Protecting Carson Buffet
by
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It rained that February evening and Mel drove with Marlene to the John Deere implement company to buy new sweeps for his cultivator. Biddle brought Hattie home that afternoon and got out of his Pontiac and walked her to the kitchen. Her eyes were red and teary and Biddle had a stern look on his face. Of course, the three of us trailed in behind them like three blind mice. She told us to go outside and Biddle went with her to her bedroom. Sure as the wind blows, we followed. Quickly the old man shoved her in the corner behind the bedroom door and raised her dress while we watched. He unzipped his pants and out came a large penis. May and Terry screamed at him and his barnyard antics. Hattie cried and the old man turned toward us with his penis fully exposed and a hand in his pocket. He came out with change and started handed coins to Terry and May. They took his money and left but I refused his quarter and it fell to the floor. This devil looked down at me with the same look Jack Jones had when he raped his cousin. Then my mother shouted "get out, get out Carson." I did not budge. Now I knew the real character of my mother and that son of a bitch, Carl Biddle. Like a beast in heat he was dangerous and so was Hattie, my mother. I stood there, shocked and angry and murder filled my heart. Where was the gun I thought. I know this son of a bitch and he needed killing and I was the one to do it. Mel's old twenty two rifle hung on two nails above the door but the old man blocked the way. It was unloaded and I did not have any bullets. Again Hattie ordered me outside, this woman who beat me with a peach tree limb bringing blood for doing such frivolous things as playing in a sand pile, asking for a second helping of banana pudding, sticking a coke bottle too far in my mouth and the list went on. I had irrepressible proof he was her lover from age sixteen until this day. He was from the pit of hell, a killer, a whoremonger and most likely the father of my younger brother and sister, or God forbid, even me. Perhaps a barbaric Neanderthal savage could show his penis in the presence of an eight year girl, a nine year old boy and a twelve year old while sticking it in their mother, but in a civilized society it is criminal, disgusting and to say the least, pornographic. I left and went outside a boychild whimpering and whining with my tail between my legs, ashamed and angry she was an adulteress. A man would have bristled, snarled and attacked. Was I a man or a boy? I wiped away my tears and sniffed up some pride and looked around and saw a shiny new Pontiac parked in front of the house almost in knee high grass and not five feet away was a steel spoke rim wheel with a ten inch bolt stuck through its hub. Where could I drop it? I deviously deducted a combination of tall grass and a concealed iron spoke wheel in line with a shiny new Pontiac equaled busted motor. Location meant everything. I walked to the wheel, picked it up, walked to the grassy spot, took aim and dropped the wheel in the grass right in the path the new Pontiac would take and said "down periscope." I did not have to wait long before Biddle waddled out with obvious satisfaction and took a last cigarette from his pack, wadded the empty pack and threw it down at his new car. He paused long enough to light up and let the reefer dangle from his lip as he blew smoke out his nose and mouth. I did not get a chance to kill him without mercy, but I was about to kill his brand new green Pontiac. "Fire one" I said softly. Two seconds later my "torpedo" was scrapping and grinding under his shiny new Pontiac, with the sound a steel spoke wheel makes when it ruptures a car's oil pan. Black oil streamed out and marked the yellow chert road and confirmed my direct hit. Success, success success, I jumped with joy. I thought, this is going down in my book of life as a good deed. I stooped down and picked up his discarded cigarette pack and it read Lucky Strike. Lucky Strike! I sure did, I hollered "Lucky Strike, Lucky Strike." My ecstatic voice echoed up and down the valley. The events of the previous day were still fresh in my mind when I got home from school. A strange looking older black model Ford was parked at the end of the walk way i front of the house. Hattie walked out the kitchen door and hollered "Carson, come in here. We want to see you in the kitchen young man." "Why?" I asked. When I got close to her she grabbed my arm. I jerked it back in defiance and told her "keep your hands off me." I walked in the kitchen and there was old man Biddle, puffing on his Lucky Strike. "A big hole was punched in my oil pan by a iron spoke wheel and my oil drained out and I burned my motor up." He said and I could see revenge dripping from his mouth. "You put it in front of my car, boy." he yelled at me. "No I did not." I lied. He informed me the wheel lay in the yard when he got out to go in the house yesterday. Those words put him in a trap. "What did you go in the house for?" I asked knowing full well why. Hattie spoke up and said his tire was low and he got out to check it. Then Mel spoke up. "No, he said he went in the house!" Biddle now clearly agitated said. "I did not come all the way out here to argue if I got out or did not get out of my car." He was a mean pretentious bum backed in the corner where the only way out was in his right hand pocket and his finger was on the trigger. Hattie said "I told you yesterday I was cutting you off if you did not get me out of this mess. You have been telling me for years you would and now you have to." That was why she was crying yesterday. I could see Mel was stunned by her words and was beside himself and while Biddle muttered "shut up Hattie", he was opening a can of whoop ass. The magic words needed to send things into pandemonium had been spoken and I knew old man Biddle's gun was in his hand. A voice told me "go get the gun" and I remembered Mel had an old police revolver in the top dresser drawer with bullets in the next room. In a flash I was at the dresser and pulled open the top drawer and there it was. I pushed or pulled or pressed the right button and it broke open exposing positions for bullets which i quickly filled with my thumb and forefinger. A snap of my wrist put firing pin on primer and the weapon was ready to fire with the cocking of the hammer. With the pistol held in both hands I clicked back the hammer and it locked in place. Now if I pulled the trigger hot lead would fly in the direction I pointed. I turned and walked in the kitchen and in an unfamiliar voice said "Biddle you son of a bitch, get out or I will bust a cap in your ass!"
