white farmhouse, she pressed the fingers of her right hand tightly together fashioning a makeshift iron and rubbed at the fabric all about herself. She then licked the index, middle and ring fingers and slid them across her scalp securing any stubborn wayward hairs. Three hard knocks on the door announced her arrival.

“Come on in, it’s open,” Rube yelled at the screen door and Esther quietly stepped into the front room.

“Well good mornin’, Esther, I didn’t realize that was you. What brings you all the way out here so bright and early?” Rube said as he stepped from the kitchen and saw her standing in the entry.

“Good mornin’ to you Sheriff Whitlock, I just come out this mornin’ hopin’ I could talk with you about the help you needin’,” she rubbed her hands together as she talked, “PV stays so busy all day long and it’s all I can do to keep from goin’ outta my ever- lovin’ mind since my babies done grown and gone.”

Rube wiped at his hands with a dishrag and stepped toward Esther.

“Come on around and sit down,” he said.

“Thank you, I b’lieve I will.”

“Tell the truth Esther, I hadn’t wanted to have to get anybody at all, but ’tween sheriffin’ and tryin’ to feed those boys every time I turn around it’s a wonder I manage to get anything done. How’s old PV doin’ anyway, heard he got himself another mule.” Without realizing it, Rube shook his head as he talked.

“That’s right, he sure did. He’s got the grand notion all right, he’d scratch up the whole state of Texas if I didn’t make him stop to eat supper once in a while.”

“Well, Lizbeth just ain’t been the same since we lost the baby you know,” Rube said as the mood shifted to somber.

“Yessuh, I’s sure sorry to hear about that. Must be harder than I know.”

“It is, it sure is and I just need someone to help me keep the place up. Maybe stay some evenings with the boys ’til I can get done with work and get home. I had liked to think that we could manage but it’s been some time since we had on fresh clothes and Lord knows we ain’t gainin’ no weight off my cookin’.” He laughed and tugged at his belt. “I cain’t pay all that much but I sure could use the help and any food that we had left over you could take a supper plate on out to PV, save you havin’ to do twice the cookin’.”

“Yessuh.”

“Well the sooner you could start the better.”

Esther straightened her dress and looked around the room, “Well, it’s too hot to just turn around and walk back home.” She smiled and stuck out her hand and Rube took it and shook.

HOME

APHIDS THICK AND LIME GREEN bit like chiggers when they landed on your skin. June bugs and fat furry moths hung in the screen and darted in at the light everytime you held the door open for more than a few seconds at a time. I often wondered if they had known what they were getting into, they might not have been so anxious to fly into our house. The summer that Esther came to work for us I remember feeling the weight of the world pushing down on my shoulders and me pushing back as hard as I could. And I pushed Esther just as far as she would let me push her every chance I got. I remember thinking, before that summer, there really was a whole lot of difference between me and the coloreds. More than just the shade of our skin. I used to think like a lot of the others around here. That dark brown skin just had to have something to do with not washing. Surely that had something to do with it. Then I’d see Esther washing her hands so much that they’d wrinkle. Looking back, I guess that she was the first negro I had ever really been around. Oh, I had seen plenty of them. Fact is I had seen her before, lots of times, just not up close. Seen her walking one time with a black man. I can remember thinking to myself that he was wearing a hat almost just like daddy’s. Felt and clean and tipped just a bit to the side. I had no idea that she’d ever be in our house doing all the things mama used to do. She even sewed a pair of pants for me one time when I ripped them on a barbed wire fence. Couldn’t even tell that they had been mended at all. I remember changing a lot that summer. Life seemed to get harder after that. The world started to spin faster and faster, the days just flying off into the wind like children on a merry-go- round, trying to hang on until the spinning just slings them off into the grass, some landing soft and full of laughter and some slamming down hard and just sitting down and crying.

Daddy was a farmer and a Mason and more than likely a klansman with a little bit of land out of Wellington, Texas. If you were to ask him he’d probably tell you that he was only a part-time sheriff,

just making ends meet until he could get the 75 acres that butted up to the back of our place. Everybody in town knew it was really the other way around. We all knew that he’d never get those acres. Deep down he knew it too. Elgie always said that I wasn’t nothing but a foul-mouthed, hell-bound heathen trying to be just like daddy but I couldn’t because I was born with one leg shorter than the other. Elgie was a hypocrite. He said he wanted to be a preacher someday, but get him riled and he’d cuss same as me and daddy. Eloise was out behind the rose bushes in a seventy-five dollar pinewood box that the worms had probably ate through the day after she was put there. She was so full of pus and infection, they more than likely gobbled her up inside a week. Mama’s head was hollow as Eloise’s box. She had made Daddy put Sister out there behind her rose bushes instead of in the graveyard like everybody else. When Mama wasn’t in bed, she was in a chair staring out the window. I walked down the hall one day and the door to Mama’s room was standing open a piece. I peeked in there and saw her sitting in front of the mirror pulling a small, silver-handled brush through her wavy red hair. The milk-white skin of her arms bled into her white cotton dress. I would have thought that it was long sleeved if it hadn’t been for the pattern of small red flowers that wound its way all around the fabric. Her voice was soft and raspy from not talking a lot, I suppose, and I could hear little broken verses of “Tis So Sweet To Trust In Jesus” coming from her lips, which were painted a shade of red much like the little roses. Daddy came around the corner with a cup in his hand that had a small plume of smoke drifting off its rim and up past his head toward the dim light that tinted golden the narrow hallway where I knelt staring into my parents’ room.

“What are you doin, Arliss?” Daddy’s tone was unexpectedly soft.

