by Ron Rash
‘I’m about convinced that son of a bitch is off somewheres still alive and having a good laugh at us,’ Bobby said.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Holland’s dead and he’s within a mile of where we’re standing.’
‘You’re sure of that?’ Bobby said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
I needed to get inside Billy’s head, a head that held a lot more smarts than I’d earlier imagined. I needed to think the way he did to figure out what had been done. That had worked in the past when I’d searched for a runaway from a chain gang or for a lost child or a whiskey still. Once you locked in on how a person saw the world, the hiding place could become no harder to find than a lightning bug on a July night. But that wasn’t the only reason I wanted to live Billy’s life awhile, sorry as it was, I was weary of living my own, glad to take my mind off a decision I was telling myself I’d already made.
‘Get a couple of men and go check his fields,’ I told Bobby.
‘Maybe he’s done some late planting this year.’
‘That’s a good idea,’ Bobby said. ‘I’d not thought of that.’
‘Be careful not to trample his crops,’ I said.
I sat down on a chopping block outside the woodshed and looked out over the dying beans and corn to where Billy worked. I knew the why and the how, and I pretty much knew the where. Like I’d told Bobby, that body was within a mile of where I sat. There was no way it couldn’t be. I knew the plow horse had hauled the body, because Holland was too big for Billy to carry.
Suddenly I realized something, not the answer but what would lead to the answer—the horse hadn’t broke its leg in the field but while carrying Holland’s body across the river. Its hoof had slipped on a slick rock, just like Billy had said, but that rock had been in the river. The weight on its back had done the rest.
What had happened then, Billy? I thought. You probably did what you said. You beat the hell out of that horse and got it up the bank and into the woods and then shot it. But you got Holland’s body off first. You left it there in the river or on the bank. You came back and tied a creek rock to the body and wedged it in an undercut or sank it deep in a pool. You didn’t bury it in the ground, Billy. You were smart enough to know better. Your best chance was the river, your only real chance, because water can keep things covered up, even in a time of drought.
I checked my watch. Almost five-thirty. I’d heard the dynamite blasts off and on for the last three hours, but Tom would have let me know if something had come up. The same with Leonard. I watched the men out in the field, moving slow through the tobacco as though wading through a pond. Billy worked out there among them, doing his best to act like he didn’t even notice all the commotion around him.
‘I know the Holcombes is some kin to you,’ Mrs. Winchester had said. I didn’t want her or anyone else saying I hadn’t done everything possible to find out what had happened to Holland. So there was one other thing to be done, a visit I’d put off long as I could.
She lived a good mile upriver. My scarred lung and knee begged me to send Bobby, for it was an up-and-down mile. But I knew how superstitious Bobby was. He’d grown up in Long Creek but had kin who’d lived in this valley, including his Uncle Luke who’d been the Widow’s neighbor for a while. Bobby would know the stories about her. He’d no more make a visit to that old woman than he’d spend the night in a graveyard. No, I’d have to be the one to call on Widow Glendower.
I followed the river up past the old Chapman place to where Wolf Creek flowed into the river.
Once when Travis and I had been kids we’d fished Wolf Creek. It had been October, the time of year when brown trout swim into creeks to spawn. We’d started at the river where the creek entered and caught two trout right off, big males with hooked jaws, the spots on their sides big and bright as holly berries. Travis and I had worked our way on up the creek, dragging our heavy stringers behind us. One more pool and we’ll turn back, we kept telling each other, because we knew who lived at the head of that creek. But the fishing was too good. We’d kept on going.
Then we came to where the creek forked. Between the two forks stood Widow Glendower, like she’d been expecting Travis and me. She was dressed in her black widow’s weeds. That had made her white hair and white skin more unsettling. She couldn’t have been more than fifty, but to Travis and me she looked older than the mountains themselves. We had managed to hold onto our rods and reels, but we dropped the stringers of trout at her feet and took off down the creek, splashing and tripping and not daring to look back till we made the river. We’d never fished Wolf Creek again.