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About the Book
Neither Ku Klux Klansmen, kinsmen, nor demons could keep Carson Buffet from the truth. At the moment he asked "Who is Irwin Craig" he provoked the wrath of his mother and she blocked every path to an answer to this question. The rural town of Stonewell held horrible secrets and they were all connected to Carson in one way or another. Hollywood movie makers threw "Pinky" in the nest of the The Tennessee Ku Klux Klan on the last Saturday night of 1949. The Klan covered Stonewell like Jack Frost in a sea of white and rekindled memories of the night the Klan hung a school teacher and seven black students in 1868 after the Civil war. To be sure, the Klan still "kept black folks in their place" and let them know the South belonged to whites. Carson walked out the Appison theatre that last Saturday night of 1949 just weeks away from his twelfth birthday into this swarm of angry Klansmen and they would be on his heels soon. Puppy love bit him on the school bus when he met Elaine Craig. Their flame extinguished by both families when they found out. Elaine, the niece of Irwin Craig, a name Carson never heard did something to Carson's mother and her family that ruined them financially. After Hattie, his mother, lost her luxurious life and she hated the Craigs. Carson refused to let love die and started his own investigation to save his romance with the pretty Elaine. His quest to find out "Who is Irwin Craig" uncovered adulterous affairs, murder and deceit involving both families. When his mother made a deal with the devil the hounds of hell started nipping his heels and Death lurked behind every tree. Carson's faith in the human race faltered and he asked his sister Marlene to help him answer questions about Craig. She was some help, but he got the truth and nothing but the truth from his Uncle Buck Bradford. However, this truth spoiled when his uncle's wife committed him to an insane asylum the next day. Carson's tainted truth from his uncle only excited him to kept digging. His search for Irwin Craig dug up dirt on his family and Elaine's family. The devil aimed to shut down his search and kill Carson. Thus he fought a huge canebrake rattlesnake he grabbled with in a black pool while Death watched from behind a tree. When Carson survived the snake, the devil unleashed a huge electrical storm to take him out, but his guardian angel intervened. No matter how hard the devil tried, Carson's guardian angel protected him. Then, the sins of his mother and her lover escalated into murder and a high profile lawyer named Nelson Rose arrived in Stonewell to defend an accused murderer, a black man. Nelson Rose arrived with a hidden agenda. Revenge. Rose's kin from generations before were connected infamously to Stonewell. This was why he defended the black man for shooting the Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon. The arrival of Rose would answered questions Carson was not prepared to hear. Although Carson's investigation led to romantic and financial success, it also uncovered the truth about his real father, a name that best be kept secret. The facts collected by Rose and contributed by Carson consummated a shot out with the Klan and left many of his adversaries dead. Would Carson's valiant effort to save his romance with Elaine be successful? O would he find love some where else? Read the book.
About the Author
Due to the sensitive nature of the subject of this fiction book the author's pen name is Steelyard Scales. To be sure, this fictional account of the south is based on real events but not at the location described in this book. A few months after his birth, parents lay Steelyard on a pallet in their cotton fields. Here he grew up working in the hot southern sun, a "red neck" and wrongly identified as being prejudices and illiterate by supercilious ostentatious people. A sacks of cotton weighed on steelyard scales and ginned meant new shirt, pants, shoes and food for him and his family. In the fields he heard black's talk about a terrorist group, the Ku Klux Klan. Black folks said " the Klan marched in their Sunday best white bedsheets and pillow cases making clucking "KKK" like chickens in a chicken house." But, the terror they inflicted on the black race was not a joke. He learned at an early age white and black colors clashed in the southern towns where failure to use a schools, water fountain, bathroom and was a crime subject to jail time. This kept black people separated from white people and "colored only" facilities were every where. When cotton farming modernized, he married and moved to California. He worked a job in the aerospace industry making missiles and rusted away in the city smog and moved back south. While in California he observed white and black colors mixed well and even married. However, the plight of blacks was worse in the south. Reports of northern black youths demise for disobeying the law of the south was frightful. The absolute authority imposed on both the white and black populous and enforced with clubs, dogs, and the Klan. To be sure, the south could be a dangerous place to live. Steelyard observed some whites were "closet" drinkers and lovers. He observed how "closet" adulterous women abused little children and this fictitious life became the bedrock for his story. He knocked the rust off his writing skills, sat down and wrote this book about the life and times of a mixed up little southern country boy saving his first love while his mother and the devil who were determine to prevent it. For sure his book is fictional about the plight of little boy and a black man in a white man's south back in the early 1950's. Warning!! Steelyard's wild imagination may not let you put this book down until you get to the end and then you may want more.