Story Merchant Books had the good fortune to discover and publish Milton Lyles Bayou

Trilogy (The Cruelest Lie, The Candle Seller, The Other Side of Tomorrow) because Im
convinced that Milt is a major, authentic, though still largely unrecognized, voice in
American letters. In a more and more saturated story environment, his stories stand out
for their moral grit, their genial cynicism about human nature, and their profound insight
into the humor and depths of the human soul. Here is his latest short story.

The Summer War

I did not as a boy despise the blistering, energy-sapping, wearisome heat of Louisianas
summers. I now find my refuge in air-conditioned hotels and the upscale cars which haul
me to and from them, but as a boy I did not experience such luxury. I took my refuge from
the heat in the soft shade of a cool, green wood lot traversed by a lazy bayou.
The imperturbable beauty of that place is a long time gone. Like so many of the
places in my journey from idealistic youth to cynical old man, it fell victim to the
modernizing tide that brought interstate highways flanked by the vulgarity of strip malls
and the equally unimaginative and uninspired tract houses strung together with ribbons
of asphalthouses now inhabited by lives which boast the depths of their prosperity by
the make of the SUV crouching outside their two-car garages and by the diminished size
of their TV dish antennas.
But in the summer of my thirteenth year, it was for a time a place of beauty and
excitement. My five friends and I ran through the secluded woods and frolicked in the
tepid waters of the slow flowing bayou which cut across it. We were, in that place, free of
the worrisome eyes of our mothers, who took their refuge from the heat in darkened rooms

made bearably cool by the endless beating of window fans. In their absence, we formed
sort of a friendly gang, calling ourselves The Church Street Raiders.
My friends and I were not without enemies. There were the Cajun boys from Ford
Street, youth very much like and unlike us who traveled in barefoot splendor the concretelined coulee that was the boundary of our claimed territory. They would sneak up on our
wood lot and lob ineffective clods of dirt at our tree house fort, a place of sanctuary from
which we hurled down upon them insults and equally-harmless sticky, wet, hand-formed
red clay balls. They were coon asses, Cajun French. We scorned them because we
thought ourselves to be real Americans. The colored kids, who lived on the perimeters
of our lives, were as overlooked and taken for granted as the slow passage of time itself.
Neither my friends nor I had, in that seemingly long ago time, experienced the kiss of a
girl for whom we really cared, or had been compelled to make a painful moral decision
based upon courage and good conscience.
The Cajun boys were part of our boyhood games of war in a time of real war in the
adult world. But they were our make-believe enemies. Our only real and true enemy was
the One-Legged Crow, who happened to be the legal owner of our wood lot. She was a
sixty-three year-old Baptist widow woman who had been aged far beyond her years-- by
days spent in the harsh sun, by the alcoholic antics of her late husband, and by both her
nutmeg brown skin and her dark somber clothing. I cannot recall ever seeing her dressed
in anything except long, black mourning dresses.
I was responsible for establishing her title, because she looked to me like a giant
crow. I find crows to be frightful birds. They have seemed so since I was a very small boy.
I was I guess about five years old when it happened. My mama, Miss Ruby, was a loving

but somewhat lazy Irish girl with red hair and a quick tongue. Mama suffered from real
bad headaches, and her doctor, Doctor Billy Ray, prescribed for her a strong, bitter-tasting
headache powder that had the effect of putting my mother to sleep through the worst
hours of the headache. On days when her head got really bad and my papa was at work,
mama would say to me, Mookie, mama is going to take a white powder nap. Im going
to put you on the clothesline so youll be safe.
She would then strap a belt around my waist. It was one of my daddys thick, wide
work belts with extra holes punched into it with an ice pick so as to accommodate my
small waist size. The loose end was not cut off, and it flapped down my backside like a
tail. It was that flapping, black, back tail which inspired my nickname, Mookie. It began
as Monkey, a childish tease, but softened into Mookie as I grew older.
My mama used that belt and a dog chain to fasten me to the clothesline in our back
yard, giving me sort of an oval arena where I could play. Mama would hook the dog chain
through the belt at my back, locking the buckle in place so that I could not reach it and
free myself. She would then hook the catch end to the clothesline, which ran in a straight
line from the back, right, outer corner of mamas kitchen, wherein she never found time
to cook, to the left, outer corner wall of daddys empty garage, wherein no car had ever
been contained. Daddys garage was instead the habitat of a flock of Guinea fowl and
Bantam chickens, which he raised as a hobby, and speckled-bellied laying hens, which
were the source of mamas egg-selling business and our Sunday chicken dinners.
The chicken pen enclosed the back half of daddys garage and extended across
the remainder of our backyard. Our backyard shared a fence with the backyard of a
colored man named Mose Jefferson. The chicken pen, with its residue of commercial

