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

by Trey Holt

  “When’d you start this shit?” Lucky said, holding his cigarette out between us.

  I wanted to tell him the truth. Oh, when I was nine and your brother used to give them to me. But it was just off and on for years. For kicks. For the hell of it. Still not too bad, though. It’s only gotten worse in the last few months. After no more football; you know, you remember that, don’t ya? Seein’me laid out on the field. It’s the only time I can remember your ass cheering for me…when I was playing football, that is. You’d take your hat off and wave it around and scream at the top of your lungs. Almost dance in the stands. Embarrass Mama when she was there with you. Anyway, since then. Since all the shit hit the fan. You remember when that happened, don’t ya? Right about the same time as Percy....

  “I’m almost eighteen,”I told him.

  “What the hell difference does that make?” he asked.

  George Preston watched the words pass back and forth like lobs in a tennis match.

  “I guess it means I’ll be out on my own pretty soon,”I said.

  “Yeah, I guess,”he said.“You might have a hard time supportin’yourself, throwin’papers.” He turned to George Preston, still watching.“You know, we thought he might have a chance to go to college. He had three or four schools lookin’at him last year. That would’a been two from here in the last ten years. Him and Ronnie Langford. But I guess neither worked out.”

  George Preston rolled his eyes toward the ceiling, tilted his head back. Appeared to be searching his memory. Made a sad face. One of the late casualties in World War II. He’d have done anything to get away from his father. Something we had in common. Now his father was crazy as hell. According to those old bags in line to see the dead woman for the umpteenth time, maybe another.

  “Yeah, you didn’t play after that injury, did you?” George Preston asked me.

  I drew in deep on the cigarette, deliberately. Just to get at Lucky.“No sir,”I said.“That was it.”

  “Didn’t you want to play?” he asked me.“Was it that bad that you couldn’t play again? Especially with it being your senior year.”

  His questions reminded me of the judge in my head that had sounded off over and over and over after it first happened. I could remember it starting even as I was laying there on the field, the pain of having my shoulder torn out of the socket and the crowd falling silent. It was like a part of me died and the pressure that went with it was lifted at the same moment.

  “It was pretty bad,”I said.“A couple of ligaments, the rotator cuff, cracked collarbone.”

  “He could’a played again,”said Lucky. The same way he had said it back then until everything else happened. Until that part of him died, too.“Or at least that’s what I thought at the time. In the end, though, it had to be up to him. I guess we all got to live with the decisions we make.”

  Outside George Preston’s office window, under a light by West Main, I could see the cold rain that had been falling most of the day had almost stopped, a fine mist now floating downward on the slow wind. George Preston arose from his desk chair, a nineteenth century Victorian, he’d told me earlier—whatever the hell that might have meant—and made his way to the door, barely cracked. He inched it open a little further and peered briefly out into the hallway.

  “They’re still coming,”he said.“Either that or the ones that have come have never left.”

  “Yeah, the parkin’lot is spillin’over the edges,”said Lucky.“There’s a lot of people still parkin’all up and down West Main. I saw Frank and Jenny Bowman walkin’I know half a mile to get here.”

  Mr. Preston started back toward his desk chair, but then made his way back to the door and peered around its edge. I knew people like Eva Vickers would be here,”he said.“The ones that come to the funeral home as some kind of odd hobby…that are here every time the doors are opened know the people or not. But my God....”

  “I ain’t sure God’s got much to do with this,”said Lucky.

  “Sometimes I wonder what God has to do with anything.” George said, this time shutting the door completely and returning to his desk.“But then others it feels like everything that happens has got something to do with God. With some kind of guidance or something.”

  Planned Nature of Things. Randomness. Human Frailty.

  “Death draws people to itself,”said Lucky, sounding like Percy.“Rest from all the thoughts that swarm through your head, that drive ya day and night. Rest from wonderin’if what you’re doin’s right…or knowin’what you done wasn’t right.”

  George Preston, seeming a bit perturbed that Lucky had stepped on his philosophical property, quickly changed the subject to the more concrete.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  Lucky looked at his Bulova, courtesy of my mother. The nicest thing she had ever given him. Would ever give him, besides herself.“Quarter till six. Almost dinner time.”

  “Maybe that’ll keep people at home for awhile.”

  “I wouldn’t count on it,”said Lucky.“Y’all want me to bring you something when I run home?I’m sure Mary’d be happy to fix you somethin’.”

  “No thank you,”said George Preston.

  “I’m not too hungry either,”I told him.

  “You got your bottle with you?” asked George.

  Does a bear shit in the woods? I thought.

  Lucky reached into his jacket pocket and produced the thing, besides his Lucky’s, he was never without. He unscrewed the cap and wiped the top with his coat sleeve. Handed it to George, who took a drink like it was iced tea.

  “Don’t let Brother Brown down at Fourth Avenue know you’re doin’that,”said Lucky.

  “We all have our secrets, don’t we?” said George, arising, pushing his chair under his desk. Taking another drink, just as big.“That’s one thing I never have understood.”

  “What’s that?” asked Lucky, standing now.

  I stood because they had.

