XLVIII

Bill Marmaduke, Sheriff of Limestone County, tipped his hat to the ladies as he walked down the boardwalk, and shook hands and patted the backs of the good ole boys and brothers of Strangetown. His smile was as big as a shotgun blast, and his grip as warm and as welcome as a Christmas fire. You couldn't help but love the man.  He knew everyone's name.  He knew something about you, some connection or witness, that he never forgot. He was a master politicker. Goddam him, Bourbon George Houston would say, give him five minutes and you'd go from hating a man you never met to making a friend you'd share your sister's diary with.  To the Democrat Greeks of the County, he was a dangerous political opponent.  

He walked far up the deep bottoms of Town Creek past Madame de Smet's cathouse and the Nickajack Theater, and past the public gazebo where, directly across a foot bridge crossing over to the left bank sat the lair of Maw Possum. It was a two story clapboard rowhouse with no windows at all save for a large, round and curious porthole on the second floor.  This is where the old witch told fortunes and worked hoodoo elixirs and cast magic spells. Like it were church, Bill removed his hat before entering.  Inside the single porthole cast an iridescent shaft of light into this space, which was hazed by the smoke of berries and pinecones that smoldered from a pair of urns, beside which a sort of altar-like table sat on a platform.  Something like a laced bridal veil hung over this table, obscuring the figure which sat behind it.  This wasn't the first figure to notice, however.  That would be the large black man who sat behind the door trying to read the papers by the scant light. That was Papa Laduc, who at full height was near seven foot plus a stovepipe hat.  Slung at the man's side, Bill noticed a long Colt 1860 Army revolver.  A bit antiquated by this time, it was a beast of a pistol.  The man was said to be one of Maw Possum's husbands. Even the sheriff did not seem to draw his interest. He merely nodded to Bill, then nodded over to a sweetgrass basket on a pedestal beside the door.  

In this basket, most supplicants would usually place cash, sometimes to see the Witch of Strangetown, and sometimes just to pay their kickback to her. Others would place a stone into the basket, a small polished obsidian stone that she called a Quark, unique to the carrier which they were loathe to lose, for it bound them in thrall to Maw Possum's power and favor. Every freedman that Maw Possum had moved through her Underground Railroad had a Quark.  Every man who couldn't pay for one of her spells or remedies had a Quark.  Every man who owed a debt to Maw Possum had a Quark. And for every Quark they had presented, there was an equal and mysteriously identical Quark she would fish out from a velvet bag.  It was all a very nice trick, Bill admitted.  Nevertheless, he took out his Quark from his pocket and tossed it into the sweetgrass basket and carried it thus before the alter-like table where, behind the white veil, Maw Possum sighed.  

Well if its not our Knight of Cups, she said.  You just hang on, Bill. I's got your Quark somewhere. She spoke with a raspy voice with a surprising singsong range of pitch.  

She grunted as she leaned down to grab her velvet bag of Quarks.  On the table at which he took a seat sat a human skull draped in wax from a sagging candle. The flame looked sick. Bill looked around.  Beyond the veil and around the platform were shelves and benches filled with curious objects and strange bottles. There was a satanic-looking cornucopia, there was the flayed skull of a lamb that had been cured, there was a jar of eyes, there was a necklace of German sausages dangling from a bookcase. A statue of High John de Conquer held out a morsel of molded bread. There was a boiling cauldron with what must have been Maw Possum's supper, because it smelled of vinegar and lemons and oil.  Maw Possum had finally found her bag and she shook out about a dozen Quarks. The bag looked like it held a hundred of such Quarks, but amazingly she found the one that matched that which Bill Marmaduke placed on the table from the basket. Bill shifted uncomfortably. Her tricks were uncanny. He overcame this sensation and rubbed his eyebrows, then blurted out.  

Let's cut the shit, Maw. Your so-called husbands are squeezing in on my tote.  I get 15% of the purse on the tracks, and 10% of the tables across Strangetown. What the hell is this I hear that you raising your taxes on Wagon Wheel and the Broken Spoke?  I'm getting shrugs when I come around to collect.  They say your rail-splitter here had done cleaned them out. He tossed a hand towards Papa Laduc, who remained uninterested.  

Bill Marmaduke was the only white man who talked to her like this, and it snapped the old witch's patience.  She threw open the veil and shook her matching Quark at Bill between her gnarled old fingers. She looked old, crumpled and porcine. She wore a turban set with rhinestones, and wore a panoply of charms from about her neck. Her spirit was spry, however, and she spat back at Bill Marmaduke.  

I wonder, Bill, if it ain't a goddam nuisance to even hold onto this thing.  You have been the biggest pain in my ass since I got you elected.  Did I not build this town?  Did I not make you Sheriff?  

