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

by Trey Holt

  “We haven't had heat all winter,”she told me.

  “Humh?” I said, trying to rescue my mind from the wandering it had undertaken.

  “We haven't had any heat besides the stove and the fireplace all winter.”

  “Why?”

  “The only money we have coming into the house is my check,”she said.“That and what Bobby makes selling his whiskey. Mama hasn't gone to work in months.”

  “I thought she worked at the elementary school cafeteria.”

  “She did,”she said,“but she left there a month into the school year. Well…I really don't know if she left or of she was fired. She's pretty much just walking around unconscious since Daddy and Sheila. She dreams at night, says Sheila calls her, tells her to come down to HG Hill and get her…that she's waiting outside. This morning, she told me that she had been to HG Hill in the middle of the night because Sheila had called her and asked her to come. She was inside looking for her when she saw that she was outside. Mama said she started screaming for her, hollering, running toward her. But all the lines were backed up and people were standing around in the aisles and she couldn't get to her. By the time she got to the door, Sheila was gone. She woke up screaming her name, woke me up…woke Bobby up. I didn’t even know he was there. I found him standing in the door with daddy's shotgun.”

  I nodded, pulled her close. My other brain had started to think again. Previous to the present few moments, it had been quiet for half an hour…since its desires had been sated.

  “Are you listening?” she asked me.

  “You know I am,”I told her, my hand starting its journey, under her blouse, down across her belly to the elastic on her underwear.

  She took my wrist in her hand. Stopped my hand's descent.“Were you scared walking over here tonight?” she asked.

  “Of what?” I asked, playing stupid.

  “The killer, I guess,”she said.“I mean, when I really get to thinking about it…that somebody killed that woman…did to her what we saw…it makes me think it took somebody that was either really mad or with a special kind of meanness. Not just your run of the mill meanness.”

  “The guys who did it are in jail,”I said sarcastically. I had already filled her in on what Lucky had told me. She didn't believe they did anything to that woman, any more than I did.

  “I mean, just to leave her there…laying…I mean, lying there all sprawled out like that…on that cold, hard December pavement. I just can't imagine what it would take in somebody's heart to do that.”

  “Yeah,”I agreed. But I didn't believe myself. I knew I was lying. I also knew good and fucking well what it felt like to want in your heart to kill somebody. Or at least to hate them bad enough to want to do it. Van, Raymond Collins, Lucky. I had in me what Lucky had, I suspected. In me, it just didn't bubble to the surface so easily or quickly.

  “So, you really don't have heat?” I asked her.

  “No…but I really don't think it's that big of deal. A lot of people lived without heat just a few years ago. I mean, except for what we have. We're going to get it turned back on. Are you forgetting we have an outhouse, too?”

  I shook my head. I'd never used it, but I hadn't forgotten seeing it either. For the moment that we lay there quietly, I tried to imagine her using the thing. In her hose and heels, her dresses, skirts and blouses.

  “We use the Sears and Roebuck catalogue,”she said.

  “Huh?”

  “We use the Sears and Roebuck catalogue to wipe.”

  “To wipe your ass with?”

  “Our asses…and other things.”

  I shook my head again.“I'll have to try that some time.”

  “It's a lot of fun,”she said.

  We lay there, close enough to a window that we could see the December sky, hints of its stars littering the small section in view. My breath rose in front of me, hers as she breathed more slowly. I pulled her tightly to me once more.

  “You never did answer my question,”she said.

  “What?” I said.

  “Are you scared? Were you scared?”

  “Uhuh,”I said.“What's there to be scared of? When it's your time…it's your time.”

  I knew what I had said to be a lie. There was Randomness…The Planned Nature of Things…Human Frailty. Never knowing which was which. When one was going to raise its head, then the other, then the other. All of them biting you in the ass at one time or another. Leaving the scars of their teeth marks for you to forever contemplate.

  “Why'd you walk?”

  “I couldn't sleep,”I told her.“Lucky came upstairs…was botherin' me again. The son of a bitch hasn't been upstairs in months…and now he can't stop himself. He's comin' up there every night.”