  “They say we’re saved by grace. But then you have to live‘right’too. No living in sin or grace won’t reach you. But they also say we’re all sinners. I just really don’t understand it. It seems like to me it has to be one or the other.” He took another slug, shook his head.

  Lucky wiped the spout when he got the bottle back, took his own swig. Shook his head along with George. George Preston turned his eyes to me, peered into mine the way somebody does when the alcohol first loosens them, or at least they expect it to.

  “Young Hall,”he said,“you make sure and don’t speak word of this to anyone. Do you understand? One report that I was drinking whiskey in my office during this fiasco and I’m afraid people would be highly offended. Not everyone’s as accepting as your father.”

  He took the bottle once more from Lucky and turned up another dose. Offered it to me. Lucky nodded his head when I looked at him. I took in half a mouthful, to show them I could. Almost choked, unsure if it was the whiskey or what George had said about Lucky.

  “You’ve been a good friend to me the last six months,”said my father.“I’m just returnin’what you’ve given me.”

  George nodded and searched through his top desk drawer. He placed a piece of gum in his mouth and offered Lucky and me one. Lucky declined, but I took mine. Thirty seconds later, George had spat his in the waste basket at the side of his desk and held it out for me to follow suit. You can’t chew gum while you’re dealing with bereaved people, he reminded me. Not only is it disrespectful but it gives an impression that you’re flippant. I think that’s the word he used. And no matter what reality is, he told me, people’s perception of it is just as important.

  Chapter Thirteen

  The hall of Franklin Memorial Chapel was still full of people when Lucky left George Preston’s office, without looking at anything but the front door through which he would leave, and George Preston and I exited to return to Celestial Gardens. The reprieve George Preston had hoped the dinner hour would bring had in no way occurred. Conversely, more people seemed to have t
aken this time to make their way to the Chapel, see the woman who had been found dead behind the high school some thirty-six hours before. The circus sideshow.

  Of the hundred and fifty chairs in the visitation room itself, a hundred and twenty-five of them were filled with Franklinite’s asses. There were at least thirty or forty people standing near or around the casket (steel and aluminum, George Preston had assured me earlier, to keep the body from decomposing longer—a way to milk the city for more money, Lucky would tell me later). The line not only wound out into the hallway now, but around the casket itself, so the average person would have two looks as he or she passed.

  The mud the rain had left looked as though it had begun to settle into the forming path on George Preston’s carpet. Three or four feet wide, the swath was as apparent as it was that the woman was dead. I watched his eyes follow the trail of soil around the room until it exited along with the line going out the door of Celestial Gardens. Realizing he was outside his office now, where scowls and the like couldn’t be shown and whiskey could not be drunk, he wiped the contemptuous look from his face and replaced it with a smile.

  He moved close enough to me that I could smell the gum on his breath.“I’m sorry, but I have to go back into the office, Young Hall. I apologize for not helping you very much.” He raised his brow and sniffed a couple of times, pinched at his eyes again.“But I feel like if I stay out here, I might have…have a nervous breakdown.”

  I nodded my head and turnedmy eyes to the floor, amazed that both“adults”in this situation had abandoned me. One for“dinner,”one to keep from having a nervous breakdown. Not looking at anyone, I made my way into Celestial Gardens and grabbed one of the empty metal folding chairs. I folded it open quietly and walked to the door by which everyone was entering and exiting. Strange, I thought, how everyone was coming and going from the same door. Entering. Exiting. And equally as strange how no one looked at the other. People talked over one another’s shoulders, or quietly cast words back over their own. Nevertheless, if their eyes were not on her, they were cast on the dirty carpet or the fancy French wallpaper. Until I found Lucky crawling over the railing on the front porch, I don’t believe that my eyes made contact with the eyes of another human being in Franklin Memorial Chapel either.

  + + +

  “Sons-a-bitches,”Lucky said to himself.“Goddam motherfuckin’sons-a-bitches. I try to do what’s right and this is what I get in return?”

  His eyes had yet to meet mine. And I had yet to look at the other end of the porch, from the iron railing on the west side all the way to the steps that led onto the porch itself. He glanced up at them then lowered his head and tried to make it in through the door. Three more steps and he would run chest to chest into me. He pursed his lips once more, continued his ongoing battle with the air, trying to draw breath from it. Placed his hands on his knees, opened his mouth wider.

  Later I would tell him that I saw them, too. That it was the reason I had come outside, to warn him, to give him heads up. But he probably didn’t believe it and I, too, knew it was a lie. I had come outside to have a cigarette to avoid the people, the situation, inside the building. George Preston had been right: it had turned into a spectacle, a circus. So much so that I found myself as ashamed I was a part of it as I had for having left her where we did the day before.

  When my father was able to regain his steady breath, he reached down and picked up a plate of food he had slid under the wrought iron railing. One of my mother’s white dishes, with wax paper over the top, covered what was our normal fare three or four nights a week. It was the same plate that would drop and splinter into a hundred pieces when the man spoke, scattering chicken and green beans and mashed potatoes across the concrete. Another stain for George Preston to worry about.

