True Fires by Susan Carol McCarthy

sink, lured by the soft shift in his tone, and smiles at his outreached hand. He pulls her into his lap, enjoying the rainwater freshness of her hair beneath his chin, and pats her shoulder in apology. “It’s this woman, Ruth Barrows at the
Towncrier,
tryin’ to help these part-Niggers pass for white,” he says, by way of explanation.
    “Won’t get past you, though, will she?”
    “No, ma’am, she won’t,” he agrees, savoring his wife’s unquestioning faith in him, the sweet press of her small frame against his chest.
    “What time do you have to be at the fairgrounds?”
    “The rally doesn’t start till two. I told Hathaway we’d meet him around noon, share some fried chicken for lunch. Might need your help with the bunting ’round the stage.”
    “Chicken?” she asks, sitting up to face him. “For how many?”
    “Ten or twelve, I imagine. I been braggin’ you make the best fried chicken in the county.”
    “Ten or twelve? By noon?” She jumps up in a panic. “I better tell Ceely to get a move on!”
    While his wife calls up the stairs to tell Ceely, their colored girl, “Forget the beds for now, we need to fry up some chicken!” DeLuth strolls out the back door, across the dirt yard, and past the barn to check on the whereabouts of the herd this morning.
    In the south pasture, he sees three of his four gray-white Brahma bulls—Ol’ Ben’s on loan to Clive Cunningham—and most of his two dozen cows. It was the Judge, of course, who’d suggested they go to Texas, take a gander at this odd breed of cattle from India by way of Brazil. Most of the local cattlemen had laughed their heads off at the Brahmas’ looks: hump-backed, goit-necked, hound-eared, the bulls were ugly as sin. But the laughing stopped when the beef boys learned the Brahmas could tolerate heat, with no loss of milk, up to 105 degrees; that they weren’t picky as to pastureland; that their thick, droopy skin naturally repelled the blood-sucking pests that caused most diseases; that the cows could calve and bulls could serve for fifteen years instead of ten; and that, when crossed with traditional European stock, Brahma beef gave the best “cutoff” value available, with a minimum waste of fat. “He who laughs last, laughs best,” the Judge always said. Right again, ol’ man, DeLuth thinks and feels loss, like a whiff of the Judge’s cigar smoke, float through his thoughts.
    First Birdilee, now the Judge. What the hell’s goin’ on today, got
me wallowing ’round like a goddamn sow in slop? DeLuth leans over, snaps a stem of sweet grass from the base of the fence post, and sucks on the sugary stalk.
    It’s the rally, of course. His first ever without the Judge sitting on the stage or nodding in the wings. Not that he wasn’t ready or hadn’t learned well what the ol’ man had to teach.
    Like the Judge’s Number One Campaign Rule—something he called The Terrifying It: “There ain’t a bit of difference between political campaigning and late-night ghost-story telling,” the Judge always said. “You gotta have a first-class boogeyman, something that scares the panties off your constituents. Real or imagined, it don’t make a whit of difference. S’long as it’s
you
against The Terrifying It, and
you’re
their only hope for getting an ounce of sleep after the election.”
    Their first campaign, The Terrifying It was those over-proud Nigger war veterans, strutting their stuff up and down Main Street like they owned the place. DeLuth’s stump-thumping promise was to “Put every Nigger in the county back to work!” either on his own volition, or, through vigorously enforced antivagrancy laws, in the Sheriff’s citrus-picking chain-gang. “Hard labor, with no pay, will settle their sulking hash, but good!”
    In their second campaign, The Terrifying It presented itself as a unionizing labor leader who complained that the Sheriff ’s chain-gangs were little more than slave camps. The Sheriff promised he’d