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

by Trey Holt

  “You want some, hunny?” she asked me.

  I looked at Lucky. He nodded then shook his head when she asked him if he wanted any.

  “Yes ma’am,”I told her.“If you’re gonna fix some for Uncle Percy.”

  Miss Helen made herself busy, disappeared into the kitchen. I imagined her drawing the cake out of one of cake plates with a lid on it, slicing it with a big, long knife and then placing the slices on small plates…just like my mother would have done. Sure enough, she brought two small, white plates through the doorway in a matter of seconds, handed one to me, one to Percy. Asked Lucky again if he was sure he didn’t want any.

  “No thank ya,’he said, standing.“We’re gonna have to be goin’. When’d you say Mr. Oscar was gonna meet us over at the cemetery?”

  “When I talked to him, he said he was goin’back over there in a half hour or so. He said he hated to leave it for very long. But he didn’t figure anybody’d bother it on Sunday mornin’. Anyway…he said he’d be over there when you got there. I’m figurin’he’s there now.”

  “I don’t figure he thought anybody’d bother it on Saturday night either,”said Lucky.“We better get on over there. Boys, y’all about ready to go?”

  I nodded. Percy scowled.

  “Can you guarantee me that they won’t see me? That you can keep Walter away from me?”

  “When did you get on a first name basis with him?” asked Lucky.

  Percy finished his last bite of cake like he hadn’t eaten in days and held the plate out for Miss Helen to take.“Like Jacob spending all night wrestling the angel, a night like that changes a lot of things. With FDR dyin’. With Truman takin’over. Missouri Mule. Okinawa. Vienna. Nuremberg. You tell me why I wouldn’t know his name!”

  “Can I speak with you outside for a minute, Miss Helen?” Lucky asked.“Henry, stay in here with Percy and finish your cake.”

  “Can I have another piece, Miss Helen?” Percy asked.“I’m awful hungry.”

  “Sure, sweety,”said Miss Helen.

  Across from me, Percy ate his pound cake like it was the last bit of food he’d ever put in his mouth. He chewed and smacked so loud I figured Lucky and Miss Helen could hear him outside. Between bites, he pushed the hair out his face that would fall every time he’d lean forward to meet the fork his hand held.

  Out the same bay window through which I had watched Percy when we sat in the driveway, I now watched Lucky and Miss Helen discuss only God knew what. The call from Mr. Oscar Garrett, I imagined, and what had happened to the cemetery.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Rufus Cornelius was the only black man buried in the Confederate Cemetery, he told me. He pulled the pack of cigarettes out of his sock. Assured me that this is the way it had to be; that otherwise somebody would take them from him. Cigarettes were a difficult enough commodity to get anyway, with the war and everything, but try your hand at it in a mental hospital. Or“the goddam asylum,”as Lucky would come to call it.

  “They’re tellin’me that there isn’t any such thing as Walter,”he informed me.“I find that absolutely ridiculous. That’s like tellin’somebody that there’s no such thing as World War II. When you see the evidence all around you, then it’s hard to deny.”

  I hadnoticed Lucky’s breathing deepening, his face turning a little flushed when Percy began speaking to us in the corner of the ward, then in his own room.

  “I know you’ve been talkin’to them,”he told Lucky.“I saw you the day you all brought me down here. Talkin’to them. Explainin’to them how best to take me out of the picture. With Walter, it’s like a double-edged sword; he haunts me like a goddam ghost, but you put one of us out ofcommission and then there’s no telling what can happen!”

  “Percy, there’s people dyin’all around you, and you’re goin’on with shit like this?”

  “That’s precisely why I’m goin’on with‘shit like this,’”he mocked Lucky.

  “You’re just lucky that your ass ain’t overseas, like them boys that left a coupl’a weeks ago. Langford—hell of a football player—and that Burkitt boy. Both a’them signed up before they could even draft‘em. Now…there’s some heroes for ya.”

  Percy grimaced, almost like somebody had pressed on some of the wounds they had treated when he first came into the place. Cracked ribs, a concussion, deep lacerations on his neck and shoulder. He pinched his lip with his thumb and forefinger, cigarette smoke billowing in front of his face from the Chesterfield poised between his next two fingers.