  “Police Chief Hall?” one of them called. A medium-built, dark-haired man in his early thirties.“Any changes in the case? Anything new?”

  Lucky finally noticed me as he almost ran into me, looked at the broken plate, the scattered food, but not at the man. Didn’t say a word to him. Kept walking.

  “Dillard Hall?” another man called. This one older, white hair topping his head.

  Lucky took me by the arm, tried to make his way, while pulling me, through the double front doors of the Chapel, kicking the broken glass and, inadvertently, half the food through one door onto the carpet as he managed to get the door open.

  “Chief Hall?” a third one called from behind the other two.“Any breaks in the case?”

  The manner in which Lucky had me, my arm, the one door was not quite big enough for us to pass through quickly. My shoulder hit the door still closed. Lucky eyed the food spilled and now spread across the porch onto the carpet. He tried to reach and scoop most if it with one hand as he attempted to push me through with the other. Mrs. McFadden and Mrs. Vickers, along with three other women were slowly traipsing toward the door. Lucky raised himself right into Mrs. McFadden’s ample bosom, pushed me there, too. From the impact, Lucky’s hat flew backward and then his head and then his short legs, until he was resting on his ass there on the front porch of Franklin Memorial Chapel, the three reporters now circling him as Eva Vickers, Jeannie McFadden and the other women cordially asked if he was okay then passed by and otherwise uneventfully out the double doors.

  “Chief Hall?” the older one said,“we’ve heard you now have two men in custody. Is that true?”

  Lucky looked up at him like if he could have gotten away with it, he would have, in fact, shot the bastard. He felt behind him, his stubby hands running over the concrete and through the mess of food, for his hat. The marks on his head, almost fully fermented by now, looked worse than they had even a couple of hours earlier. Or maybe it was the yellowish light. I remembered what George Preston said about reality and perception, wondering for a moment how bad his head was really hurt, if he needed to go see Dr. Guppy. With the hand free of holding the door open, I tried to reach Lucky and his outstretched hand after he had placed his hat, now decorated with green beans and some mashed potatoes, back on his head.

  “Just let me sit here a minute,”Lucky told me.

  The three men converged around us, so close that Lucky couldn’t have stood by himself if he had wanted to. Lucky took my hand and, with my help, pulled himself up, his shoulder hitting one of them in the chest as he stumbled a couple of steps and sat on one of the benches on each side of the front door.

  “Did you take another negro man into custody, Chief Hall?” the older man asked, the one with a tussle of white hair. He had a pad in his hand, a pen ready for Lucky’s response.

  Lucky appeared, circled there on the bench on which he sat, to have resigned himself to the hard fact he was going to have to hold conversation with them.“Yessir,”he told him.

  “So, were they both involved?” the younger one asked, his pad and pencil poised, too.

  “I ain’t sure that either of them were involved,”said Lucky.

  It sounded like Lucky might have done more than go home for“supper.” It sounded like—and I imagined—that he had been sitting out under the carport, nursing his bottle in the car. Probably the only place in town no one would bother him.

  The other two scribbling, silence was opened for the third, Fred Creason, from our hometown paper, a three-time a week rag called“The Review Appeal.” “Why do you say that, Chief Hall?”

  “Just a hunch I got,”said Lucky.

  Although I had no idea what they were writing, and would not until the day after when I sat in the floor of the paper office and read it, it seemed like they were noting ten words for his every one. As far as I could remember, reporters from the Nashville papers had never been to Franklin to interview him about anything.

  “Then why’d you take them into custody?” the younger one asked. A tag on his shirt read,“Larry Beaman, Nashville Banner.”

  From the look on his face as each question was now hurled, one after another, I imagined the war in his brain waged between what-should-I-
say? and what-shouldn’t-I-say? somehow moderated or impeded by the alcohol it was swimming in. With each inquiry, he looked a little more deeply into the eyes above the mouth that had asked. He took out a cigarette, to calm his nerves, I imagined…for something to do with his hands, which had been picking and wiping at the beans and potatoes remaining on his hat.

  “‘Cause I thought it was the right thing to do,”said Lucky.

  “Why? If I might ask,”the older one said. Herman Garrison, from the Nashville Tennessean.

  I knew what Lucky didn’t want to say. That some good citizen of Franklin—somebody he was probably friends with—would probably try to kill them, just because they could. Because not a jury in the county would convict a white man for killing a black man in Franklin, Tennessee in December of 1953.

  “It’s what we’ve got to go on right now. We’re lookin’into every available lead,”said Lucky.Having now fully recovered his breath and bearings and knocked most of the food from his hat, he arose from the bench and stepped between two of the reporters on his way to the front door once more.

  “What other leads do you have?” Larry Beaman asked. He had positioned himself where Lucky could not pass through the doorway.

  I looked in the door, to see George Preston peering out nervously onto the porch. I figured he was poised to attack the chicken and green beans the moment Lucky and the reporters cleared.

  Lucky’s feet weren’t steady. On his second and third steps from the place where he had stood, they had moved laterally to help him steady himself. He raised his hand casually and propped himself on the wall.