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

by Trey Holt

  Love always and forever,

  Sharon

  And that’s what I did for the next two hours—wait Lucky out so that he might go to sleep so that I could then go out my window in the attic, roll my motorcycle to the end of the driveway and then to the end of Cleburne Street and then ride to see Sharon after she got off work. But Lucky wouldn’t sleep. Every time I came down the stairs and looked around the corner, he was still just sitting there in that chair like he was glued to it. Smoking. One after another. He hadn’t turned on the television all night. Lucky did that like clockwork, the same way he shit, showered and shaved. If he wasn’t at the filling station shooting craps, he was in that chair staring at the television. Finally, I went in and sat down with him.

  “Boy,”he said.

  “Hey Daddy.”

  He stared at the stucco wall, pulling his Lucky Strike to his mouth in rote.

  “Bad day?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “That woman?”

  “You heard?”

  “How could I not?”

  “I heard Bugg finally let you all out.”

  “Yeah, he let us out right before lunch.”

  “I haven’t eat all day,”he told me.“Is your mama in bed?”

  I told him she was.

  “Good,”he said,“she was worried about everything.”

  “Yeah, so was Mr. Shafer. He tried to get Tully in the house when we were out front today.”

  Lucky pulled his bottle of Evan Williams out from the crack in his chair. It was the reason he had asked if Mama was in bed. She knew he nursed a bottle of whiskey most of the day; and he knew she knew. Nevertheless, it was never done in front of her. Denial of such things, I guess, is easier when you don’t have to confront them with your eyes.

  “I guess I ought’a try to go to bed,”he told me.“I’m gonna have to get up before you throw your papers to go down to the jail. I got two deputies down there tonight.” He lit anotherLucky and pulled his bottle from the crack in the chair, took a swig then returned it there.“They think the woman was from over at the Burgess house,”he said.“Ivy…something Ivy. Mary Ivy. Fuckin’Sammy Samuels came by today and told me he saw her out walkin’last night. Just out walkin’in those goddam riding pants she wore. Two niggers followin’her. Walkin’along behind her in the dark as pretty as you please.”

  It was like he was talking to himself. He stared out the window on the door that lead to the porch.

  “After I got that lead, I never got over to the Burgess house to even see if it was that woman. I spent my whole day at the high school trying to keep everybody in line there. Hell, I couldn’t get some of the faculty to quit staring at the body. Couldn’t get them to go home. Much less the damn kids. Never have understood that, like stopping on the highway to see something gruesome after a goddam wreck.”

  I thought about Sharon, the crying jag that she’d never mentioned in her note. I wondered if he was the one who put her in the car.

  “I probably shouldn’t have arrested that janitor,”he said.“But what do you do? A white woman seen walking down the road last night, two niggers following her. She ends up dead this mornin’and the janitor who gets there before everybody else is a nigger. I guess he was going to try to get her into that incinerator before anybody got there. Who knows?”

  He cupped his face in his thick, short hands and rubbed his eyes.“You got that money yet?”

  “Not all of it,”I told him.“I’ll have it with next week’s paycheck.”

  He didn’t even acknowledge I had spoken. He snuffed out the last cigarette he had lighted and opened his bottle again. He didn’t drink this time, though. He simply stared into the almost clear liquid, tinged barely brown.

  “You really don’t think Jackson Mosby did it?” I asked him.

  He kept his eyes on the concoction in the bottle, that mixture that he loved so well. Smoke filtered around his face, the bottle. Covered him in a haze.

  “I don’t know,”he said, drawing on the stub of a cigarette then chewing on the end of one of his fingers. He spat something out of his mouth I couldn’t see.“I doubt it,”he said.“I don’t believe nobody would be so stupid as to drag a body to where they work to burn it. And if he was gonna do that, then why wouldn’t he have done it earlier? When there wasn’t anybody there?”

  Maybe because I was there, I thought.

  “I mean, he knows what time people get there. Hell, he’s been cleanin’that buildin’every schoolday for years.”

