Peggy Bennett
THE PAWN
Like a dream the dim parasite clung to him, the past
sucking on his future.
Montague was born in a shack near Waycross, Georgia,
his
daddy the midwife.
This
was 1929. Willie Wassaman farmed a white
man's land. He shared profits with Mr. Crooker. The good gerills
were rare in that land. The Okefenokee Swamp was in the next door
country, and this soil was gray and mouldy like the contents of graves.
The little farm sat out in the middle of nowhere, and all the North–
erners arguing about the South left this out like a phantom.
Out in this vast homogeneous gully, Plymouth Rock chickens
bathed in the dust and walked their colonies of ticks. Four hairy black
sows and a hog laboriously hurtled like low chute logs, oinking and
swimming in the bushes. A poor ribrocked Jersey cow roamed
in
desolate pastures, looming up austerely at sunset after cheating the
buzzards, and seeming content to starve in mournful calm, puffing
sighs through her great dark wet nostrils, and chewing dry grass with
a gently waggling flattened chin. In this lonesome country each ani–
mal was an individual with powers.
Montague grew up thinking that the cow, Asia, was his mother.
He did not remember feeding at Delia's breast, but he drank Asia's
soft downy
milk
and saw Willie ruffle her soft hairy tan hide with
the distorted earthy star of his brown lover's hand. Her head was a
big pocket-book with enormous soft brown eyes given a wild anxiety
by the black lines under them in the whitened tan face. Her whole
head was drawn into the tapering nose. Willie swore that, under the
marcelled ribs and the lagging skin, the heart was as big as a blessed
angel's.
Willie had moments of cruelty. He cursed and kicked at the
chickens when they did not lay their oval eggs in visible patches.
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