Bottomland: Based on the Murder of Rosa Mary Dean in Franklin, Tennessee

by Trey Holt

  “The police can’t be all over the place,”I told him.

  “What?”

  “The police—they can’t be all over the place. There aren’t but three of them. Well, four including Lucky.”

  I didn’t look at him as I spoke. I couldn’t. I knew that I might actually carry through the impulse of hitting him.

  “Gentle-men, gentle-men,”said Mr. Langley.“It’s time to stop the chatter and engage some English History.”

  Van gave a“sshhh,”his finger up to his mouth.

  I stared at the desk, the kind that had the chair connected to it, made from wood off the ark. I looked at the scribbling, the marks left cut in it by all the ones who had come before me. All the poor sons of bitches that sat here before me, listened to Mr. Langley and other men like him tell them how to become men. Upstanding pillars of our society.

  + + +

  By the time Lucky got home that evening it was past eight o’clock, his supper sitting on the table two hours by then. We had all heard the screen door on the back porch slam shut and Lucky’s boots slide by us across the kitchen floor linoleum. No description. No words except,“What a goddam day.” Then just right to his chair where he lowered himself into it and slid his boots off, each with the other foot. From my seat in the kitchen I heard him inhale a couple of times, breathe the breath out rough through his chest.

  Normally he might offer us a word or two, tell Mama he was going to sit down a minute before he ate supper. But on this night, he said nothing besides his brief, profane description of the day. He just stared at the stucco wall on the southside of the house facing Cleburne Street. He looked like might have worked a week’s worth of hours in a day. I was sure that neither he nor Franklin had ever seen a day like this one.

  By third period at the Academy, I could hear it echoing off the walls of every building I walked into, hear the whispers behind teachers’backs. Hear the jokes made. See the fear in the eyes under the jokes. But men didn’t stop, in my imagination I could hear Dr. Bugg saying that. We wouldn’t be able to just go home, because we had duties to fulfill, responsibilities. At the Academy were future lawyers and judges and politicians. All kinds of power brokers and shit like that.

  Nevertheless, Dr. Bugg’s voice had crept onto the intercom system with five minutes left in English class.“A special assembly,”he called for. We had only had four or five of these in the time I had been there, since ninth grade. By the time everyone assembled in the auditorium, it was almost twenty minutes into fifth period. As they had in the hall earlier in the day, the words swarmed around me. There were even a couple of guys who asked me questions, like I might know something more about it than they did.

  “Hall?” Allen Atheny called from three or four rows behind me.

  “Yeah?” I hollered back at him. I was still trying to use my best, strongest voice. I could feel it shaking down deep in my throat, almost to my chest, every time I spoke.

  “I heard we’re gettin’our asses out of this place cause your old man’s tellin’everybody in Franklin to go home and lock their doors.” He wrapped his arms around himself and pretended to be shivering from fear.

  Just as Mr. Hernando, a Cuban Spanish teacher who was famous for giving demerits, started making his way toward Atheny to slap a couple of demerits on him for his cuss word, Dr. Bugg called everybody’s attention to the front. He always began every assembly with the same words.

  “Now, boys,”he said, his voice coming from the back of his throat and finding its way somehow up through his nose.“We have a very serious subject to talk about. So I need you to listen like your life depends on it. As you might have heard, we’ve had a terrible catastrophe in Franklin over night. A local woman, Miss Mary Ivey, was found behind the high school this morning. Although they don’t know yet because the coroner hasn’t issued his ruling, they think she was—”

  It was as hard for him to speak the word“murdered”as it was for him to acknowledge there was a lower social class.

  I heard Van’s voice behind me three rows. I don’t know who he was telling. Maybe anybody that would listen.“Her fuckin’throat was cut ear to ear. That’s what I heard.”

  Mr. Hernando cut him a warning eye. Van played kiss-ass again. Smiled at Mr. Hernando like he had been saying something sincere to one of his neighbors.

  “....They say two niggras followed her last night and did this terrible thing. Right now, they have one of those men in the custody of the law and they’re trying to find out who the other one is.”

