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

by Trey Holt

  I turned down the block to see if they were still in view.

  He grabbed me by the shoulders and snapped my head back toward him.“Don’t let them see you looking! They know you’re my nephew.”

  At this particular moment, I wanted to deny it for all I was worth. His eyes were wild, and seldom blinked. Above blue saucers, tiny bloody rivers cut jagged-like through the irises.

  “Percy, that was just Elmer Murphy and Jack Hooper,”I told him.“Road men…trash men. They know Lucky…know you.”

  “That’s what you think,”he said.

  “I gotta go,”I told him.

  “Suit yourself…watch for that pig though. He’s big. Big tusks, the size of baseball bats. Red eyes. He was there when the goddam Germans massacred every living soul in Oradour-sur-Glane in Haute-Vienne last summer. Do you know what that was?”

  I shook my head.

  “It doesn't matter. What does matter is the son of a bitch is mean. I mean mean.”

  As I watched Percy saunter off toward the river, just a few buildings down, I saw Mr. Shafer arguing with that boy about something. Mr. Shafer finally nodded his head, reached into his pocket and gave the little boy what appeared to be a couple of dollars. As Percy passed them, he spoke something to them also. Probably about the pig or the trash men or whatever the hell else he was talking about, I assumed.

  + + +

  “What’s the goddam pig Percy’s talkin’about all the time?” Lucky asked me.

  I looked at my mother and Jean’s backs as they washed dishes. Watched a gray bank of smoke leave Lucky’s mouth and hover over his head before it started its rise and dissipation.

  “Sir?” I said, trying to turn off the projector flashing images from the night before in my head like I was at the Saturday afternoon picture show.

  “I saw Percy this mornin’walkin’back toward the homeplace…and besides the fact he looked like shit, he said that he’d been at the woods all night hidin’from some goddam pig. He said the damn thing chased him down the railroad tracks and then into the woods. I don’t know…I couldn’t make any sense out of it. It’s really kind’a embarrassin’. I’m glad Mother and Daddy are too far out in the country and too old to know much about it. I think the best thing I can do for him is get him a job.”

  Lucky’s solution for everything. Work the piss out of you.

  It hadn’t done much for me yet except get me mixed up with Ronnie Langford and Fred Burkitt. The one check I had gotten, Lucky had taken me straight to Franklin National Bank with it, made me open a savings account.

  “You look tired today, too. Hell, you look almost worse than Percy,”he said.“You know, he almost looked like he’d been in a fight. He had a big skinned place over his eye…a couple of cuts on his arms…a bruise on his head. He told me that shit again about the pig with the big teeth chasing him through the woods. Finally catching him over in the graveyard. I hope he hadn’t got hisself into any shit I can’t get him out of. Mr. Oscar wouldn’t appreciate that.”

  Lucky was in his last couple of years of being Mr. Oscar Garrett’s lackey. He never wanted to go back to working at the mill just out of town, where he’d met Mr. Oscar to begin with, when he came in to get feed for his cows and chickens.

  He wouldn’t appreciate what had occurred the night before either, I thought. I wondered if the word was out yet. Who knew? Who was telling who at this exact moment? If Ronnie or Fred Burkitt even remembered it? If they’d really cut Vans and my dicks off like they’d told us they’d do if we ever told?

  “Spit on that grave!” Fred Burkitt had yelled as he took me by the shoulders and raised me four feet off the ground. Shook me till it felt like my brain rattled.“Do you hear me? Spit on that goddam Yankee nigger’s grave!”

  Van tried to tell him that there weren’t Yankees or colored people in this cemetery. It was a Confederate Cemetery, for the dead Confederates from the Battle of Franklin. November 30, 1864. Hood’s troops. Right over there at Carnton, they laid the five dead generals out. There’s blood still on the porch.

  He started to squeeze me. I could smell his breath and his body odor as he tightened his bearhug, both foul. He squeezed hard enough that he began to grunt. Ronnie Langford laughed, said it sounded like he was taking a shit. Van started to kick at Burkitt’s shins. He was so drunk he probably wouldn’t have felt if you’d set him on fire.

