The Mystery of Beautiful Nell Cropsey

by Bland Simpson

  —Whatdya say, Cale?

  —Boys.

  —Fellow raises hogs an’ hominy, now he’s all right.

  —You heard about the ‘leven cent cotton?

  —Naw, but I heard all I care to about the four cent.

  —Believe if I had me a wife on a cold night like this I’d be gettin on home to her, Cale.

  —Hell, the rate he’s gettin there we liable to find him an’ the hoss an’ buggy all froze to the road in the morning.

  —Be seein you, boys.

  —Be seein you, Cale.

  Cale Parker had stopped to rest his horse, but mostly to jaw and get warm and now, after an hour or more, he was done there, so he drove on toward Mack Fletcher’s store up the road, where he could do it all again.

  The silent witness, the bright waxing Beaver Moon, rose higher in the cold sky. The moment was coming.

  Hell, his wife didn’t care when he got home. So Cale stopped again when he reached Fletcher’s store and went inside, where he stayed another hour.

  —What time is it got to be?

  —Ten, thereabouts.

  —I’d of been home now if I hadn’t of stopped.

  Cale Parker talked another ten or fifteen minutes and then headed on toward town at the same steady gait. He stopped at bridges and muddy places and walked his horse and buggy over them so the thin wheels wouldn’t mire. The hard cold was setting, but the mudholes weren’t frozen yet. It was too damn cold to get stuck.

  Now Cale could put away some liquor, that was no secret. He’d drink and pass out in the buggy and trust his good horse to pull him in that buggy all the way home to where his wife would hear the clanking of the hames and buckles and come outside. The horse, with Cale dead drunk in tow, would have stopped at the gate, waiting. She’d get up and open the gate and let them in and prod her reeking man into the house and bed.

  But Cale Parker swore he wasn’t drinking that night.

  Five miles up the road from Fletcher’s he reached the Cropsey house, Cropsey the potato trucker down from New York with all the young’uns.

  Who was that he saw there?

  A man and a woman about the same height were walking along the side of the road. Maybe a boy and a girl. Medium-size people. Cale noticed heights because he was barely five feet tall. It looked like the man was the size of the woman. He couldn’t see the man’s face. Well, it could of been anybody—he met a lot of people walking on the rivershore road.

  The boys at Fletcher’s store told Cale it was about ten, and he stayed on a bit. If he left at ten or before, Cale Parker missed the moment of Nell Cropsey’s disappearance. But if he left after ten, then he should have been passing the Cropsey house between eleven and quarter past.

  It could have happened either way.

  Then Cale Parker saw another man walking just a lit-tie way behind the couple. Just a little way back. Who was it? Nobody was saying nothing to nobody. There was just the clanking of the hames and buckles and the thin wheels on the hard ground and the wind soughing through the cypress and pines and blowing the clouds across the moon.

  OLLIE CROPSEY

  He was hateful that last day. In the afternoon he came in the kitchen with Let and Carrie, popped me hard on the back, and said sarcastically, You’re a nice girl, and I knew right away he’d overheard us laughing at him. Before he left he rubbed soot across Carrie’s face and my face. I grabbed a corncob and ran it over the stovetop and poked the sooty thing at Jim to pay him back. He ran out the back door, never saying good-bye or anything. I wish to God he had never returned.

  I had rarely seen Nell in such high spirits. Uncle Hen blew a few tunes on the harp while she and I danced our way in to the supper table while Nell sang out,

  Here I go with my lame foot,

  Come on dance with me.

  She still had her toe taped up and bandaged on account of the trouble that corn was giving her.

  Eight or eight-thirty Jim came back. Nell and Carrie sat at the dining room table sewing jackets for their trip. Roy Crawford was there, but he and Jim never spoke. I said hello to Jim twice before he’d even reply.

  Our parents went up to bed soon, and Uncle Hen would’ve too, but Nell pouted and cajoled him to play more songs. When he quit she told him he was stingy with his wind. She couldn’t get enough music.

