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

by Trey Holt

  “And Hood was a doped-up bastard. On that laudanum, they think. With a stub for a leg and a mangled, useless arm. Chickamauga had about finished him off anyway.”

  Uncle Percy reached to pull his cigarette to his mouth, but then realized he hadn’t one. Hiking up one britches’leg, he pulled them out of his sock. He knocked one out of the pack with his long, thin fingers and raised it to his lips.

  “So you had Sherman’s anger, Lee’s knowledge that he was at the edge of the bottomless chasm of defeat and Hood’s basic frailty, fueled by the damn dope he was on. All of it caused by a flawed system to begin with. They all had their plans, too. Sherman’s had been completed. Lee’s was just a hope, peterin’out with every confederate that fell. And Hood’s was just crazy as hell. I guess he was, too.

  “Hood came up through Alabama, stopped only long enough to fight a skirmish. Then crossed the Tennessee River and the state line. Up through Pulaski to Columbia, he went. Tryin’to keep Thomas and Schofield’s men from getting to Nashville. On the way through, they stopped to camp. Patrick Cleburne, the man the street you live on was named after, said as he looked at a church in the grove they camped by—‘If I should happen to die in battle, I should like nothing better than to be buried here.’A week later, he was, along with Granberry and Strahl and so many others. Go look at that cemetery some time. Read the stones of the dead who still walk among us because they can’t rest.

  “And this very river played a part in it—the Harpeth! A river that was cut in this ground from the very beginnings of time. Franklin was built, facing south in the big bend in this river. Either army that made it through had to cross the river. When Hood had left Georgia and come up through Alabama, he was ahead of the Federals. For him to be able to pull off the plan that Lee and he had made, he had to get to Nashville before they did. But first he had to do the same at Franklin.”

  “But what did Hood do? So sure that he had everything perfect, he stopped outside of Franklin and bedded down. Now, it wasn’t like his troops didn’t need it. It was late November, cold…. a lot of them didn’t have shoes or coats. But they slept good because they had pushed so hard from Georgia. They laid down on that cold ground south of Franklin and huddled under their blankets and slept.”

  Chapter Nine

  From the parking lot to the shrubs to the scrubbed concrete front porch, Franklin Memorial Chapel was pristine. The white paint on the brick and clapboard of its facade was redone every spring. The black, iron rails around the front porch re-blacked every season as well. Inside, double front doors led to a floor that was finely carpeted and stretched itself out as a kind of wide hall or lobby. Initially, off it was a room on each side—both used by the families to find peace from visitation or to argue about something that was or was not going to be put in the service. Behind these rooms, on both sides of the hall, was seventy-five feet of white walls. The doors to the visitation rooms these walls hid were a good hundred feet from the front door. One on each side:“Celestial Gardens”and“The Zion Room.”

  The man who ran“The Chapel”as it was referred to by most people around town, George Preston, was dark-haired and pale man and lived alone above the funeral home. Ever since I could remember, it had been rumored that he was“queer as a three dollar bill.” His hands and handshake softer than his quiet voice, he’d make eye-contact for only a few seconds before he turned his gaze politely to the ground. His hand would then usually find its way to your shoulder and comfort you. A well-respected Church of Christ deacon, and I reckon, a closet homosexual who had moved several“poor boys”in with him and out over the years, he just about had a corner on the market of death in Franklin. Franklin, Spring Hill, and part of Brentwood for that matter.

  With both the Academy and Franklin out that day, I had gone with Lucky as he talked to Mr. Preston about what he needed him to do. I swear, it looked like he hadn’t seen sunshine since 1949.

  “Absolutely not,”he told Lucky.“I cannot do that. It would make a mockery of death. A mockery of my place of business. This is not a showroom. It’s a place where loved ones are laid to rest.”

  “I know that’s what it says on your business cards and in the phone book, George, but that doesn’t meet our particular need now. Evidently, this woman didn’t have any‘loved ones.’Or if she did we don’t know who in the hell they were. What we do know though, is that somebody slit her throat and was prob’ly gonna throw her in the incinerator, but didn’t quite get her there. So, from that we can figure out that somebody, at least for a few seconds, hated her.”

