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

by Trey Holt

  Lucky leaned backward and looked out the side window at the Smithson’s yard and house. He grimaced and shook his head when he saw lights were on, as springtime darkness descended.

  “He said we had tonight to do somethin’. He was takin’her to the hospital to get examined in the mornin’. He says there ain’t ever been anybody else. Hell, the way he keeps her and Todd in that house he ought to know. So you got till mornin’to come up with some kind’a explanation or I guess the only explainin’that’s gonna be done is why I had to arrest my own brother.”

  Percy turned just enough to look at the door behind him, glanced away when he saw my mother and Jean still standing there.“Would you want me to say I did somethin’I didn’t do?”

  Lucky pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Handed one to Percy and lit it. Leaned against the deep freeze door.“You know, the idea of you goin’back don’t…. But it’s the only thing I know to do.”

  For the moment, Percy would agree to go. Eventually sitting down with Lucky on the step leading from the back porch to the backyard, they smoked several cigarettes together as they discussed what my mother, Jean and I could not hear after Lucky told us to stay inside. He would only ask me to come outside when the time finally came for Percy to leave.

  “I think he’s been seein’Christine Smithson,”Jean said when we had settled at the kitchen table, still half-fearing we’d hear a scuffle.“I think that’s what he’s been doin’!”

  “You mean you think he’s been fuckin’her?” I said low enough that my mother, at the sink, couldn’t hear.

  Jean gasped, like I’d slapped her. I smiled.

  “Do you know anything about it?” my mother asked me, sitting with us.

  I shook my head.“No ma’am.”

  It was true, he’d never mentioned anything like that to me. I remembered the few times I’d seen them looking back and forth, him making gestures and nodding out the window.I remembered Lucky telling me that Mr. Smithson had called, said that we needed to pull the shade. But nothing else. In the last month, I’d had my own problems. Been so immersed in them I could seldom see out from the dirty glass I stood behind.

  “I bet I’m right,”said Jean.“I never thought about it…but one afternoon, when I came home from school early because I wasn’t feelin’well, I saw him comin’out from behind the brush and the fence back there behind our yards…back there where they burn the trash sometimes.”

  A feeling came over me to slap the smugness off my sister’s face. But I really had no idea. All I knew was that going on a couple of months before, he’d seemed stranger than usual, preached from the top of a car without most of his clothes. Taken and lost a job at Earl’s fruit stand. I couldn’t have told you what the hell he’d been doing while I’d been gone. And I’d been gone a lot.“Chasing skirts,”as Tully called it. Really, just one skirt. Then I’d been sitting on my ass for about a month, feeling sorry for myself, trying to figure out what in the hell I’d done wrong.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  If I’d known the hole I’d fall into when we left on that goddam motorcycle that day, I’d have never stopped, but left Nashville and driven west off one of those bluffs near the hillbillies down in Ashland City. I guess I should have known from the first couple of times I’d talked to her. By the second time I saw her, it didn’t seem to make any difference anymore. The night, even the poison moonshine hadn’t washed it away. Lucky’s asskicking the next morning—the split lip, the torn knee—had not. Even seeing Percy almost naked on top of Mrs. Nedler’s car had not removed her memory.

  Perhaps“memory”isn’t the right word; it seemed to go so much deeper than that. Everything did. Talking wasn’t really talking, but something more. Her smell, her sound, they were hers, but more than that, too. The words she spoke carried both the meaning that they did, and the meaning that she was in fact saying them to me. This girl, beautiful enough to be saying these words to anyone in the world she wanted to, was saying them to me. Had for some reason chosen to hold my hand across the seat, had chosen to stop on the street and talk to me, ask me to her prom. She not only didn’t want Van, she wanted me.

  That Saturday afternoon, her arms wrapped around me as we road west through Green Hills and then to the rich people’s section of Nashville, Belle Meade, I was invincible in a way I’d never been. I’d somehow had been given the antidote for a malady I’d suffered from my whole life. I needed to be nowhere else with no one else. Time could have stood still or stopped all together, never taken another step and I would have been satisfied.

  “I want a house like that one day,”she whispered in my ear as we made our way down the boulevard that ran through this part of town.

  I nodded, looked at it. Thought of her house. Of how her family made us, as solid as concrete in the middle class, appear rich.“Yeah,”I said over the rumbling of the Indian.

  It was the perfect spring evening, the way it is in Tennessee in May, before the heat takes over, before the air becomes sticky and clings to you in the form of sweat. The smell of everything beginning to bloom. As the daylight began to lose itself to darkness, the air was like silk rubbing against my bear arms as were her hands on my waist.

  As the ride had begun, she had barely laid her hands on my sides, almost like she was afraid to touch me, like her memory from the night before was as shaky as I’d been. But as the speed increased, so did her grip on me, perhaps a natural reaction. Even through the wind that whipped around us, I could feel her breath on my neck.

  “It’s gorgeous out here,”she told me.“It reminds me of where my daddy comes from.”