  “Yeah,”I agreed.

  “And I tell ya this—I don’t think the woman is from over at the Burgess house. Don’t ask me why I think that but I do. Maybe she just don’t look exactly like her or somethin’. I’ve run that Ivy woman in before for public drunk a coupl’a times. She’d just be runnin’down the street drunk, or wobblin’, as pretty as you please. I’d pull up and ask her what she was doin’and she’d say she was ridin’. Crazyass. She come from a family that had horses or somethin’ …I’ll tell ya that. I’ll get on it in the mornin’.”

  Lucky pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and turned his eyes to me only briefly. As my eyes ran away from his, he laughed to fill the silence. His chest rattled like loose tools in box.

  “And I’ll tell ya this:”he said,“if it’s not that Ivy woman then that means it’s somebody I ain’t seen before. And if it’s somebody I ain’t seen before, then that means that she was from out’a town. And if she was from out’a town there’s probably more to this than anybody believes right now or wants to believe.”

  + + +

  The fact that Lucky arrested Jackson Mosby was, I guess, partly my fault—a lack of courage, you might say—and because he was a nigger. I shouldn’t use that word and don’t now. But I’d be lying if I said we didn’t use it then. Lucky used it. Jean, my sister, used it. I’d like to say I didn’t. But the only one in my family who didn’t use it was my mother. My saintly mother who used the term“colored.” I didn’t know if people in this world are ever really as good, as needless, as my mother acted, or whether it’s just that—an act. Whether the bad in them has been so long denied that even they don’t believe they have it anymore. Maybe people like her deny other people’s bad so long that they convince themselves they don’t have it in them either. I know, though, I have it in me.

  Ten years before, I hadn’t thought one thing about it being wrong to watch Lucky’s friend Sammy Samuels beat the shit out of Arliss Mosby, Jackson’s son. On this particular day, when I had been about ten, Lucky had gotten a call that there was some trouble at Frank’s on Main, where Jackson Mosby had a shoeshine stand…where Arliss worked for him sometimes. Lucky was in the shop, me right behind him, in the time it took him to round the block and park.

  The trouble had just started when we arrived. Evidently, Sammy Samuels had insisted that the shine he had gotten the day before hadn’t lasted, had worn off before he got home to show it off to his wife and kids.

  “Godammit, Frank,”he yelled to the man who owned the barbershop, creatively named“Frank’s Barbershop on Main.” “That little nigger boy didn’t do any kind’a job on my shoes yesterday.”

  “We gave you a shine free, Sammy,”Frank told him. Sammy was standing at the door, making sure everyone walking down Main Street and in the barber shop heard him.

  “Look at my goddam shoes!” Sammy yelled.“Do these look like any shoes that have seen a shine?”

  The shoeshine boy, Arliss, stretched his neck out to take a look at Sammy’s shoes.“Sir, them ain’t the shoes that I polish yesterday.”

  Frank left the head he was working on and walked across the shop to Sammy and Arliss, and now my father and me. He was a small man with the only hair on the top of his head that which he swung over from the part just over his ear.

  “As a matter a fact, sir them ain’t the shoes that he wore in here awhile ago. Them ain’t even the shoes that I shine then.”

  Arliss must have been thirteen, maybe fourteen at the time, and obvi
ously still naive as hell when it came to black-white relations in this town.

  “Sammy, don’t you try to pull that shit on me,”Frank said.

  “If them is the same shoes,“commented Arliss,“they so old that they won’t hold no shine.”

  “What did that goddam nigger say about my shoes?” Sammy said, making sure to avoid the subject that he had already gotten one shoeshine free and now was going for another.

  “He said that if he did shine those shoes yesterday or today that they’re so old that they won’t hold no shine,”Frank laughed. As did his patron and the man in the next chair and the ones waiting. Lucky laughed, too.

