THE MEANEST MAN IN HORSE CREEK VALLEY

“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.