When Widow Glendower came to the cabin door she didn’t look much different than she’d looked a quarter century before when I’d last seen her.
‘You look to be an Alexander,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, but there was nothing to her knowing that. Anybody in Jocassee would recognize Alexander features.
‘You ain’t got need for a granny-woman, have you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m the high sheriff, and I’m looking for Holland Winchester. I was wondering if you’d seen him?’
‘Oh I’ve seen him,’ Widow Glendower said. ‘I seen him twenty-odd years ago when I brung him into this world.’
‘Have you seen him the last two days?’
‘No,’ she said, saying the word slow as if she was mulling my question over in her head.
‘Does he ever come up this way hunting or fishing?’
‘No. I’d recall it if I seen him doing such.’
I stepped off the porch, knowing I’d wasted my time coming here. Widow Glendower grinned at me.
‘Come back and visit any time, Sheriff,’ she said. ‘And be sure you let me know if you have need of a granny-woman.’
I was short-breathed and my knee needed a rest, but I didn’t stop walking until I reached the river. I sat down on a log where I had a good view of the bank and finally saw what I was looking for, the plant Andre Michaux had found in the valley in 1788. The Cherokee called it shee-show. Because it grew close to water, they had believed it could end a drought.
I walked over and kneeled beside the plant whose flowers looked like tiny white bells. I touched the leathery green leaves. De Soto’s secretary Rodrigo Rangel had not mentioned the flower in his writings. Neither had Bartram. Michaux had been the first European to see the plant for what it was, something rare and beautiful, submerged from the rest of the world in the valley of the lost.
Most of the men had gathered in Billy Holcombe’s yard by the time I got back. Stonewall hadn’t caught a scent. Tom Watson had brought nothing out of the river but a snapping turtle and a few more trout.
Billy soon called it a day as well. I watched him limp out of his field toward the house where his supper waited. You don’t seem a man Luck has found often in his life, Billy, I thought. Maybe now that you need it most though, it has finally come. But even the dead can slip free like Houdini from rocks and rope that hold them down. Currents can tug a body out of the deepest undercut. You’ve read your Bible, Billy, I thought. You know the dead can rise on the third day.
When the last man finally straggled in, I told Leonard and the others who’d walked the woods that I wouldn’t be needing them anymore. I told Tom and his men to be back at 9:00 in the morning.
‘That body’s got to be in the river,’ I told Bobby as we got in the car.
‘Well I don’t see how we missed it,’ Bobby said. ‘We poked every undercut and dynamited every blue hole a damn mile upstream and down. You think it to be farther away than that?’
‘No,’ I said as we bounced down Billy’s drive. ‘That body can’t be too far from that horse,’ and soon as I said that I realized what Billy Holcombe had done. I laughed out loud at the sheer smarts of it.
‘What’s tickled your funny bone?’ Bobby asked.
‘I’ll show you.’
I turned the car around and headed back up the drive.
‘Get a shovel and a rope from the trunk,
’ I told Bobby as we got out.
Bobby did as I told him while I stepped up on the porch.
‘Come on,’ I told Billy when he came to the door. ‘And bring a lantern. We need to go back over to where your plow horse is.’
Billy was worried. I could tell that right away. Lucas Bridges, the county coroner, claimed a dying man or woman had a certain smell about them. I believed a scared man did too, and what I smelled coming off Billy Holcombe was more than sweat from field work.
‘Step ahead of us and be the bell-cow,’ I told Billy as we left the yard. ‘I’d rather see a snake before I put my foot down on him.’
Though rattlesnakes were bad to crawl on hot nights, I was more concerned with Billy trying to slip off in the dark. I wanted him out front where I could watch him.
‘What you got on your mind?’ Bobby asked.
‘Maybe just a snipe hunt, but I don’t think so,’ I said.