chicken food and cracked corn remnants scattered in the dust, often attracted a flock of
crows. I never took note of them until a baby crow fell from the nest at the top of the tall
pecan tree. It happened during one of mamas white powder headaches. I saw it fall, and
by stretching out the maximum limits of the dog chain, I was able to pluck it from the
grass. It was an ugly, sickly looking thing with a big yellow bill and a scrawny, wet, black
body. The little bird filled the air with shrill cries, and the adult birds descended upon me
like a swarm of angry bees. They beat at me with their black wings and slashed at me
with fierce yellow beaks.
Disoriented by panic, I clutched the baby crow in my hands far too hard and ran
blindly up and down the length of the clothesline calling for my mama. But Miss Ruby did
not come to save me. The hands that took the dead baby crow from my hands and cast
it into the chicken pen were the charcoal black hands of Mose Jefferson.
I had crushed the life from that baby crow out of fear and confusion, not out of
anger. The crows that attacked me wanted to save one of their own. What they did, they
did out of a deep-seated biological drive. But at the age of five, that did not matter to me.
I hated them. I firmly believe that we are not born with hatred within us. It is learned, and
that day on the clothesline I had learned to hate the crows. As I grew older, I took full
advantage of every chance I got to punish or harass crows, even to the point of death.
As I saw it, The One-Legged Crow was just as low-down mean as the flying crows.
If they offended her, she harassed and tormented weaker creatures. She relentlessly
pecked away at them. As daytime squatters on her lot, my friends and I knew this
firsthand.

The One Legged Crows given name was Sally Braswell Troop. The rest of the
town called her Aunt Sally. Shed lost her right leg when her late husband, Bradford
Ludlow Troop, raced the Sunset Limited through an unmarked train crossing. Bradford
had a cream colored Packard 1601 convertible with a straight-8 motor, hydraulic brakes,
and independent front suspension. It was a real fine car, but no match for the power of
that big steam train.
As my daddy told the story, Aunt Sally bailed out just before the engine of the train
cut the Packard in half, with a dazed Bradford still slumped over the steering wheel inside.
Sally was still cursing her husband at the top of her voice for the drunken son-of-a-bitch
that hed been when her right leg slammed into a telephone pole. It was splintered above
and below the knee like a white pine tree caught in a whirlwind. Aunt Sally was hauled off
to the hospital in the back of a Borden's milk truck. The driver threw out all the cases of
milk and packed ice around Aunt Sallys mutilated leg. Her last words before she passed
out were, Dont let that old drunk Billy Ray hack my leg off. My leg can be saved.
But Doctor Billy Ray Bordelon did hack her leg off. When Aunt Sally woke up from
the operation, the doctor told her that he had no choice. She said to him, You had no
right. He responded that she would have died otherwise. Better off dead, was Aunt
Sallys retort.
Doctor Billy Ray had taken off her leg nine inches below the hip. It was not a neatlydone piece of work. He had spent most of Friday night and all of Saturday morning in a
Bourr game at Buster McCrackens fish camp on Little Pecan Island. Aunt Sally
maintained that Doctor Billy Ray butchered her leg because he was drunk. She tried
without success to sue him for malpractice. Just about everybody at the card game that