  “You just see if I get my shoes shined in here again,”he said.“Or my damn hair cut, you bald son of a bitch. I don’t know why I would’a ever thought a bald man could cut my hair anyway.” A comment which drew about as much laughter as Frank’s last one had.“I’ll go up to the barbershop on Eleventh Avenue and get my hair cut and my shoeshines from now on.”

  “Just don’t take them shoes,”said Frank, taking the apron off his customer and dusting his shoulders with a talcum brush. Another round of laughter spread through the room and made its way out the door to Lucky. Even Arliss and I laughed. I figure, though, that Arliss was a lot like me. He didn’t know what the hell he was laughing at.

  Thirty minutes later Lucky got another call, this time from a Main Street shop keeper that wanted to stay anonymous, that there was a fight taking place behind Frank’s on Main. When we got there, it wasn’t a fight as much as it was that Sammy, a pretty good-sized man,had caught Arliss alone and had knocked him down to the ground and was now systematically kicking the shit out of him with one of the shoes they had commented on. Arliss had been sitting out back drinking a Coca Cola because Frank didn’t let him sit on the bench in the front of his shop when he wasn’t working.

  Lucky pulled up about seventy-five feet from the sight of Arliss scurrying around on the ground while Sammy Samuels’foot found its mark again and again. Arliss’s stomach. His rib cage. His chest. His ass. His balls. Airless crawled across the back parking lot, blood on his hands and knees from where he had hit the gravel, blood streaming from his nose and mouth where Sammy had hit him and kicked him, his little shoeshine kit stowed all over.

  “What‘d you think about that, little pecker head? How them shoes now?”

  I looked at Lucky, sure that he was now going to go handcuff Sammy and throw him in the back of the squad car. But he just sat there. Still seventy-five feet away. Still watching.

  “He’s awright. He’ll get home,”he said.

  And I guess he did. But he never made it back to Frank’s. By the next week, another man had taken Jackson’s son’s place and by the next year, Jackson Mosby had gone to work at the high school as their janitor. Shoeshining, I guess, had been too hard on him. And his son Arliss.

  Chapter Five

  When Van and I had pulled up in front of the house the first night that we picked Sharon and Sheila up, in typical Van-fashion he had told me:“Now when we get these people’s house you’re gonna realize that they’re poor as shit. They ain’t got a pot to piss in.” He cackled.“Really, I guess they got a pot, but they don’t have a bathroom.” Van and I had always had indoor plumbing, didn’t know what it was like to be without it. Later, Sharon would tell me what it was like.“But poor girls fuck like rabbits.”

  “I’m ready,”I’d told him.

  “That’s the only reason I got us dates with these girls,”he said.“Word is that their old man’s been bangin’ ‘em for years.” He laughed that laugh again.“Hell, girls like these, you buy‘em somethin’to eat they’ll be in the backseat with ya in a matter of minutes.”

  In a way I never liked to admit, if nothing else, he was right about their house. It was little more than a shack. Mr. Bishop met us on the front porch. I got a glimpse of Sharon’s mother when she passed by the doorway. Coal black hair like Sharon. Darker skin. She would later tell me her Grandmother was born on a reservation in Oklahoma.

  “Hi ya doin’?” Mr. Bishop offered as he stuck out a calloused hand and I shook it.

  “All right,”I said.“Yessir. Allright.”

  “You boys from BGA, right?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Play football, right?”

  Van chimed in.“Yessir. I play tight end and corner back. Henry here, he plays half back and returns kicks. We’re both s’posed to start this year. Henry…he’s got college potential. Or at least that’s what they say.”

  I nodded then wagged my head back and forth.

  “Never had a chance to play that stuff myself. A’course, in my day it was just startin’to get big.”

  “When was your day, old man?” Van would laugh after we’d let the girls off that night.“When was your day?” and“Wonder why the hell they didn’t do anything? Goddam, we took’em to a nice restaurant. I bet they hadn’t ever eat anywhere that nice before.”

  Sheila said she had never been to Dotson’s. Sharon told her she had too. She reminded her it was right over the river when you came into town.