I wonder if that wasn't Barry Hogan who got my elected with his wagons and his liquor.  

I's got his Quark too, Bill. She was nearly out of her seat.  Everyone was on edge. The gubernatorial election was approaching and the Klan was pressing in on the rural precincts. She shook her head and sighed again.  

Let's go for a walk together, Bill. It will do us both good.  

She stepped out from behind the veil with her cane, a gnarled old women who was surprisingly locomotive on her feet once she got started. When Bill thought to offer his hand to help her down the platform, she snapped at him.

Git your goddam hands away from me.  They've got greed all over them.  I don't want to lose my coins.  

Outside in the broad noonday sun, Papa Laduc removed a parasol and walked with Maw Possum down the boardwalk offering shade to his wife. Bill Marmaduke walked beside Maw Possum. He kept his hat off out of respect for the Witch.  She approved of this smugly.  

Folks tipped their hats and curtsied to these respected matron and patron of Strangetown.  All eyes were on them.  Maw Possum walked with a limping and rhythmic gait, first throwing her cane and dragging herself forward behind it with a surprisingly rapid and light motion. She gave an airy grunt with each step she took, though she never gave the impression of exertion or exhaustion.  She was like some dark old gnome who had strolled down from the mountains for a brisk hike among the realm of men.  

Look what I built here, Bill, she said.  Dey's nowhere in the world like it.  Not in da whole South. I come into this place from a home and family I don't even remember.  I come from the East, over the mountains.  I been bought and sold a half dozen times over.  All I've got is dis family.  This is my home.  These are my Darlings.  And you my Darling too, you know.  White and greedy as you ass is. 

She placed her hand on Bill's lower back, her hand glittering with rings and nails as long as bullets.  She continued.

Look. Times are tough. I know. Ask a sister how tough times can be?  You just white.  You ain't never going to know, and I don't hold that again' you. But there are evil plans afoot. I need you to do as you been elected to do, Sheriff. The new world we building together here?  It is in great danger, Bill.  I can guarantee you first cut on Wagon Wheel and Broken Spoke, but I need you to turn your attentions to this danger, or we risk losing it all.

Bill held out a hand. She stopped.  They were just outside the Wagon Wheel where a handful of Germans were playing dominoes on the porch of the saloon.  

What evil, he asked?  What the hell are you talking about?  

I talking about an old evil from over the water dat come to the New World. She squinted an eye and cast it about before shooting it up towards his face.  Then she asked, what do you know about Adelphon Kuklos?  

XV

Jesus Christ forgives, but you never forget. That is a truth they never teach you in the Bible about your worst sins. Brother Pruitt never forgot that truth no matter how hard he drank. That was a sin too, he thought morosely. He thought about hanging himself every night, the feeling stronger on some days, less on others. By the grace of God. By the grace of God. One day at a time. God had called him to go forth into Nineveh. How could he look away from the countenance of the Lord and refuse? Besides, it kept him alive. It kept him ahead of his demons. God had a plan for him he repeated to himself.

When he was alone in his tent in the evenings, he would be visited by ghosts. All of them started in Missouri where the war had swept across the vast backcountry like a brushfire. A young St. Louis abolitionist full of piss and fire, he enrolled as a Jayhawk partisan. They fought Confederate Bushwhackers in a vicious and fluid guerilla war where the most savage depredations were perpetuated. Thousands of refugees were on the move in a countryside that was depopulated by terror. Farmsteads were torched, women were raped, boys of military-age were being shot.

 
A settlement of German immigrants was in distress. So the Jayhawks promised to defend it until they could move the corn harvest out to feed the federal army. They dug rifle pits and split log barricades and waited for the Bushwhackers to come. They came in through a steady rain. As Evander ducked low in his muddy pit he raised his rifle slowly and drew a bead on the shape of a horse and rider. The ambush was loosed. Firing exploded. He pulled the trigger and the man toppled, hit in the side. Fighting continued for two hours in a pitched firefight through driving rain where the smoke hung evenly, so they all moved in close with pistols and knives. It was bloody business.

 
When the firing petered out, Evander crept low through the brush, rifle ready looking for the first Bushwhacker he had winged. He found him behind a wild forsythia bright as the sun where the man had crawled into for cover. The rain had ceased and the rebel's wound was smirched with mud. A pool of blood collected on the earth. Along the rebel's shoulder belt hung a string of scalps. Evander saw red. Without a word he knelt down and pressed his knee into the rebel's neck. With one determined motion he had carved the man's scalp off with his Bowie knife. The man screamed and writhed. And when he had finished this, he silenced him by cutting open his throat. The earth around was soaked with blood and rain.

