One Foot in Eden

by Ron Rash

  ‘I haven’t been keeping up with them, Darrell,’ I said, and he moved on down the counter with his tea pitcher.

  I walked over to the office afterward. Mrs. Winchester hadn’t called. I told Bobby to go home and get a good night’s sleep, because it looked like we might be traipsing through woods and water come morning.

  After a while I went home too, or at least what I called home now. Janice was in bed reading her book on Charleston.

  ‘How was your meeting?’ I asked.

  ‘Frustrating, as usual. Gladys Williams had her silly suggestions. Anne Lester wouldn’t agree to anything.’

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said.

  I undressed and got into bed. In a few minutes Janice lay the book on the table and turned off the lamp. The window was open, but no breeze fluttered the curtains. It was a night when sleep would come slow and fitfully, a night I would stare at a ceiling I could not see and think about the choices I’d made in my life, the choices my brother had reminded me of.

  I pressed my chest against Janice’s back, my hand rubbing her hip.

  ‘No,’ she said, moving away.

  The heat lay over me thick and still as a quilt. The only thing stirring was my mind, remembering that first year Janice and I had been married, remembering the nights Janice reached out for me. She would go to bed first because I’d be up to midnight doing my school work, my body bruised and aching from the afternoon’s practice. The lights would be off, and I would undress and lie down beside her. Janice would pull me to her, no nightgown or slip, only her warm skin smooth against mine. I would be exhausted and she half asleep, and somehow that made it better, as if our hearts had an energy that went beyond our bodies, like we’d stepped out of time into the sweet everlasting.

  I finally got out of bed, walked into the living room and picked up Red Carolinians, the book I’d just begun when Bobby had interrupted me that night two weeks ago. The story was one I’d heard about and seen parts of growing up in Jocassee, a story of people living and working land for generations and then vanishing, leaving behind the arrowheads and pieces of pottery I’d turned up while plowing. Leaving behind place names too—Jocassee, Oconee, Chattooga—each pretty, vowel-heavy word an echo of a lost world.

  I thought of how the descendants of settlers from Scotland and Wales and Ireland and England—people poor and desperate enough to risk their lives to take that land, as the Cherokees had once taken it from other tribes—would soon vanish from Jocassee as well. Fifteen years, twenty at most, and it’ll be all water, at least that was what the people who would know had told me. Reservoir, reservation, the two words sounded so alike. In a dictionary they would be on the same page.

  There was a kind of justice in what would happen. But this time the disappearance would be total. There would be no names left, because Alexander Springs and Boone Creek and Robertson’s Ford and Chapman’s Bridge would all disappear. Every tombstone with Holcombe or Lusk or Alexander or Nicholson chiseled into it would vanish as well.

  I looked at my watch. Past midnight and Mrs. Winchester still hadn’t called. As I finished the book’s last sentence, I wondered if Holland’s body might also vanish under that coming water.

  ‘The Bartram book hasn’t come in yet, Sheriff,’ Mrs. Pipkin said the next morning. ‘I’ve unfortunately learned the employees at the state library are never in a hurry. A month ago my husband ordered a book he needed for his shop class. It still hasn’t shown up.’

  Mrs. Pipkin slipped the library card into the book I’d returned, a book that had quoted Bartram. My Uncle Thomas had owned Bartram’s Travels, and he’d let me borrow it when I was in high school. I wanted to read it again, so I’d asked Mrs. Pipkin to find a copy.

  ‘Maybe it will come in today,’ Mrs. Pipkin said. ‘I’ll let you know if it does.’

  Mrs. Pipkin disappeared into the fiction section to re-shelve a book.

  Prim, that’s how I supposed a novelist would describe Mrs.

  Pipkin—her hair tight in a bun, her spinster dresses and clipped, precise words. But she was attractive despite her best efforts. Her beauty was like a secret she couldn’t conceal. I wondered if she lay down at night with her black hair loose about her shoulders. I wondered if there were nights she reached for the man who lay beside her, understanding that a woman’s beauty is sometimes best revealed in darkness.