  “It’s so callous,”he told Lucky. I noticed his milky white hands were shaking as he tried his best to find a cigarette. Lucky reached in his shirt pocket and knocked one out of the pack. He held it out then touched the end of it with a match when Mr. Preston took it.

  “It’s not callous,”Lucky told him, lighting his own cigarette.“It’s doin’somethin’nice for the woman. That’s all.”

  “If I were to do this, how would you want her to look? Dressed nicely? The wound concealed as well as possible? New clothes? These services aren’t cheap. And they’re not easy. Especially since Michael moved away.”

  Michael had been Mr. Preston’s last“roommate.” The last poor boy he’d helped off the street. He’d been gone a couple of months and the next“case”had yet to come along.

  “You know,”he said,“that Michael moved back to Nashville where I found him. He’s working in an antique store there. It’s so hard to keep good help.”

  “I’ll get ya good money to do it,”Lucky told him.“You write me out an estimate and send it over and maybe we can get movin’on this. I’d like to have her out later today.”

  Mr. Preston had hedged a couple of more times, before Lucky had to indirectly remind him that he or one of his men had found him“loitering”several times on county roads that were on the outskirts of city property, with his helpers. How many times he had let his“helpers”slide on things he should have arrested them for, vagrancy, public drunk, DWI, and other things unmentionable. It was true; I knew Lucky hardly ever arrested anybody for anything.

  Mr. Preston had agreed to a more than fair price, Lucky assured me as we pulled out of the Chapel’s parking lot.

  + + +

  My mother was in the kitchen, stirring chili on the stove top. Turning over grilled cheese sandwiches in a pan on the next eye. Lucky had dropped me off after our distinguished conversation with Mr. Preston, told me I should go home and watch out for Mama and Jean until he came back, noon as usual, he guessed. As usual as well, when I had walked into the house, Jean had been whining about something.

  “I feel safe with Daddy watching over the town,”she told my mother, watching her work at the stove, not helping.“But he can’t be a hundred places at once. He just can’t. And I don’t trust his men, not a one of them. You know how hard he always says it is to find good help.”

  Something George Preston and Lucky had in common, I thought. I watched her mouth rattle out sounds as she popped her gum in the infrequent pauses.

  “I mean, I know that Daddy would come runnin’if he thought anything was going to happen to us, but what if he was all the way on the other side of town? I know he’s going to be off hunting for that nigger boy. Not that I don’t love being with you, Mama, but this is just before my last Christmas in high school.”

  If you hadn’t failed the seventh grade, I thought, your ass would be out by now. Would have graduated the year before like you were supposed to.

  “It’ll be fine and don’t say that word,”my mother told her.“Your daddy will take care of everything. He always does.”

  As I sat at the kitchen table with Jean, I was reminded, when it came to Lucky, both she and my mother lived in the same world. An imaginary one. My mother, it seemed, had worked night and day trying to help her. But all she had wanted to do was talk about the people she was in class with. Finally, they thought it might be better to have her repeat the grade again, so technically she wouldn’t flunk
.I wondered if he’d take care of it like he had when I’d actually spoken the words about Jean I had thought a few moments before. That she had flunked the seventh grade…was just overwhelmed by that tough seventh grade math. On the bad side of his whisky-drinking, he’d punched me in the face and knocked me over backward out a chair and then cursed me until I returned to the table to play my hand of Rook.

  + + +

  “What a goddam day,”Lucky protested.

  “Daddy!” said Jean. Fucking goody-goody.

  Lucky shuffled to an ashtray on the kitchen counter, and knocked the ashes off the end of his butt of a cigarette. He took another deep draw, rattled out a couple of coughs and smothered the life out of the thing.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother asked.

  He walked to the stove and pulled the top off a pot, smelled its innards.“Everybody in town’s up in arms about this woman. Everywhere I go, it’s all anybody wants to talk about. They keep asking me who it is. And I keep sayin’that I don’t know.”

  “Is it the Ivy woman?” I asked him.

  “Nope,”he said.“It ain’t the Ivy woman.”

