One Foot in Eden

by Ron Rash

  Amy didn’t look up.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  I went out to the shed. The first thing I did was tie three lengths of rope together with square knots. Then I got me a roll of barbed wire and a hoe. I took the collar and trace chains off Sam and led him into the shade of the white oak. I walked around Holland’s body and leaned over. I swatted at the bluebottle flies and yellow jackets and then reached under Holland’s arms and heisted him up.

  He was heavy, heavy enough that I pondered I might have to call Amy to help me. The stubble on Holland’s face prickled my cheek while I hugged him against my chest. A yellow jacket stung me on the neck and I felt the poison riffle through my skin like scalding water.

  Then I steadied Sam and grabbed Holland at his middle and shoved him onto Sam’s back. I looped the rope around Holland’s neck and ankles and tied him to Sam like a saddle. There was a lot more rope than I needed, at least right then, so I wrapped it around Sam a few times and knotted it under his belly.

  I picked up the hoe and shotgun and laid the roll of barbed wire across my shoulder like a haversack. The barbs jabbed my shoulder like thorns on a devil’s walking stick. There was nothing to be done about that. The ground stained dark where Holland had laid but the dust had already drank up his blood. Another few minutes and you wouldn’t be able to tell a man’s life had spilled out there. Amy came out on the porch but she didn’t say anything. We was past words now.

  I led Sam down the field edge past corn stalks and beans near dead as Holland. For better or worse, I thought as I rubbed my neck and almost laughed because it was hard to reckon knowing worse than this. But I knew that wasn’t certain so. Things can always get worse. If what I had in mind didn’t work they’d soon get a whole lot worse.

  I left the hoe on the cabbage row closest to the river. I led Sam a few yards downstream to a pool that held a big brown trout I’d been trying to catch for two years. l’d used everything from hellgrammites to spring lizards and hadn’t got much as a nibble. I couldn’t outsmart a fish with a brain the size of a butter bean but here I was trying to outslick a sheriff who’d passed most of his life catching people like me.

  I shucked off my shoes and left them on the bank. Then I wrapped the rein around my hand between my thumb and fingers and made a fist. I grabbed up the shotgun and stepped into the shallows the tail end of the pool. Sam followed me off the bank, the water raising to my kneecaps. The water ran slow, the stones under our green and slick. I took my time, tucking my feet in white pockets sand amongst the rocks. Sam stepped his way careful too, careful calm, not shying the way many a horse would when the water got deeper. I watched Sam take another step away from a field he’d never work again. It made me sick to the heart knowing what I was going to do to him.

  I tried to think of other things, letting my mind jump in all directions like grasshoppers flaring out of high weeds. My mind lit down on nothing good, just thought-pictures of my daddy laid out dead in his coffin, Holland and Amy tangled together, me in bed as a boy with my legs froze up with polio. Don’t think, Billy, I said to myself, just do.

  Halfway across Sam’s legs splayed out in front of him. He near went tumbling and kicking into the whitewater downstream, taking me and Holland with him, but he found his balance. We got the rest of the way without slipping and sloshed out of the river onto Carolina Power land. The power company didn’t allow hunting or logging so there wouldn’t be many folks poking around these woods. I thought that might be important in the later on.

  I’d turned to help Sam up the bank when I saw her. She was so far upriver you could just make out it was a woman, a woman coming my way. It had to be Sarah Winchester, looking for her boy. That thought paled me. I tethered Sam in the trees deep enough not to be spotted. I carried the shotgun with me as I walked back to the river.

  She was closer now, an old woman dressed in black, some kind of tote-sack in her hand. It wasn’t Sarah Winchester though. It was Widow Glendower. She stopped every so often, stooping that creaky old body of hers to pick something off the riverbank. I’d watched her in past times do much the same, mainly in the spring, passing by without never a word or nod as I’d worked in my field.

  I’d as lief it be the same now but I couldn’t chance that. I walked upriver, not exact sure what to say or do, wondering if maybe she saw me before I saw her. A woman that old won’t have good eyesight I told myself. Don’t fret yourself more than you need to.