night staunchly maintained that Doctor Billy Ray did not drink while he was playing cards.
If there were mistakes made, they were products of fatigue and the complex nature of
Aunt Sallys traumatic injury. Aunt Sally did not forgive Doctor Billy Ray or accept the
losses she had sustained. She became The One Legged Crow, dressed always in black.
She wore her mourning dress as much for her missing leg as for her dead husband. Her
whole life became focused on her only child, Jude Bradford Troop, the son she and
Bradford had conceived three months before going to their wedding bed twenty years
earlier.
The wood lot where my friends and I had played at boyhood games was where
Aunt Sally wanted Jude to build his house once the war was over. She owned it, but she
always called it Judes Wood Lot Down by the River. However, the boys and I had claimed
the so-far-neglected space in every way we knew how: we built our tree house in the old
magnolia tree, we defended the land from the Cajun boys, and I had even begun to design
a Church Street Raiders flag to fly above the property.
On the 13th day of June 1944, our claim was finally challenged: Aunt Sally sent
Mose Jefferson, who was also her hired man, to run us out of the wood lot. My five friends
and I were gathered in the tree house, having a heated discussion over who was the best
hero, Superman or Captain Marvel. We were drinking RC Cola, eating Planters Peanuts,
and being little boys loud. I favored Captain Marvel and was making my case on his
behalf. Mose Jefferson stole upon us as quiet as death. It was my name that he called
out, and for a long second I thought it was the voice of God himself calling me home to
heaven. When I came to my senses, it was the fact that Mose had singled me out to talk

to which made me mad-- Mose was a neighbor and knew my daddy, but I felt put-upon
by this and indeed I became chiefly responsible for what happened next.
You best listen to what I say, Mookie, he continued. Aunt Sally wants you boys
off this property. She says to take yalls stuff and not to come back in these woods no
more. If you do, she will put the law on ya.
I did not show myself to Mose, and the other boys were as quiet as thieves. I just
yelled down to him in what I thought was a very mature voice, Mose, you go and tell Aunt
Sally to let us be. We aint doing any harm to her wood lot.
I waited for his reply and got none. Just when I thought he had gone away, I heard
a small noise behind me. When I turned, there was Mose crouching on a large branch not
three feet from my face. He looked at me with very hard eyes. If I was you and your
friends, I would busy myself clearin out of these woods for good and always, and not
wastin your time or makin Aunt Sally perturbed talking about what is or what aint.
I spoke harshly to Mose. I spoke in the manner that cruel white men talked to
colored folk. It was, I think, pride and anger which led me to say, Well you aint me, and
dont you go forgetting it. You aint nothing but a raggedy assed old colored man. I could
see right away in his eyes how my words stung him like a whip.
I knew that if he told my daddy or even my mama what I had said to him, I was the
one who would get a whipping. They had not raised me to be what daddy called, a trashy,
back talking child, and daddy was well known for not being prejudice against colored
folks, Catholics, or Jews. One of the multitude of complaints Aunt Sally had against my
daddy was that he supported Franklin Roosevelts Jew war in Europe, the war that had
whisked away her son, and in her words, was not even man enough to fight in it. I was

just about to put it right and apologize to Mose, but before I could wet my mouth, one of
the boys threw a red clay mud ball and hit Mose right upside the nose. Four other mud
balls followed in rapid succession. Mose half fell, half climbed down to the ground and
fled the wood lot chased by six mud ball throwing boys and the sound of their wicked
laughter. I felt bad about what I had done for just a moment, but I got carried away in the
perceived victory defined by the image of Mose sliding and scrambling down from the
tree.
I do not, after all these years, know which boy threw the first mud ball. None of the
five have ever admitted to being first to fire. I know I joined in as Mose fled the tree and
the wood lot, which makes me guilty as any, and more so than most for what followed.
We boldly roamed the wood lot for the best part of an hour. We laughed at how funny
Old Mose looked running till his ankles smoked. He had suddenly become Old Mose
and would remain so for the rest of our lives. One by one the other boys found feeble
excuses to leave the wood lot. As they departed the tree house fort, they took their
possessions with them, knowing full well that our treatment of Old Mose and Aunt Sallys
response would surely lead to our banishment from the wood lot for a couple of weeks.
Aunt Sally was very partial to Old Mose. T. J. Sinclairs daddy said Aunt Sally treated
Mose as good as a white man. Even to the point of letting the nigger eat at her table if
there was no company in her big fancy house. Mr. Sinclair used the word nigger a lot. T.
J. used it, but not to the face of colored people. He was clever in that fashion.
I was the last one out of the tree house fort. I dragged up the rope ladder one last
time, secured the entry door with the bolt latch, lowered the shutters over the windows,
and climbed out through the escape hole in the leaky roof. It was well into the afternoon

