For John Alfred Preston, personally, the appointment meant a steady income, not that he needed such financial security. He led a quiet, unostentatious life, preferring to impress his fellow man with his good works—his service on the advisory boards of two local schools, and his long tenure as an elder in the Presbyterian church—rather than with material possessions. He was proud of that. He felt that his character had much to do with his being regularly entrusted with the job of county prosecutor. There were a number of other lawyers now in Greenbrier County, but some of them seemed little better than the rascals they represented in court.
Preston continued to peruse the Greenbrier Independent until an ad on an inside page brought him up with a start. Rucker! Exactly the sort of attorney he had just been thinking of, as much a scoundrel as the local felons. What was the old devil up to now?
Suing somebody. There was the legal notice, tucked in the column between the ad for the Lee Military Academy and Green & Bready’s Grocery. Commissioner Withrow was announcing that on February 20, he would make his ruling in the case of W. P. Rucker versus Lewis Skipper and others. Some civil matter—a squabble over money, of course. Rucker seemed to bring lawsuits against people for sport, much as another man might fish or hunt. He might even have become a lawyer for that express purpose, because it was hardly the man’s only profession. He was also a physician, a tavern owner, and Lord knew what else.
Or, rather, the devil did.
William Rucker had been courting trouble in one form or another for forty years. Nobody mentioned it in his presence these days, because he seemed to have turned respectable as he aged, but his past was as colorful as a dime-novel outlaw’s.
Rucker had missed almost as much of the war as Preston had, but for a different reason. Rucker was a rabid Union sympathizer who didn’t let a little detail like owning slaves himself stand in the way of his political preferences. After he directed the destruction of the railroad bridge over the Cowpasture River, he was captured in Summersville and sent to a Confederate prison. He might have been hanged if President Lincoln himself had not authorized detaining a Confederate surgeon to use as a bargaining chip to win Rucker’s release. The negotiations went back and forth for months, but finally Rucker resolved the matter himself by escaping, and when he eventually managed to attach himself to another Union command, he went back to his old ways, and succeeded in getting Union troops to burn another railroad bridge.
Perhaps William Rucker felt that the long years of peacetime were dull after all his youthful escapades. He seemed to have boundless energy, despite his age, and he spread himself thin amongst all his various enterprises. While Preston practiced law solemnly, a priest to his civic duty, Rucker was a gadfly, acting as if each case were a battle, setting fire to legal bridges when he could.
You had to be polite to the man. He was, after all, a member of the legal fraternity, no matter how unorthodox, but Preston could not bring himself to consider William Rucker a colleague, still less a friend. He was at best a colorful diversion from the ordinary business of law, and at worst a habitué of the court on the other side of the process—as a defendant. Members of the county bar still murmured about the time Dr. Rucker ended up in court when his own wife sued him for getting money from her under false pretenses and then using it to pay his gambling debts. People laughed about it, but it made Preston shudder to think of a man swindling his own wife, and a union so acrimonious that the spouses must conduct their battles in court. There was also talk about Rucker’s irregular moral conduct. About fifteen years ago, he had fathered a child with one of his household servants. Since it was common knowledge that Margaret Scott Rucker had come into the marriage as a wealthy woman, and that she still owned most of the couple’s property outright, it was a wonder that Rucker had not found himself on the receiving end of a suit for divorce. How could anyone trust a man so lacking in loyalty and principles?
Preston supposed that sooner or later he would be facing Dr. Rucker in the courtroom, prosecuting some hapless wrongdoer who had hired Rucker as his attorney. Appearing against the flamboyant old scoundrel was not a part of the job that Preston was looking forward to, but it would be his duty to do so, and Preston was never one to cavil at duty or to shirk an obligation. As always, he would behave as a gentleman, even when dealing with those who were not.
eleven
WHEN THE FUNERAL WAS OVER, we went back home and got on with our lives. I took the sheet from Zona’s coffin out of the wagon and set it in the willow basket with the rest of the soiled laundry. Another couple of days went by before I got around to washing it, but it never occurred to me to throw it away, because it was almost brand-new, and there was no sense in wasting it. By the end of the week, the weather cleared up, and although the sunny day wasn’t any warmer than the drizzly ones, at least I could be sure that the washing would dry if I hung it outside on the clothesline.
I heated up water on the stove and set about washing the sheet, first thing. I didn’t want the house tainted any longer by traces of Edward Shue. When I unfolded it to dunk into the hot water, I noticed a foul odor coming from the sheet. What could have caused that? It was only next to Zona’s body for a few hours, and her death had been so recent that there should have been no smell of death attached to it, but whatever it was, hot water and soap ought to get rid of it. I pushed the sheet into the water, and reached for the soap to give it a good scrubbing, but when I looked down into the wash water, I saw a red stain spreading over the water, seeming to come from the middle of the sheet. Blood? I didn’t see why there should be any blood on the sheet, for if Zona had fallen down the stairs, there shouldn’t have been any blood, and if he’d wrapped her a few hours after she died, there would have been no bleeding at all—dead things don’t bleed. As I stared at the reddening water, I began to wonder why Edward would put a dirty sheet into his wife’s coffin—it seemed a disrespectful thing to do, from someone who professed himself to be heartbroken over his dead bride. I put the soap directly onto the red blotch on the sheet and scrubbed as hard as I could, but the stain stayed put.