 
That ghost came often. Maw Possum called them boo hags. A lot of soldiers were visited by them. She prescribed all sorts of hudu remedies Evander thought pagan, but most veterans stayed with drinking. Its all they knew. Its all he knew. Beside Madame de Smet's cathouse in Strangetown grew a forsythia within sight of where he would preach, bright as the sun. And the Word of God would come to him, and he would be tortured by the uncertainty of its conscience or divine provenance.

 
"But if a man come presumptuously upon his neighbor, to slay him with guile, though shalt take him from mine altar, that he may die." - Leviticus 21:14

 
With all these ghosts - boo hags - he had nothing left but Jesus Christ. He surrendered his soul to Him. It was all he had left. Everything else was a phantasm of chaos denuded of any meaning, and that was worse than hell to Evander Pruitt. It was as though his soul needed some choice towards daily sanctification, or it would wither into the void and nothingness. If he were an Apostle, he'd be a Thomas.

As Evander Pruitt rested down into his cot in the tent he pitched in Strangetown's bottoms, he drank the numbing elixir. The boo hags came again. The man he scalped. He was wounded in the side like Christ, lanced by Evander's trigger. The blood from his scalp pooled. Christ's blood washes. This blood is befouling. While he felt saved today, he wondered if suddenly he were not tomorrow. He receded into a fitful sleep, and hoped he would never wake up again.

XI

Braxton Butler III walked down the left bank boardwalk that runs along the funky bottoms of Strangetown, past the Broken Spoke and Madame De Smet's. He hung a right past a stand where a German brass band was playing the polka, ducking into the alley beside the theater. There, behind a shack where freedmen were frying chicken, he found the man known as Spiderman. The origins of this name are clouded in myth, but he peddled a tincture known as Black Cow. Spiderman was black and scarecrow-ish. He walked with a tumbling motion and he was apt to twitch his arms in random spasms.

Black Cow was the street name of an abortifacient that had been prescribed by the witch Maw Possum since before the war. It was sought by slaves who did not wish for children born into bondage, or who were raped and impregnated by their white masters. It was not the only abortifacient she prescribed, for she would also prescribe potions of tansy or herb-of-grace depending on the customer's constitution. What Spiderman had discovered, however, is that in sufficient (but not too much!) doses Black Cow would induce a euphoric state, which he described as the 'wiggles.'

 
According to an 1881 article in the Scientific American it consisted of a tincture of ergot, soda phosphate and water sweetened with molasses. It was not particularly addictive, though its unusual sensations were increasingly sought in the underbelly of Reconstruction society. Ergot, a fungal poison of rye, was the active ingredient. In excess quantities it triggered seizures and vomiting or, worse, vascular trauma and dry gangrene. Cases of St. Anthony's Fire, as the disease ergotism was called then, were on the rise in Limestone County, which perplexed Royal Bill, the sheriff.

 
When Spiderman saw Braxton he smiled. He was missing so many teeth you could see his tongue. They exchanged a curiously bumping but friendly handshake and Braxton passed a roll of Yankee greenbacks for which he received a small fruit box. It contained a dozen apothecary bottles of Black Cow. Braxton at once wrapped the parcel in gunny cloth. Once this furtive exchange was complete they sat down together on the grass and grooved to the music that filled Strangetown. They ate fried chicken and smoked a marihuana cigar that Spiderman rolled up from a string bag he kept in his pocket. The conversation was convivial, but it was most unusual for the reason that Braxton was the scion of a Greek.

 
Braxton Butler III had returned home from the University of Alabama when the Yankee army had burned down the campus. He spent several years loafing around Limestone County, frequenting the races and saloons of Strangetown to the odium of his family. Now that the war was over, he was planning to return to Tuscaloosa to study law. And so from his dormitory in Woods Hall he sold all twelve bottles within a week to his fraternity brothers in Alpha Gamma. When he returned to Athens for fall break they had made over $200. They kicked back a fifth to Maw Possum for her tax, then they discussed ways they could grow their little operation.

 
As fortune would have it, Congress passed the Comstock Laws banning the interstate commerce of pornography, contraceptives and abortifacients. The price of Black Cow rocketed in price from $15 to $25 per bottle. Braxton, whose youthful entrepreneurial spirit was piqued, bought ergot-tainted rye from Kentucky for pennies on the bushel. They partnered with a notoriously dangerous black marketeer from Nashville called the Melungeon, whose network spanned the length of the L&N Railroad. Within a few weeks they were bottling Black Cow in the grave keeper’s shack behind Dement Cemetery. By the end of the year they were grossing $1,700.