when I started out. I had just taken the log bridge across Cat Bayou when I heard the
sound of a heavy hammer falling hard on finished lumber.
I did not run as Old Mose had, but I was quick and stealthy in my return to the tree
house fort. The late afternoon sun cut slashes across the wood lot floor, and I watched
through my tears as Old Mose used a nine pound hammer to smash down our tree house.
His face was ugly with hate, his clothes were marked with red clay stains, and I knew it
was the six of us that Old Mose was smashing with that hammer. Our youthful vanity had
made him our enemy.
I told my friends what I had seen, told them to be watchful of Aunt Sally and Old
Mose, and told them that a price should be paid for the destruction of our tree house fort.
I became, by virtue of my insult to Old Mose and my tale of how he destroyed the tree
house, the acknowledged leader of our little band.
The six of us began to meet in our new fort, a very inferior newly constructed club
house atop my daddys garage chicken coop. We set out from there like Carlsons Raiders
on Makin Island to inflict damage on our enemy. The rule was if you thought up the prank,
you had to pull it off, and if you failed to contrive a prank or lacked the nerve to carry
through with it, you were no longer a blood brother and a Marine Raider, our newly formed
identity.
We all took Dean to be the dumbest of our group, but he pulled off the first raid all
right. While we hid and watched, Dean removed the four screws which secured Aunt
Sallys mailbox to a cypress post. Then we began the excited wait for her to come out on
her crutch (she scorned the use of an artificial leg and hated her wheelchair), open the
mailbox, and struggle to gain control of it as the mailbox slipped off the post and fell onto

the edge of the muddy ditch that marked the boundary of Ford Street. In frustration,
jiggling on her one good leg like a puppet with a broken string, she threw that mailbox into
the ditch. From that time on, she had Old Mose pick up her mail at the post office. The
only flaw in our plan was that she did not appear to credit the mishap to us.
T.J. was up next, and he said we ought to supply clues which suggested us as the
culprits without directly tying us to the acts of vandalism. We used T.J.s slingshot, which
his daddy called a nigger shooter, for our next prank. Lonnie, whose dad repaired pinball
machines, got us six steel pin balls from a couple of the junked machines. T. J. fired them
into the windows of Old Moses house, destroying six squares of glass. I think he and
Aunt Sally got the idea about then that they had a problem, and that the wood lot boys
were the source of it.
The next day Old Mose came to see my daddy. Old Mose was doing that hat in
hand, eyes down, shuffle-footed thing colored men did when seeking favors from white
men. I could not hear their conversation, but I could measure the anger by the redness in
daddys face. When daddy got mad, his face would turn beet red. After Old Mose had
been gone for less than a minute, daddy searched my room for a slingshot, but he did not
find one. I had thrown my own on top of the garage in anticipation of what had to follow
the breaking of Old Moses windows. Daddy did not bother to come right out and ask me
if I was a party to the window breaking. We both knew that if he had, I would have, no
doubt, lied about it.
I had a whipping coming. What surprised me was that daddy whipped my butt on
the front porch using the same old, wide, black belt that mama had used to tie me to the
clothes line the day that Old Mose saved me from the attacking crows. I did not cry at

