The Blackstone Commentaries

by Rob Riggan

  “Don’t get me wrong. I believe firmly in justice, Mr. Willis, and I don’t believe there’s any difference between Southern or Yankee justice, or justice anywhere, for that matter, if it works, something I have yet to see. Now, why’d you come here?”

  “Frank!” Sarah said.

  “Rachel invited me.”

  “Rachel hasn't invited any man here since she lost David. She and David grew up together, went to grammar school and high school together. And church. Used to be here Sundays after church, and after school, like he was our own. He was our own. A hard worker and honest. He was going to be an engineer and already started going to college for it, except the war was going on. We scarcely know what her life’s like anymore, these past three or four years.” He stared hard at Elmore, the way Elmore suspected he probably wanted to stare at his daughter. “I hear you have an appetite for cards and loose women. Is she part of that?”

  “FRANK!”

  “No, sir. Not that I know of.” But he let his anger show.

  “Don’t get prickly with me, Willis,” Cady had said, at which juncture Rachel jumped off the couch and stormed out the door, heading for the car.

  Without even a glance at the man sitting in a righteous huff nearby, Elmore had stood and said, “You’ll excuse me,” to Rachel’s mother.

  “You’re really not upset, are you?” Rachel said now.

  “I’m sorry it happened.”

  “My father can’t even be civil, and you’re not upset? I don’t know why I took you home!” She flicked her hair in disgust.

  “Maybe I should go back and challenge him to duel,” Elmore suggested, reaching to turn on the headlights.

  “Ha-ha!”

  My God, I believe I’m right! he thought, and tried to change the subject and make talk like they’d shared on the courthouse lawn and all the way to her parents’ house, when he’d lost all sense of time. He couldn’t recall ever talking to a woman so much. “You and David had no children?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  He shrugged. “I was just asking.”

  “You think because we got married so young, we should have had kids? Maybe I was really married at thirteen and they’re all grown up. Want to meet the little dears?”

  “Whoa.”

  “Elmore Willis, I would never, never marry anyone because I got pregnant! Especially if I loved him. I’ve seen that kind of hell.”

  “Fine,” he said.

  “We had to actually work hard so we would have a life someday. We didn’t have any money. But you wouldn’t understand that, would you?” She glanced over her shoulder at Phineas. “At least my parents approved of your dog.”

  Is she nuts? he wondered, but forgot even that as they suddenly climbed onto a high meadow, the sun sinking below a wooded ridge above them, pulling shadows up out of the valleys after it. “This is wonderful country!” he said.

  They plunged into a grove lush with the smell of pine. Crossing a plank bridge, she said, “Stop here!” pointing to a wide place crisscrossed with tire tracks. Obeying, Elmore turned off the motor. In the heavy silence, he heard the downhill rush of a creek. “I hear you do a lot of skinny-dipping. Everyone talks about it, women especially. You going to deny it?”

  “No.”

  She flung the door open. “Well, I don’t have a swimsuit, and I’m going swimming!”

  Stunned, he watched her storm down a well-worn trail.

  It was almost dark when he emerged alone from the trees onto a small bluff, the sudden thunder of water overrunning the forest. He looked down. Maybe forty feet below, the stream cascaded into a frothing pool. Above, all he saw was a thin pewter band of light silhouetting the trees that crested the high ridges. He heard Phineas bark and, again looking down, saw a pale figure scramble onto the rocks below, the shadow of the dog behind it.

  “You coming?” Rachel’s shout was swept away as she disappeared into the water. For a moment in that darkening, dreamlike world, he felt as lost and desolate as he ever had.

  A frigid, convulsive blackness whipped his body when he dived into the pool, numbing him until his lungs began to scream. He had just surfaced, his wild gasps turning to laughter, when a shadow flew out of the water and knocked him backwards. He felt legs slide around his waist and lock, and then he was pulled under.

  “Are you trying to goddamn kill me?” he roared as once again he burst into the night air, flailing wildly.

  From behind, an arm glided around his neck and warm lips slid over his ear. “It’s my pool,” she gasped, then turned him, jammed her mouth against his and drove him under.