 
There is an old adage that if two partners go into business and they make $10, they split their earnings gratefully down the middle. But if two partners make $1,000, then each partner becomes a sunnuvabitch to the other not worth their keep. And so it was with the Melungeon, who increasingly saw his network as the linchpin to the whole operation. His gang were a rough-hewn folk from the East Tennessee mountains known as the Crab Orchard Boys. They were killers all, veterans of the violent Unionist insurgency whipped up by William Brownlow, who was now a Tennessee Senator and a political ally of the Melungeon. With the L&N Railroad now being extended towards the Coosa Valley and the settlement of Birmingham, the Melungeon began to his set his sights south. Strangetown, with its anomalous prosperity in a region destitute from war, seemed like the perfect place to move shop.

V

The Darlings of Strangetown all loved “Royal Bill” Marmaduke, Sheriff of Limestone County. The man was a living legend, and a deep thorn in the side of the Greeks. He was a Republican. Among their councils on the Hill they sneered him as a scallawag, traitor to his class, traitor to his race. But he was a war hero. He swore his oath to the Confederacy in Huntsville, Alabama and mustered into the 19th Alabama Infantry Regiment. He fought under Fighting Joe Wheeler at Shiloh with the 19th Alabama, and rode as a guerilla fighter with his friend Frank Gurley, who became Sheriff of Madison County. When John Bell Hood invaded Tennessee in the winter of ’64, he came down out of Hurricane Valley to fight with the 19th Alabama one last time. When he mustered back in, there wasn’t anybody left he knew. And when he fought at Franklin, he lost all the new friends he’d made too. He was a changed man after all that. But that’s a whole another story.

 
He ran on the Republican ticket, which was roundly viewed with cynicism by his fellow Greeks and suspicion by Strangetown. Maw Possum brought in the colored vote and helped elect Limestone County’s first Republican. Royal Bill ran down the Klan’s operations out of Dogwood Flats while getting his take out of Strangetown’s tables. The Klan was bad enough. There were a lot of people coming home from the war with everything gone, and then being told it’s the negro’s fault, it’s the Yankees’ fault. They’re told that they might have lost everything, but at least they are still white and they should be grateful. And people actually believed that stuff and joined the Klan because they just ate it up. The Klan’s problem was that most of them were stupid, but they provided a pool of useful idiots for the real enemy of Strangetown.

Adelphon Kuklos was a secret society of absolute white terrorists. They were a committed few willing to do violence on their fellow man for a white world. No one knew who its members were. Rumors and gossip abound about the AK. They controlled the Klan from the shadows, and possibly the Greeks themselves. All anyone really knew is that Royal Bill Marmaduke shot one of them dead saving the life of Drake Shoney down in Belle Mina. The Adelphon Kuklos had strung Shoney up by the noose when Royal Bill pulled out his Navy Colt and shot down a figure in a scarlet robe as the others fled. No one recognized the man who Royal Bill shot, and the investigation into this curious episode is a story for another time.
After that, Royal Bill grew beloved in Strangetown. He had taken on the terrorists himself. His popularity snowballed from there. He ran parades and rodeos and raced wagons around the track. The crowds in Strangetown cheered Royal Bill who rode along like a king on his wagon. He became a powerful political force that was resented by the Greeks, admired by The Major, and profitable to Maw Possum.

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.

II

Growing up in Limestone County and around the city of Athens you might have heard stories about Strange Street. It don’t run but a hundred yards or so across the Town Creek floodplain near downtown Athens. About the only thing its known for today is a place to drop off your cable bill. But back during Reconstruction it was known as Strangetown.

They were heady times then. Everyone was glad the war was over. The Yankees came down and brought real money. Life was coming back. There was a new promise in the air, and nowhere was that promise felt more vibrantly than in Strangetown. There was music again. It was in those years lined with shacks and cathouses, saloons and a racktrack. It was looked askance by the folks on the Hill who lived in columned mansions, and whom the folks of Strangetown called the Greeks. It was a hot bed of sin and generally disapproved of behavior, but also a wellspring of Republican votes.

Strangetown was run by three power brokers then. There was Maw Possum, a former slave and hero of the Underground Railroad before settling into Strangetown. Supposedly she ran a wide network of rackets across town. And then there was “Royal Bill” Marmaduke, who was a hero of the Army of the Tennessee and who became the Republican sheriff. All the game tables paid up to him while he kept down the Klan, who ran their own red light outfit down in Dogwood Flats. Then there was Brother Pruitt, who loved Jesus and ate and walked with the coloreds, but to whom every one paid up anyway on account of their guilty consciences. Most folks in Athens don’t think about all that went down in Strangetown, probably because its so seldom heard of. I'll see if I can't dig up more stories from this fascinating time in Limestone County, Ala.