IV

Everybody was getting it down in Strangetown. It was the place to be in the days after that damned ole war. Everyone was so desperate, and here was a place where money suddenly flowed like honey. Only three years before the Yankees had pillaged the town like lunatics. Even the Greeks on the Hill were feeling the pinch. Egyptian cotton flooded the market, and Confederate bonds were in the toilet. Now the Yankees were dumping thousands into Limestone County to give freedmen and poor whites what The Major patently called “The Square Deal.” It sounded suspicious to anyone who first listened, but everyone went along with it because this was real money. It wasn’t that Confederate dreck they just printed out like it was nothing during the war. Nobody knew or asked where this money came from, but it worked, and that’s all that mattered.

Strangetown was getting crowded with all sorts of comers: freedman, veterans, cranks, immigrants, laborers. Everyone was coming to get some of that Square Deal The Major kept going on and on about. The problem was that Town Creek was a place of ill-humors. Frequent flooding left an air of miasma for which people fashioned masks. So, The Major financed a dam, which gave Brother Pruitt more than a foot of water to baptize the wicked in. Next, The Major planked in the road known today as Strange Street and built a bridge over the waters. Businesses sprouted along the banks and the main drag. The Major walked down every day from the Freedman's Bureau to look satisfied at the progress.

At one point during Reconstruction, Strangetown had no less than two cathouses, four saloons, and a Chinese laundry. There was also a theater, a brewery, three fortune tellers and two churches. That was in addition to the shacks and tenements that crowded this little clapboard skyline. And then there was Maw Possum, giant of them all, who ran Strangetown with a deck of Tarot and the luck of an obsidian stone. She called everyone in Strangetown her darlings… the Darlings of Strangetown.