  I walked across the square to the courthouse and telephoned Tom Watson and Leonard Roach while Bobby rounded up a dozen other men. Tom and Leonard rode with me, Leonard’s bloodhound Stonewall lying between them on the back seat.

  ‘You picked a good day to get us up in the hills, Sheriff,’ Tom said. ‘By noon-dinner time Seneca’s going to be hot as a bellyful of wasps.’

  When we got to Mrs. Winchester’s she met us on the porch.

  ‘You’ll be needful of this,’ she said, offering me what she clutched in a hand gnarled into a claw by rheumatism.

  I took the shirt I hadn’t had to ask for. She knew what we were about.

  It was a grim business for her to see, Tom pulling the grappling hooks out of the back of the car in case we needed them, Leonard pressing Holland’s shirt to Stonewall’s nose as three carloads of men set themselves six feet apart to start their sweep through the woods.

  Her expression didn’t change as she watched though. She’d already buried a husband and two of her four children. It crossed my mind that a body to bury beside the others was all she hoped for now. I needed to know why she was so certain he was dead, so as Stonewall trotted through the woods toward Billy Holcombe’s farm, I stepped up on the porch.

  ‘I’ve got to know more than you’ve told me, Mrs. Winchester,’ I said. ‘I reckon you know that.’

  For a few seconds she didn’t say or do anything. Then she nodded.

  ‘So what can you tell me?’

  ‘Holland was having relations with her,’ she said, not even blinking.

  ‘You mean Billy Holcombe’s wife?’

  ‘Yes’

  ‘And you heard a shot from over there?’

  ‘I heard it,’ Mrs. Winchester said. ‘What Holland went and done wasn’t right, but he shouldn’t ought to have died for it.’

  Stonewall bayed closer and closer to Billy Holcombe’s farm.

  What she told me was the truth, all of it, because it all made sense – Billy acting so unsurprised to see me, Holland disappearing but his truck being here, the shot she’d heard.

  ‘He was wearing his soldier uniform,’ Mrs. Winchester said.

  ‘He always wore it when he went over there.’

  For the first time her voice wavered.

  ‘However is it fair that he could do all that fighting in Korea and not get much more than a briar scratch, then come back home and get shot in his own back yard? Can you answer me that, Sheriff?’

  I shook my head. I had no answer, at least none I wanted to tell her. She was an old woman who’d outlived two, maybe three, of her children. Whatever mistakes she’d made raising them she didn’t need to be reminded of. I just looked down at the ground between us, knowing she and I had more in common than she probably realized.

  I had lost a child too, not like her but in my own way. There ‘had been times as the years passed when I’d wonder what that child would have looked like had it been born alive. I’d imagine a child at five or six or eight or ever how many years had passed since the miscarriage. Sometimes I’d imagine a boy, sometimes a girl. Picking at scabs, that was all I was doing at such times, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

  I put my hat back on.

  ‘I’ll do all of what I can to find your son, Mrs. Winchester.’

  ‘I thank you for it,’ she said.

  I stepped off the porch and walked into the woods, meeting Leonard and Bobby and Tom on their way back.

  ‘It’s like he’s done disappeared into thin air, Sheriff,’ Leonard said. ‘We got out there in front of Holcombe’s house and the trail went colder than grave frost. I figured I’d
start Stonewall again out in front of Mrs. Winchester’s, see if he can sniff up another trail.’

  ‘If Stonewall doesn’t, you all start dragging the river,’ I said.

  ‘You speak to anybody over there?’

  ‘No,’ Bobby said. ‘I saw Holcombe’s wife peeking behind a window but she didn’t come out.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to talk to the both of them. I’ll get up with you later.’

  I walked on, the cicadas making their racket above me in the trees, calling for rain as Daddy used to say. Doing a pretty poor job of it too, for the pieces of sky I saw through the trees were blue as a jaybird.

  I stepped through the barbed wire fence. Down toward the river I saw Billy in his field, but I stepped up on the porch instead. I rapped my knuckles on the door.

  When she looked at me through the screen I saw what had brought Holland this way. Amy Holcombe was blue-eyed with yellow hair that fell to her waist, tall and slim but full-breasted. When she opened the screen door, I saw she was pregnant.