  “Maybe he just wants to talk to you,”she said.

  “He just wants to avoid my mother,”I told her.“He's drinkin' more.‘Specially since…that woman. He's just been soused the last coupl'a nights. One of the reporters even noticed it. I don't think it's usually that obvious.”

  “Reporters?”

  “Yeah. From the two Nashville papers and the Review Appeal.”

  “About that woman?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sharon sat up and wrapped her arms around herself, like a chill had found its way to her. She patted and fluffed the back of her hair, trying to knock the flat spot out where we had been laying on the floor.

  “So, did you go right home and go to bed after you left the funeral home?”

  I sat up, too. Nodded.“Tried to. If Lucky had left me alone.” Images of those damn dreams rattled through my head like a freight train.“Or if those dreams had left me alone.”

  “What'd you dream about?”

  “Too much stuff to go into,”I told her. I watched her as she stood, brushed herself off.

  “Does your mother know you're over here?” I asked her.

  “Yeah,”she said.“If she doesn't know where I am, she goes into a panic. Thinks something bad's happened to me. Starts to fight to keep her breath.” She made a couple of slow steps toward the door of the room we were in. What I guessed had been the living room. Stopped before she got to its edge.“Do you want to just come over here in the morning?”

  I felt my eyes tighten around their rims. I tried to fight the feeling off, as I always did. Since I had it so much. I had only let myself come into this place a couple of times before; swore both times I wouldn't come back. The flashes of Percy in the front yard, proclaiming his message in his underwear, socks and shoes. The thought of what Van and Sharon had done in this house. He'd proudly told me, he'd fucked her in every room.“Wore her ass out,”I think was how he put it.“And, man, she knows how to fuck. Somebody's, or maybe a lot of somebody's, been fuckin' her for a long time. She was all over me.”

  “Hunny, do you want to just go to the river? I don't think that we should go back to the high school yet, do you? I know we both go back to school tomorrow, but I don't figure it's safe, do you? I mean, we probably shouldn't be seen there, should we? I thought we could go to the river or come back over here.”

  Standing there in the dark, looking at her silhouette across the living room of this abandoned house, I wanted to cry. To grieve my life. Hers. That woman's who I was beginning to hate. Lucky's. My mother's. Percy's. Everybody's. Even her father and sister's, who I'd only met a couple of times. I wanted with all of me to give life to the feeling that pounded in my chest, that most often came out as anger. I wanted to scream at the top of my fucking lungs, to the heavens so maybe Percy could hear me, that he was at least partly right. That we all just want to be loved. What he was never able to escape his head and the pig long enough to tell me was this: the shit we put ourselves through to get it, or sometimes to keep from getting it, is absolutely amazing.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I’d begun to think that Percy was now like Lucky thought he was when he was alive. Always somewhere when you didn’t want to see him. Like the wind, he seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, his pres
ence known only when he wanted it to be, when his spirit somehow brushed across me. Untouchable, unpredictable. Or maybe I just wanted him back. Wanted to hear him tell another story, hear him laugh that strange, heartfelt laugh.

  The house. The river. The attic. The Carter House. The Confederate Cemetery. I couldn’t get him out of my head. The goddam fruit stand on the way out of town, where he’d held the only job he’d ever had…one Lucky got him because it was across the road from where he shot craps so he could keep up with him. The one that he lost because he started“preaching”in the parking lot during one of his shifts. The jail cells that I’d only seen from the outside—knowing that whatever happened was likely to have happened in one of those three cells. The same ones that Arliss and Jackson now inhabited.

  When he broke in 1953, it was only partially as it had been in 1945, the summer of Percy and Ronnie Langford. The summer when I started the paper route that I wouldn’t stop until I got married. The summer that my sister got her own room, a nicer bed that Lucky bought his favorite girl at Sammy fucking Samuels auction house.

  I was never sure if his serious craziness only showed itself often enough that you would know it was there. Or if in the blink of an eye he could snap, like lightning strikes in a summer thunderstorm, scattering the black sky with jagged light.