  “Spit on it, you little dickhead or you’re gonna knock the next one down! With your fuckin’head. Do you hear me, little bastard? Huh?”

  “Just do it!” Van screamed.“He’s gonna kill ya!”

  I would’ve screamed long before if I’d had the breath to do it. At the same time I spat, Van hit Burkitt in the leg with a nearby rock he’d found.

  “Goddam little fucker…broke my leg!” hollered Burkitt as he took the first two steps after he’d dropped me on my shoulder and arm. On the third step, he went down. By the time he arose, Van had another rock, chambered above his shoulder. His voice was trembling as he spoke.

  “If you come toward him again, I’ll knock you in the head with this goddam rock! Do you understand me?”

  Fred Burkitt stared at Van like only a drunk can do. He stumbled a little, staggered, then turned his eyes to Ronnie, then back to me and Van. I had moved far enough away I was certain I’d have four or five steps on him if he started after me again.

  “He spit on the thing, didn’t he? That was all I wanted. He spit on the Yankee nigger’s grave.”

  “I told him there ain’t no Yankee niggers in here,”said Van.

  “Would you shut up!” I said. As is often the case in such situations, the shakes had overtaken me only after the crisis had passed. My hands and my legs trembled so hard that I was certain all three of them could see the movement in the moon light.

  “He did it,”said Van.“Now leave him alone.”

  I am not certain why, at that moment, we did not hightail it…go through the couple of thickets of woods, across the railroad tracks, through the field and back to our houses.

  “I’ll do it, too,”said Fred Burkitt. He cleared his throat and sent a hocker flying at the same grave I’d spat on. Laughed that same strange sound again.

  “Stupid ass,”Ronnie commented.

  “That’s easy for you to say,”said Fred Burkitt.“You’re leavin’tomorrow to go be a Marine. You got a girl. Did I ever tell you you were my best friend?” Then, out of nowhere, he screamed again. Crying, he held his sorrowful face in his thick hands and allowed the grief to pass through him for only a few seconds. Then he arose with another scream and made his way full-steam—or as full-steam as he could in his condition—toward another gravestone.“Goddam Jap!!!” he yelled as he made contact and the stone wavered then toppled, broken at its base. He lay there on top of the stone for a moment, imitating death, his arms sprawled out beside him, his head thrown back. Then he arose and kicked a couple of smaller stones in the next row, representing Mississippi, one of them identifying the number of dead from that state: 424.

  “No…that one was the Jap!” he hollered.“The short one was the Jap. The two big pale ones was Germans. Goddam krauts.”

  As if it were spreading like a communicable disease, Ronnie Langford took aim and ran toward a taller, thinner stone. Made contact with it with his shoulder like he was hitting a dummy in football practice. Over it toppled, its base cracking like a muted fourth of July firecracker. Fred Burkitt knocked two or three smaller ones over with his foot, making like he was kicking a ball. Ronnie followed suit on a few more in that same row. Burkitt slammed a taller, cylindrical-shaped one with his shoulder, breaking two-thirds of it off the top. Ronnie hit another with his foot, one representing the army of Tennessee, 230 dead, pulling its base out of the ground. Burkitt, with a running leap, hit with both his feet near its top, pulling it the rest of the way out of the earth. Spat on it for good measure after he was finished.

  Van and I did not speak. Just stood and watched. One of humanities worst qualities, I have since co
ncluded. With each thing that happens, every new event that transpires, believing that it will get no worse. No one reacting because no one else seems to be. Waiting for someone else.

  One by one, they took running shots at the horizontal stones, using their bodies to bring out of the earth that which had been there eighty years. And one by one, the gravestones toppled like bowling pins…until the last strike caused a scream to come forth from the darkness. Then another. And another. And the laughter to stop. Yes, Van and I had started laughing, too, as the markers of history became tattered remains of sacrifice and someone’s hard work. Then there were no sounds. No crumpling tombstones. No laughing. No screaming. Just silence.

  + + +

  Lucky came back to the table and sat down. Shook his head and rested his face in his hands, his elbows on the table. He had been in Princess Jean’s room when the only telephone in the house rang. Had had to pry himself out of her company so he could take the call.

