The Unquiet Grave: A Novel

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “I take it Kenos didn’t follow their example?”

  “Well, he was young—and drunk. It was Christmas Eve, as I recall. 1893. A fellow named Thomas Reed was giving a Christmas party that evening for those of his friends and relatives who had helped him in wood chopping that day. Apparently, Kenos Douglas was not one of their number, but after getting himself inebriated, he wandered over to Reed’s place and barged in on the festivities. For some reason, he fired off a pistol, shooting through the ceiling, and Reed quite sensibly ejected Douglas from the party. I believe there were children asleep upstairs. After Reed pushed the interloper outside, he shut the door and stood pressing against it to prevent Douglas from getting back in. Angered by this treatment, Kenos Douglas fired his pistol through the closed door, mortally wounding Reed.”

  “Did he know he had killed the fellow?”

  “Well, he hadn’t—then. Thomas Reed died three days later. By then Kenos Douglas, accompanied by his brother, George, had headed for the hills. The county court set a five-hundred-dollar bounty for his arrest, and a week later one of Greenbrier’s expert trackers, a fellow named Dawson—or ‘Tall Sycamore,’ as folks called him—had followed the Douglases’ trail to the headwaters of Anthony’s Creek, up in the mountains. He managed to get the drop on them, and they surrendered without a fight. So Dawson let the brother go, and took Kenos Douglas off to jail.”

  “Did he get the five-hundred-dollar bounty?”

  “I suppose so. I never heard anything to the contrary. Anyhow, Kenos Douglas was installed in the jail in Lewisburg to be tried in the court term in April, which gave his family ample time to secure representation for him. Mr. Henry Gilmer prosecuted. I knew him well enough. He was the prosecutor for a term in between the terms of John A. Preston. It was the two of them that Dr. Rucker and I went up against in that murder case I told you about. We’ll get around to it directly. This Douglas case I only knew about the way all the legal community gets to know about what cases are being tried in a given term of court. Murders were rare enough to be fodder for discussion.”

  “What kind of a defense could you mount in such a case? Insanity? Impairment through intoxication?”

  “As I recall, Dr. Rucker claimed that Douglas didn’t do it. He maintained that some unidentified third party had fired the shot through the door as Douglas stood by watching.”

  “In which case Douglas could clear himself by telling the court who did fire the shot, right?”

  “Unless it was some heavily disguised stranger unknown to him. I believe that was the theory.”

  “Then what became of this stranger after the shot was fired?”

  “Vanished as mysteriously as he appeared.” Dr. Boozer laughed, and Mr. Gardner permitted himself a wry smile, but then he added, “Remember that the defense doesn’t have to prove anything. They can offer an alternative explanation for what is alleged by the prosecution. Reasonable doubt. If you can convince the jury that there was another possibility, they may vote not guilty just because they’re not sure. That was Dr. Rucker’s plan. He didn’t even confine himself to one theory.”

  “Throw everything at the wall and see what sticks, huh? What was his second hypothesis?”

  “Well, if they didn’t care for the mysterious-stranger theory, then he offered them the chance to believe that the shooting was purely accidental. Maybe Kenos Douglas was just going to fire off a shot into the air or at a tree, but at the last second somebody nearby jostled his arm and the bullet went astray—through the door and into Thomas Reed. Remember you’re dealing with a bunch of drunks in the dark here, so who’s to say?”

  Boozer looked thoughtful. “I suppose it could have happened like that.”

  “And had you been a juror, Doctor, that conclusion would have prevented you from voting guilty, wouldn’t it?”

  “I don’t know. It might have. Especially since he was on trial for his life. I’d want to be absolutely certain before I voted to condemn a man. Did that strategy work with the jury in the Douglas trial?”

  “He got a hung jury in the April trial. Apparently a couple of the jurors were of the same mind as you are about being completely sure before sending a man to his death. Finally, the judge gave up and dismissed the jury, ruling that they’d start over with new ones in the November term of the court. So the following fall, Dr. Rucker went through the whole scenario again before a new audience.”