  “The attendant told us all you do is sit in the corner and smoke cigarettes. He said you don’t talk to nobody else or really even have anything to do with the other fellahs.”

  Percy looked around him like he was observing where he was for the first time. Laughed a little.“Walter, the son of a bitch, tells me everything I need to know.”

  “I’m gettin’tired a’hearin’about goddam Walter,”Lucky told him.

  “Maybe if you’d tell him that…and not me…he’d leave me alone,”Percy said.

  “He’s not there!” Lucky said.“I can’t tell somebody somethin’ —even if that somebody is a pig—that ain’t there! Do you not fuckin’understand that!?”

  “I understand more than you’ll ever think I’ll do. I understand where this world’s headin’. To hell in a handbasket! I understand that you got that goddam lighted box so you could keep up with everything that I do! I know that’s why you started keepin’your winda’s open—so you could see what I was doin’!”

  “No…I got that‘lighted box,’as you call it, because somebody was nice and wanted me to have it. The same way I got those goddam Chesterfield cigarettes I brought you today. It’s nice to have friends. But you gotta talk to the people around you before you can make one.”

  “I wouldn’t trust anybody that gave me anything,”said Percy.“There’s somethin’connected to everything.”

  “What’s connected to the cigarettes and the brownies I brought you? You think Mary is out to get you, too? Is that why she made the brownies for ya?”

  As if he just remembered they were at the base of the chair he sat in, he reached and got the pan. Took the aluminum foil off and held the pan out to Lucky and me. Asked where Mama and Jean were.

  “They stayed at home today…tryin’to do some spring cleanin’,”Lucky lied.

  The truth was that they’d been so upset the only time they’d come to see him, two Saturdays before, that they’d said then they wouldn’t come back. Couldn’t come back. Truth be told, I think Lucky was afraid to come by himself after that. Had dragged me with him. Said it was good for me to see the results of refusing to work. Said if you can’t live in the real world, then you make one up. Exactly what Percy had done.

  Percy and I both took a brownie out of the pan, started chewing.

  “I bet a lot a’these fellahs have come back from the war, haven’t they?” said Lucky.

  “‘Ey ca-it sh-sho-d,”said Percy, still chewing.

  “What?”

  “Shell-shocked,”he said after he swallowed.“But you wouldn’t know anything about it. It’s for people who’ve fought in a war.”

  “Like you have?” said Lucky, drawing on his own Lucky now.

  “I tried to sign up,”said Percy.“They wouldn’t let me. Said I couldn’t go fight the Japs and Hitler. You…you told‘em that you needed to stay here and keep the peace. Had Mr. Oscar Garrett tell‘em that he couldn’t do without ya.”

  Both things Percy said were true. He had tried to sign up. Mr. Oscar Garrett had asked Lucky to stay, told Uncle Sam he needed him worse right where he was.

  “I’m gonna act like I didn’t hear that,”said Lucky.

  “How’s that different from what you normally do?” shot Percy.

  Lucky looked at him, at me. At the cigarette in his hand. Shook his head. Hacked a couple of times as he was walking to the window.

  “Deceit is a terrible thing,”Percy said to his back.

  “They think we’re about to fi
nish things off in Europe,”Lucky said.

  “I wouldn’t know,”said Percy.“I haven’t seen a newspaper in weeks.”

  “You want me to go by the library the next time we come and bring you some books?”

  “Suit yourself,”Percy said.“I don’t know if I could even read one. That medicine they’re givin’me makes me sleepy most of the time. What’s it called? See, that’s not like me…not being able to remember what something’s called.”

  Lucky hadn’t remembered what it was called either when we had been on our way there. He had just said that the doctor had told him that they’d give it another few days and then they’d try“other means.” They were just beginning to think that electricity might help work the kinks out of some people’s heads. And Percy sure had his share of goddam kinks.

  Watching the oaks and elms and maples pass the car, just beginning to show their color for the year, I wanted to ask Lucky why he had done what he had. If he knew. If he’d sacrificed him. Maybe both things were true.

  “I think he was with Hood, too,”Percy said.

