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Stories from the Verse
Multiverser: The Thirteenth Story
Chapter 33: Brown 375
Table of Contents
Previous chapter: Takano 167
Further down the Joliet Road, Derek saw a farm up on the left. The mule quickened its pace. Derek noted that he had adopted the local nomenclature. It just made more sense that way.
They pulled into the smaller farm with the scent of frying chicken hanging in the air. Derek s stomach grumbled, and Vashti poked him in the side with a grin on her face. A middle-aged Black woman with a severe cast to her features came out.
"Hiram, what be these?"
"Juney, these be nice White folk."
"You too Christian sometime, Hiram. Let me check." She turned to them, and gave them a gimlet eye as if she were trying to see their souls.
"Okay, I feed chicken for a nickel. But I only feed people I like. So what's your politics?"
Derek started to answer, but she shushed him suddenly.
"No, I want to hear the little woman." Derek noted that Juney Johnson had no doubt of them being married. He looked at her again, and decided that there was a powerful bit of insight in that harsh gaze of hers.
"Politics?" Vashti asked, confused.
"Yes, the party that rules the country." She turned away. "I don't think I like them. She's ignorant, and that's on him." Derek felt wrath stirring.
"I--don't understand," Vashti said.
"Obviously. Who should rule?"
"The caliph or amir," Vashti replied looking puzzled, but now sounding more certain. The housewife stared in shock, and then broke into laughter.
She was more jovial but she still asked.
"So I guess that makes you a peasant farmer?"
"Oh, no, I was bodyguard to the calipha."
"Well, la-di-da--" but the usually scornful phrase was spoken softly. "Come in calipha's bodyguard, I've decided I like you. Your husband can come too."
"See I tolds you they was nice."
"You don't know nothing, Hiram," she said as she led Vashti off. Hiram gave Derek a side grin.
"I'd not put up with it, but she's a mighty good cook which covers a lot of sins."
"I heard that Hiram," she shouted back.
"I knows you did. Why I said it," he shouted back as he began to walk the impatient mule to the barn, while shoving Derek after the others. Derek followed the two women back around the house to a table with four already eating. He took a seat next to a Black man, and biscuits were passed to him. Green beans were slopped on a plate, and a pile of fresh from hot oil fried chicken was placed near him. The other eaters went to grab pieces, and a spoon came down on their knuckles.
"Let the girl and her husband get a couple pieces first, then you lot can eat some more."
They could have a plate for a nickel or all they could eat for both of them for twenty-five cents. They spent the quarter, and Derek felt like he had eaten a whole chicken by the time he was done--that plus three biscuits, and two large spoonfuls of mushy grease-flavored green beans. The others left, and some new ones came to the table behind the Johnson's house.
As he ate, he found out that this was a common enough thing for a Black community. Some of the women were cooks, and would make fried chicken by the boiling oil filled pot or in their trusty skillets of heavy iron with which they threatened anyone who raised their ire. Derek thought that he might be in heaven. The chicken was flavorful and juicy, and the constant use of skillets as potential weapons made him smile each time he heard it as it was one of his own favorite weapons. He made a note to get directions to other such farms on the road to Joliet. He also found that he had already passed one. He also found out that the right answer to Juney's question was 'Republican and God bless Abraham Lincoln.' However, Vashti's monarchism had thrown her for a loop as the answer to 'which do you prefer, Democrats or Republicans' was not supposed to be, 'I prefer an absolute monarch.'
He remembered in a previous world seeing what the Spirit of New Orleans thought. She saw Lincoln as the Widowmaker, a thug, and a tyrant, and had been glad to see him die which she regarded as simple justice. However, Juney Johnson saw Lincoln as one of God's angels sent to Earth. Maybe one day he would meet the man himself, or at least a variant of him, and get a better clue himself.
Pumping water from the backyard pump, he cleaned face and hands, and then drank from the spout with cupped hands. There was a tin cup, but he shuddered to think of what diseases might be passed about from lip to lip.
With heavily laden bellies, the duo left with good wishes ringing in their ears, and a couple of skinny hounds following them for a few hundred yards down the road before the dogs turned back to go back home. This made him realize that some of that chicken was probably not chicken. Some might be pheasant or other game birds caught by hunting. He had heard talk of hunting and fishing along with weeding gardens and tilling farm fields from the eaters at the communal table. No doubt the bossy Juney sent her husband out with the hounds to shoot pheasant, and the more relaxed and tired out Hiram was glad to get out of the house into the woods where nobody yelled at him. Even though he thought they loved each other, he resolved not to be like that with Vashti. He wanted something better than a sort-of functional relationship.
As to the old stories that have long been here:
