by Ron Rash
‘Who?’ Billy asked.
Smart, Billy, I thought, but be careful you don’t outsmart yourself.
‘The groundhog,’ I said.
‘No, I don’t expect I will with you all blasting up the river.’
‘Then you won’t mind Bobby taking your shotgun with him. We might need to check it if a body turns up. Besides, I don’t like to be around loaded guns. I’m bad superstitious that way.’
‘Suit yourself,’ Billy said, like it was no matter to him. Bobby picked up the gun and left. I squatted down and wiped my glasses, something to do while I thought about what should come next.
Leonard and Stonewall had come up with nothing. Neither had the men searching the water and woods. We’d search the other side of the river come afternoon, and Tom could take his grappling hook and dynamite farther downstream. Surely Holland’s body would show up by dusk.
But maybe I wouldn’t have to wait that long, I thought. Maybe if I got under Billy Holcombe’s skin he might save me a few hours.
‘I’m going to give you the lay of the land, Billy,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll let you have your say. Mrs. Winchester says Holland was tomcatting around with your Missus. She believes you done shot and killed him for it.’
Come on, Billy, I thought. Get riled up. Tell me what a worthless son of a bitch Holland was. I’ll not argue with the truth of that. Tell me how he threatened you or your wife. Tell me how it was self-defense. Confess and we’ll get this over with here and now.
‘That’s all lies,’ Billy said, but the lack of heat in his voice argued otherwise.
‘She claims she heard the shot.’
‘She heard me shoot my plow horse.’
‘She claims the shot was near your house,’ I said, not giving him much as a second between questions. ‘Maybe even inside it.’
‘She’s a old woman. She’s just addled.’
‘What about your wife and Holland?’ I asked.
‘That’s a lie.’
I looked at the buzzards. I’d have to walk over in a minute and make sure that was a horse they were drawn to. My knee wouldn’t enjoy risking a slip in the river, but there was nothing to be done about that.
‘So you wouldn’t have a problem with me checking inside your house?’
‘No,’ Billy said.
His face showed me little. He was getting more comfortable with his lies, like a card player learning how to bluff.
‘Or anywhere else on your land.’
‘No.’
‘And you shot that horse yesterday morning as well?’ He caught what I was trying to do.
‘I shot my horse yesterday morning, but I didn’t shoot nothing else.’
‘So your horse broke its leg plowing?’
‘Yes,’ Billy said. ‘I was plowing my cabbage and his hoof got slicked on a rock. I didn’t want to smell him so I took him over the river, put him back a ways in the woods.’
That made sense but only up to a point. You may have gotten a bit too clever for your own good, Billy, I thought.
What I said was, ‘Let’s go have a look at that horse.’
I let Billy lead, both of us taking our time as we made our way down the bank. He stepped into the water, but slow and careful, careful beyond worrying about slipping. He was scared, scared because it was clear he couldn’t swim. That would make it harder to sink a body deep where you’d want it, Billy, I thought. It could still be done, but you’d have a rougher time of it. Maybe that body is in the woods after all, I told myself.
I stepped into the water right behind him, close enough to grab him if he slipped, if he tried to run when he got to the far bank. That would have been quite a spectacle, the two of us limping through the woods on our game legs, him trying to get away, me trying to catch up. But though I stayed close I really didn’t believe he’d run. Yesterday, that would have been the time for that. It was too late now, too late for a lot of things.
A crime of passion, Billy, that was your defense, I thought as I followed him through the shallows. You should have come into my office yesterday and turned yourself in, telling it all up front about Holland and your wife, You’d have probably gotten off light, Billy, even if it was a war hero you killed. But you’ve messed up now. You hid your crime. You made it seem calculated, premeditated.
The water rose to my knees but no higher.
Press a one-inch piece of curved metal with your index finger and your world changes forever, doesn’t it, Billy. Just a little thing like the pressing of a bit of metal, or a little thing like a teammate banging his shoulder pads into the side of your knee in a scrimmage—an accident, not even a hard hit, just a little popping sound inside your knee.