Maybe it will go away when the sheet dries, I thought.
When I finished scrubbing it, I wrung out the water and carried it out in the yard to dry on the clothesline. The cold wind whipped around me as I fastened the clothespins to the edges, and I knew that between the sunshine and the fierce breeze, the sheet wouldn’t take long to dry.
I went back into the kitchen and poured out the tainted water I’d washed the sheet in. After I’d fetched more water and heated it up on the stove, I got on with washing the family’s socks and underwear, trying not to think about that stained sheet flapping outside on the clothesline. Half an hour later, when I went back outside to hang out the rest of the washing, I looked again at the sheet. It was whipping back and forth in the pale sunshine, but although the wind had dried it completely, the stain—the pink blot like a faded bloodstain that I had scrubbed so hard in near-boiling water with lye soap—had come back. Blood will out—I remembered my father saying that. I couldn’t remember the story, exactly. Something about a custom back in the olden days in England—that to find the real killer the authorities had him touch the victim’s body at the wake, and if he was guilty, the corpse would begin to bleed. Blood was a sign.
Now, I am not a fanciful woman, nor a superstitious one. I’m not afraid of black cats, or the number thirteen, and I don’t think you can tell anything about the future by looking at tea leaves in the bottom of a cup. But I am a God-fearing woman, and I do believe that the Lord doesn’t want murderers to go unpunished. For those who call out to him in prayer, He might well send a sign to help move justice along in the right direction. That’s not superstition, believing in that; it’s faith.
I had prayed for a sign, hadn’t I?
This must be it: the Lord’s way of telling me that my suspicions were right. Zona had been murdered.
But it wasn’t enough.
I believed, but earthly justice requires mor
e than a stain on a sheet as proof that a wrong has been done. I could see myself going into the sheriff’s office, carrying that pink-stained bedsheet and claiming that it was the Lord’s way of telling me that my daughter had been murdered. Like as not, instead of arresting Edward Shue, they’d clap me into a lunatic asylum.
I looked up at the bright blue sky—what Daddy called the cope of heaven—spread out above our old oak tree and stretching so far beyond Sewell Mountain that it felt like you ought to be able to see all the way to paradise. “I thank you, Lord,” I said. “I thank you for this sign, and I believe it, but if you want me to see that this murderer is brought to justice, you will have to give me more evidence than this. I fear that lawmen have hard hearts, and they will need more convincing than this.”
I waited for a moment, standing there by the clothesline, bathed in winter sunlight and hearing only the sound of the wind rattling tree branches against the tin roof. I don’t know what I was expecting. An angel to appear in the yard next to my bedraggled flower bed? A voice from the clouds? But all I got was a brisk wind carrying the faint smells of wet leaves and wood smoke. The Lord’s time is not ours. After another minute, I took that stained sheet off the clothesline, and went back to hanging out wet socks and underwear.
Another week went by, and I didn’t say anything to anybody about the sheet, or about my hopes for more solid proof that Zona had been murdered. Jacob had not so much as spoken our daughter’s name since the day of the funeral, and the boys seemed to be done with grieving already. They got on with their chores and their schoolwork as if nothing bad at all had happened. The young don’t take things so much to heart, I reckoned. Zona hadn’t lived here in the last months of her life, and so for them it was easy to forget that she was no longer living at all. My only companion in grief seemed to be the weather, for it turned bitterly cold the week after the funeral, and the trees glittered with crystals of ice. We were cooped up in the house, except when we had to venture out to feed the animals or chop more firewood. I tried to keep myself busy, scrubbing floors and polishing the furniture with beeswax, but it doesn’t take much thinking to clean a house, and that left my mind free to dwell on Zona and that devil who had killed her. Every time we ate dinner, I’d picture him shoveling food into his mouth without a care in the world, maybe going to a social over in Livesay’s Mill to get likkered up and dance with all the young women, looking for wife number four, like as not. There’s many a flighty young miss who would be only too happy to console a handsome brute like Edward Shue. Zona had been foolish to take up with him. She knew about his other wives—knew that the one before her had died from a fall. Still, it’s common enough for a woman to die young: fevers and childbirth and accidents carry them off well before they’re three score years and ten. Many a man is on his second or third wife before he finally goes to his grave, and no one thinks he is a Bluebeard on account of it. Having two wives die within two years might seem like extraordinary misfortune for Edward Shue, but it wouldn’t necessarily lead folks to conclude that he had made away with them.
He had, though.
The more I scrubbed, and swept, and shined, the more my anger grew. I’d catch sight of my reflection as I polished the mirror, and think how grim and hard I looked, as if all my feelings had curdled in the pit of my stomach like soured milk. The only thing that would bring me back to the warmth of the world was seeing that Zona’s murdering husband got what was coming to him. Smiling, handsome Edward Shue was like a farm dog that had got away with killing a chicken. Nothing would stop him now that he’d a got a taste for blood, and he’d go right on killing chickens until he was put down.