We made our way across the river, the same river De Soto had crossed. De Soto hadn’t found what he’d been looking for in Jocassee, but, as Michaux had discovered, things could be found in the valley of the lost. All you had to do was look with a careful eye. That and know where to look.
The moon wasn’t out, and it took me a moment to realize what that meant. Then a breeze rustled the trees. If the horse hadn’t been close by I’d have smelled the sharpness in the air that comes before rain. I wondered if Billy knew the rain was coming. If he did I wondered if he saw it as more good luck. Or did he believe it no longer mattered since I knew now what he’d done with Holland’s body? Yes, Billy, the eyes can lie, but eventually they’ll tell the truth. If I could see your eyes they would tell me, Billy. But I’ll know soon enough, I thought as we stepped onto the far bank. Soon enough.
‘We got to move that horse,’ I told Bobby. ‘Do you think if we put a rope around its neck we could drag it a few yards?’
‘We can try,’ Bobby said.
The buzzards had flown up in the trees to roost for the night, so all Bobby had to scare off was a possum. Bobby tied the rope on, doing his best not to breathe, for the horse was plenty rank after two days under a dog-day sun.
‘You help too,’ I told Billy. We dragged the horse until I said stop.The lantern made the ground shadowy, but there was enough light to see there was no body. I picked up the shovel and stepped closer. Two jabs and I knew that ground.
‘Let’s go,’ I said, ‘and leave the damn rope, Bobby. I don’t feel like smelling dead horse all the way to Seneca.’
For a few minutes I had been so certain. But I’d been dead wrong. Now it was as if I was back at the beginning, with nothing certain at all, not even if there had been a murder. Maybe he’s not even dead, I thought. Maybe Holland had gotten Amy Holcombe pregnant and taken off to Texas or California. Maybe Bobby was right and Holland was having a good laugh at our expense, that this was Holland’s way of getting back at me for what happened at The Borderline—have me come out here and make a fool of myself searching for someone who was alive half a country away.
But I couldn’t believe Holland was alive. Billy Holcombe had been expecting me when I stepped into his field. Mrs. Winchester’s grief was real. As we recrossed I could smell the coming rain. A real chunk washer, I hoped, enough to raise the dead.
‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ I told Billy as he stepped up on his porch. ‘Who knows what might turn up, especially after a good rain.’ Billy said nothing to that. He just went on inside to finish his supper.
‘You mind driving?’ I asked Bobby.
‘Not at all,’ Bobby said, so I handed him the keys. I closed my eyes as we bumped down toward the river.
‘Radio bother you?’ Bobby asked.
‘No,’ I said.
Hank Williams’ voice rose out of the static, singing about his loneliness. He was a young man, still in his twenties but already rich and famous. I wondered if what he sang was just words to him. His voice argued otherwise. That old, weary voice knew what the high lonesome was. I’d heard Williams was bad to drink. There was something deep inside him that money and fame couldn’t cure. I reckoned it must be in a lot of us since his records were so popular. Loneliness was a word you could give it, but it was something beyond words. It was a kind of yearning, a sense that part of your heart was unfilled.
A preacher would say it was man’s condition since leaving Eden, and so many of the old hymns were about how in another life we’d be with God. But we lived in the here and now. You tried to find something to fill that absence. Maybe a marriage could cure that yearning, though mine hadn’t. Drink did it for many a man besides Williams. Maybe children filled it for some, or maybe like Daddy even the love of a place that connected you to generations of your family.
‘Wake up, Sheriff. We’re back,’ Bobby said. I opened my eyes.
‘You go on home, Bobby. I’ll meet you here at 8:30.’
I went into the office, walking past the cell I thought for a few minutes this evening I was going to fill. The book Mrs. Pipkin had brought lay on my desk. A damp cellar smell rose off the old paper when I opened it. Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, the cover page said. Below the title, By William Bartram.
The first splats of rain streaked the windows, and though I hadn’t even a tomato plant in the ground, memory made my heart lift. I knew Daddy heard that rain, and Travis did too. They would sleep better tonight than they’d slept in weeks.