  “I needed to get ready for church anyway,”Jean called tauntingly as she shut her door.

  “Go ahead and get ready all you want. It won’t make you any easier to look at,”I mumbled under my breath. As the door shut, I realized for the first time how a night with little or no sleep makes you feel the next day. I’d been so tired that I’d gone back to bed after the paper route.

  Van had already concocted his story on the way home: he’d play sick in the morning. And nobody besides me and Fred and Ronnie would ever know he’d been out. And they sure weren’t gonna rat us out because we had so much more on them. He’d crawl back in his window and Scoot and Evelyn would never the be the wiser.

  Lucky breathed in deep, rubbed his face and his forehead with his palms. Let the air come out as he shook his head.“Somebody tore up the goddam graveyard,”he said.

  “What?” said my mother, passing through the edge of the kitchen behind him.

  “Somebody tore up the Confederate graveyard last night. I got to go over there and see how bad the damage is. Miss Helen said Percy come down to her house and told her that the pig did it. That the pig knocked down a bunch of the stones and the pig was tryin’to get him but didn’t. She said he looked about as bad as somebody can. You know, I hate to say it…but when I saw him this mornin’, I knew how bad he looked. But some things is just easier to overlook them. She says she’s got him down there at her house…and he won’t come out…that she just give him a glass of ice tea and let him sit there.”

  “So that was her on the telephone?” my mother asked.

  “No…that was Mr. Oscar. He wants me to go get Percy and then come over to the cemetery. You wanna go with me?” he asked me.

  Although church seldom sounded particularly appealing, it did on this day. At the same time, though, I suspected Lucky would more likely think something strange if I all the sudden had an urge to go.“Yessir,”I told him.

  “Will you drop Jean and me off at church on the way?” my mother asked.

  Lucky moved his head up and down, his hands still covering his face.

  + + +

  Miss Helen Riley’s house was a little brick on Fair Street, a block south of West Main, two blocks north of Franklin Memorial Chapel. As Lucky sat in the driveway, finishing his cigarette and fishing for then hiding again his fifth under the seat, I could see Percy through the bay window, his hand nervously rising and falling from his mouth just like Lucky’s. Sipping his iced tea like it was a Sunday afternoon social, passing the time of day with Miss Helen, who must have just passed the mile marker of forty. Never married, she aspired to be a librarian if she ever finished her correspondent college degree in Nashville. As he gestured with his hands and Lucky stared at the floorboard, I wondered what the hell he was telling her. I wondered why Lucky had left him to wander the town.

  At the door, Miss Helen welcomed us into her living room. The blue saucers under Percy’s eyes had grown and darkened as he must have dropped ten pounds he didn’t really have in the couple of weeks I hadn’t seen him. As Miss Helen asked us to sit and for our drink preference, I tried to remember the last time I had laid eyes on him. I only knew I’d seen him once or twice since he’d claimed the men in the work truck were“one of them,”that the television was a plot so“they”could take over our minds. He had remained scarce, he’d told me, so as to boycott Lucky’s acquisition of a television. It had been easier to avoid than embrace this thing that seemed to be growing like weeds taking over a summer garden.

  And perhaps Lucky wanted most to deny it. Maybe rightly so, he knew that the crux of the responsibility of my uncle would fall directly and squarely on his shoulders. Wanda Jean and Nellie were in the country, where his behavior, for everything else it was, was rendered fairly benign. Lucky’s journey from the mill, to policeman, to the assistant chief had secured him staying in town, by car just ten minutes away; but lifetimes away, too. Lucky knew, as did everyone else, that what Percy did while he was in town would ultimately come home to roost at his home, no one else’s.

  “Hey, Miss Helen,”Lucky said cordially after she had finished trying to make us comfortable.

  “Hey yourself,”she said. She pushed on her hair with her hand, back and front.“I know I probably look awful.”

  “You look fine,”said Lucky.“Don’t she look fine, Henry?”

  I nodded.“Yessir.”

  Percy’s attention was in the far corner of the room, next to a potted plant. Finally, he shifted his eyes toward Lucky with a passing glance, then smiled at me without opening his mouth.