  Jim sat in a rocker between the corner stove and the door from the dining room to the hallway. After a while, he asked me if there was any water in the pump, and I said I guessed there was a little and handed him a glass. He wouldn’t take it.

  —I might poison it, he said.

  Jim was stiff and cold and gruff all night. He sat in the rocker and every now and again checked his pocket watch. He stared off into space and didn’t pay one whit of attention to our conversation. Nellie and Roy wouldn’t bother with him, and I didn’t feel like it myself.

  —Jim! Carrie said suddenly. What are you smiling about?

  At least Carrie would be a little nice to him. I couldn’t wait for Nell and Carrie to be gone so Jim wouldn’t come around anymore. He was too much to bear like this.

  —Was I smiling? he asked. I didn’t know it.

  She managed to coax him into a conversation and they somehow got to talking about death.

  —I nearly drowned one time, he said. There was a very pleasant sensation in my head. That’s how I want to die.

  The rest of us stopped talking and looked up at Jim and Carrie.

  —I’d want to drown in my favorite pond, she said. Near where we live in New York.

  Since Carrie had spoken, Nell felt free to. She still hadn’t said a word directly to Jim since the night she told him, Pull.

  —Well, I wouldn’t want to drown and have my hair come all out of its crimps, Nell said. I’d want to freeze—that’s about the easiest way to die.

  Jim checked his pocket watch again, and I looked up at the clock. I certainly didn’t want to think about dying or suicide. Carrie started up for bed three times, but Nell pleaded with her so to stay a little longer that each time she came back for a few minutes.

  —Don’t go, Nell said and sang, You’ll miss me when I’m gone! Carrie sat on Nell’s lap and didn’t go upstairs to bed till about quarter to eleven.

  We all stood when Carrie finally left the room, and Roy Crawford chucked Nell under the chin, saying, Nell, you look mighty sweet tonight.

  And I said, As if she didn’t always look so.

  Jim said nothing and sat like the bump on the log he’d been most of the night, until he checked his pocket watch one last time.

  —Eleven o’clock. My mama said I must be in at eleven tonight.

  —My, but you’re getting good, Jim, I said.

  He rolled a cigaret. I remember that, and then he took his hat from the finial of the rocker and walked out into the hall, whereupon he turned and looked back through the door and spoke:

  —Nell, can I see you out here a minute?

  I’ll never forget that moment. He spoke and Nell, not answering, looked at me quizzically. When I die, I pray I meet our Lord, that I might ask Him and learn why He let me nod yes to Nell my beloved sister, and why He let me close the door behind her forever.

  LEN OWENS

  The Ray made it up into the Pasquotank River before the winds dropped off. They were abreast of Newlen Creek about 10:30 when the Captain said to take in the sails, so Len and Sherman set to it.

  Len fired the engine and Captain Bailey said, Well, we’ll probably make five miles an hour on into town. It was still windy, but in gusts now so they couldn’t depend on it. After they made the moorings at the Norfolk and Southern depot wharf, the Captain looked down at his hanging clock in the cabin and said:

  —Half past eleven exactly. Len, I want you to stop to the bar and buy me half a pint. You go along with him, Sherman, and bring it back to me.

  The Captain jumped into the cabin and put water on the stove. He wouldn’t be doing without his hot whiskey on a cold night like this.

  Le
n Owens and Sherman Tillet trotted along with their hands in their pockets, it was that cold. They made Barnes’s bar by the Poindexter Creek bridge in maybe five minutes. No one was there but Barnes and his boy.

  —Bring a bottle with you? Barnes asked.

  Len hadn’t, so Barnes rinsed one out and filled it from a barreltap.

  —Some cigarets, too, Owens said. He took off the silver paper they came in, lit a smoke, and gave one to Sherman along with the bottle. Another five minutes elapsed in the bar before they left.

  Len Owens walked double quick along Poindexter Street, put his cold, cold hands in his pockets, and trotted to the short bridge over Tiber Creek. There was not a soul abroad till he crossed the Charles Creek bridge over to Dry Point, where he saw Jim Wilcox coming at him in the moonlight.

