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

by Trey Holt

  Mr. Langford, who had been screaming the whole time he hit my father, over and over and over,“The goddam guilty should be punished! The innocent ones should be protected!” said nothing, made not a sound, after the two men had wrestled him into their arms and Lucky had taken the pistol from his hand.

  Lucky simply stood there and stared at Mr.Langford and shook his head, almost like he couldn’t give voice to words that would wrestle the situation into any kind of understanding. As Mr. Chester held one of James Langford’s arms and Mr. Harvey held the other, my father studied the men in front of him like they were a still picture, as if time or what would come in the next few days could neither alter nor detract from what was.

  Chapter Eight

  She had been waiting there in the dark and cold for me for half an hour the next morning. But she wouldn’t be mad, I knew that. There was something about her, for the first time in my life, that took whatever I offered. My bike’s light flashed quick across the windshield of the old jalopy she drove and then to her face and then fell moot in the merging trees and their mostly naked branches.

  I pulled the Indian into a tree line that was as close to the river as I could get. But as far away from the spot—or at least where I imagined it to be—as I could. In my head, I imagined it to be just down the bank on the last stand of this flat spot of ground, as the river bank was thick with brush and mud as it made its way down into the almost black, muddy water of the Harpeth.

  My anticipation for her was so high I couldn’t feel the cold on my hands and face any longer. I forgot that my feet had long ago lost their feeling. The pounding in my shoulder, ribs and hands from my run-in with Collins had left me. What I had seen with Lucky, Sammy Samuels and James Langford had gone from my memory. In my mind was just Sharon, the vacuum she created. High, round cheek bones, skin that was neither dark nor light, but mostly olive, almost iridescent. Teeth that were a little separated in the front. Lips that were as deep red and perfectly shaped as I had ever seen. I could feel myself growing just thinking about what I imagined her face to be.

  “Hi,”she said when I opened the car door.

  I could feel the wind trying to push it shut as I got in. I rested my hand on the inside door handle and didn’t let the door slam.”Hey,”I said.“How are you, baby?” I leaned across the seat and pressed my lips to hers. She smelled and tasted as good as she always did. Made me grow more. Made me glad I was sitting now.

  “I’m okay,”she said. She smiled the same way I’ll remember if I live to be a hundred and fifty.“How about you?”

  “I’m all right,”I said.“Cold,”I said in my best shivering tone, hoping she wouldn’t notice my pants until it shrank.

  “It is cold,”she said, turning her eyes back out the front windshield, to the stand of trees, the almost darkness they created, directly in front of us. She pulled at the coat that covered her, pushed it up around her neck.

  “Does the heat work in this thing?” I asked. Knowing full well it didn’t at all, or at least very well.

  “It does some,”she said.“Aren’t you warmer than you were on your motorcycle?”

  “Yeah, I guess I am,”I said.

  “I was starting to worry about you,”she said, laying her head on my shoulder.

  “I went down to the jail and Lucky and Sammy Samuels and Jimmy Langford had…they—”But then it seemed not to make one bit of sense in the world to go into it, to report what I had seen. Lucky would be all right, I suspected. As all right as people get, anyway. The same for Jimmy Langford.

  I felt my eyes drifting to the spot where I suspected it had happened. I turned my eyes to the distant spot where Tully and I had almost gone in. Replaced, for a moment, the emptiness with quiet laughter to myself.

  “Lucky took a gun away from a man and threw it in the river,”I told Sharon.

  “He what?” she asked.“When?” she said before I could answer.

  “This mornin’,”I said.“This man had a gun and Lucky took it away from him and walked two hundred feet and threw it in the river behind the jail.” I could hear the same river moving past us now a hundred feet away, its water whispering its secrets as it traveled south.

  “Is he all right?” she asked.

  “Far as I know,”I said.“He didn’t know I was there.”

  “He doesn’t know a lot about what you do, does he?” she said.

  “Why would I tell him?” I asked.“It just gives his ass more ammunition to shell me with.”

  “How’s he doing with all the stuff with the woman?”

  “He’s all right, I guess,”I told her.“He sat up most of the night drunk. That’s why I never got to your house.”

  “That’s all right,”she said.”I had to go home after I got off anyway. Mama went over next door and called me at work.”

  By“went over”I knew she meant to Edna Taylor’s house and the nearest phone. Down the road, on the edge of the“mixed section,”her husband worked for the railroad, let Sharon’s mother use the phone when she needed to.

  “She said she needed me to come home,”she told me.“She said her head was‘swimmin’‘so bad that she couldn’t take care of Suzy. When I got there, Suzy was sitting in the kitchen by herself in the dark. Mama was in the bedroom layin—I mean, lying on the bed with a washrag—wash cloth over her face.”

  I pulled myself close to her, across the ragged seat of the old car. I felt a spring poke me in the ass at about the same time my lips touched hers. I jumped and she laughed.

  “You need a blanket to go over this seat,”I told her.“If you don’t get one, one mornin’you’re gonna have to take me to the hospital with a spring stickin’out of my ass.”