first, but it was daddys policy to whip you till you cried. Of course, if he felt I was faking
and cried too fast, he would lay on a few more swipes of the belt for what he called the
general principle of the thing and for good measure. I guess it was kind of like, and one
to grow on at a birthday spanking. Of course, in daddys serious whippings, one swat
was never enough.
I looked up from my tears that afternoon and I saw Old Mose just down the
sidewalk. He no longer had his shuffle-footed, hat in hand, false humility face on. He was
standing there, his dirty felt hat pushed back far on his head, his arms folded with authority
across his chest, and a forty-four tooth possum smile lighting up his face.
Whippings from my daddy, as painful as they were, did not deter me. I now hated
Old Mose because he had seen me whipped like a small child and had laughed at my
tears and protestations. I had not begged daddy to stop, but I had come very close to that
ultimate humiliation. This new game of pranks had become more consuming than the
imitation war we had fought with the Cajun boys. We felt we had, by cause of the
destruction of the tree house and our banishment from the wood lot, just reason to inflict
punishment on Aunt Sally and Old Mose. It made our vandalism seem more heroic than
criminal.
The third, and what proved to be the final prank, was mine. Aunt Sally had an
American flag flying on a lighted flag pole out in front of her two-story house. She had
said she would fly it twenty-four hours a day, seven days, a week, three hundred sixtyfive days a year, until the war was done and Jude was home safe and sound. I proposed
the removal of Aunt Sallys flag a week from the date, on the night of July 3. We would
replace it with the flag which I had designed and recently completed for the Church Street

Raiders. It was a two foot by three foot bleached cotton banner adorned with a drawing
of a Marine Raider I copied from a comic book. Imposed across the Stars and Bars flag
he held aloft in his left hand was the broken body of a cottonmouth water moccasin. I had
carefully printed DONT TREAD ON ME along the snake. The Marine Raider was firing
a Thompson submachine from the hip with his right hand, and he had a Bowie knife
dripping blood clasped in his teeth. He looked an awful lot like John Wayne.
The task which I had set for myself was not an easy one. Aunt Sallys flag was not
secured to the twenty-five foot flag pole with a pull rope. The flag lanyard had been
removed after some neighborhood boys, I suspected the Cajun kids, stole two of Aunt
Sallys flags. She had pledged to shoot the next person who trespassed upon her property
and violated what she called Judes flag. It was now secured to the top of the pole by a
short metal chain and two clasps. The only way to remove it was to shimmy up the pole
without her seeing, and that is exactly what I planned to do.
The six of us gathered in the coulee on the night of July 3, 1944. Aunt Sallys flag
hung limply on its flagpole, bathed in white light from a spotlight mounted on her front
porch roof.

We set out toward it in a single file with me in the lead. The Ford Street drainage
ditch was hot and dry and carried the faint smell of cat urine. Aunt Sallys house was dark
and quiet. A dog barked somewhere off in the darkness. To our advantage, Aunt Sally
did not take with dogs. She was, like most widow women, a cat person. She even had a
hand painted sign nailed up to the wall by the screen door of her front porch. It said in
neat, black, block letters, A house without a cat is not a home.

I slithered up out of the ditch like a snake, Raider flag tucked in the back of my belt,
and my breath coming in short excited gulps. My hands were wet with sweat, and the
contents of my stomach did little flip flops. I had not done any real practice or preparation
for the task which lay before me. I had, of course, shimmied up some pine trees with thin
trunks, and rode them down to the ground, and that experience gave me a false sense of
the ease with which a steel pole could be climbed. It was a difficult task, but I quickly
developed what I took to be an effective technique. I would lock my legs on the pole,
squeeze tight with my thighs, reach up with my right hand, place my left hand above it
and pull myself up half an arms length.
The climb seemed to take forever. Twice, I damn near gave in and slipped back
down the pole in defeat. The thing that kept me climbing was ego. I liked being the leader
of the Raiders. I liked the feel of the weight of admiring eyes on my face and body. So I
closed my eyes, gritted my teeth, and climbed through the pain until at least my right hand
filled itself with the base of Jude Troops flag. I could not with one hand free the Stars and
Stripes of the clasp which held it. With great difficulty, I pulled my Boy Scout knife from
my only pocket that did not have a hole in it. I cut away the bottom ring of Judes flag,
shimmied up the top of the pole with my knife in my teeth, just like the raider on my handdrawn flag, took a strong grip on the eagle which capped the flag pole, and slashed the
American Flag free in one quick cut.
As the flag fluttered toward the ground, I heard a loud moan. I swiveled my head
towards the sound. I was looking into Aunt Sallys bedroom. By the illumination of the
flagpole light, I saw Old Mose and Aunt Sally lying naked upon her bed: him a coal black