  “Did it work that time?”

  “Juries are peculiar, Doctor. They are the variable in the legal scheme of things. I suppose for those of you in the medical profession the equivalent would be the disease that might kill one strong young person and not another, with no apparent reason for the difference in outcome. So while that April jury was befuddled by Dr. Rucker’s efforts in misdirection, the November jurors would have none of it. They came back with a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree, but they called for a sentence of life imprisonment instead of the death penalty, so Kenos Douglas went off to the state penitentiary at Moundsville, which should have been the last of him.”

  “Should have been?”

  Gardner smiled. “This is where your profession’s variable comes into it. In 1899—I was still practicing law in Lewisburg then—we heard that Kenos Douglas had come down with tuberculosis during his five years’ imprisonment in Moundsville—and no wonder. The men were confined to tiny prison cells without heat or light for fourteen hours a day, and fed on rations that were little better than pig swill. The wonder is that they didn’t all contract it. But Douglas did, and in view of his medical condition—and perhaps to keep him from infecting the rest of them—the prison authorities granted him a compassionate early release and sent him home to die.” Here Mr. Gardner paused with a laugh that ended in a coughing fit. “Except he didn’t.”

  Boozer fished a linen handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it over. “He didn’t go home?”

  “No. He didn’t die. The pure mountain air of Greenbrier County revived him, and he got married, raised a brood of children, and went right on living. The government couldn’t take back the pardon, though, so he finished out his life as a free man, and as far as I know, he never got into any trouble again.”

  Boozer thought about it and shook his head. “People don’t usually recover from tuberculosis—at least not by just going home and not getting treatment. There are clinics in places like Switzerland . . . Do you suppose Douglas was misdiagnosed?”

  “I always figured it was the mountain air. That’s what brings rich people to the big hotel in White Sulphur Springs. They said it was healthier there in the mountains, especially in the summer fever season.”

  “It’s possible, I suppose, but medically speaking, I find it unlikely.” Still frowning, Boozer stared into the fire, scanning pages of medical texts in his mind. “If I had to bet on it, I’d put my money on a misdiagnosis. Squalid, overcrowded prison; second-rate doctors with rudimentary equipment and too many sick prisoners to treat—it would be easy for them to make a wrong guess when they were examining him, especially if tuberculosis was prevalent in Moundsville, which I’m sure it was. It’s what they would have expected to find.”

  “And you think it was something else?”

  “You said he was a drinker, didn’t you? And the food in that prison was bound to be vile, so I’d expect him to be physically run down. It’s not uncommon for heavy drinkers and malnourished persons to develop a lung abscess, and my guess is that your Mr. Douglas was both of those things, and that a lung abscess is exactly what he got.”

  “How do you get a lung abscess?”

  “Well, it’s a microbial infection. Sometimes you can get it from aspirating your own vomit, which a drunk has been known to do. When you do that, some of your own mouth bacteria enters your lungs, causing an infection: inflamed tissue, dead patches in the lungs. But the symptoms of a lung abscess would easily fool an overworked doctor: a spiking temperature, a cough that brings up blood and phlegm, chest pain. So they assume that he has
tuberculosis and send him home, and when his environment changes for the better, he gets well.”

  Gardner shrugged. “That disease doesn’t sound like much of an improvement over TB, if you ask me. Recovering from it could be a miraculous occurrence, too.”

  “Maybe so. Death is more random than we’d like to think. Some people die in days from an infected finger, while others live for decades with some malady that ought to have killed them. Every profession has its miracles, I suppose. If you want to give God the credit, call it a miracle. Do you think that fellow Douglas deserved his?”

  “Miracles have always struck me as random happenings, Doctor. If they go by merit, then the Lord must have a different scorecard from mine. If I was in the business of handing out miracles, I believe I would have given one to Thomas Reed, the man standing behind the door, not to the fellow who shot him.”

  “Maybe it was a sign that Douglas didn’t do it after all—or that it was an accident.”