  + + +

  “There’s more to it than the main three components. Randomness, Human Frailty and The Planned Nature of Things. If these things, although they are fine ideas, wonderful concepts, were the final word in our existence, we indeed would be in deep shit. Although they are three components that are present in every human event, every human situation, there is one concept—and I shouldn’t even say‘concept’here, because this is just a term, fallible, incomplete language representing a virtually unrepresentable reality—that is greater than these things. And that concept is this:...”

  He was poised on a car, in the parking lot behind the Fourth Avenue Church of Christ, a lot that also ran behind most of the shops on Main Street, where people parked to do their shopping on Saturday. The lot was half-full, maybe fifty cars. When he had first taken to the top of the car, there had been only one or two people, I imagined, but now there were fifteen or twenty. Most of them knew him…that he had acted like this before. Perhaps it hadn’t been noticed so much the first time, the Summer of Ronnie Langford, the summer of the end of the war because in a strange way it had been more discreet because Lucky had willed it so. Everybody had been about to bust being happy the war was over. About to fold and wither like an autumn flower with sadness. That the football star, the one that could have played for the University of Tennessee, had gone never to return. Youth gone. War won. Innocence further tainted. Civilization saved.

  And perhaps it is fair to say he had not been this bad either. The second time the spirit overtook him—his words, not mine—he was worse, I guess. Found himself so deeply in its possession that he could no longer wrest himself free of it.

  Just as I had arrived, he had turned his attention, his wrath on Hood again. Moved to the hood of the car as a symbolic gesture, he would later tell me. Hood, get it, Henry Boy? Get it? His mortal enemy that had lived almost a hundred years before him. He had been explaining how Schofield and his troops passed them as Hood and his men slept. I heard people in the growing crowd murmuring, gladly informing each other who he was.

  He began to address Hoodwith just his shirt off. His britches didn’t come off till he got to his theological principles.

  “It’s November 29th, 1864,”he told them.“Right up here, not five miles down the road. Well, maybe nine or ten,”he smiled.“The Yankees passed by Hood’s men, sleeping within a few hundred yards of the road. Only when they got to Thompson Station did Hood even attempt to bother them. And it wasn’t Hood then; it was Forrest. Creaking wagons, thousands of marching men, they watched the Confederate campfires burn as they passed by in the night.”

  I had a feeling that most people in the crowd had heard this a thousand times, not listening the last nine hundred and ninety-eight or so. It was such common knowledge around Franklin, I imagined, that almost no one thought of its import anymore. He seemed undaunted, there on the hood of what I estimated a forty-eight Plymouth.

  “There was a straggling soldier that evening. He found himself still coming up the Columbia Pike, well behind where most of his fellow troops were. Just before he made his way back to his own regiment, he saw Yankees passing by, heading north toward Franklin. Straight away, he went to Hood and told him. Hood woke up Pen Mason, his adjutant general, and told him to have Cheatham move his division—which, perhaps, he rethought from his earlier decision. Then the son of a bitch rolled over and went back to sleep. And Mason must have, too, because Cheatham said that he never got the order.”

  As I had seen Brother Myron Brown do at the Fourth Avenue Church of Christ many a Sunday, my uncle turned his head from side to side, surveying the attentiveness of his audience. His ribs were more evident than normal there in the springtime, morning sunshine, gleaming from the east off the windshield of the Plymouth. I imagined he had to be cold, the day yet failing to take on its full heat. He turned the intensity of his voice up a notch. Started gesturing with his hands as he spoke.

  “Who, then, my friends, was responsible for this horrible blunder? Was it, in fact, Cheatham? Probably not…but he certainly could have been more painstaking in gathering information concerning the front. Was it Cleburne, another man on whom Hood tried to pin half-hearted blame? Especially after he had laid down his life on the battlefield just up Columbia Pike here. Bate perhaps? Who carried out the distorted orders Hood had given and left Franklin Pike wide open for Schofield and his men to pass through. Forrest? Bate? Brown? No!”