  “Who?” Lucky said, sitting again. He lit his own cigarette then stretched for Percy’s.

  “You said you didn’t want me to talk about him anymore.”

  “No—what I said was…Shit, forget it. I just wanna be able to talk about somethin’real every once in awhile.”

  “I’d say Hood doin’what he did was about as real as it gets.”

  “Here he goes,”Lucky said to me,“retreatin’into make-believe again. Just like the doctor said he would. Schiza-somethin’or another.”

  “If you think Hood was make-believe, you haven’t lived in the same town that I have all these years.”

  “You’re probably right,”said Lucky as he arose and stepped toward the door.“I haven’t.”

  “You ain’t goin’, are ya?” said Percy, lowering the half-eaten brownie in his hand to his lap.

  “Yeah, I reckon we better be headin’out,”said Lucky.“Mary and Jean’ll be lookin’for us.

  Fatass. Home in bed, probably. As sometimes happened, I felt bad when this thought passed through my head. Looked at Percy as he passed across the tile floor that had once been new, now dull and yellow with age and wear.

  “Can Henry stay a few minutes and talk to me?” he said.

  Lucky nodded, pulled the door the rest of the way open and said he’d be in the car.

  “He’s doin’that rather than get mad,”said Percy.“My brother’s always had a bad temper.”

  I nodded. Felt like I needed to run too.

  “When people think they’re not enough, it causes them to do bad things,”he said.“I think they call it an inferiority complex. Or something like that.”

  I wished Lucky hadn’t left me. I wished I couldn’t smell the odor of the place, somewhere between piss and body stink. I wished I hadn’t had to see these people around Percy, the ones he refused to talk to because they, too, were in on the plot. The ones with missing limbs and a strange, faraway look in their eyes.

  “He’s always been that way. Thought that Daddy and Mama loved me better than him. Always knew I was smarter than he was, too,”he snickered.“Your daddy blends good. That’s his strength. He’s one of‘the people.’People trust him even though they know he’s got his hands in a lot of things he shouldn’t. Craps. Stolen television sets. Bootleg whiskey. And that just scratches the surface. But they know, too, that they can trust him to do the right thing when it comes down to a tough situation. He’s like Mr. Oscar in that way. That’s probably why he handpicked him. I think he thought that he’d finally get Mama and Daddy to pay more attention to him when he got the job as a policeman. In a little town like Franklin, that’s real prestige. But they just kept worryin’about their‘frail’son. I was the youngest, the one with somethin’wrong with him. You know what? I bet I saw daddy, when he was young and strong, beat the hell out’a your daddy fifty times. The crops weren’t growin’well—whip Dillard’s ass. The rains weren’t comin’like they should—whip Dillard’s ass. The corn and tobacco didn’t bring enough at the market—whip Dillard’s ass.”

  I sat watching him dig a pack of cigarettes out of his sock, amazed at how clear-headed he sounded now. How for just a moment, his brain must have pushed Walter and‘the plot’away. Cleared like a cloudless sky.

  + + +

  “Yep, he’s buried right there,”he told me a second time, after he’d already said it once.“You know that shoe-shine man. Jackson...umhh, Mosby. It’s his great-grandfather. He died when they were tryin’to get all the bodies there. You know that they dug up everybody they could find and moved them there? The McGavock family gave the land…moved the bodies. Buried them again. Rufus Cornelius was a free man by then. He stayed and helped them. And died of heat stroke while they were movin’ ‘em. Didn’t your daddy have a run-in with one‘a them Mosby people not long ago?”

  “He watched while Sammy Samuels had a run-in with Jackson’s boy, that little nigger, Arliss,”I said.

  “One of these days, that word’s gonna be thought of as one a’the worst cuss words we can say,”Percy told me. He pushed himself back on the bed and pulled his knees up to his chest.“You’re gonna see a lot a’things change in the next ten or fifteen years. I bet the colored people and the white people’ll be goin’to school together.”

  I laughed, unable to imagine it.