  “How do you know?” my mother asked.

  “I know because I talked to Miss Mary Ivy herself at the Burgess house. She was right there, pretty as you please, when Johnny Forrest and I walked in. Sittin’on the couch, smokin’a cigarette there in the main room of the place. Louis Woodson and Robert Smith was just sittin’there, too.”

  “Did Miss Ivy have her invisible horse in there with her?” Jean asked.

  Lucky looked in the pot again and my mother started pulling bowls out of the cabinet.

  “Nah,”said Lucky.“She said he was tied out back.”

  Just as Lucky predicted the night before, after the moment or so it took for Miss Ivy’s continued breathing to sink in, my mother and Jean came to the next conclusion.

  Jean gasped.“Daddy,”she said,“what does it mean?”

  “It means, Jeannie, that we don’t know who she is or why she was here. Or who the hell killed her, or why.”

  “Have you caught the other nigger yet?” Jean asked.

  “Colored man,”my mother reminded her.

  “Then…colored man. Have you caught him?”

  Lucky watched my mother begin to set the bowls of chili on the table in our kitchen—where we always ate breakfast and lunch unless it was a holiday—and propped himself against the counter. He took off his hat for the first time since he had been inside. I hadn’t asked him and he hadn’t volunteered the information.

  “Daddy, what happened to your head?” Jean asked.

  My mother, who no longer seemed excited about anything to do with Lucky, walked to him and examined the marks illuminated by the sunlight making its way in the kitchen window. One was the size of a half-dollar, raised and still crusty with blood just above his temple. The other two were smaller, one just below his hairline and the other an inch or so into his thinning hair.

  “A goddam shelf fell over on me down at the office,”he said.“We was back there, lookin’through some old evidence and the damn thing just come over. City won’t give us enough money to do anything right.”

  “Did it hurt?” Jean asked.

  No, I dumbass, holes knocked in your head feel good. Oh, but I forgot, you’ve never been on the wrong end of somebody knocking the shit out of you.

  “Oh, a little. But it’s fine now.”

  After my mother set the food out and disappeared into the next room, she came back with a wash rag and some peroxide. She daubed at the marks, especially the larger one, until she had erased most of the dried blood from Lucky’s head and scalp. Then she placed a light kiss on his head and sat down at the table with the rest of us.

  As is often the case, the first few bites of everyone’s lunch were taken in silence. Spoons rattling against the sides of bowls, the ruffle of shirt sleeves touching edges of bodies or the table. The almost silent parting of lips as they opened and food slipped through. Napkins rising from laps, wiping away what had not gone in. Returning to laps in the same civilized manner.

  “She goes out at two,”said Lucky. He spooned in another bite of chili, I guess, waiting on a response.“That’s the earliest George Preston said he could put her out. He’s charging the city double what he’d usually charge. He says the cost it’ll be for him in—what’d he call it?—public relations, will‘far exceed what I bring in for doing this one thing.’”His nose remained upturned a little, his upper lip the same, trying to imitate the way George Preston spoke.“He says the next dozen or so people who have a funeral for a family member’ll hesitate to bring them there…think about maybe goin’to Nashville or Columbia. He says the next four or five funerals ever’body goes to there, they’ll just see her.”

  For a few seconds, my sister stopped the steady progression of shoveling into her mouth. Her face dropped in that same kind of pout I’d seen a thousand times more than I wanted to. Her eyes turned glassy.“Does she look terrible, Daddy?”

  “She don’t look like she’s been to a party,”Lucky answered. He spooned the last chili into his mouth, chased it with the last two small bites of his grilled cheese sandwich.

  “You want some more?” my mother asked him.

  “No thank you,”he told her. He knocked around in his shirt pocket until he came out with his Lucky’s and a book of matches.“Do you know where my other cigarettes are, Mary?” he asked my mother.“God knows I don’t wanna have to go see Paul Chester again today.”

  I heard the drawer shut on the bureau in their bedroom. Watched my mother as she walked back into the room, laid two packs next to Lucky’s arm on the table.