  “Oh,”Sheila had said.“The one with the fruit stand right there by it.”

  “Yeah, sweetie, that’s the one,”both Sharon and Van had said at the same time. Which brought a laugh.

  Van’s daddy, Scoot, had lent him the car for the night. For the most part, Scoot was a scared-faced, pale man who looked older than his years. I had been told that’s why he got the name, always seeming like he might take off running from everything. Several times, I had witnessed with my own eyes Van driving his daddy’s car with his daddy in the front seat, and intentionally speeding up to the fourway-stop at the corner of Cleburne and Adams, and then throwing on the brakes at the last second. I had then seen Scoot there under those Oaks and Elms grabbing the dash like a maniac as Van locked the brakes and laughed.

  It was easy for us to hold Scoot in disdain. He was only kin to us because my mother’s siter had married him. His blood did not run in our veins. Nor ours in his.

  + + +

  At first glance, it was hard for me to believe that my Uncle Percy was my father’s brother. A thin, tall man, his hair hung around his face, often shading his eyes. He was well over six feet, the only member of my family who was so. My father, as I am, was five foot eight on a good day.

  At first I acted like I didn’t see him. I ignored him as my father had been doing for years. On the bench, it looked like his legs went on forever. His dirty boots, still wet from his walk along the river, were crossed at the ankles. He trimmed an apple with a pocket knife my father had given him.

  Van grabbed my shoulder and pulled me to a stop.“Hey, look, it’s your uncle. Hey, Percy. Hey, hi’ya doin’?”

  My uncle threw up his hand at Van but didn’t look at him. One of those early spring nights that the sky begins to last longer, it shone in colors evident no other time of the year. My uncle’s movements were highlighted in the strange light, the sky mixed with the early glow of a light over the parking lot, as he shuffled toward us.

  “How are y’all?”

  “Pretty good,”I told him.

  “Is Dillard home tonight?”

  “Far as I know,”I told him.

  He acknowledged Sheila and Sharon with a nod. Still didn’t look at Van.

  “Don’t tell him you saw me–been studyin’the river,”he said all in one breath.

  “What you been studyin’?” Van asked. I was sure he just wanted something to talk about once we got back in the car with the girls. Both Sharon and Sheila had moved back a couple of steps from him. I guess I might have been frightened, too, if I hadn’t known him.

  “I been studin’the goddam river,”he told Van,“just like I always do. If you had any brains, you’d study it too.”

  Van leaned toward Sharon, took her hand playfully, and whispered loud enough for me to hear.“He means if I was crazy like him.”

  I wasn’t sure if my uncle had failed to hear him or he was simply used
to hearing things like that.

  “What’ve you been studyin’about it?” Van said.

  I had enough sense to know that I should route this conversation elsewhere. In times like this, though, my tongue was the last member of my body that knew what to do.

  “I been studyin’how it goes in and out of town. I find it very odd that such a thing like that could affect the whole history of a state.. A country. Not only that…but affect so many lives. And those men would have had children and their children would have had children and so on and so on. Do you get what I mean?”

  “I think so,”said Van.“I think I get it.”

  My uncle’s eyes were cast toward the river again, its foliage leading to the edge.

  Van looked at the girls and winked.“I’m not sure though.”

  He craned his neck then stretched his shoulders, like his head might be hurting.“I’m talking about how something as simple as the direction that time cut a river might have in fact determined who was going to die in this battle and who wasn’t.”

  “What battle?” I heard Sheila ask Sharon.

  “Some things are preordained from the beginning of time. That’s what I’m trying to say. I know there are people who will say that that’s bullshit—’scuse my language, fair ladies—but they simply haven’t gone deep enough in the metaphysical nature of our existence.”

  “Percy, you’re a smart son of a bitch,”Van told him while he slapped him on the back.

  Percy didn’t crack a smile. Still never looked at him.

  Van looked the sky over, beginning to become purple at its edges.“Need a ride?”