THE MEANEST MAN IN HORSE CREEK VALLEY

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  • “If I was that ugly, I’d at least stay home with it.”
  • The child laughs, thinking it’s a joke, but he is glaring
  • at the women passing the porch where the old man
  • and his Yankee granddaughter rock.
  • “The Levelheads, I call em,” he says loudly,
  • so the women have to hear. “Look at em.
  • Heads don’t go up and down when they walk.”
  • They look the same to her as the other mill women,
  • gaunt, withered, pale, but their gliding walk
  • seems to her beautiful.
  • Walking toward the company store to buy Moonpies,
  • one spotted hand holds a cane, the other hers.
  • “Mind you don’t fall. That curb is high.”
  • The cane raises up, comes sharply down
  • on the shoulder of a black man who jumps into the street.
  • Eating the sweets on the bank of Horse Creek
  • the old man deigns to explain. “Nigras don’t belong
  • on the sidewalk when a white man’s passing.”
  • He pumps the well handle and she drinks icy
  • artesian water from the hanging tin cup.
  • When the cross burns on Cemetery Hill,
  • he brings her into the sandy yard to see.
  • She thinks it is a church thing.
  • There’s a photo in the album of this man, young.
  • You can see the old man coming in the raised chin,
  • in the sneer of disdain. Beside him is a beautiful girl
  • who is not the grandmother she knows. This is her
  • father’s mother, dead delivering a daughter,
  • the daughter taken by the Moonpie rocker
  • to his childless brother’s door, never to nod or smile
  • as he passed her, growing up in this tiny town
  • where everyone knew he had given her away.
  • She was erased from his life, as was her sister
  • when she ran from the shell-shocked husband
  • who was beating her, driven to the train by a gardener.
  • “She run off with a nigra,” the lintheads say
  • and her grandfather held as how he’d had just one child
  • and one treasured grandchild, blue-eyed and fair,
  • a small person who begins to understand
  • that he is dangerous, Moonpies notwithstanding.