Going long for Gloria

“She had it coming.” Thomas said it with a straight face, no smile, looking right at the judge; his Honor was framed by two men Thomas knew from the farm. He could bug his eyes and he did it know, craning his neck out, straining himself to make his point. Tan hands knitted together in a relaxed way belaying his full white eyes. The boy made a scissor form in the plain wood chair up on the small raised platform splayed with afternoon light. His shoes were shined, but laying on their sides fidgeting on the wood floor. The only other folks in the Town Hall room were Tanya and Cliff in his Sunday suit. Cliff looked at his folded hands. She watched Thomas intently.

“Please refrain from remarks like that and tell us what happened. Just from when you came to the farm that day. OK?” The three Arkansas men were really farmers who filled in on matters like wrongful death; rare enough not to need full time justice but stuff still happened in the boonies. Serious tones stirred the dust in the smoky room, sunlight cast Thomas in deep shadow as he spoke.

“I ran out to Cliff’s just before sundown so’s we could throw a few footballs. We do it every day. We play catch and Cliff’s taught me to go long. I’m a fair passer but Cliff’s the best. He could’ve played pro he told me! We throwed til dark and went to work. I’m helping him in his cotton gin for a while now, since I turned fifteen. I run for the wagons with the tractor and Cliff packs the seeds. Hard work, if I don’t mind saying so, and it always made Cliff angry.”

“What do you mean angry? Did he say he’d kill his wife?”

“Nah, nothing like that. He was always spouting off about injustice. Can’t no black man get a break in Arkansas he says all the time.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“Nah, we didn’t talk much. Took a break after every wagon and he’d down a few and rant like someone’s out to get him. All them white farmers fed him a dose of teasing about it, I tell you. He didn’t mind them so much. They was white folks after all. He just thought black folks didn’t get a fair shake. That’s all. He ain’t no racist or nothing. I don’t think so anyway.”

“Thomas, keep to what you saw, hear?” Harley Granger wanted to get this over with and get over to the café. Clem and Dickson and him had business, didn’t care much for this case. But a complaint had been filed and that was what he was elected for.

“The field was full of cotton wagons. Nobody’s combine must have broke down that day. Cliff promised me a chicken dinner if we finished all of them. ‘Yum! ‘, He’d say, ‘Can’t you just smell the chicken? And the cornbread?’ His no good wife promised him a chicken dinner.” Thomas looked to the heavens when he spoke of the dead. Cliff looked up with a painful look at Thomas’s talk about his wife, his deceased wife. He thought, ‘If she jus hadn’t run.’

“He said it so many times I got sick of hearing it. He drank a lot and we worked like demons. Got the whole thing done around seven and shut down the mill. We walked over to the house, maybe a hunderd yards, and Cliff ‘axes me, ‘Can you smell chicken?’ I had to say no, I didn’t smell nothing. Cliff got madder and madder as we got to the house. Gloria is just sitting on the porch talking to Tayna. She was a little older than me, I think. Cliff’s thirty-eight, you know. They got married when she got pregnant. Tanya’s the one that’s been raising the baby. Good that she got her now. I respected Cliff for helping Gloria out of a mess, his too, I suppose. But she was lazy. He got nothing for his trouble as much as she promised him. She’d say one thing and do another. He’d get riled but he never laid a hand on her that I seen. But that morning she got scared when she seed him storm past her into the house. I stayed on the porch and told Gloria to go along. Told Tanya to scat, too. They both got off the porch but only Gloria ran. I saw Cliff go down the hall into the kitchen and open the oven. He yelled, ‘Where’s my chicken?’ He yelled it so loud that Gloria took off. Tanya and me backed away the other way down the road. But Gloria just ran like a rabbit, zig zagging, across the field. Cliff was kinda yelling when he bust out through the screen door and went down the steps with a frozen chicken in his hands. I don’t know what he planned to do with that chicken but he seed Gloria running and took aim. Just the right size for his hand. he palmed it with the legs back and his fingers on the breastbone. Geez, Joe Namath would have been proud of that throw. A perfect spiral, it hit her right in the back of the head, must have been sixty yards. You shoulda heard the thunk.” Thomas bowed his head solemnly and smacked the base of his skull. “Cliff just went over the edge.”

"She went face down stiff. Didn’t move or nothing. Cliff just stood there stunned. He didn’t move or talk but big tears came down his face. There was nothing we could do. When Tanya and I finally got him in the house, he told us to call the police. He’s a good man, really. Sometimes he gets angry and sometimes he drinks too much. This was an accident pure and simple.” The boy looked like he was about to cry. Like he was going to lose his best friend. His Adam’s apple bobbed and the men noticed.

After just a few minutes with their backs turned, the common sense men looked back and Harley spoke for them.

“Cliff you are free to go. She had it coming.”