  “I’ve buried two wives now, and both of them died young, and both deserved better treatment than they got out of life. If I didn’t believe that such judgments were random, I’d figure that either I was crazy or else God was.”

  “I suppose that brooding on the inequities of life could lead one to despair.”

  Mr. Gardner smiled. “Then don’t brood on it, Doctor. Philosophers have been grappling with that question for centuries; I don’t suppose that psychiatrists are likely to find the answer.”

  eighteen

  GREENBRIER COUNTY, WEST VIRGINIA

  1897

  SPRING CAME BACK TO THE world in the months since Zona died, but it was still winter in my mind. In a couple of weeks the trial of her killer would begin, and Mr. Preston said that I was to be called as a witness. Just me. Not Jacob or anyone else in the family. We didn’t talk about the trial at home. Every time I mentioned it, Jacob said, “Will that bring her back?” I didn’t know if he was angry at Shue for killing her, at Zona for the foolish life she led and threw away, or at me for not letting her rest in peace.

  The other day over dinner I said to him, “By the time of the trial it will be six months since we laid her to rest. The ground will have settled by now. We ought to be thinking about getting her a headstone.”

  Jacob looked up at me with a spoonful of beans halfway to his mouth. “Now why should we do that, Mary Jane? Didn’t you already prove that Zona ain’t there anyhow? Isn’t she strolling around the county, paying calls on folks?”

  Perhaps he meant it in jest, but I answered him with a cold stare. “Just to me. Just after it happened. Not since. And that appearance was a miracle God granted me in an answer to prayer.”

  Jacob grunted. “Well, maybe you could pray for a grave marker then. Those things don’t come cheap, and we have better things to do with what little money we have.”

  I didn’t bother to ask him why he didn’t think our daughter was worthy of a grave marker, for I knew his excuse would be the expense of it, but that wasn’t the real reason. I didn’t know if he was ashamed of her foolish choices in men, or if he was angry with her for being murdered. He might not even have known himself what the real answer was, but it was plain that he had set his sights on forgetting her, and it would be easier to push her out of his mind if there wasn’t a stone in the Soule Chapel churchyard to remind him of her every Sunday.

  Every time we went to church, I would take a few minutes before the service and stop by her grave. The grass had started to grow there, and once spring came, I began to take what flowers I could find to mark the spot—snowdrops, then jonquils in March; later on I would take the shaggy pink blooms from the rhododendron bushes that grow in the shade of the woods up the mountain. I wished Zona could see them. She had to make do with berries and dead leaves for her wedding decorations—maybe that was a sign, now that I think back on it—but it’s sad to die in the bleakness of winter when the world looks dead as well. Only the world comes back to life in April, green and beautiful and crowned with flowers, but for Zona winter will last forever, with precious little happiness to take with her in remembrance of her life on earth.

  I prayed for her, too. I knew that she had been foolish and intemperate in her ways, but it seemed to me that she paid for whatever wrongs she did. The wages of sin is death, they say, and she paid that price in full. Surely God would not punish her further in the next world after all that she suffered here. I wish now that I could have asked her about where she is now—is it heaven? And what is it like? But in those weeks after she died, I was so eaten up with the desire to expose her killer and avenge her death that all I could think of was knowing the details of what had happened so I could make him pay. When people asked me, I said I got what I asked for. I was told how and by whose hand she died. But in a way Jacob was right. That knowledge, and the trial that was the result of it, didn’t bring my Zona back, and it wasn’t bringing me peace because I still didn’t know that she was all right, and it haunts me.

  nineteen

  LAKIN, WEST VIRGINIA

  1931

  “SO YOU ACTUALLY got to defend a white man in a court of law—in 1897.” James Boozer shook his head. “I marvel, Mr. Gardner. And in the South, too. I am still amazed.”

  The days were warm again, and they had found a west-facing bench in the sunshine.

  James Gardner shrugged. “Well, bear in mind that the client was a no-account fellow, new to the county, and that everybody knew for a fact that he was guilty.”

