TheBanyanTree: Wailing Heart

[R J Fernalld]

I do believe she was the kindest person I ever met in person.
Something like a nun, or one of those charity women that does things
for folks, but in secret, ya know? She came from someplace else, an
out of towner. Funny, she lived in that green house on Spring Street
for years as housekeeper for Old Man Eckles, but it didn't matter
none...she came to town from somewhere else. That made her an outsider.

She might have handsome I suppose...once. The widows peak and
long straight nose gave her a severe appearance, but it was those soft
brown eyes that made her face compelling. Her way was to look into
a person, not at them. Was like she could see your upsets or fears
without you even letting on. Don't recall anyone ever saying mean
things about her that's what makes what happened so hard, but I can't
remember anyone talking much about her at all. She was a fixture, a
constant that we quietly counted on like the heart of us. We needed her
compassion toward us, but we didn't often understand it, and we never 
admitted it.

It was a hot night in August of 1870 when many discovered that without her 
folks were lost. You know the kind os night...when the heat makes your ears
ring, 
your heart swells and sweats and the mind just hoversabove it all. Up on the
knoll above the courthouse, came one chilling wail, that caught the wind and
floated down across the empty town square and into the fears of us all. My 
daddy turned toward the porch and deftly took his shotgun off the gunrack
 in the hall.

"Keep the young'un inside," he said without looking at Mama.

He strode out into the night carried along on another steamy breeze toward
the knoll. I could smell fear from Mama.

I sneaked out the upstairs window, as I was wont to do when confined to the
house, and I followed my daddy up the knoll at a safe distance from his
hound
dog ears. And I tell you, what I saw when I got to the top...I ain't never
forgot.

Her unmoving body was hanging on an old dead oak on the far side of that
clearing. 
Those eyes were open and in the light of the torches all the towns menfolk
were
holding, those dead eyes seemed to shine. At the edge of the bracken where I

was hiding, I could hear the men. They were...laughing! All except my daddy.
His 
wrinkled face also seemed to sparkle in the torchlight. I could see 'twas
tears on 
my daddy's cheeks that caught the fire! My daddy cryin'? I shivered so in
that 
bracken I began to think they'd discover me there.

"I'm tellin' you, Frank, there was no other way."

"Damn you!" Daddy sobbed as his legs went weak and he fell to the ground.

"She was a threat to all that's right in this town. I don't give a damn how
long 
she's been here! She shoulda stayed back in that hole she came from! Its
done, 
Frank. We saved your sorry ass. Get the hell up offa the ground and get home

to your family!"

My mind went numb. For all my sixteen years she had been someone I admired, 
and there she was hanging from the tree I used to climb. Daddy's sobs lay
gently
on the air with the heat. His wail sang of love for this woman who was not
my mama. 
In that moment I somehow came to admire him.

I whispered my good bye to the man whose heart was broken and to she whose
neck 
had been broken by the "holier than thou". From the safety of a small town a

thousand  tears and bout a hundred miles away, I called upon that county's
sheriff
and told what I seen...telling every name except my daddy's. 

She was black, once somebody's bought and sold slave, and her crime was to
love
and be loved by my southern white daddy.

I stayed away from that town but my heart never left. Some sixty years later
I still 
remember her sweet soft eyes, and my daddy's wailing heart. 

copyright R J Fernalld 2003