“I was just watchin’ mama. She’s all dressed and fixed up and she’s singin’. ”

“I know. Ain’t that the damnedest thing. She just come in this mornin’ and said she might wanna go into town for a bit. Don’t that beat all.”

“Ya’ll gonna go?”

“Yeah, I guess we will. Why don’t you go get Elgie and we’ll all go. Ain’t no sense in ya’ll just sittin’ around here all day.”

Every once in a while Daddy would surprise us like that. Turn and just act flat out nice. Like he didn’t have a care in the world. Like everything was the way it had always been. Maybe it was Mama and the thought of her getting better that made him act that way. Although, I had seen her sing and primp before and he would still act rough as a cob. He was hard to see coming. That’s why most of the time we just tried to stay out of his way. “Live your life the best you can,” that’s what Elgie would say when it would sometimes get the best of me. I’d try to ask him why he thought Daddy was the way he was and he’d just tell me that God gives everybody a certain life and that’s the life you get so you might as well just make the best of it. Most of the time that’s what I did.

I went in and woke up Elgie. He was as surprised as me but he jumped right up and started pulling at his clothes.

By the time Elgie got dressed and we got outside, Daddy was standing on the front porch with a fresh cup of coffee and staring out across the yard. He looked at us with distance in his eyes and we knew what he was gonna say.

“Your mama ain’t feelin’ so good as it turns out and we ain’t goin’. I might just go on anyway. There’s some things I need to tend to. Ya’ll go on now and do your chores. I’ll be back directly.” His soft tone had turned stern again and we knew not to ask if we could go along.

I watched as Daddy walked out past the big shiny sedan and crawled onto the seat of his old farm truck and hung his elbow out the window. He saw me standing in the front door behind the screen and he raised his hand to wave. I just edged over a bit and pretended like I didn’t see him. The truck bed was empty and though I knew he was probably going to fill it with the heavy burlap sacks of feed that would scratch at his arms and make him itch anyplace that they touched on his skin I still wanted to go. It seemed that more and more, Daddy didn’t want me and Elgie to be around him. Even when we were working as hard as we could, it seemed that we were just doing things wrong in his eyes. I pulled the curtain to the side and watched as he pulled away. Elgie walked off towards what he called his “reading tree” and I turned and caught myself walking towards Mama’s room. She had always been so easy to talk to. She always knew what to say in times like these. I knew now that she barely even knew who I was. I walked back out on to the front porch and listened as two birds somewhere high and far removed from this place sat and called back and forth. It seemed strange how they could be so close to me and my house and all this sadness and yet be in a whole other world. The way they sang. Happy. Maybe that’s the way Mama was. She sat right in the middle of us so far away. I didn’t know where her world was most of the time, but I hoped wherever it was that it had something about it that made her happy. Elgie said that it might just be the only place that she could go to get close to Eloise. I knew that if he was right, she’d more than likely stay there. Elgie would say stuff like that sometimes. He’d be standing there all day dreamy looking and then just like that, he’d open his mouth and out it would fall. Maybe God put those things in his mouth. I don’t know, I never really questioned it much. I just listened when it happened and tried to appreciate it for what it was.

I stepped back out on to the porch and sat down in Mama’s old, cane-backed rocking chair and watched and listened to our farm. It was a pretty place when you just stopped and looked at it. Calm and peaceful when Daddy was gone. He seemed to snag the big, dark, gray blanket that covered our home on the bumper of his truck and drag it off behind him down the road as he went. You could almost see the color soaking back in as he drove away. I noticed things when he was gone. Just how bright green the stalks and leaves get on the corn plants in the garden or how far a grasshopper can fly. Especially if you flick it with your finger. There was a small cluster of purple and white flowers growing up in the middle of all the grass and weeds that had long since taken over the little bed that ran along the bottom front of the porch. Mama dug and dug on that bed until it was nothing but soft, rich, dark, brown soil. She let me and Elgie crawl along in front of her and poke our fingers down into it while she followed behind dropping little seeds into the shallow holes, pushing the dirt in on top of them and patting at it with her hand. I watched as a bee landed in the middle of the soft petals and made use of the persistent little wildflowers. I wondered if God would give the honey that they would produce a little sweeter taste as a reward for their effort.

I had been in such a hurry to get outside that I hadn’t even noticed her in the kitchen. When I walked back inside there she was, wiping her hands on a towel that she had tucked into a gap between two buttons on the front of her dress. Her smile was warm and sincere, but I didn’t want to like her. I didn’t really want to like anybody at that particular moment. I guess with me she never really had much of a chance.

“You just got to be Arliss,” she said as she patted at the side of her hair.

“I don’t got to be but I am. Who might you be?”

“My name is Esther and it’s nice to meet you.”

“Might I ask what you are doing in here?”

“Well, at the moment I’d be wipin’ this old dirty dish water offa my hands. It’s been on ’em so long they startin’ to look like a couple of old prunes. Your daddy hired me on just this mornin’ to help out around the house. I was just thinkin’ I might make some biscuits and gravy. If that’s awright with you?”

“You mean you gonna live here?”

She noticed the sarcasm in my voice and the shape of her mouth sank from the warm smile to a tight lipped grimace.

“No, I mean I’m gonna work here. If’n you aim to eat here this mornin’ then you best go call your brother, who I have not had the pleasure to meet yet, and the two of you get yourselves washed up. I been makin’ biscuits and gravy ever since I can remember and it don’t take me no time at all.” She had her hands on her hips and her head moved slightly from side to side as she talked.

She turned and disappeared back into the kitchen and I could hear cabinet doors and pans begin to rattle around. That’s the way I first remember meeting Esther. view abbreviated excerpt only...

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