  ‘I take it you’re Billy,’ she said when I stepped close. ‘Your woman told me ever much about you when she came calling.’

  She gave me a little smile I didn’t much cotton to.

  ‘Amy ain’t been to see me lately. She ain’t feeling poorly, is she? Ain’t got the morning throw-ups?’

  Widow Glendower nodded at the tote-sack she’d laid on the ground.

  ‘I got some mint in there if she’s needful. Got some boneset too.’

  ‘She’s doing fine,’ I said.

  ‘What of you? You look to be some peaked.’

  ‘I got no complainings.’

  ‘You certain of that?’ Widow Glendower asked. ‘I don’t mind the sharing.’

  ‘I’ve no need for your tonics.’

  Maybe it was all of what I’d been through this morning or maybe just rememberings of following that old woman’s notions last spring but my words came out quarrelsome. But there was something else. I was sudden afraid of her.

  Widow Glendower picked up her tote-sack.

  ‘Well, I’ll be on my way,’ she said. ‘I need to find me some yellowroot.’

  I stepped in front of her.

  ‘You best not go downriver,’ I said.

  ‘And why might that be?’‘There’s a big satinback, twelve rattles on him at the least. I saw him sunning on a rock yesterday.’

  ‘That why you got your shotgun with you? For to kill snakes?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, I best stay clear of a satinback that big, for sure when the Dog Star’s out. You tell that pretty wife of yours to come see me when she can make the time.’

  I nodded but I’d no more tell Amy such a thing than I’d tell Widow Glendower I’d killed Holland. Little enough good had already come from Amy’s passing time with that old woman.

  She started up the trail. I knew I needed to get a move on but I wasn’t doing a thing till that old woman was a good ways upriver. Widow Glendower had gone a good quarter-furlong when she turned around.

  ‘I hope you killed him,’ she said.

  Or at least that’s what I reckoned I heard. I just stared at her, my right hand gripping that shotgun tight. Then I took a couple of steps toward her.

  ‘What was your words?’ I said. My voice had no more strength to it than a shadow. My body either. The shotgun felt to be a plow-point weighting my hand.

  ‘That snake,’ Widow Glendower said. ‘I hope you kill him.’

  She turned and walked on, the tote-sack swaying in her hand.

  I didn’t move till she was out of sight. Then I stepped lively to do what had to be done.

  I led Sam downriver, looking for a white oak off in the woods a ways from the water, a big one but with a limb low enough for to reach. We walked the length of a tobacco row before I found what I needed in a stand of yellow poplar. I led Sam through some briars and scrub oaks thick and tangly as a laurel hell. Then the woods opened up some. I passed through the stand of yellow poplar and there stood the white oak, a good sixty foot tall but with a limb I could grip onto and then another I could gain above it.

  I laid down the shotgun and the barbed wire. I tied Sam to a sapling and took the rope off and leaned Holland’s back against the white oak’s trunk, his legs sprawled out in front of him. His eyes was still open and that grievened me enough to lean down and close them. I’d heard tell you could see the face of the killer froze in a dead man’s eyes. I didn’t want to know the which nor whether of that.

  I looped the rope around my free shoulder and grabbed a holding on the l
owliest limb and pulled myself up. I gained back my breath and reached for the next limb and heisted myself limb by limb to where the tree turkey-tailed and three limbs thick as my leg reached out in different directions.

  I straddled the biggest limb and threw the knotted rope end across the branch above it. I eased the rope down through the limbs till the knot end touched the ground. I looked upriver. It took a few seconds but I finally found Widow Glendower, already up near where Wolf Creek came in. She was making a stout pace for such a old woman and I was ever so glad for that. The farther away she was the more eased my mind.

  I looked far downriver and saw a Carolina Power truck parked at the end of a skid trail. Two men stood beside the truck. They was dressed in town clothes so I didn’t much figure them to come through the woods my way. But I still kept my eyes on them.

  ‘Carolina Power’s going to cork this whole valley up and make them a lake,’ Roy Whitmire had claimed last fall after the timber company sold out. ‘If you ain’t got a houseboat you best find another place to live.’