  Everything that happened in any proximity of the Academy was turned into a lesson of morality.

  Dr. Bugg closed:“Of course we don’t know what this woman had done…but Assistant Police Chief Dillard Hall, I mean Police Chief Hall has told everyone to go home, stay home, lock their doors until they had more information on the situation. If one of the niggras that did this was still on the loose, then our town wasn’t safe for anyone. Go home, go straight home, lock your doors and don’t come out!”

  + + +

  There were tires squealing and people shouting back and forth as the parking lot cleared.

  “Hey?” Van yelled at me as I walked across the parking lot toward my Indian.

  I turned but didn’t speak.

  “Chester and me are gonna go down to his daddy’s store and get some beer and go to the Willow Plunge,”he called.“Wanna come?”

  “Nah,”I said, seeing the note stuck to my motorcycle with just a little chewing gum. I knew that if I hadn’t been where I was this morning this would have been a holiday for me too. I would have felt like drinking beer and going to the Willow Plunge. But her face. Her fucking awful face.

  “Suit yourself,”Van said.“You wanna give me a ride? I don’t see Tully. I figured he’d be here.”

  Starting to half-look at the note, I said,“He probably thought they’d keep us.”

  He walked up to me and tried to look at Sharon’s note over my shoulder. I folded it and stuffed it in my pocket. I climbed on the Indian and Van climbed on behind me. Just because Tully wasn’t there.

  Chapter Four

  Even though it was just a ninety second ride from the Academy to our house, it seemed like it took the remainder of the day. Maybe that’s what happens when we’re pulled from our sense of normality, thrown into the unusual. I could feel Van’s hands pressing in on my sides, could feel the brush of his legs against mine. My love and hate for him, both were tremendous.

  The HG Hill grocery store was closed, so was the Texaco Station. The streets were as empty as I’d ever seen them. When Van and I pulled up at his house, Tully was sitting in the front yard, his grandfather hollering at him.“Nobody’s s’posed to be in their yards. Some crazy nigger’s on the loose.”

  “I ain’t scared,”Tully yelled back down the street.

  His grandfather made a face like he was both sorry and glad that he didn’t have any control over Tully. We all lit cigarettes, trying to out-cool each other.

  “Shit, man,”he said,“y’all should’a been at the high school this mornin’. What a scene. Ain’t often that you go to school and never get in the door. They just kept us standin’out there in the schoolyard. Herded us over to a corner and made us stand there like cows. Said the whole fuckin’place was a crime scene.”

  “We didn’t get anything at the Academy but a hard time,”Van said, holding his cigarette down by his side so that his mother might not see how cool he was being.“Fuck the Academy.”

  “It was godawful,”said Tully.“I just got a glimpse of her from a distance, but it was like it wasn’t even real. Like somebody had planted her there play-actin’. I swear I could see the gash in her neck from seventy-five feet away.”

  The more he talked, the sicker my stomach got. Eventually I guess Van noticed that I looked like I might keel over.

  “What’s wrong with you?” he said.

  I couldn’t answer. I was too busy making my way toward the shrubs in the corner of his yard to throw my guts up.
Maybe my body was trying to purge itself of the guilt. Maybe it was just that I hadn’t eaten anything for lunch since the Academy had pushed us all out on the street with the dangerous“niggras.”

  Van laughed like he was watching Milton Berle with Lucky, which he often did because we were the first one on the block to have a television. Another of Lucky’s deals, I assumed. He watched wrestling, boxing, Milton Berle and a few other things on it. When Van was there with us, he laughed loudest at the stuff he knew Lucky would think was the funniest.

  “What a candy ass,”he said.“He just hears Tully describin’it and he gets sick.”

  “Fuck you,”I said from behind the shrubs.

  “Candy ass,”he hollered back.

  I came from behind the shrubs, vomit still on my chin and my shirt and I shoved him.“I’m not a fucking candy ass,”I told him.“We didn’t eat lunch, asshole.”