  In the silence following her laughing, I thought of that asshole Collins again, of how I could have really been going to the hospital if Mr. Charles hadn’t gotten in the middle. How anger fueled me into believing I could do anything. And then when it dissipated, how I knew that my judgment had been bad. But I just wanted to forget this morning, forget the stupidity, forget yesterday. Lose myself in the magic and the warmth of her arms, her...

  “I just don’t think I can this morning,”she said. She put her hands on my chest and pushed me back a couple of inches.

  I forced my flashing anger into a shrug of my shoulders.“Why?” I said, trying to sound sympathetic, no matter the cause—knowing as soon as I spoke that I sounded sarcastic.

  “I just don’t feel very good,”she said. She wouldn’t look at me now. Kept her eyes out the front window.

  “What’s wrong?” I said.

  I felt good that I had forced my voice into a more even tone, knowing that being nice was probably my only chance. I noticed tears streaming down her cheeks as she spoke.

  “All she talks about any more in Sheila,”said Sharon.“She called me last night and told me that she’d been into town and seen her. Seen her outside the grocery. I told her that she must have been dreaming. But she swore to it. She’s just like her mama that way. Granny was always sure she was seein’—seeing things she didn’t actually see. Or at least she would have claimed that she saw them. You know what I mean.”

  Finally the bulge in my britches had mostly subsided, its tiny brain having given up hope.“I guess,”I sighed.

  I scanned the river bank, the open field of grass, turned brown from the winter cold. Looked how close Lewisburg Pike ran to the river itself.

  “Did your daddy find out who the woman is yet?” she asked me.

  I knocked out a cigarette, trading my thoughts of one pleasure for another.

  “Naah,”I told her.“All’s he told me was that he thought it might be that woman from the boardin’house.”

  I started to tell her what I had heard Lucky and the other men talking about outside the jail. That they were going to put the body out if it wasn’t her. Then I thought better of it. Remembered how I had seen her at her daddy and sister’s funeral. Unlike Ronnie Langford at Jimmy’s request, both the caskets closed, there side by side. Her
mother too incapacitated to do much of anything. Suzy, nine years old, hanging onto Sharon like she was her mother. For all practical purposes, I guess she was.

  “I hope they find out who she is,”she said.

  In the silence that settled between us, she scooted toward me and laid her head on my shoulder. The impulse arose in me again, but this time I tried to fight it. I knew it would make me feel better, but probably make her feel worse. Like so many people, we had an unspoken trade. I was her emotional prop; she gave me what I needed…or at least wanted.

  “Yeah, me too,”I said.

  I started to tell her in that same silence of how I had been in a fight with Raymond Collins that morning, how I had defended her honor. But I figured this would hurt her, too. It’s my experience that it’s the truest things that make us mad enough to fight, that hurt us the most.

  I stroked her hair as her head rested on my shoulder. Her smell was the best thing I could ever imagine. Her softness. She nuzzled her shoulder into my chest.

  “What’d you do last night?” I asked her.

  “I told you while ago,”she said.“I worked like I always do and then I went home as quick as I could because of Mama.”

  “So you did go home when she asked you to?”

  I checked my cigarette, flicked some ashes in the dashboard ashtray.

  “I got Teresa—you know, the girl who works over in sportswear—to close my register and I left right after they locked the doors.”

  “Was Mr. Smith mad at ya?” I asked.

  “No, he’s a really good boss. He tries to work with me. He knows we’re going through a hard time right now.”

  She had tightened, raised her head up for a few moments. Lowered it again.

  “Prob’bly‘cause he’s got a hard-on for ya,”I told her.“He prob’ly goes back in the stock room and strokes the thing while he’s watching you out the door.”

  She sat up a little and smiled one of those smiles that’s really not one.

  “He’s got a wife and three kids,”she said.

  “All the more reason he prob’ly does what I said,”I told her. I reached over and cranked down the window a couple of inches and threw my mostly smoked cigarette out. Thought how Paul Chester was due to get us some more. How Van had got us hooked up in that situation to begin with. Son of a bitch. Heard Raymond Collins big fucking mouth again. Saw those bulging eyes. Felt my fists wrapped up in his shirt collar.

  “You don’t ever go anywhere with him, do ya?”

  “Mr. Smith?” she said.

  “No!” she said. She returned her hand from my leg to her own lap.

  “Don’t answer like I’m stupid,”I said.“It’s not like you haven’t before.”

  “I haven’t since you got so mad that time. Since you threatened to go talk to him. It’s like I told you when you got mad at me last night—I can’t afford to lose my job. Mama just works at a school cafeteria and doesn’t…. Daddy didn’t have any life insurance. We’re about one check away from not being able to pay for that godforsaken house we live in. I know you and Van thought it was pretty funny. But it’s a roof over our head.”

  It flashed through my head, what Van had said about it that had somehow gotten back to Sharon—that you could spit from one side of it to the other. Proved what an asshole he was. I pushed the thought away, focused on other discontent. Fear.

  “So you haven’t gone anywhere with him?”

  “No, not since he asked me to a couple of months ago when he was having trouble with his wife.”

  Out the front window, the sun was starting to come up on the river, throw its strange light down its surface. Too many colors to say. Overall, one color I couldn’t define or put a word on.