  ‘They can’t never run us out if we don’t sell,’ Travis Alexander had said. ‘And there’s not a price they can offer that’ll buy out me and Daddy.’

  ‘Carolina Power owns every politician in South Carolina,’ Roy had said. ‘They’ll do what they damn well please. Just ask them farmers that lived down there where Santee-Cooper Reservoir is.’

  The two Carolina Power men soon got in the truck and drove toward Tamassee. I reckoned Roy was right about a lake coming that had all seemed so in the far-off I hadn’t fretted much on it. There wasn’t no need to now either. I had troubles enough in the here and now.

  I shimmied on down and tied one rope end under Holland’s arms and the other around Sam’s neck. I pushed and twisted the roll of barbed wire over Holland’s head till it laid around his neck like a yoke. The barbs tore into his face and back of his head in the most awful kind of way but I knew in my heart it was not near as awful as taking his life.

  I took Sam’s rein and walked with him out into the stand of yellow poplar, Holland’s body circling slow as it raised into the sky like a body caught in a suckhole below a waterfall. I looked at Holland dangling from that white oak and tried not to see it as a sign of my own future.

  The rope spread Holland’s arms out. They was stiff now as firepokers and as he raised higher his arms looked like wings. I remembered Preacher Robertson reading from Revelation how on Judgment Day the dead would raise from earth and sea and fly to heaven and what a glorious sight that would be. But as I patted Sam’s flank and Holland lifted another few yards toward the sky, his face gouged by barbed wire, the hole in his chest boiling with bluebottle flies and yellow jackets, I reckoned a man might witness no more terrible sight than the dead resurrected.

  When Holland reached the big limb I stopped Sam and told him to stay. I climbed back in the tree and geed and hawed till Holland’s body laid near the lengthwise of the limb. I gripped onto the rope with one hand as I straddled Holland’s chest and wrapped my legs around him and the limb like a bear hug.

  It was a tricky business. I got stung twice more by yellow jackets and without Sam holding steady I’d of never got it done. I uncoiled the barbed wire with my free hand, letting it dangle down till it almost stretched to the ground.

  When only two strands was left on Holland’s neck I tightened and twisted them together and then started wrapping the rest of the wire around him, starting with his shoulders and then over his arms and then every few inches till it was down to his ankles. I wrapped it tight and close as bark on a tree, mashing the arms against his sides, letting the barbs cut deep in his skin.

  It seemed like it took forever and I had to stop several times to rest and dab some tobacco on my stings. I was high enough to see Mrs Winchester’s house as well as mine. Smoke curled from the chimney and I reckoned Mrs. Winchester was cooking noon-dinner and there was probably a place set at the table that would never be filled again.

  That fire was a good sign for me. She wasn’t worried enough yet to trouble the sheriff. As I worked I wondered if Holland had pondered much about the men he’d killed. I wondered if he’d dreamed about them or said prayers for them. I said a prayer right then for Holland and asked him and God to forgive me not just for the killing but what I was doing now, for many of the older folks argued a soul couldn’t rest easy till it was in godly earth.

  But it was a sorry excuse for a prayer, asking nothing more of me than some muttered words and I figured it had about as much chance being heard in heaven as a hog’s fart.

  When I finally finished I didn’t climb down. I needed to think out what questions Sheriff Alexander might offer up and how I would answer. He was a smart man, like every Alexander I ever knew, and he’d had some college down at Clemson. I sat and tried to think through all and every question and how I’d answer.

  ‘No, I ain’t seen Holland Winchester,’ I said right out loud, trying to calm each word as it left my lips.

  I tarried in the white oak a while longer. Being that high up it was like I could have a good look around not just at the countryside but at my life. I’d broke quite a sweat getting Holland tied to that limb and the hard work had settled my mind the way hard work sometimes can. I thought about me and Amy and our getting to the other side of all that had happened. For we would, though I wasn’t certain sure of the how yet.