  I cut my eyes to Jean, who had been remarkably quiet for going on a record amount of time. Her eyes were far away, scared.

  “What does she look like?” Jean asked.

  Lucky drew what looked like half the cigarette in one breath and blew out a great bank of grey smoke.“You mean her physical appearance or what she looks like after what was done to her?”

  Tears the size of small marbles hung in the corner of my sister’s eyes. She tried to speak but her breath caught her words, slowed them in her throat.“I...don’t...know.”

  Lucky picked one for her.“She’s...I’d say…early, mid-twenties. Dark hair. Average build. Pretty normal lookin’, I guess.”

  Partly out of a desire to be mean to Jean and partly out of the suspicion that I, in fact, had information that would get everybody’s undivided attention, I contemplated telling what I knew. Describing her as plainly as I could. Taking Lucky’s wrath, my mother’s disappointment, Jean’s scorn for being behind the high school with Sharon.

  Jean turned her eyes to the kitchen window, then out the back door and through the windows on the back porch.

  Lucky stood, stretched himself out like an old dog.“I’m goin’to talk to Arliss Mosby in a few minutes. I talked to him this mornin’. Talked to his mama, too. He had a’alibi with his mother and his sister. Claimed his daddy was there, too. Neighbors on both sides claim they didn’t see nobody leave or come. His mama says his daddy was there all night, didn’t leave until when he had to go to school the next mornin’. I reckon’it’d be hard for either one of‘em to have slit a woman’s throat and then take her to the high school if they was with the two women of the house.”

  I replayed in my head seeing Jackson Mosby appearing at the door the morning before, seeing the lights go on the same way, the same time, they did every morning behind Franklin High School. Tried to imagine if he’d had time to dump a body by the incinerator.

  Like Lucky could read my mind—which, sometimes, I was sure he could—he said,“Them first kids that found the body didn’t call Miss Helen until around 7:00. Jackson Mosby, the best I can figure, comes to work between 5:30 and 6 every mornin’. Closer to 5:30. So, if it was him…or him and his boy, then it just don’t make no sense that they would have brung her up there and dropped her by the damn incinerator at 5:30 in the mornin’. It would stand to
reason that he either got there later…or somebody else dropped the body there. There ain’t no other way around it.”

  I guess I had been around Lucky long enough now—had, I hate to admit, made his thinking enough my own—that I was able to conclude what he had not. Jackson Mosby could have been there when he usually was and saw someone so he dropped the body. But as soon as the thought passed through my feeble brain, I knew, too, that Jackson Mosby knew the time I...we...got there every morning. He was as accustom to us, as I was him.

  Lucky turned his thick wrist over, palm down, looked at the gold Bulova watch my mother had given him a few Christmas’s before. He rubbed his face with his hands, picked his hat up off the counter. I looked at the clock that hung on the kitchen wall over the table. It was one o’clock.

  “Why you goin’to talk to that nigger again?” Jean said.

  “Colored man,”my mother reminded her again.

  “I’m goin’to see that Arliss Mosby again‘cause I guess I’m gonna put him in jail,”said Lucky. He lit another Lucky and made his way to the kitchen window. Looked at the mammoth oak in our neighbor’s, the Smithson’s, yard. He flicked his ashes in the sink, ran some tap water over them.

  Watching his back, I thought of how odd it was that he had discussed this thing that had happened with us. In the history of his work on the police force, I know I could have tallied the cases he had spoken about on both hands.

  For a few moments, I played out all the possible options of the situation in my head. I’d tell him what I knew and he’d beat the shit out of me. For knowing and not saying anything. For my silence making me culpable in the crime, even making it appear like Sharon and I dumped the body. Him never letting me out of the house again except to work. Not getting to see Sharon again; telling him that I was going to see her, no matter what he said. Standing up to his ass. I was getting to the point where I thought I could take him, even though he had me by fifty pounds that middle age had dumped on him. The fact that if his son was the one to come forward and give information that acquitted this“colored man”in the court of popular opinion, how it could be construed as an inside job, Lucky getting me to say what he wanted. After all, Lucky was good at things like this, good at the deals under the table.