Buck didn’t know how old he was, that’s for sure. We guessed it to be somewhere between seventy and ninety. His head was bald, and shiny. His face was thin, and I was never sure how he could shave it with all the lines and droops and excess skin it contained.
His stance was straight, his figure bony. His skin was chocolate milkshake rendered luminous with the same glow as my dad’s fine calfskin boots after my repeated (unwilling) attacks with Booth’s Mahogany Creme and chamois.
Buck’s eyes were loose-lidded, and the iris of them seemed smudged, as if someone had stepped on a Necco Bittersweet Chocolate Wafer, down on Riverside Avenue, just in front of the Fairfax Theatre where I spent most of my Saturday afternoons in the company of Tom Mix, Roy Rogers, and those endless Dick Tracy serials.
Buck would come to garden on Thursdays, arriving sometime between five and five-thirty, a.m. He carried his work clothes neatly rolled in a brown A&P shopping bag which grew shabbier and more wrinkled as the year advanced until sometime around Christmas it was discarded for a new one. I would awaken at six-thirty to the sound of his chopping the grass and the slow, rhythmic “chunk” of his hoe would mix with my waking dreams. “There’s a woodchuck in the yard,” I would think, sometimes; and at other, darker times, I would think, “I can hear death outside in the bushes, with his. . . .” Being literate, I knew the word was scythe, but being eleven, I didn’t know how to pronounce it. I knew the sharp shiny curve of its blade, and heard it as it cut into my days, there before the sun had but risen, warm and thick and full against the hazy North Florida sky.
I would arise from my child’s wrinkled bed, and look down on the faded blue back of Buck’s boll-weevil shirt, watch his whole body keeping time to a work rhythm from his own youth, never questioning that his was the world fixing other man’s lawns, weeding their gardens, trimming their hedges, stooping, as he had done some twenty-five thousand times, in the arc of the sun shining against the sky, blazing down to wrinkle his eyes, thinking unimaginable thoughts of a time when this land was all scrub Pine ’possum country.
Buck got paid $5 for his 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. stint. He got grits and collard greens from Dilsey the cook about 11:30, along with a twenty minute respite from his labors. I can hear their slow voices from the kitchen below, mixing with the scent of pot liquor and fatback, o their voices! slow, easy, heavy with the warm juices of the rural south: if they spoke to us now, you most probably wouldn’t be able to understand them, but I grew up bilingual, with that child’s ability to speak in dialect, and I listen to and comprehend that foreign language:
“Lawd hit’s ’bout uh hunnert . . .”
“Sho nuff. Yew wan mo’ greens?”
“How lawn I bin workin? Law, iss newn ’fore newit.”
“Disn’s nebber bin wurs. Yew wan’ greits to?”
“Show. Dey gittin’ tin cints fer ride naow.”
“Ain’t du truuf! Gwine up ’fore yew nossits!”
“Aihm walkin’. Dey’s not ginnin’ if fro’ me . . .” The alien language of an alien workforce, and every word of it brings back to me those rich summers in the thick miasmal comfort of sweet-honey youth, before the ragerie of knowledge had cut such wisdom and satisfaction from my days. That music out of the southern black is the music of my innocence, and I ride it still down the halls of my early days, mourning, as we all must mourn, as all mankind must mourn, that we are to grow, and grow into pain and wisdom.
Just before Buck left for the day, he would get his glass. “I’m goin’ naw, Miz Milam,” he would say, and my mother would send me to the ornate carved Louis XIV liquor cabinet to get out the Old Mr. Boston. She would take a dime-store tumbler and fill it to the brim with what he called his “medicine.”
We would sit at the white porcelain blue-edge kitchen table, Buck with his full-to-the-brimming glass of sunshine, me with a skinny leg swinging back and forth under the table. He would take a sip, just a sip, just to make sure it wasn’t tainted, just to make sure it was the real McCoy. And, then, after a smack of the lips, he would move his head back and suck in the whole tumblerfull of whiskey. Neat. Ah: if the Old Mr. Boston Whiskey Company wanted a commercial for their product, this is it! Buck becoming, measurably, more warm, his skin softening with a fine glow, his eyes becoming less dilated, a tad sparkly. Bang, goes the glass on the hard white tabletop, and his mouth moves from a tight pucker, upper and lower lips move a bit over dark, toothless gums; there is a whistled breath, a sigh from the deep ages of dark satisfaction, and my dark friend sits before me, his soul at one with the great comforting forces of the universe that reward seventy years of desperately hard labor with the delight of fire in the pylorum. We couldn’t have been more delighted, Buck and I, he in the warm arms of Mr. Boston, me in the warm arms of life in the sunny south, at a time when the shadows were hazy, the sunshine was bright, and the smell of the newly cropped bermuda grass touched my nostrils, and the days awaited me breathlessly, endlessly.
My father let Buck stay at the Old Timuquana Country Club after it moved to its new headquarters on the edge of the rich, brown, slow-moving St. Johns River. I remember the Old Club grounds as a place of especial peace. The oak trees had become distorted with age, arthritis in the knots, craggy old men with grey-green hair hanging almost to the ground. The one path into the estate was slippery with fallen oak leaves, and pine needles, and the mulch of plants growing and dying at their own pace, on their own land. The trees and the bushes owned that land, and Buck, and the clapboard shed he lived in were tolerated tenants. The shadowy acres took care of their own — the outside was hot and thick, but in the grove of the old Country Club, it was cooler, and all had come to a suspension of time, a cessation of conflict. “There’s no life here” you would have thought, but you would be wrong: the moss was heavy with ants and redbugs and ticks, the trees thick with bluejay, and most afternoons, the bob-white would shrill their incessant two-fold whistle which, since my own father’s name was Bob, seemed related to me. “Bob-white, bob-white,” and the last word would shoot up, quickly, as if to confirm the fact that my dad was Bob, and indeed, was white, in this land of the Universal Black South.