‘My father will help us’ was what Janice had said after Coach Barkley told me I no longer had a scholarship. I was married by then, Janice two months pregnant. What she meant was that her father would give us money to finish my teaching degree, money to help with the baby. But Janice had come back from her parents’ house with the news her father was poor as any Jocassee farmer. I dropped out of school to work at Liberty Mill. Then came the miscarriage, and hospital bills made sure not even night classes were a possibility.
‘Something’s wrong,’ she’d said that June night.
I’d reached up and turned on the lamp. Blood soaked the bed’s center, the blood of our child. We frantically pushed away from the sagging middle of the bed—away from each other. Away from the stain that widened between us.
‘Severe tearing and scarring of the cervix,’ the doctor told Janice and me three days later as we’d prepared to leave the hospital. ‘I’m sure you know what this means.’
Janice and I had a pretty good idea what it meant, but neither of us said a word, as if by not answering we might at least keep something alive.
‘You won’t be able to have children,’ the doctor said.
As I’d helped Janice out of her seat she winced in pain. I’d held onto her arm and we’d walked out of the hospital slow and careful, like people who no longer trusted even the ground beneath them.
I smelled death soon as Billy and I struggled up the bank, its odor stronger with each step deeper into the woods. Then I saw it. There were so many buzzards it was hard to tell at first what they huddled over. Every buzzard in Oconee County seemed to have gathered, the trees black with others waiting their turn. I held a handkerchief to my face and waded in among them. I kicked off enough to see Billy had told the truth about at least one thing.
‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ I said.
We waded back across the river before I asked him the question that had made me think he might be lying about what was drawing the buzzards.
‘How did you get a horse with a broke leg across a river?’ I asked.
I could tell right away that question was one he hadn’t expected. His eyes locked on his right hand, the same as they’d done the day before. Looking for strength. I bet he didn’t even know he was doing it, but it was good as any lie detector machine.
‘I beat hell out of him,’ he said, but a good ten seconds passed before he thought up that lie.
Billy turned his back to me and started topping his tobacco. I just stood there a minute. Letting him know I didn’t need to rush off to look for any more suspects because we were past the suspect stage now.
When did it start to go wrong for you, Billy? I wondered. Are you like me? Can you remember one thing—a harsh exchange of words, a bad harvest, a morning when she offered her cheek instead of her lips when you kissed her? I know when it went wrong for me, I thought, and here’s the worst thing, Billy. I believe Janice and I would be different people now, better people. That miscarriage wouldn’t have happened. We would have children, and I’d be a teacher, maybe at a college. At night Janice wouldn’t turn her back to me, Billy. Something cold wouldn’t have locked inside our hearts if I had been one step slower or quicker to that ball carrier, if the coach’s whistle had stopped one play a second quicker.
I left Billy in
his tobacco field and walked through the woods to Mrs. Winchester’s house. I told her we’d be back that afternoon. Then I headed up the dirt road to see Daddy.
He came out of the barn when I drove up. Daddy had aged a lot the last few years, especially since Momma had died. His heart gave him trouble, and the doctor had told him he needed to slow down. He had sold most of his cattle and worked fewer acres.
But Daddy still did more than he should. He wasn’t a man who could sit on a porch all day or spend afternoons up at Roy Whitmire’s gas station playing checkers and gossiping. I knew Travis would find him one day soon face down in a field or pasture. From what the doctor said it was a miracle it hadn’t already happened.
‘Travis said you was hunting for Holland. Found him yet?’ Daddy asked.
‘No sir, not yet. But we still got some woods and river to cover this afternoon.’
‘You been upriver to see the Widow?’
‘Not yet,’
‘I reckon you’ll have to,’ Daddy said.
‘If nothing doesn’t show by late afternoon I expect so.’
‘You ain’t skittish to go up there, are you?’
‘No sir.’
‘Good, for there’s a many who are. People always have wanted to believe the worst things about her.’