  “Guilty of what?”

  “Oh, homicide. First degree murder. His bride of three months was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their home, and he went to great lengths to prevent the doctor from doing a thorough postmortem examination. They finally dug her up a month later, and found she had a broken neck and finger marks on the skin around her throat. But even if he was a heartless monster, he had to have a defense, and we were it.”

  “Is that why you were allowed to defend him?”

  “I was only part of the defense team, and that was because Dr. Rucker, who was chief counsel, appointed me. Maybe some of the people in the community would have said the wife-killer didn’t deserve any better lawyer than the likes of me. But never mind that they would have been misjudging my ability, the fact was that in court I was not the face of the defense. William P. Rucker was. In court he sat there beside the accused at the defense table, looking like a Sunday school image of God, with his beetle brows and his long white beard. Most of the time I was just a young fellow at the far end of the table, scribbling notes while the witnesses talked.

  “I did contribute to the efforts for the defense, though. Such as it was. Indeed, how can you defend a man when the whole community believes his dead wife herself accused him of murdering her? We did try, though. We rounded up what witnesses we could—mainly other men around Livesay’s Mill who would say that Trout Shue was a genial companion and a hardworking employee for James Crookshanks, the blacksmith. All of that might even have been true, for all I know, but of course being a capital fellow doesn’t prove that you didn’t choke the life out of your missus, though I’m blessed if I ever could figure out why he did it.”

  “So you did believe that he was guilty?”

  “Well, I tried to keep an open mind there at the beginning. You don’t want to go thinking you’re telling lies in court, or abetting falsehood. I hoped he wasn’t guilty—I can’t put it any higher than that. I didn’t know any of the people involved in the case. They all lived miles away from White Sulphur Springs, and even if they hadn’t, we would not have run in the same circles. But I had the chance to interview two of the prospective witnesses. Dr. Rucker thought they might tell me things they wouldn’t tell him or the prosecutor.”

  “Really? How come?”

  “On account of their color, Boozer. Remember that the youth who found the body of Mrs. Shue was one of our race, a neighbor named Anderson Jones who used to run errands for Trout Shue. Jones and his mother were neighbors of the Shues, and knew the
m tolerably well. About nine weeks before Edward Shue’s trial for murder would commence in Lewisburg, we began to think about framing a defense, and so one afternoon in April, Dr. Rucker sent me over to Livesay’s Mill to see what the Joneses could tell me. The accused wife-killer had been in jail more than a month by then, since the day of the autopsy in late February, and judging from the public sentiment concerning the case, we hadn’t much hope of getting him off, but we had been retained to defend the fellow, and we took the view that if we could save him from the gallows and get him only a term of imprisonment, we might count that as a victory.

  “I rode out from Lewisburg to Livesay’s Mill that afternoon in my buggy. You wouldn’t think it any distance at all these days, what with paved roads and fast motorcars, but at the turn of the century, when it was all dirt roads and mudholes, you had to go at a slow pace if you didn’t want your horse to go lame or keel over from being pushed too hard. Anyhow, I got there by midafternoon, and although the weather was still cool and windy, and the roads muddy, at least it was not bitterly cold or snowing. I guess by now you’ve learned that spring can behave any way it wants to in West Virginia.”

  Dr. Boozer nodded. “I don’t pack my winter clothes away until May.”

  “So I rode out there and found where they lived without any trouble—out in the country everybody knows everybody; you only have to find somebody to ask. Aunt Martha Jones was the wife of a farm laborer named Reuben Jones, and they lived in the settlement that had grown up around Livesay’s Mill, in a modest rented house with a brood of children. It’s hard to tell how old Mrs. Jones was. I remember thinking she was a woman in late middle age, but I was thirty then. Maybe I would have seen her differently if I had met her now. There was quite a young child as well as five older ones, as I recall. In fact, three of her offspring were adults, although they lived at home. Mrs. Jones must have been a little over fifty, but her wrinkled face and plump, shapeless body proclaimed that she had taken a hard road to get there.