  He shoved me back. Harder than I had pushed him.“Fuck you too!” he said.

  If Tully hadn’t stepped between us, I was going to do again what I had already done once a few months before.

  “Look, assholes,”he said,“if you all are gonna fight, then both of you are gonna have to whip my ass and neither of you can do that.” He put one hand in my chest and one in Van’s and pushed us three or four feet apart.“It almost made me sick to see it this morning. It probably would’a made anybody sick.”

  For a few seconds, I wondered if Sharon had told about the sun rising on us and the fresh corpse behind Franklin High School. It made me wonder what the note said again. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, brushed at my shirt with my palm. The taste of my stomach and its contents still lay on my lips and tongue.

  For thirty seconds or so, Van and I stood in the corner of his yard and stared through each other with looks that could have left bruises. Tully still between us, we looked around him, over his shoulders.

  “Just let it go,”he said to both of us.“It’s a strange day. You fuckers just need to get over yourselves. You been like this for months.”

  Van picked the cigarette up he had thrown down when our words started. He drew on it, still staring me in the eye, unwilling to be the one to look away first. I laughed his look off.

  “Have you talked to Sharon?” Tully asked.

  “Not since this mornin’,”I said.

  “You wouldn’t have believed it,”said Tully, his brown eyes shimmering like wet beach sand as he spoke.“I guess the first kid got there and then she started screamin’. And then you know it didn’t take two or three minutes until there were people all over the place, hollering their lungs out for the teachers and Mr. Thompson to come. Pretty soon there were fifty people standin’there and then your daddy came…and then his men came.”

  “I heard they arrested that nigger janitor,”Van said.

  “Yeah, that was the biggest part of the scene,”Tully said.“They went in the high school and got him and drug him out in handcuffs. The whole time he was hollerin’that he didn’t do it. That he didn’t have nothin’to do with it. He just kept yellin’that he didn’t see the body because it was dark. That he would’a called the police if he’d seen it.”

  Again, I felt like I was going to be sick.

  “And that was when Sharon started. It was the oddest goddam thing. She just started bawlin’her head off. She cried so hard that Mr. Thompson—you know, he’s the principal—had to come help her to her car so she could go home.”

  “Was she all right?” Van asked. Like he really gave a shit. The impulse to lay him out came over me all over again.

  “Yeah, she seemed all right after she sat in the car for a little while. She seemed to come back to her senses.”

  Tully watched Mr. Shafer come out two doors down and peer up at us to make sure we were still alive. He kept his eyes on him for only a moment then he turned back to us. Van lit another cigarette and smirked at me. It could have been a smile I saw as a smirk. Everything about him was arrogant to me. From his light green eyes to his skinny, lanky body to his peroxided blonde hair. His hair had been that way since early in the spring when we had all used a bottle of peroxide on the beach in Alabama one weekend. Tully had since let his grow out. Lucky had dragged me in the house no more than thirty minutes after we got back and held my head just a few inches over the commode water. Then he had thrown me in his cruiser and driven me down to Frank’s on Main and told him to shave my head. Of course, Van’s parents didn’t do one goddam thing.

  “Your mother’s hollerin’for ya,”Tully said.

  “Huh?” I said back. I had been staring at him, of all things at the crease in his pants. He was immaculate. His khakis were pressed as smooth as a tabletop. His shirt the same. The tee shirt under it was snow-white.

  “Your mama’s callin’ ya,”he said.“She and Jean just came out on the porch. She’s motionin’for you to come over there.”

  “I don’t give a shit,”I said.

  Van laughed. Tully said,“Man, you ought’a treat your mama better.”

  “Henry,”she called.“Henry, come on home. Your father has said that shouldn’t anybody be out on the street.”

  Jean bobbed her head up and down like a puppet.“That’s what he said,”she echoed.

  “Come on,”she said.“Just pull your motorcycle over here under the shed and come on in the house.”

  “You wanna go to the Willow Plunge with me and Chester?” Van asked Tully.“He was s’posed to go down to his old man’s store and get us some beer then come by and pick me up.”

