EQMM, May 2011 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dell Magazines

Fiction: JIM LIMEY'S CONFESSION by Scott Loring Sanders

Atlanta-born Scott Loring Sanders has had two novels published over the past few years, 2008's The Hanging Woods and 2009's Gray Baby. Published by Houghton Mifflin in the category of young adult fiction, "The Hanging Woods," said the Canadian journal The Labradorian, “shows how mature young adult fiction has become. It's gotten to the point where the separation between teen fiction and adult fiction is all but indiscernible.” Adult readers won't want to miss these books.

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As told to his granddaughter, Rita Limey Phillips, on October 19, 1993, several days before his death in Woodley, Alabama.

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My daddy's name, your great granddaddy, was Robert Limey. At least that's what the white folks started calling him after he went into business for his own self, back when I was just a baby. I guess he didn't ever see no reason to correct them. When he got killed, about nineteen twenty-two I think it was, I took over the business. I was somewhere around thirteen, fourteen years old, and not at all ready for my daddy to be gone.

The day after Daddy went in the ground, it was time for me to get to work. I was the man of the family then, and it was up to me to take over the business. I'd been going around with Daddy some anyway, so I knew most everything there was to know about it. I hitched Miss Annabelle to the wagon, loaded up the barrels of lime, then headed to town.

We made all the lime right there on the property. Daddy'd been a smart man and figured it all out his own self. He built a stone kiln and used shells from all along the riverbanks of the Alabama. He used to pay us boys a penny a sackful. There were shoals along the river where it was nothing but crushed shells. Whole bars you could walk on that reached way out into the water. Clam shells and mussel shells, all bleached white from sitting in the sunshine for a hundred years. Daddy worked four days a week making lime in the kiln, and the other two on privy duty. Sunday was church and rest. So that's where I was headed with Miss Annabelle that first day after Daddy'd been buried, going to town for privy duty.

There were about fifty privies spread throughout Woodley that we took care of, most in town, some out in the country. Lots of farmers used the lime for their cotton and peanut crops too, so that's why Daddy spent so much time making it, because everyone needed it for something or other. You can make a fair dime in lime, that's what he always said.

There wasn't much to it, really, privy duty. I had me a steel shovel that I'd scoop the stuff out with. At the back of each privy was a plank, blocking the opening. I'd slide out the plank and then shovel the slop, dumping it into a slatted whiskey barrel sitting on the wagon.

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