RONNIE L RICHARDS

Jarrod

Not long after the Civil War had ended, sixteen-year-old Jarrod decides to leave the family farm in order to escape his cruel father. He ends up in Indian Territory, encountering Wyatt Earp and several of his deputies. 

Prelude from Jarrod

        Jarrod laid on his back.  The afternoon sun pressed right through his closed eyelids.  He laid a forearm across his eyes and waited for the cobwebs to clear.  His nose hurt and he tasted the raw, metallic taste of blood in the back of his throat.  Slowly, he opened his eyes and peeked out from under his arm, squinting against the glare of the sun.
        Twenty feet away stood his dad, chopping cotton as if nothing had happened.  Jarrod reached around with his other hand and found his hoe lying at his side.  He pushed it out of the way and rolled over, getting up onto his hands and knees was a chore.  His nose felt like it was broken and it throbbed with every beat of his heart.  He spat out blood and stood up.  When he bent over to pick up the hoe at his feet he became so dizzy that he staggered a step toward the row of young cotton plants that he had been thinning just a few minutes earlier.
        Jarrod’s dad turned toward him.
        “Get your ass back to choppin’ that cotton boy,” he yelled at Jarrod.  “You’re more worthless than the laziest buck nigger I ever had slaven for me.  Maybe next time you’ll think twice afore you open your mouth.”
        As his head cleared, Jarrod remembered a glimpse of his dad’s hoe handle as it smashed across the bridge of his nose.  They had been arguing, about what Jarrod couldn’t quite remember because they were always arguing about something.  Then it came to him, when he had complained about not being his dad's slave, that the war was over for five years now and there were no more slaves, that’s when he got smashed by the old man’s hoe.
        “You hear me, you worthless piece of shit, get back to work.  Hell, your momma worked twice as hard as you and she weren’t nothin’ but a lazy injun.”
        Jarrod stood there gathering himself.  He thought of his momma.  He never knew her.  She had died giving him birth.  In fact, he didn’t know much about her or her family.  He did know she was a Cherokee named Rising Fawn.  She was only four years old when she and her mom had escaped from the army encampment here in Waterloo, Alabama while they were waiting for the fall rains to raise the Tennessee River to a navigable level.
        The army was in charge of moving the Cherokees out of Georgia and into lands set aside in Indian Territory west and north of Ft. Smith.  When they had arrived at the Tennessee River in July of 1838, the river was too low to navigate so they had set up camp in Waterloo.  His dad had told him this was when Jarrod's momma and her momma had fled the camp.  He had taken them in and hid them until the army moved on.  His grandma died a dozen years later from the fever and his dad had married his momma.  At least that’s the way his dad had always told it to him.
        Talk was his dad had stolen them from the camp and had worked them like he did the rest of his slaves.  It was also rumored he had killed momma’s mother after Jarrod's momma had grown into a beautiful young woman and his dad started bedding her.
        Jarrod's dad threw his hoe down and walked toward him.  When he got close enough Jarrod swung his own hoe at his dad’s head.  The hoe caught him right across the forehead, breaking the handle.  His dad’s one good eye, his left eye had been pierced by a Union officer’s saber at the battle at Shiloh Church, rolled up and the old man dropped to the freshly hoed dirt of the cotton field.
        “The war’s over and you lost, you mean son of a bitch,” Jarrod yelled at the prone man.  “And I’m sixteen years old and am no longer going to be your slave."