One time, I was allowed to be the dispenser of medicine, my mother gone on some journey, somewhere, and I chose for a medicine jar not the Long’s Five-&-Dime tumbler but a more luxurious ice-tea glass from Charles Wells’ Jewelers, a glass, indeed, more accustomed to my mother’s manicured friend’s hands than Buck’s gnarled, older, blacker ones. I laid a doozer on Buck, and I recall his eyes, tearful, after he had downed what to others might be a near-fatal dose of medication. He is merry, Buck is, and I become merry too as he tells me about his one short-lived romance.
I can see him now, I can see us, as we gather around the table in that brightly lit kitchen, the sun’s gaze so benign on master and son, as I am initiated into the world of love and marriage for the poor, and the black. I can smell the fresh edge of the whiskey as Buck picks up the glass, licks the rim to be sure that he doesn’t miss a bit of the juice of the gods. His pate collects a square of light reflected from the bright outdoors as he tells me about buying sacks of lima beans, flour, hominy, black-eyed peas so she can cook for him.
He brought her, nameless, dark, aethereal her to his once-palatial estate, where the pine had faded dark, elongated rings turned black amidst the wood gone white and dusty. He brought her clothes with the silver he had saved carefully, so carefully, in the old sock, under the mattress: he had to dip into a thousand yard’s worth of work to convince her to stay with him.
Buck is merry, I am merry, he is old and I am young, he is black and I am white, he is the child of the dirt and I am the man of wealth, and we are merry, as he tells of his three-day romance. She stayed in the woods for three days, and when she left she took the beans and the hominy and the black-eyed peas. She took her dresses, but left the flour. O yes: she took the silver too, a twenty-year hoard of grass cut in the 100 degree sun: she took however much it was and disappeared north east south or west, spilling out like diaspora from the dandelion turned from sun to moon, spilling out two decades of sweat into the juke-joints and cheap hotels of Brunswick, or Valdosta, or Live Oak.
And so Buck lived on by himself, in the many years (he couldn’t remember how many, time is uncounted unsorted coins saved for the aged) since she had left. He and the bluejays and mockingbirds and bob-whites stayed on in the breathless summer wait of The Old Country Club, he so pure in his joy at the woman who had pinched his poke there so long ago where the birds whistle my father and the scythe comes down silver and sharp across the land and one doesn’t question the strangeness of women, the strangeness of the black man’s world, the strangeness of boys who sit cross-and-thin legged across the table, breathing in the aroma of sharp whiskey and the new-mown grass, watching mouths round in mirth at the fates played by all the gods on the hopes of all of us, even the poor and the black.
I know what happened to Buck. It has to do with the creatures (winged, four-footed, shadowy) that live in the dark corners of the land, the mind, the universe. Long after I had been shipped off to school in the north, my father sold off the estate to a developer. In a tall building downtown, white hands signed and shuffled sheaves of paper, and the next week, a man (manager, realtor, agent) came to Buck to tell him he would have to move along. There is no protest (only the protest of injustice cries inside), the building is vacated. Within a week a Caterpillar earth-mover arrives and turns the land all askew.
Trees are uprooted, bushes are smashed, vines and flowers are crumpled. The brush country which has been home for rabbit and squirrel and blacksnake for so long is rendered flat and desolate. The old bleach-wood clubhouse, home for Buck, peopled with his memories for so long, is smashed and torn, rendered into crumpled wood and bent nails and torn tarpaper. He has probably moved into town, into a single room in a sagging boarding-house, and he lives out his time with a single metal frame bed, a wash-basin, and the cracked edge of a mirror.
I never saw him again, and those who should have known were not able to tell me where I could find him so that I could bring him one last fifth of medicine. He disappeared into the darkness of the city, disappeared forever — and yet I don’t know: I think he may still be in the garden at home. I have to tell you: I was there just a few years ago and I heard him in the garden. I awoke in the room where I shaped my first thoughts and feelings and memories (the memories of the shades are the strongest) and I heard Buck out in the yard. I was in my grandfather’s long bed where now my toes peep out of the end, my head banging in dreams against the headboard — and I hear the “chuck chuck” of the scythe outside.
It is that dark-dawn hour before the sky loses its infinity, and I know Buck is there at work, his shade hovering over the shiny metal blade, counting in the strokes my years, calling out to me with its cuttings, Buck calling me out of some unimagined place, letting me know that he will be there, always, slow, counting out my days; he, never-ceasing, omnipresent, hacking through the tall growths, gathering in long strands of time, binding together, shaping us as our days run ceaselessly forth. I am scarcely awake in the new day, in my old bed of child-memories, and I hear, for perhaps the last time, the sound of that dark angel, preparing us for the measure of our days, chopping the hours and days and weeks and months, parsing out our moments as easily as the sky comes to be broken now with the last remnants of our darkness.
This story originally appeared in The Sky’s No Limit, and is reprinted by permission of the publisher.