  I wondered right then and there whose child it was.

  ‘What brings you out this morning, Sheriff?’ she asked, trying to act surprised—as if she hadn’t noticed the dog and searchers tramping all over her yard.

  ‘Holland Winchester’s missing,’ I said. ‘His momma says he was over here yesterday.’

  ‘I don’t know the least thing about that,’ Amy Holcombe said, and she said it in a flat kind of way, the way someone would say something they’d memorized for a test.

  ‘You mind me visiting with you a minute, Mrs. Holcombe?’ I asked and stepped a little closer.

  ‘I’ve got a bushel of chores to do,’ she said. ‘I ain’t even cleared breakfast off the table.’

  ‘Just for a minute, Mrs. Holcombe. Then I’ll be on my way.’ She didn’t want to let me in, but I could tell she was calculating it would be more trouble not to. She opened the screen door wider.

  ‘The house is ever a mess. Like I said, I got a lot to do.’

  I smelled the wood smoke as I stepped inside and remembered I hadn’t seen a gap in the trees for a power line. A clock that didn’t work lay on the mantle above the hearth. Beside it an oil lamp, against the wall a couple of ladder-back chairs. That was enough to know they were poor in a way none of my people had been since the Depression. They got water from a well, and they still used an outhouse. I wasn’t even sure they had a truck. There’d been no tire tracks in the weeds and rocks that passed for a driveway.

  She didn’t ask me to sit down, but I did anyway.

  ‘I can get you some tea to drink,’ she said, but her tone made it clear she didn’t want to get me anything other than out of her house.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  She sat down in the other chair.

  ‘I just wanted to ask you about Holland Winchester. Like I said, his momma thinks you might know something.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Amy Holcombe said, and she caught herself, because what she was going to say was either ‘I didn’t know him’ or ‘I didn’t know him hardly at all.’ Either way it was past tense, the tense used to speak of the dead.

  ‘I didn’t know him to be missing,’ she finally said, and that was slick on her part because she didn’t have to take back the I didn’t know.

  ‘I think maybe you and your husband know where he is,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be easier on everybody if you all just go ahead and admit it.’

  ‘I don’t know nothing about where Holland Winchester is,’ she said, getting up from her chair. ‘I got things to do, Sheriff.’

  ‘You won’t mind me looking around, will you?’

  ‘Me and Billy, we got nothing to hide,’ she said. She picked up the broom like she was going to sweep me out if I didn’t move toward the door on my own.

  I got up from the chair. Nothing to hide but a body, I thought, a body I believed would turn up soon enough.

  ‘Goodbye, Mrs. Holcombe,’ I said, but she’d already turned her back to me.

  The sunlight was bright and startling after being in the house.

  I checked the barn first and found a truck with two flat tires and a cracked engine block. The only way that truck could have moved was if there’d been a team of horses to drag it. That was good news for me. Holland’s body couldn’t be too far away. I stepped in the woodshed, and after that I peered down the well. I wasn’t seriously searching, just getting a feel for the layout of the farm.

  I watched Billy out in his field. He hadn’t tried to make a run for it, the way many another man might have. Instead, he was going about his business. I wondered for the first time if I’d underestimated him. I wondered if he might be like those men I’d known in the Pacific, the ones you’d have expected to be the first to cut and run and then in battle they surprised you, surprised themselves.

  I had been a man like that, though I was big and stout-looking enough to fool everybody but myself. I hadn’t known what I would do in battle, and the morning I waited for the LAV to land on Guadalcanal, I was so afraid I threw up.

  ‘The hillbilly’s not used to the ocean,’ one of the other soldiers said, but it wasn’t seasickness. Then we’d waded in, and I heard a thump against the chest of the man beside me. He stopped as if he’d forgotten something on the LAV as a stain blossomed on the front of his uniform. The sand puffed up in front of me from a bullet aimed too low, and I felt in that moment something of what I’d felt in football games after the first hit, the first smear of blood on my jersey. The fear was still there, but it was muted, like the sound of the crowd is once the game starts. Even my bad knee didn’t seem to slow me down. I ran for the tree line like a wingback zig-zagging to avoid tacklers. I made it but was still gasping the watery tropical air when a Japanese soldier raised up ten yards in front of me. I aimed for his heart and I found it.