  —Hello, old boy, Jim said to him. Owens had been knowing the ex-sheriff’s boy a fair while. He seemed right genial and at ease in spite of the bitter cold. He rolled a cigaret, and Len had one of his storeboughts.

  —Where you been keeping yourself, Len?

  —Coming and going, three trips a week. Hard winds and bad weather lately. Been to see your girl?

  —Yeah, Jim Wilcox said.

  It was too cold for much of that, so they split off, each heading to his own home. Len Owens bet himself that the bilge-pump water on the deck of the Ray was probably freezing. He called his wife from the front porch of his Morgan Street house four or five times before she woke up and let him in. He’d been out on the water all day, and Lord, he had a bone-deep chill.

  They locked the door and went upstairs, and Len heard the tolling of the courthouse bell as he undressed. Way across the black river, the steam whistle blew at Blades’s shingle mill and the night-force men stopped for midnight lunch.

  A hard winter cold set its grip upon the low tidelands and all the sound country. Men out on boats drank hot whiskey to stay alive, while a waxing moon rose and fell and dark clouds passed by and mill workers cut shingles in the night. Bells and whistles sounded through the brittle cold-snap night that froze that black river to its edges. Nell Cropsey vanished and the moment froze clear through.

  3 The Trial

  W. O. SAUNDERS

  On a cold, sunny Friday morning two days after Christmas 1901, a couple of fishermen out on the Pasquotank saw something dark floating in the river less than a hundred yards away.

  —What’s that? one of them started.

  —A log?

  —A piece of old boat hull?

  They paddled over to where they could get a better look.

  It was a woman’s body, floating face down, her loose tresses waving at length on the river’s surface. They dared not touch her—one of them ran an oar down into the soft ooze of the river bottom to mark the spot, and then they rowed straight in to the sandy beach in front of the house the Cropseys called Seven Pines.

  William Cropsey’s wife, weeping hysterically, met them at the shore.

  Nell Cropsey was found.

  OLLIE CROPSEY

  I heard Mama shriek and run out front and down to the river where the rowboat was making its way in. They found her, they found her, she was screaming.

  Papa put on his heavy coat and went with the two men, who kept apologizing and saying maybe it’s not her, maybe it’s just not. We didn’t touch her, they said—didn’t see her face. It could be anyone, but you’d best come with us, Mister Cropsey.

  It is like a dream that never leaves me.

  Mama is at the edge of the river sobbing Nell, my Nell, and we try to get her back into the house where at least it is warm. Papa climbs into the rowboat, and one of the men tells a little boy to go and fetch the coroner—go and tell Doctor Ike there’s a dead girl in the river. And Papa says nothing. The oarlocks creak against the wood as the boat goes out. We walk Mama slowly back to the house, and I turn to look out on the river as the boat stops by some sort of stake. I can see one of the men—it must be Papa—reaching his arms into the water and taking hold of her and turning her round to see, and I look away.

  Then we are in the house and there is ringing in my ears and a tight hard knot in my breast and I am taking shorter and shorter breaths. I hear voices and see out the window that people are gathering, though I can barely focus on them or on Papa getting out of the boat and walking up to the porch. Then he comes into the living room and says, —It’s Nell.

  I do not awaken from this dream.

  When it turned warm again, I got in the habit of swimming the quarter mile from our house up the river to the wharf at the foot of Main Street. Many is the time I made that swim with a prayer in my heart—Lord, forgive me, for I put her in this black river with a nod.

  TALK

  Word flew through the river town like an indiscreet coupling of magic and wildfire, and hundreds from every walk of life left their tasks and swarmed down by the river that was the lifeblood of their town, the dark river that had at last given up its dead beauty, Nell Cropsey.

  —Who found her?

  —J. D. Stillman—he’ll get a hundred dollars for it.

  —She drowned?

  —Don’t know yet—they’re waiting on the coroner.

  All morning and the rest of the day, men from the swamp country headed for Elizabeth City as the word got around that they’d found Nell Cropsey dead in the Pasquotank River.