‘She’s done herself no favors shutting herself up in that hollow by herself,’ I said. ‘That’s the kind of thing gets people to talking.’
‘If that suits her I see no reason for it to be anyone else’s concerning,’ Daddy said.
He looked at his watch, ‘You ate?’ ‘No sir. I was thinking you and me could go over to Salem and get a bite.’
‘No need for that,’ Daddy said. ‘Laura brought over some collards and peas the other evening. Fixed me a pone of cornbread too. We’ll warm that up.’
‘I thought you might enjoy cafe food for a change.’
‘No,’ Daddy said. ‘What I got here fits me fine.’
I knew if I went to Salem I’d be going by myself, so I went inside and sat at the kitchen table while he warmed the food. The kitchen looked like it always had in some ways—the Black Draught calendar above the stove, the metal tins of sugar and salt on the counter. But Momma’s recipe box wasn’t on that counter. There was no sifter or rolling pin out. The kitchen didn’t have the warm smell it’d had when I was growing up and Momma always seemed to have bread or a pie in the stove.
Memory took me back to a winter evening when Travis and I had walked home after hunting squirrels on Sassafras Mountain. It had started snowing, flakes big as nickels swirling down from a low, gray sky. By the time we stepped out of the woods we couldn’t see our feet, but we could see the yellow pane of light across the pasture. That glowing window was like a beacon leading us to a warm, safe place where people who loved us would always be waiting.
Maybe that’s the best blessing childhood offers, I thought as Daddy lay my plate before me, believing that things never change.
‘That’s better than any cafe food,’ Daddy said.
There had been a time I would have agreed with him. The thick, salty tang of fatback added to the collards and field peas would have made it taste all the better. Laura’s crackling cornbread would have tasted sweet and moist as cake. Now the food tasted greasy, sliding down my throat like motor oil.
‘Country food,’ Janice called it. The few times we’d come up here for Sunday dinner and a bowl of collards or plate of venison had come to her she’d smiled and said, ‘No, thank you,’ and passed the bowl or plate to the next person.
‘How’s Janice?’ Daddy asked, as he always did.
‘She’s just fine, Daddy.’
‘That’s good to hear,’ he said.
I could hear the cicadas singing in the trees as we tried to think of something else to say. Though we sat five feet apart, it seemed a lake had spread out between us, but it was something wider and harder to get across.
‘You need to see them twins,’ Daddy finally said. ‘They done growed up on us.’
‘I mean to do that, Daddy. If we don’t find Holland this afternoon I’ll try to go by there tomorrow.’
‘One of them boys carries your name, son,’ Daddy said, trying to make his tone gentle. ‘You shouldn’t have to already be up here to let him catch sight of his uncle.’
Daddy looked at his empty plate. There was nothing for me to say. Like Holland when he’d decided to get involved with another man’s wife and Billy when he’d decided to do something about it, I’d made my choice.
‘We could use some rain,’ Daddy said, trying to move us past what he’d said about my nephews. I knew he’d make small talk the rest of my visit. He would have said the same words to a stranger, and I wondered if that was what I had become to him, a stranger who had once been a son.
‘Yes sir,’ I said and drank the last of my tea.
‘You want some more?’ he asked.
‘No. I need to get back over to Billy Holcombe’s farm.’
‘You think he had something to do with Holland disappearing?’ Daddy asked.
‘I think he killed Holland.’
‘I just can’t notion Billy doing something such as that.’ I got up from the table.
‘People can disappoint you sometimes, Daddy. I reckon you know that well as anybody.’
Daddy knew what I was saying. ‘Come back when you can,’ he said.
I walked on out to the car. Daddy stood in the doorway and watched me back down the drive to the county road. As a young man he’d been a legendary hell-raiser, like Holland a man bad to drink and fight. After he’d married Momma he’d settled down, working dawn to dusk to make sure we had clothes and shoes and never went hungry. We never had, even in the leanest of times during the Depression. He’d held onto this land too, land that had been in his family for one hundred and eighty years.