  Uncle Percy bent and took his shoes off one at a time. He touched his socks but then seemed to remember he had a pack of cigarettes there. He produced one and lit it. Offered one to the people in the crowd who were close. No takers.

  “Who then?” he screamed in a voice so shrill it made the same people he had offered a cigarette jump.“In his book—and I will not mention the name here—Hood tells such a self-glorifying story that it shouldn’t even be considered in a serious analysis of the events. He, my friends, John Bell Hood, the commanding general, was responsible. If it had been a great victory rather than an incredible travesty, then his would have been the credit!”

  The crowd had grown to around fifty now. Shoulder to shoulder they stood, gathered around to watch this nut. To make sure this was really Lucky Hall’s brother. The Assistant Police Chief’s brother. I mean, Police Chief’s. How did he get that job anyway? He and Mr. Oscar Garrett were drinking buddies, crap shootin’buddies, didn’t you know that? Word was that they were both tied up with some moonshiners down in Alabama, runnin’whiskey up here through Peytonsville, or Little Texas as it’s mostly called.

  “Some people say Hood was drunk....” he proclaimed. He took the last couple of draws off the cigarette in his hand, picked up one of his shoes and put it out on the sole. Lit another after he had produced the pack once more from his sock. I imagined this would embarrass Lucky as much as him standing on a forty-eight Plymouth behind the Church of Christ, proclaiming his gospel.

  “They infer that from the fact that there had been a raucous party at the Thompson House the night before. Celebrating, they were, the fact that they had Schofield cut off. That he would not reach Thomas and the rest of the troops in Nashville. That this was the turning point of the whole goddam war!”

  He paused with his cigarette for a moment, almost like he was posing for a camera that someone in the growing audience—probably now around a hundred—might have.“Hood was a man in constant pain,”he said.”The stump of his leg hadn’t healed from Chicamauga. One of his arms was useless and hurt all the time. He’d had at least one fall from his horse that day. And, as a result, some believe that he was given laudanum, which produces a state of euphoria—a state in which you believe everything is going to turn out all ri
ght, that with a snap of a finger, the world’s problems and the confusion and despair that accompany them will vanish. Is it possible that this is what happened to Hood and his army?

  “It’s explained best, I think, by an old colored preacher who was a servant at the Thompson house the very night Hood stayed there before the travesty of a battle took place. He said, very simply,‘I tell ya why the Yankees passed by the Rebels in the night. God jus’didn’t want that war to go on no longer.’“

  Again, he paused, this time making his way to the windshield of the car and sitting on its roof. I suspected he loved having an audience. Almost like a play-write doing a one-man show, he was able to give his ideas birth outside his own soul and my ears. Tell himself that these people were listening to him, watching him, not because he was crazy, but because he was smart. Knowing, as I did about him, that if he was not smart, he was nothing. Knowing more and more each day that he, too, was crazy as hell.

  Perhaps Lucky had seen it coming. When he had moved him back in with us. Told his sisters Wanda Jean and Nellie that he saw no other way but that he stay with us all the time. That their parents could no longer care for him. When he had traveled just a little past Thompson’s Station and picked up him and few of his things up and took him back to our house. Because he didn’t want him to go back to that place…that goddam place. It about killed me to know I was the one who was responsible for what happened in‘45, Lucky had told me. Keep him busy, is what Dr. Guppy told me. That’s why I got him a job at the fruit stand down by the river. I knew Lucky would say if he was there. He don’t change. He just gets older and does the same shit.

  But in‘45, it was the shit with the cemetery. A Confederate cemetery, at that. Where we are—not that I’d know about anywhere else—you’ve got two strikes against you if people think you messed with anything to do with the Confederacy (although, ill-fated and wrong, Percy would have said) or the military. Especially in 1945. That was the reason you wanted him to disappear, whether it be in a mental hospital or back to the country past Thompson’s Station. You only felt bad when they started to fry his goddam brain. No, Lucky, he’s changed. It’s just you and I that haven’t.