A Gathering Of Old Men...
Earnest Gaines
How It All Goes Down...Part One
It's just another quiet day near Marshall Plantation. Old Aunt Glo is feeding her little nieces and nephews a healthy little meal. Then Candy Marshall shows up, and things get a whole less quiet.
She tells Glo's nephew George—whom everybody calls "Snookum"—to get a hold of Lou Dimes—a big city reporter and Candy's main squeeze—and Miss Merle, the owner of what remains of another plantation. Along the way to Miss Merle's place, Snookum's also supposed to tell Rufe and pretty much every other African American male in the place to get over to Mathu's quick. Beau Boutan's corpse is getting ripe in the grass outside Mathu's house—and everybody knows Fix's (Beau's dad) unhealthy obsession with revenge, destruction, and murder.
A few hours later, literally every male member of the Black community around Marshall has shown up at Mathu's house, along with a few women and children, including Candy herself. Oh, and all the men are carrying shotguns with at least one empty shotgun shell—the same type of shotgun and caliber of shell that killed Beau. Not long after the Gun Club for Men starts hanging out around Mathu's front porch, Lou Dimes shows up—with Sherriff Mapes, and you had better believe that Mapes is not thrilled by what he sees. He's also more than slightly afraid of what might happen if Fix Boutan jets down to Marshall with some of his redneck pals and sees a group of elderly, shotgun-toting Black men in the wake of his son's killing.
Mapes tries to get to the bottom of all of it and get it all over with before Fix has a chance to do the kind of awful hideousness that he does best, but the old tried-and-true scare tactics that Mapes has used in the past aren't flying that day. Everybody there is taking credit for sending Beau on a one-way trip to that Honky-Tonk bar in the sky.
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