I knew I should call Janice, but I couldn’t make my hands pick up the telephone. Sometime tomorrow I would have to figure out the words I would say to her and then say them, as I had the first time I’d left.
‘I’d end up getting drafted anyhow,’ I’d told her when I joined the Marines in 1941. But I’d wanted to go. I’d wanted to get away from her, away from a life that had been something so different from what had seemed promised, away from my dead-end job in a cotton mill, away from that miscarriage and a marriage that we both knew was a failure. How could it not be when all our union had brought into the world was death.
But I had come back to Seneca and Janice. Maybe it had been a sense of obligation, of knowing that Janice had chosen me when there were plenty of other men from wealthy families she could have had. I now believed it was more than that though. I believed that our lost child had bonded us in ways that outlasted even love.
I opened the brittle pages to Part II, the section where Bartram left Charleston for what would be called for a few more years the Cherokee Nation. I followed his words the way he’d followed the Savannah River upstream to where the land became hills and then mountains. I turned the page, and Bartram was describing the place where my grandfather’s great-grandfather had settled twelve years before Bartram passed through that valley.
I continued on again three or four miles, keeping on the trading path which led me over uneven rocky land, and crossing rivulets and brooks, rapidly descending over rocky precipices, when I came into a charming vale, embellished with a delightful glittering river, which meandered through it.
He had been from Scotland, that first Alexander, a man who had fought with Prince Charlie at the battle of Cullodden. He’d come down the Shenandoah Valley. Ian Alexander found his wife in southwest Virginia, a woman named Mary Thomas, who being Welsh would have shared his hatred of the English. He stayed there five years, then came farther south, stopping in this place that surely reminded him of the Scottish midlands where he’d been born. Most of his neighbors were Cherokee, and his oldest son would marry a Cherokee. But soon Colonel Williamson would push the Indians into the high mountains of North Carolina.
My Uncle Thomas had not known which side that first Alexander had supported. He must have seen what the British were doing to the Cherokee was the same thing they’d done to the Scots, but with the Indians gone there would be more land for whites like him. More interesting, what had his son done? Did he fight with his wife’s people or against them? Something had happened, but it was lost now in the valley’s past.
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Bartram did not mention meeting anyone as he’d passed through Jocassee that spring day. But I wondered if Ian Alexander had stood in a field and watched Bartram as he rode his horse along the trading path. Perhaps Old Ian acknowledged the white stranger with a wave, perhaps a meal offered and accepted.
I read on, following Bartram as he moved northwest and crossed what would someday be a state line. He’d stopped and rested at the top of Oconee Mountain. Turning to look back on the land he’d traversed that day, Bartram had described what he saw. The mountainous wilderness appearing undulated as the great ocean after a tempest, he’d written, as if he’d witnessed the valley buried under a huge, watery silence two centuries before it would happen.
Like Michaux, Bartram was a naturalist. He understood that things disappeared. Maybe that was why he’d felt compelled to preserve with sketches and words everything he saw, from Cherokee council-houses to buffalo bones. He wanted to get it all down. He wanted things to be remembered.
I lay the book down. The rain drummed against the roof and the town was quiet and still I was tired, tireder than I’d been in a long time. I went into the cell and lay down on the cot.
I dreamed of water deep as time.
Sunlight streaked through the bars when I woke. The telephone was ringing, so I stumbled out of the cell to my desk.
‘Daddy’s had another heart attack,’ Travis said.
‘Where is he?’
‘Over here at the hospital’
‘I’ll be there in five minutes,’ I said.
I wrote a note telling Bobby to go on up to Jocassee and start dragging the river, that I’d join them soon as I could.
At the hospital I found Travis and Laura slouched in plastic chairs. The twins lay on the couches.
‘How bad is it?’ I asked Travis.
‘The doctor says he might live a day or two, but he ain’t going to leave here alive.’