  “You’ll believe anything,”I told her.“Trouble with a wife. Don’t you know that’s what men tell young girls when they want to reel‘em in?” Or at least that’s what Lucky had told me.

  “I just know he never bothered me,”she said.

  “And I guess Van didn’t either, did he?”

  She didn’t answer. I assume she was smart enough by now to know it was one she would always lose. I knew all the details. Both he and she had told me. Him, bragging. Her, when I asked her. Over and over and over again.

  “Huh?”

  “I dated Van,”she said.

  “From what he said there wasn’t much datin’to it.”

  In the beginning, she had told me the details. I had asked for them, wanting to know if what he had said was true. Why she had done it.

  “I didn’t know if you liked me. You wouldn’t come out and say it.”

  “I held your hand over the seat, didn’t I?”

  “Yeah…and you went to my dance with me. Do you remember what a good time we had?”

  Her hand moved up and down my inner thigh. I could feel myself coming alive again. And I didn’t want to.

  “It was all right,”I said.

  “It must have been more than all right,”she said.

  The truth be told, the feeling had been more intoxicating than anything I’d ever known. A dozen times as strong as a drunk at the Willow Plunge with Van and Tully and Chester and that asshole Collins. So captivating it felt like it might take my breath. That it took all my thoughts. Every thought carried with it an image of her face or the smell of her or what it felt like when she touched me. What it had felt like when she had taken my hand and led me to the floor to slow-dance, the band playing Perry Como’s“No Other Love”while she laid her head on my shoulder and wrapped her arms around me. And even though I had never before felt the feeling that developed in me over those few hours, I quickly decided I could never again live without it. As I rolled up in front of their clapboard house on the edge of the“mixed”section of town in the car Lucky had let me borrow that night, I didn’t want to let her out. Of the car or my sight.

  “I had a really good time,”she told me as she leaned toward me across the couch-like seat.

  “I did, too,”I had told her.

  I was on my best behavior. Wore the only suit I had. No cussing. We had been together six hours by this point. Dinner at this restaurant in Nashville, the dance, sitting at a table with Tully and his date. Me, faking—and probably not too well—like I could dance when she talked me into going out onto the gym floor turned dance floor for the night. A ride out through the springtime country after we left the dance. Making out in a church parking lot at the edge of a milky glow thrown by a light on the other side of the parking lot.

  She pressed her lips to mine in the car in front of her house.

  “Won’t your daddy see us?” I had asked her.

  “He goes to bed early.”

  I had begun to notice how she articulated her words so carefully. Tried so hard to speak proper. Before I could think much about it, I’d lost myself in kissing her again. Even that night, if I could have pulled our bodies together as one, I would have. It was as if her broken edges fit my own. The next day it was as if I had no choice but to go to where she worked, to ride my motorcycle down Nashville Highway and wait in the parking lot until she walked out to her car after work.Listening to her breathe as her head lay on my chest. Sitting with her until the night became so quiet and still around us that I felt like a part of it. Like a part of everything that ever was or would be.

  + + +

  So different from Lucky, both in size and temperament, his long frame stretched out to six foot three or four, most of it legs. Everybody else I knew anything of in the Hall family had long torsos, short legs. He walked with his hands in his pockets most of the time. His eyes, downcast. Watching the ground as it moved under him, his old boots as they moved across the earth of Franklin.

  His clothes hung off him where in the last few years he had dropped twenty pounds he still needed. And though Lucky tried to get him to Frank’s on Main at least once every two or three months, his hair always hung across his forehead into his face. At one point, though I couldn’t remember exactly when, Lucky had thought it a good id
ea for him to live with us. But those days had quickly passed. Nevertheless, the pattern had mostly continued.

  Jean had gotent her own goddam bedroom because they moved my crazy-ass uncle upstairs with me. In the first year he lived with us, he began to take me to the river with him, show me“how the water flowed,”he said.“Most people don’t want to know how the water flows,”he told me.

  “Everything comes from a combination of three things: randomness, a planned nature of things and human frailty. You take the ground on which we sit,”he said, pointing to the earth beneath us, smoke rising from the stub of a cigarette in his pinched, yellow fingers.“It’s covered with the blood of your relatives…my relatives. Of the men who came down here to try to straighten our asses out. Why?” he asked.

  “Number one,”he answered his own question,“because of the belief in this country that capitalism is the way, even almost a hundred years ago. The south’s whole economy was based on work that slaves did. The money they could make from having people do your work for free after you bought them. Like we’re all flawed people, it was a flawed philosophy. We’re still sufferin’from it now; prob’ly still will be in a hundred years. Then you take Sherman’s march. Human Frailty, too. Human behavior is always imperfect, done from a limited perspective. He had lived a long, bloody, tiresome war. By the time he made his way through the south, he was one angry son of a bitch, that General William Tecumseh Sherman. Of course, they were good battle plans, to cut off a great deal of the south from itself. Good enough plans that they made Lee rethink what he had to do.”

  He stared into the river for a few moments, its water bubbling quietly, its current moving undetected, silent.