I wasn’t sleeping any more than I was eating. Lately I had even given up trying, for lying there wide-awake in the darkness gave me no distraction from the thoughts that kept circling in my mind, and my restlessness was robbing Jacob of a sleep that otherwise would have come to him easily. Finally, I moved into Zona’s old room, empty now except for a bed and dresser. We were going to move H. C. into the room come spring so that he wouldn’t have to share a room with his younger brothers. We should have moved him already, when Zona left home for good, but what with one thing and another we hadn’t got around to it. I’d sit up there nights, mostly thinking but praying a lot, too. Sometimes I’d stare out the window, looking at the bare tree branches silvered in moonlight or watching the clouds scudding across the sky between little puddles of stars. A week or so went by, and I acted just the same as usual, doing my household chores, and being there in the kitchen with breakfast cooking before any of the rest of the family got up. They never asked me how I was feeling, or whether I was getting any rest, and I never told them anything about what I was going through.
Finally, though, one day I did. I waited until I had set eggs and fried bread on Jacob’s plate, and while he started shoveling it in, I said, “I’m going to town today. Over to Lewisburg, that is.”
His fork stopped midway to his mouth, and he gave me a wary look, as well he might. Lewisburg was the county seat, but it is twenty miles away, and we hardly ever went there. Folks like us have little need for stores, and little to do with the local officials who are situated there. “Lewisburg? Whatever for, Mary Jane?”
“Going to see the prosecutor. It’s time we got Edward Shue put away behind bars.”
“The county lawyer? You want him to arrest Zona’s husband?”
“I want him to arrest Zona’s killer.”
“I doubt he’ll listen to women’s intuition.” Jacob gave me that foolish little woman smirk and went back to spreading honey on his bread, as if that remark had settled the matter.
“You could come along with me, and help me convince them that she was murdered.”
He shook his head. “I don’t believe I care to do that.”
“You don’t want your daughter’s killer to be punished?”
“I don’t want you to go making a big fuss in front of the whole county, and then see Edward Shue get off scot-free when they can’t prove anything against him. Then everybody would think you were a bitter old woman who had taken leave of her senses. It’s better if we just get on with the business of living. Zona made her bed when she chose to marry a fellow she hardly knew, and now she is dead and buried. There’s nothing we can do that will help her—probably never was.”
I folded my arms and gave him a squinty-eyed frown. “She thinks otherwise.”
He just stared at me for a couple of moments. Ask me, I thought. If you care at all about our lost daughter, ask me what I mean by that. He opened his mouth, and I waited for the words, but after a moment or two, he shrugged, and went back to eating his bread. “Lewisburg.” He sighed. “Well, I haven’t got time to take you all the way to town. It would waste the whole day, and I’ve got fencing to mend.”
“That won’t stop me from going. I’ll get there one way or another, Jacob.”
“That’s your lookout, then. If you want to go stirring up trouble, I’ll have no part of it.”
There was no shifting Jacob once he had set his mind on a course, but I didn’t need his permission or his company in order to get to town. He was probably right about the lawyers not being willing to listen to a woman’s claim without any physical evidence, but I thought I might stand a better chance if I took along someone that they would pay more heed to. The best choice, I thought, was Jacob’s older brother Johnson Heaster. His farm was ten times bigger than ours, which made him a man of substance in the community. They’d hear him out, anyhow. Whether or not they’d believe him—or me—was another matter, but I was determined to try.
After breakfast, when Jacob and H. C. went outside to make a start on mending the fence, I packed lunch pails with ham biscuits and winter apples, and saw the younger boys off to school. Then I put on my hat and coat, and set off down the road to Johnson and Abigail’s house. It would have been quicker to cut across the fields, but I dreaded winter mud and icy puddles more than a little extra distance, so I took the long way. It ga
ve me time to think up what I was going to say to my brother-in-law. If I could convince him that I wasn’t crazy, maybe I had a chance of winning over the county prosecutor.
“I need a ride to town.”
Johnson was surely surprised to find me on his doorstep on that cold February morning, without a wagon or a horse in sight, but he tried not to show it. Like everyone else in the community, he was treating me gently on account of my having lost a daughter a few weeks back. When he hears what I’ve come for, I thought, he may think I have taken leave of my senses, but it probably won’t surprise him. Grief sometimes spirals into madness. He’d be relieved if I didn’t take on like Salome seeing the head of John the Baptist on a platter. I was taking it hard, and everybody knew it. But I had to convince him that I hadn’t lost my reason. I had good cause to be upset—not just by the death of my daughter, but by the wherefores of the matter, too.
My brother-in-law Johnson was by way of being the Heaster family patriarch since his and Jacob’s parents were long dead. He was a good half a dozen years older than Jacob, and he had married Abigail toward the end of the war, thirty-three years ago this month. They had more of everything than we did—more children, more land—but we didn’t begrudge them any of it. It was a comfort to know that we had family we could count on in time of trouble, and they weren’t so prosperous that they didn’t have misfortunes of their own to plague them every now and again.
The Unquiet Grave: A Novel Page 14