  Later he recalled a glimmer of light beckoning way overhead, and finally an exultant cry shouted into the high, dark reaches of the gorge. Smooth stone warmed his knees as the night air tickled his wet body. He clasped her head and, as her breath caught, pushed into her. Once more, he floated to the bottom, only there was no water, just vast heat in a sudden rush of unfathomable quiet.

  He woke into roaring darkness, a warm tongue against his face. “Phineas,” he whispered, hugging the dog, grateful for his reality. Then from the darkness came weeping, the most desolate sound he’d ever heard.

  XV

  Drusilla

  Drusilla found Rachel the next day sprawled face down and naked on a bed that filled most of a tiny room. When she shook her, Rachel groaned, flopped onto her back and dropped an arm across her eyes. The room reeked of sweat and damp sheets and unwashed clothes piled high in a corner.

  Rachel peeked finally. Her eyes moved out of the sunlight streaming in the window and found Dru. Then she yanked the pillow over her head before finally, reluctantly, heaving out of bed and stumbling past her aunt into the kitchen. She shoved her hair back in exasperation and looked Dru’s way but didn’t seem to see her. “There’s no damn air conditioning in this house,” she said. “Mr. Fleming next door, that old letch can just feast his eyes.” She turned her back on her aunt.

  Dru looked around. It always amazed her how tiny Rachel’s house was, a rented bungalow with a small, closetlike bedroom and kitchen, a bathroom and a living room not much bigger than any of the others. When she glanced into the bathroom, she saw an empty gin bottle and a sopping towel on the floor next to the shower. She knew that Rachel, when she was unhappy, liked to sit down in the shower, sometimes for hours, letting the water go cold.

  She shivered looking at it, then went into the living room and stood at the screen door staring out at the street, not seeing anything, just thinking.

  “What time is it?” Rachel asked behind her.

  She turned to find her niece leaning in the doorway to the kitchen, still with nothing on and looking utterly oblivious to the fact. Against her dark hair, her skin looked too pale. Her body verged on being muscular in an athletic way, but it was slim and shapely, too, she thought, and truly beautiful. And she really doesn’t give a damn!

  Rachel waited, scratching one calf with the toes of the other foot.

  “It’s four,” Dru replied. “That’s P.M., honey.”

  Rachel groaned and glanced over her shoulder into the bathroom, then defiantly back at her aunt.

  “You’ve been crying again.” Dru tried to make it sound matter-of-fact, like it was an everyday occurrence and they could talk about it.

  “Some other time, Dru,” Rachel said, and turned back into the kitchen. She walked like someone determined to get through life because that’s what you did, like it was a duty. Turning on the cold water, Rachel reached for a glass, then took a long drink. Suddenly she thrust the glass to one side and plunged her head under the spigot, causing Dru, who had followed her, to smile with something like relief. Or maybe it was hope.

  “Did you kill that entire bottle last night?”

  Rachel pulled her head from under the water, shook her hair violently, then presented her aunt with a big, forced grin. “Can we talk another time, please?”

  “No. Tell me, why do you keep going out with Pemberton?”


  “It wasn’t him.”

  “So what sonuvabitch was it this time?”

  “He was actually patient and quite nice, and has to think I’m a complete Looney Tune.”

  “Who was he?”

  “Just never mind. What brought you over here anyhow?”

  “Lunch, remember? And if he’s such a nice person, why don’t you try telling him how you feel?”

  “What, that every time a man screws me I cry because he’s not David, and it’s the loneliest, blackest feeling in the world, and they might do it to me until I was dead and I don’t suppose it’d change? Great erection therapy.”

  “Rachel, you’ve got to get on with your life.”

  “Tell that to Papa.”

  “Oh.” There was a long moment’s silence. “Now why on earth would you want to take a man up there, of all places?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “It sure does, honey. You going to try to talk to him?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I’m going to sleep some more.”

  “Uh-uh. You don’t need any more sleep, you need food,” Dru said.

  In reply, Rachel stomped off into her bedroom and slammed the door. Dru waited two or three minutes, then found her sitting on the edge of the bed, staring down at her body where sunlight from the window splashed across her thighs.