  In the three weeks before a bullet pierced my lung and sent me back home, I’d killed at least three other men.

  ‘I’m giving you this deputy’s job because you know if it comes to the have-to you can kill a man,’ Sheriff McLeod had told me after I got back to Seneca.

  ‘Yes Sir,’ I’d answered, glad to have a job outside a mill, a job where I’d get to use my brain some, use it even more when Sheriff McLeod retired two years later.

  As I walked down the field edge to where Billy worked, I started a conversation with myself, because there had been times doing such had helped me solve crimes. O.K., Billy, where would you hide a body? Maybe in the barn loft? Maybe the bottom of the well? It doesn’t seem likely. You had to know those were the kinds of places we’d look first. Maybe in the woods, but a fresh-dug grave would stick out like a No-Heller in a church full of Hardshell Baptists. Besides, the ground is hard as cement. No, Billy, I said to myself. You didn’t bury that body.

  The season was against him. It was the time of year when the Dog Star rose with the sun, and while that meant hot weather and little rain, there was more to it than that. The old Romans had considered it an unwholesome season, and it was hard not to agree with them. Ponds and rivers got scummy and stagnant this time of year, the air still and heavy, like a weight pressing down. The cattle got pinkeye and blackleg, and a dog or cat could go mad. Polio got worse too, or so people believed. Children weren’t allowed to go swimming or to picture shows.

  For Billy it also meant a dead man would bloat and rot twice as fast.

  If he didn’t bury Holland’s body, anybody within a half mile would soon enough smell it.

  Unless he put it in the river, and that was where I figured the body to be. Low as the river was it could still hide a body, especially if you weighted it down with a creek rock or waterlogged tree.

  Billy saw me coming and raised up from topping his tobacco.

  He stood in the middle of a row. The first stick of dynamite went off and then another, but Billy didn’t take his eyes off me. I thought for a moment he might raise his hands over his head and make it easy for all of us, but he didn’t.

  Then I saw them, drif
ting down slow as black ashes over the trees across the river. To tell the truth I was disappointed in Billy. He hadn’t kept his head about him after all. It was almost funny the way he stood in the field facing me, doing his best to look innocent while right behind him the buzzards in the sky marked a giant X where Holland’s body was. Billy’s shotgun lay at the end of his row, and I stood between him and it.

  ‘Looks to be something dead over yonder,’ I said.

  I waited for Billy’s face to go pale as he looked over his shoulder and saw he’d forgotten about buzzards when he’d hidden Holland’s body. I’d seen men piss on themselves at such moments. Others would cry, or fall down, or run though they knew there was nowhere to run to, run like chickens that had just had their heads cut off and their bodies didn’t yet know they were doomed.

  ‘It’s my plow horse,’ Billy said, hardly giving the buzzards a glance. ‘He broke his leg yesterday.’

  And that set me back, set me back hard as if he’d suckerpunched me in the stomach. He couldn’t have come up with a lie that quick and delivered it that matter-of-fact, at least I didn’t believe he could.

  ‘That’s some hard luck,’ I told him.

  We talked a couple more minutes, but before I could bring up what Mrs. Winchester had told me and Bobby, Tom and Leonard sloshed out of the river, Stonewall loping behind them.

  ‘Bring up anything?’ I asked.

  Tom opened his pack to show a big trout the dynamite had blown out of the water. I pointed out the buzzards to them.

  ‘Damn,’ Bobby said. ‘I guess we been looking down when we should of been looking up.’

  ‘You want us to go look?’ Tom asked, but I told them I’d take care of that, for them to go on to town for lunch, round up some more men if they could and get back by two o’clock. They started to leave, but I nodded at Bobby to stay a few moments longer.

  ‘What you got the .12 gauge for?’ I asked Billy.

  ‘Groundhog been troubling my cabbage,’ he said, and that was a reasonable enough answer.

  ‘You seen him lately?’ I asked.