shadow lying across the whiteness of her belly, and her face lit with the most loving of
smiles, a smile which transformed her wrinkled face into a thing of beauty.
I do not know what made her look toward the flagpole. Maybe the sight of the two
of them made me gasp, or perhaps it was the shadow of a bat or night owl crossing in
front of the light. More than likely she just felt me watching. I dont know for how long our
eyes were locked before she screamed, but as soon as she did, I lost my hand hold and
went sliding down the flagpole. I was unable to grasp it with my knees or hands and at
some point, still high up on my slide, I came free of the pole and fell, as they say, ass
end over tea cups. I broke my collar bone, two ribs, and my right wrist.
I do not know if what followed next was by loving plan or selfish betrayal. Aunt
Sally had come out of her house yelling rape almost before I hit the ground. My
companions had run off in fear, leaving me to meet the police and ambulance that
responded to Aunt Sallys frantic phone call. I do not blame them now, but it took me a
lot of years to get to that point.
They arrested Old Mose. He did not suffer the humiliating and painful indignity of
a two-hour hellish whipping with a logging chain followed by a fiery lynching. Old Mose
got his due legal process, confessed so as to spare Aunt Sally having to testify, and was
executed in the State of Louisianas portable electric chair three weeks later in the
basement of the parish jail.
I carry still the guilt of Old Moses needless dying. I always knew in my heart he
did not rape The One Legged Crow. My daddy did not hold me to be at fault for what I
saw. He accepted the fact that our lives are defined by accidents and choices. He visited
Old Mose every day up until the day he was executed. On the occasion of daddys last

visit, Old Mose confided that he and Aunt Sally had been lovers for a good long time. He
told my daddy that what was happening had to happen, and that he bore me no ill will.
That information did not much help to assuage my guilt. I dreamt for years of the
old black man strapped to that chair with fire coming out of his mouth and smoke boiling
out of his ears.
The execution of Old Mose marked the end of The Summer War, the termination
of my friendship with my five youthful companions, and the death of my innocence. Aunt
Sally never spoke to me or to my daddy again. She had all the trees in Jude Troops wood
lot cut down. She then had it fenced off with barbed wire and, posted with no trespassing
signs. For the remainder of her life, she sat on her back porch swing near the ice box.
Her crutch and a telephone were on a wicker table by her side. If you walked to the upper
edge of the coulee as I often did, you could see her there on all but rainy days wearing a
black dress, drinking copious amounts of gin splashed over shaved ice, and calling the
police each time someone trespassed on the now-empty no mans land of a wood lot.
It was twenty years after the war before my father and I had the courage to really
talk about Old Mose and Aunt Sally. Jude Troop had been killed in a car wreck in London
in the days which preceded the great invasion of Europe by the Allies. Aunt Sally had
been notified on June 13, 1944. She had sent her man Mose to tell my five companions
and me to leave the wood lot. The sound of our games and boyish laughter was too much
like the sounds her Jude and his best friend, my daddy, had made when they were boys
growing up faster than trees on Aunt Sallys wood lot.
It was, no doubt, my smart-mouthed impudence which prevented Mose from
delivering Aunt Sallys message in its entirety. I do not believe that he did not intend to

tell us the reason why we were being banished from the wood lot. The only comfort that I
can take in all that happened that summer is this. We all travel in the hand of God, and
our falling away from life or the fall of others is always only part of our doing. Old Mose
angry as he was, should have told us they why of it. If he had done so, there would not
have been a summer war.