  “Nah,”Tully said.“I guess I ought’a go down there and be with Mr. Shafer.” That’s what he always called him. Not Granddaddy, not Grandfather. But“Mr. Shafer.”

  “Suit yourself,”said Van.“I’m goin’.”

  “When he picks you up?” I said.

  “Yeah,”he said.

  “Times like this, I bet you wish you had a car.”

  + + +

  Lucky didn’t speak to anyone for over an hour after he plopped in his chair. His dinner sat on the table, getting colder and colder until finally my mother had wrapped it in cellophane and put it in the icebox. When she finally told Jean and me we could eat, I shoveled a few bites of mashed potatoes and green beans into my mouth while I listened to Jean go on about what she had seen that day.

  “It was Peggy Williams that came on the body,”she said.“She said it was awful. Of course, I didn’t ever actually see it. But they said it was like your worst nightmare. They couldn’t stop people from gatherin’around to look at it. That’s why they say Mr. Thompson closed the school. So he could just get the crowd to go.”

  Between bites of her roll and sips of ice tea, she told it like Lucky hadn’t been there. She talked just to fucking talk. Like it was just in her nature for her mouth to run like a sewing machine.

  “It was awful, Daddy...” she said. And Lucky listened like he hadn’t been there, like he hadn’t seen the whole thing for himself. Took the energy to turn his head toward the kitchen from his chair in the living room.

  “And this one girl…she just about lost her mind. She just cried and cried and cried. I felt so sorry for the poor thing.”

  Lucky sat and listened to every word she had to say. Or at least he bobbed his head up and down like he was. I grunted when spoken to and my mother said virtually nothing, like usual. Just cleaned up everybody’s plate when they were done. And Lucky sat in his chair and smoked cigarette after cigarette, the same chair that wreaked of his cigarette smoke when he wasn’t there, over which there was a stain on the ceiling that grew darker with each passing month.

  Finally, after Jean had shut her mouth and she and my mother had gone into my parents’bedroom to talk by themselves, Jean stepped into her own room, the one with the window unit air conditioner that kept it frigid in the summer and the baseboard heater that kept it toasty in the winter. She had a four-piece bedroom set—cherry, that Lucky had bought at an auction in downtown Franklin—which included a chest of drawers, a bureau with a mirror so sh
e could look at her ugly puss, a night stand and a nice bed that had box springs. After the auction, when Jean got to move into what had been the“family room,”my mother, always one to try to focus on the positive side of things (another way of lying to yourself, I thought), told me to look at it like I would then have a bigger room and my sister out of my hair.

  As for me, my bedroom was up the stairs in the attic. Fifteen stairs that were akin to climbing the side of the damn house into a room that had to be hotter than August in hell. I had a mattress that sunk down in an old four-poster twin bed, its mate across the room, past where the stairs came up. Afraid that somebody was going to come up behind me and read over my shoulder, I climbed the stairs into hell itself.

  Sweetie,

  I thought maybe they’d let you all out of school. But after this last year, I guess I ought to know the‘fucking Academy,’as you call it, better than that. Anyway, I thought that I would stop by and see you…or at least see your motorcycle. It smells like you, do you know that? Or maybe you smell like it, I’m not sure. Mr. Thompson let us out of school. It was crazy there. Peggy Williams came on that woman and pretty soon everybody was there. They didn’t keep us long after that. Of course, your daddy came and all his men came. But I didn’t utter a word. It was hard, but after I got to thinking about it, I decided that we really weren’t doing anything wrong. She was there when we got there. At least I think she was. They think that that janitor did it. What’s his name, Jackson somebody? Anyway, I guess they think he was going to try to get her into the incinerator and that girl stopped him. But, thinking about it more, how could that be? He was there when we were there. He always is. Do you think he had her in his car or something? Or does he even have a car? I don’t think he does. Anyway, I thought I’d come by and see you before I left for Nashville. Call me at work if you have time. I’m hoping that we get to see each other tonight.