  “I wish it wasn’t summer anymore, Dru,” Rachel said. “I want it to be over and school going, the kids and everything to worry about and no real time of my own.” Her gaze didn’t move from the sunlit skin and stark black hair of her sex, like it fascinated her. “Ugly, isn’t it?” she said finally, looking up at her aunt, her eyes red. “It’s all ugly. Maybe if I could have done more for him, been better for him somehow, he wouldn’t have wanted to go away, and then he wouldn’t have gotten killed.”

  “I doubt that,” Dru said, sitting on the bed and taking Rachel in her arms.

  Part Three

  XVI

  Eddie

  It was hard to rattle Eddie. But from the moment he and Charlie rounded that last bend and plunged through the flares into the world of the Carvers’ blasted Monte Carlo, he had become uncharacteristically obsessed. Weeks, months later, he would conjure up that car with its shattered windows and all, already derelict somehow, because from the outset to him it was more than what it was: it was an omen. An omen for everything crazy that was coming. If anything, his obsession was a state of amazement verging on outright disbelief at the sequence of events—the collective sequence, by God.

  For instance, if it hadn’t been for the Blackstone County Fair and Richard Skinner burying that boy alive, he doubted Charlie would ever have taken the trip to Pinetown, which to his mind was what changed the course of things for good.

  The Carver case had been delayed so much already—Charlie had checked out leads and done enough investigation to convince anyone except maybe the Carvers he’d done what he could—that if he’d let it go, he might have gotten over it, and political necessity being what it was, he and Pemberton could have made a truce. By then, people were beginning to think maybe Carver and his wife had gotten just a bit dotty about the whole thing, were pushing where it didn’t need pushing, seeing that a lot of time had gone by and everyone seemed okay. Though Martin Pemberton was a well-known sinner, people were ready to forgive him because he’d done surgery on a good number of them over the years. Even without the status of his family, he was an icon, if not a saint.

  Eddie thought he almost had Charlie convinced to drop the case until that day in July when the Carvers came to complain about the third preliminary hearing postponement, after which Charlie appeared more troubled than ever, and in a private way that excluded even Eddie. And if that wasn’t bad enough, Skinner showed up, and all Charlie’s frustrations suddenly had a place to land.

  It began with “The Burial,” as it came to be known, which took place at the county fair. The Damascus Gazette & Reformer only reluctantly reported the event because Harlan Monroe, a great promoter of the advance of Southern civilization and industry, usually avoided such stories like the plague. The fact was, however, no one had ever seen the likes of the crowds attending that so-called funeral and the nearby monkey wrestling. The paper estimated the crowd for The Burial alone at “over 500,” but everybody knew the paper never got anything right. The sheriff’s department’s estimate was well over a thousand, and maybe double that, and the visitors didn’t slacken off day or night for most of a week.

  For Eddie, the whole notion of a fair had been a joke for years—ever since the animals and tractors and pie contests and whatever else made a real fair began to disappear and the chamber of commerce handed it over to the carnies and the strippers and such, and didn’t even bother to hold it in September anymore, the end of the harvest, the way you would a real fair when people still had something to show for their labor, but brought it around in July because the carnies, strippers and such had so many other places to go and people to fleece. But it was still the Blackstone County Fair, and the chamber held its nose, put its hand out and ran to church for absolution on the last Sunday.

  The Burial was like nothing the county had ever seen. Skinner, the man who concocted the event, showed up in an old black Cadillac hearse with huge, upswept fins, no hubcaps and bald tires, the only thing fresh about it being some printing just below the driver’s window:

  THE LIVING DEAD

  Oswena, Tenn.

  Which was why he got the initials L. D., for the Living Dead.

  He found a boy, Julius Lippett, seventeen years old going on five, in sneakers, bib overalls and T-shirt, whose father was a part-time dirt farmer and factory worker and most-of-the-time drunk from up near Asheville. Skinner promised the boy two hundred dollars to stay underground in a pine box for five days, with just a big wooden chimney running up above ground to keep him alive and happy with a supply of air, comic books, Moon Pies, colas and Hardee’s hamburgers. They dug a grave and put a funeral awning over it, and the first night the fair was open Skinner, donning a black suit and top hat, threw a white choir robe over the boy and started to read the service. His words were accompanied by organ music coming from the open rear of his hearse. With smoke swirling out of it and a red light inside, its chrome casket rails all shiny and gleaming, that vehicle looked more like a one-way trip to hell.