  —I never heard of a drowned woman floating face down.

  —Me neither.

  —How’d she look?

  —I heard she was just as good looking as ever. That was a pretty gal, boy.

  —I thought maybe the crabs and fish might of got at her. You know how they do.

  The liquor was flowing that day, and the town’s barrooms were doing land-office business. Crowds spilled out of the saloons, onto street corners, by the wharves. And everywhere they formed, there were threats against the life of Jim Wilcox.

  —Where’s that son of a bitch Wilcox?

  —Deputy Reid’s gone down the county to Newbegun to get him.

  —What about the girl, now, what’d you say?

  —Well, I understood em to say she’s a looker even dead and been in the river all this time.

  —How you know she’s been in the river all this time? Reckon she’s a pure virgin?

  —Don’t know. Waiting on the coroner about that too. They’re supposed to be looking her over down at the Cropsey house. You want to go?

  —Let’s have us another round first.

  The word spread and the liquor flowed and the talk got rougher as the day went on. They were working the mob beast up to its task, the simple duty of getting drunk and coiling a rope and throwing it over a limb and putting Jim Wilcox’s neck in the noose and seeing Judge Lynch’s justice done up proper.

  THE AUTOPSY (MORNING)

  Doctor Ike Fearing drove up in his buggy just as the fishermen were coming back in with William Cropsey. Cropsey had identified his daughter, and they had tied her body to the oar-stob before rowing in again to get the coroner.

  So this was Nell Cropsey, lifeless in the Pasquotank River, after thirty-seven days of anguish, vigil, search, and suspicion. How had she eluded them—all that dragging, cannon firing, the diver, and the electric submarine lantern? She seemed amazingly well preserved, only a bit swollen and her skin slightly tinted from so much time in the dark juniper water.

  The coroner held the rope that was tied to her arm and they towed Nell Cropsey in to shore. At the sandy beach, they pulled her from the water, wrapped her in a sheet, and placed her on a quilt. A few men stepped forward from the swelling crowd and, pulling the quilt taut like a stretcher, carried her up to one of the outbuildings, a windowless barn in back of the house on the west side.

  Doctor Ike sent for a couple more physicians and empaneled a six-man coroner’s jury. About eleven o’clock, they proceeded to conduct the inquest in that crude working room.

  The big barn doors had to be thrown wide open in order for there to be enough light. Chief Dawson and his men form
ed a police line to keep the ever-growing crowd back from the bam. The gawking mob pressed in as close as it could—everyone wanted to see Beautiful Nell Cropsey.

  She lay on a makeshift table with her feet toward the open doors. Except for a missing slipper, her clothing seemed to be in no disarray. There was a small bandage tied around one of her toes, covering the corn that Jim Wilcox had asked about six weeks before. The doctors and the coroner’s jurymen looked for the photographs Wilcox claimed he’d returned at that last meeting, but they found nothing. Then, in short order, they did something that set the crowd on edge.

  They stripped her naked.

  Right in front of two thousand people they stripped her all the way down except for a pair of black stockings. Only those in the first two or three rows could see, but they turned and told and the words cut like a knife through the mob—them boys up front can see every bit of her! There were adolescent boys and plenty of men a good deal older seeing their first naked woman. There were blacks looking on, too, but the white men were too busy staring themselves to care that niggers were getting an eyeful of white womanflesh. All morning and all afternoon, men jostled their way up to the police line and once there—Jesus, you could see everything!

  To all appearances, Doctor Ike said, there were no external injuries. Then he took his scalpel and made a neat vertical incision from just below the breastbone down to the pubic bone. He cut her wide open.

  There was no water in her stomach.

  Her lungs were collapsed and empty, except for a small bit of bloody fluid. Doctor Ike cut off a piece of lung and pressed it between his hands—a froth oozed out. He dropped it in a jar of water and said,

  —It floats.

  Both chambers of her heart were empty.

  The jurymen shifted from foot to foot, uneasy, uncertain. What did it mean? A stenographer took it all down. Doc, what about—?