He had held onto it not only for those who’d come before him but for his children and grandchildren. I knew his greatest satisfaction was being able to look in the fields and see his son and grandsons working the same land he’d worked all his life. He’d heard the talk about Carolina Power flooding the valley, but I knew he couldn’t have believed there’d be a time when Alexanders didn’t farm this land. I hoped he was dead before Carolina Power had the chance to take that belief from him.
He’d prepared Travis and me to carry on what Alexanders had done here for six generations. Daddy had been a stout, rough-looking man, a man not to be trifled with. But he’d taught us in a patient, caring way, his hand always light on our shoulders. When I went off to Clemson, he’d believed it was only for a few years, that I would come back to Jocassee.
Now he was an old man with a bad heart and a farm that would one day vanish completely as a dream. A man whose oldest son had become little more than a stranger. I stared through the windshield at his lean, craggy face like I’d watch something about to be swept away by a current, for I realized this could well be the last time I saw him alive.
Right then I decided I wouldn’t run for re-election. I’d serve out my term and then come back here and live with him. I’d farm this land until Carolina Power ran us all out and drowned these fields and creeks and the river itself. However long that was, it would give me some time to be a son and a brother again, maybe even learn how to be an uncle.
I backed out of Daddy’s driveway and headed toward Billy Holcombe’s farm, but it was like the car was driving itself. My mind was busy mapping the future.
I’d ask Janice to come with me, but I knew she wouldn’t. I’d pack up a few clothes and leave the savings and house and car. It sounded so easy, but it wouldn’t be. I would carry fifteen years of being part of another person’s life away with me as well. I wouldn’t be able to shuck a marriage the way I could a house or job.
I checked my watch. One-thirty. Janice was probably at a tea or playing bridge. She’d be wearing a hat and hose despite the weather, still playing the role of the wealthy doctor’s daughter.
‘Where’s Mrs.
White Gloves?’ a town councilman had asked his wife at a Christmas party when he didn’t know we were behind him.
‘Probably still at home teaching the sheriff the proper way to unfold a napkin,’ the councilman’s wife had said.
You want to think the worst of her, I told myself as the road curved with the river. It’s easier than the truth—that sometimes what goes wrong between two people is nobody’s fault.
I remembered what else the councilman had said that night, what Janice had heard as clearly as I had.
‘Thank God she and the sheriff don’t have any children. Can you imagine what kind of mother she’d be?’
‘Please don’t,’ Janice said when she stopped me from grabbing the councilman by the collar. ‘Their snippy comments don’t mean a thing.’
But the hurt in Janice’s eyes had argued otherwise.
By two o’clock, forty men had gathered in front of Billy Holcombe’s house. Besides more dynamite, Tom Watson had brought another grappling hook and some bamboo poles to poke undercuts with. I gave him five more men and sent him on his way. Leonard led the rest across the river to search the Carolina Power land.
‘Keep your noses and eyes open,’ I said as they walked away.
‘I know there’s a dead horse over there. There might could be a dead man as well.’
I turned to Bobby.
‘Anything I need to know of back in town?’ ‘Mrs. Pipkin brought over a book, said it was the one you’d asked her to get from the state library. That’s about it. It’s too hot for people to get into much meanness.’
‘I reckon so.’
I nodded toward Billy Holcombe’s house.
‘Let’s go have us a look-see.’
‘We’ve come to search,’ I told Amy Holcombe when she came to the door.
She didn’t say a word, just stepped out of our way. I went straight to the back room. I wasn’t looking for a body. I was looking for a murder scene. Bobby and I stripped the sheets off the mattress, but there was no bloodstain and none on the floor. We checked the closet and under the house. There was no bloody sheet, no fresh-packed dirt. Bobby climbed into the well and poked the bottom with a hoe handle. Then we searched the barn and shed, but we knew soon as we stepped inside there was no body in either, because in the dog days there’s no hiding the smell of death.