  “Thank ya for callin’,”said Lucky.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,”said Miss Helen.“I’d seen him go up and down Fair Street several times, makin’his way from one tree to another, watchin’cars as they passed.”

  “I was tryin’to keep them from seein’me,”he said.“I already told you that. I assumed you were too smart to be in cahoots with the rest of them. But if you keep sayin’things like that, then I’m going to believe my assumption’s wrong.”

  As Lucky’s silence was prone to indicate, I was afraid anger was brewing in his system, frustration regarding something he couldn’t control or alter. He forced a smile onto his face.“Miss Helen was just nice enough to call us and tell us where you were.”

  Miss Helen sat on the couch, squeezed her hands flat between her knees. Smiled and raised her eye brows. Told Lucky he could smoke in her house if he wanted to. Lucky dug one out of his shirt pocket and lit it.

  “I was afraid she would let them know.”

  “Let who know?” said Miss Helen.

  Percy motioned toward Lucky. Like the motion had been scripted for years, Lucky knocked another cigarette out of the pack, stepped across the room, gave it to him and lit it for him.

  Percy drew deep on the cigarette, tried to keep his hands from shaking by laying one on top of the other on his knees.“If you don’t know who, I don’t believe it’s worth tellin’ya.”

  Lucky laughed a little. Shook his head.

  I wondered how many times he’d been hearing things like this in the last week or two.

  “Lucky told me you hadn’t been feelin’well, hunny,”Miss Helen said.

  “It’s got nothin’to do with me except the fact that I know what they’re set to do.” Percy arose from the chair, paced to the bay window and stared out, everyone’s eyes on his back.

  “You told me he’d been sick, Lucky, but...”

  Lucky nodded.

  “But he didn’t tell ya about the goddam pig, did he?” Percy said without turning.

  “No, hunny, he didn’t,”she said.“Have you got you a pig now?”

  “I’ve got ten tons of heartache now. That’s what I’ve got.”

  Lucky pulled on the cigarette. Knocked the ashes off in an ashtray Miss Helen had handed him“You’ve had that your whole life. And most of it you’ve brought on your damn self.”

  “Tell me about your pig?” said Miss Helen.

  “I can tell you,”said Lucky.“I’ve heard enough about him t
hat I can tell ya;’exactly what he looks like. He’s big…great big, with fiery eyes and long yellow teeth. And he breathes hard through his goddam nose. Runs low to the ground and fast. So fast that can’t nobody get away from him if he don’t want‘em to.”

  “You have seen him,”said Percy, motioning to Lucky for another cigarette as soon as he finished the one in his hand.“Last time I talked to you about it, you told me you’d‘never heard of such a godforsaken thing.’Those were your exact words.”

  Lucky handed me a cigarette to take to him, then with a deep breath and a sigh, rendered the room as quiet as waiting on a prayer at church. After I’d stepped across the way the cigarette and a book of matches, Percy lit it and made a face.“I’m a Chesterfield man myself,”he said.

  “If we get you a job, then maybe you can buy the kind’a cigarettes you want.”

  “You gonna keep my money like you’re keepin’Henry’s?”

  “No…but I’m gonna put my foot in your ass if you don’t straighten up!”

  Percy turned his attention to Miss Helen, who with her robe still on, didn’t appear she was going to make church on time. Much less Sunday School.

  “Do you see the way he talks to me? The real Dillard Hall comes out! It’s the way he’s been my whole life. He thinks Mama and Daddy were too old to raise me right. So he always thought it was his job.”

  “Somebody’s gotta help ya,”said Lucky.“And it sure ain’t gonna be anybody out there at Thompson’s Station.”

  Percy returned to his chair and Lucky took his watch at the window. What we were waiting on, I was unsure.

  “You sure I can’t get you boys somethin’? Some coffee? Ice Tea? Some pound cake? I just made a fresh one yesterday.”

  “I’ll eat a piece of pound cake,”said Percy.“I’ve been so busy tryin’to stay in front of Walter, I bet I haven’t eaten in a coupl’a days.”