  “That’s whose tombstone Walter pinned me under,”he said.“I knew it was in there. But I’d never been able to find it. It figures when I was just passin’through that Walter would pick that one to pin me under. I guess it knocked me right out. All I felt was the impact and then when I woke up in the daylight and started to try to pry myself out from under it…I saw it. There it was! You know, I guess I can see how it appears that I did it, since I have all the marks on me. But people just don’t understandwhat he can do if he puts his pig mind to it.”

  “Walter didn’t pin you under that stone,”I told him.

  “He most certainly did,”he argued, finally lighting the cigarette perched on his lips.

  “It was Fred Burkitt,”I told him.

  “Who?”

  “That boy that went off to the service when Ronnie Langford did,”I said.

  “Pfff,”he responded, wagging his head.

  “I saw it Percy. I know.”

  “So did I,”he said.“The son of a bitch chased me into the woods earlier. Then I hid there for a long time. But I kept hearin’all this commotion, so I finally came back down to the cemetery. I mean, I had just walked up and was tryin’to see from behind that stone when I heard him runnin’and snortin’again…and then the goddam stone just collapsed on top of me. I know nobody believes me…that they think it was impossible for a pig only I see to tear up most of a cemetery.All I know is that I didn’t do it. And that even my own brother don’t believe me.”

  I knew what the doctor had told us the week before, that no amount of“rationality or facts”would lead Percy to embrace reality. That we would not, probably could not, convince him that there was no pig named Walter and that everybody wasn’t out to get him. At the time it didn’t matter. I needed him to know what I had seen and participated in.

  “You can’t tell anybody this,”I said.

  “That’s all right,”he answered.“I know a lot of secrets. That’s the reason he follows me.” He shook his finger toward the corner of the room, dingy with dust and shadows.“Don’t you bear your tusks at me…you bastard. I mean it. My brother’s a policeman!”

  “I mean it,”I said.“You can’t tell nobody this. This’d be worse than Lucky and Mama knowin’that you give me cigarettes.”

  “Your wish is my command, my fair nephew. Godammit, Walter, quit snarlin’at me!”

  “I mean it, Percy! Listen to me! They said they’d cut our dicks off if we told. If they cut my dick off, it’d be so much worse than what happened to you.”

  He somehow tuned his demeanor to my need and screwed the craziness out of his face for a sober
moment. The last words I had spoken—so much worse than what happened to you—banged over and over in my head like a snare drum in the silence. He looked around himself at the interior of the room where he’d spent the last three weeks. At the eroding concrete of the window ledge just feet from where he sat. The decaying plaster of the ceiling and walls of a building erected before the turn of the century and poorly cared for ever since—yet still an improvement over what they had done with“crazy”people fifty years before. A lady banged on the door, stuck her head in.

  “Hunny, if you don’t come out and eat your lunch with the other patients today, then you ain’t gonna get anything.”

  “It’s all right,”he told her.“I’m not hungry anyway.”

  “Dillard’s probably right,”he said, after she closed the door.“He’s always told me if I found a woman, it’d probably make a world’a difference in my life.”

  “It wasn’t Walter,”I told him.“It was Fred Burkitt.” I could feel my heart thumping in my chest like it was trying to break free from my rib cage. Run far faraway.

  “He’s gettin’mad,”Percy told me.“Please don’t make him mad. You’ll leave and he’ll torment me long after you’re gone. Shut up, Walter!” he spoke into the corner.“If you don’t shut up, I’ll be fryin’up some bacon even if I don’t like it.”

  I tried to figure some way back to that sober face I’d seen a flash of a little bit before.

  “Just stop for a minute,”I reasoned with him.“Just stop and listen to me. Can you do that for just a minute? Without telllin’me anythin’else about Walter. Please!”

  His eyes filled again with sobriety. Fear.“Okay.”

  “It was Fred Burkitt who chased you up the railroad track,”I told him.“It was him who tore down all the tombstones. Him and Ronnie Langford. It was him that hit that stone that you was behind. I saw him do it.”

  As the words rolled out of me like the river flows after a hard rain, I felt like I was beginning to secrete poison. Sweat it out. I knew, though, that nothing short of vomiting blood would purge me of the guilt. As the words flowed, even at nine, I knew I did not speak them for him. But for myself.