  The boy, apparently thoroughly pleased by the huge crowd and his first bare-naked-woman show down the Midway, to which Skinner had treated him as part of the deal, stood in the coffin in that robe, hands folded over his chest, and stared up into the top of the funeral awning. His face was shiny and angelic, like he was already seeing the clouds and harps and whatever else was up there. He was so good, women began to weep, and there was all kinds of amening.

  Then they lowered him into the ground and covered him with dirt before anyone in the sheriff’s department knew much more than rumors. It was hard enough for a person to believe anything he heard coming out of the fair anyhow, much less that they were actually going to bury somebody alive and charge the public two dollars a shot just to talk through that chimney to prove the boy was still down there, the promise, the hook, being Skinner would pay a thousand dollars to anyone who discovered he wasn’t. People went out there day and night—some on foot, others by bicycle, car, motorcycle, truck, taxi, even a horse once, whatever it took—just to pay two dollars to talk down the chimney.

  Eddie, off-duty at the time, decided it was not only the biggest crowd he’d seen at the fair, it was the biggest he’d ever seen period. The cause was more than helped by its next-door neighbor, Red, an orangutan a fellow from Georgia trucked in to wrestle all comers. A hand-painted sign announced,

  Old Red. Meanest of the Mean!

  Don’t let him make a monkey out of you!

  Monkeys were nothing new at the fair, but, that said, Eddie for one had never seen the likes of Red before, and neither, he supposed, had anyone else. “He’d just as soon shit as look at you,” he reported back to Charlie,
who for some reason didn’t jump on the implications.

  One hundred dollars was promised to whomever managed to last three minutes in the ring with the brute. Given the three-dollar admission charged per person for each fight and the several hundred people lining up to see, the math spoke for itself. They were already flying out of the ring when Higby Wardell—better known as “Puma,” who, as well as being the strongest man within a hundred miles, owned a gambling place down in Jessup in the eastern part of the county—volunteered to help lower that Lippett boy’s coffin into the grave next door, then found himself volunteered to fight the monkey. Puma never could say no to anybody, he was so good natured. They put an old-time football helmet on him, but it was too small for his head, so the flaps stuck out like little wings and they had to tie it off with a piece of clothesline. “For safety, son,” the monkey man insisted.

  The first night, Puma lasted about three seconds, coming out of the ring wearing only his brogans and the collar of his T-shirt, the Fruit of the Loom label dangling at his neck, while the monkey trotted around mashing Puma’s overalls on its head. He showed up the next night wearing blue jeans and a trucker’s kidney belt, and then for three more nights running, appearing promptly at eight in the evening to bigger and bigger crowds. Each time, he staggered away looking like he’d just plowed the south forty with his face, but grinning nonetheless. Puma’s battle soon became positively biblical, preachers taking time off from picketing the strippers down the Midway to see if he would defeat the monkey and restore His divine order.

  Eddie discovered all this religion was making the Georgia fellow nervous. It was supposed to be nothing more than a monkey that had no goddamn use for people, beating the crap out of a bunch of bozos too dumb to figure out they couldn’t win, so the man said. Well, maybe that did have something to do with evolution, Eddie thought. Anyway, no one had figured on Puma.

  Charlie stayed away till late the third night, when he had Eddie take him out to the fairgrounds. The crowds had disappeared by the time Eddie guided the silver unmarked Dodge up behind a taxi parked near the funeral awning. An electric light shone down from inside the awning onto the chimney and the brass grill through which people could talk to the “deceased.” A white-haired old man dressed in a suit and carrying a cane was doing just that. A little picket fence, about knee high, surrounded the awning, and a short, swarthy, unshaven man leaned against a lectern beside a gate in the fence. His cheeks deeply chiseled, eyes dark, the man sported a coal-black mustache and long hair yanked back in a ponytail that protruded from beneath a grubby black beret. He reminded Eddie of hippie posters of Che Guevara.