  In a few minutes Mrs. Winchester came outside. She opened Holland’s truck door and mashed the horn a couple of times walking into the woods that bordered our farms. She laid her hands on the fence and called Holland’s name. Then she walked back out of the trees and headed for the fields and woods on the other side of her house. I could see her raise her hands to her mouth though I couldn’t hear her.

  I climbed down and raveled the rope off Sam, then climbed back up the tree and tied the rope around Holland as well. I had him wrapped tight as sewing thread on a spool. I reckoned even a tornado couldn’t shake him free of that limb.

  When I got back down I took up the shotgun and used the barrel to nuzzle Sam behind the ears where he’d always liked to be scratched. He’d been as good a plow horse as I’d ever been around, even-tempered and strong and ever reliable as the sun rising. He stepped nimble as any mule between the crop rows and unlike many another plow horse he never startled when the plow hit a stump or rock. I’d been with Sam longer than I’d been with Amy. Even after me and her got married I spent more waking hours in the springs and summers with him than I had her. I’d talked to him the way you can’t help but talk to any animal you’ve been around a lot.

  ‘That corn’s not going to make it, Sam,’ I’d say, or‘We’ll have rain by afternoon, Sam.’

  I believed he’d had a reckoning of what I was saying, even if it wasn’t word for word, the way a person would understand. That reckoning was me and him working together hard as we could to make a living from this scratch-ankle mountain land but no matter how we worked there’d be things me and him couldn’t do nothing about. All we could do was keep the reins tight and hope for the best.

  Sam snorted. He knew it was near noon-dinner time. He was ready to get across the river and graze by the barn while I ate my cornbread and beans.

  ‘You been a good plow horse, Sam,’ I said, ‘and I wouldn’t do this if there was any other way.’

  Then I settled the barrel deeper in the soft spot behind his ear and mashed the trigger.

  I made sure he was dead before I broke his leg with a rock.

  When I came up the bank I saw the groundhog at the far end of the row. I didn’t bother to load the chamber and take a shot at him. I didn’t feel like killing nothing else.

  The sun read past noon but I figured it best to be in my field if the law showed up. Besides, I had no appetite. I picked up the hoe and walked to where me and Sam had stopped that morning. I knew it was going to be a lot slower and burdensome the rest of the summer working with only my two hands to get things done. I knew even if the tobacco did well I�
��d be buying a mule or plow horse come fall with a good part of that money.

  I started chopping at the weeds like I was chopping at a copperhead or satinback, because bad thoughts was loose in my head again. I was hoping if I worked hard enough I could push them out of my mind. Every time I hit a rock sparks flew and the handle jarred my hand like a jolt of electricity. Sweat riffled off my face and though my palms was calloused I gripped the hoe so hard I raised a couple of blisters. I didn’t look up. The only way I knew I was at the end of the row was when the hoe hit tall grass.

  But bad thoughts kept swirling in my head no matter how fierce I banged that hoe into the ground. I started thinking what if Amy turncoated me the second the law arrived and told everything of what had happened? Or maybe she’d planned for me to kill all along, that she’d never loved me, just used me to get gone from her parents’ house and having to help look after eight shirt-tail brothers and sisters. I pondered what if Holland was somehow still alive up that white oak calling for help. Or Widow Glendower had said what I first reckoned her to have said. Or Holland’s momma had heard the shot that morning and called the law right away and the law had been watching while I took Holland’s body and hid it in the white oak—that the law was in the woods right now watching, getting ready to step out from behind a tree and arrest me.

  I raised up and looked toward the woods. I gripped the hoe across my chest, the blade end up, ready to swing at anybody who stepped near. But there wasn’t nobody coming out of the woods or up at the house talking to Amy. The only sound coming from the trees across the river was cicadas. Keep your head, I told myself. I took deep, slow breaths till my mind cleared like it does when a fever breaks. I started hoeing again, but slower. Slow and steady, I told myself. You got a long ways to go.

  Sheriff Alexander showed up late in the afternoon. I was finishing a row when I heard my name. I turned and there he was, wearing his big black hat that made him look more preacher than law man. He acted all casual, as like he was just out for his constitutional and happened to have ended up in my tobacco field.