  “What?” I said. Told her I couldn’t hear her.

  She said the same more loudly.

  I nodded. Didn’t tell her that Lucky would laugh till he pissed on himself at the idea that any part of Alabama would remind anybody of Tennessee.“Yeah, it is nice,”I told her. I down-shifted for a curve then hit the accelerator again; felt the power in my hands.“Lucky says it’s like it’s a million miles from Franklin. Says that Franklin and Nashville are like him and my Uncle Percy.” For a moment, I felt a great sense of relief that she hadn’t seen him that morning, like I assumed about half the town had. A streak of anxiety fired through me like May lightning that maybe she had, was just too nice to say anything. Then I remembered she’d been at work. I then began to wonder whether she’d seen Lucky kick my ass down Lewsiburg Pike. Knock me down, bloody my lip, rub my face in my own puke. I assumed that had been too early for most people to see.“He says that one does what it has to do be what it is: Franklin. And the other is more of a spectacle. Draws attention to itself all the time in one way or another: Nashville. But, nonetheless, Lucky likes his Hank Williams.”

  “Wasn’t it sad when he died?” she said. New Year’s Eve, or really New Year’s Day, I guess, in a car, in the backseat by himself.”

  I nodded. Turned onto a road I knew lead into the park. Which one I wasn’t sure. On the far west side of Nashville, there had been several hundred acres reserved and named after brothers with the last name of Warner, Edwin and Percy, oddly enough. Roads ran through them like mazes, cutting from one tree-dense lane to another. Everything was getting close to full bloom. I watched the trees pass, trying to identify them by sight: elms, oaks, hackberries, ash, cedar, birch.

  “Didn’t you think that was sad?” she asked again, nudging me in the ribs with an open hand.

  I jumped then glanced at her and smiled and nodded.

  I wound through as many roads as I could, riding hard enough as to impress her but not hard enough to scare her. I remembered that one time last year I had brought Jean out here then got the wild hair to try to scare the shit out of her, like Van had bragged he did with Scoot. Taking some of the curves fast enough that I almost had to lay the bike down, she beat me in the shoulders so that I had bruises for a couple of weeks. I laughed so hard my ribs hurt almost as long. She swore she’d never ride with me again and had only when she was too lazy to walk to the store.

&
nbsp; “Where are we going?” she asked.

  The truth was I didn’t have any more idea than I had when I just showed up at her work.“I thought we’d just ride till we saw a pretty spot then we’d just sit for awhile,“

  “I’m kind of hungry,”she said.

  “All right,”I said. Started trying to run through places in my head I could afford.

  “I can wait awhile, though. Let’s find a nice spot and park for awhile first. It’d be a shame to waste such a pretty evening“

  I nodded. Told her I agreed with her.

  On the farside of one of the parks, by where they had recently put in a golf course, we stopped.I laid the coat I’d had bundled and tied on the back of the bike down so she would have a place to sit. She sat down and pulled her skirt over her knees. I sat on the ground by her.

  “So I hear you’re a pretty good football player,”she said.

  I laughed. Partly because I was nervous and partly because I never believed it of myself. .

  “They said that you might get to go to college and play,”she said.

  “I guess I got an outside chance. Some people say I’m too little, though. Who’s‘they’?”

  “Van,”she said.

  “Right—”What I was going to say if I had finished was,“Right after he got off my ass about my shoes.” But I stopped.“That surprises me.,”

  “That’s what he said,”she said, the dying sun over my shoulder making her eyes sparkle with green, like pictures of the ocean I’d seen“He said that he was a pretty good football player…but that you were probably the best player on the team.”

  I laughed again.“I doubt it. When did he tell you that?”

  “Well, first, when he was trying to get me to fix you up with Sheila. He was singing your praises. Telling me everything that was good about you. He even said you were cute.”

  “I better watch out for him,”I said.

  She laughed…averted her eyes to a tree near us, its spring growth trembling in a slight breeze.

  “He thinks a lot of you,”she told me.“He even said that today. I told you he came in the store today. Said his parents had given him the money to buy a bunch of clothes.”

  “You must have been workin’in the department he bought‘em in,”I said.

  “Umh, no. You know, they call me a‘floater,’so I go from department to department, wherever they need me. I have worked there before. But he came up to where I was working just to say‘Hi’I guess. He said he thought that he remembered that I worked there.”

  “Let’s talk about somethin’besides Van, all right?” I said.

  “If I remember right, we were talking about you. I was asking you about football.”

  “Somethin’besides Van or football.”

  She looked around her at the hundred trees as still as stone now. I wished that I could pull back in the words that had leaked out my mouth.

  “Where you wanna eat?” I asked her.

  She shrugged and set her eyes on a stray, late golfer making his way down the fairway in sight.

  “I don’t know,”she said.“I’m over my hunger for the moment. I’m enjoying just sitting here. I feel like I never get to sit anywhere very long; I’m always so busy with everything.” She smiled a smile at me that I would eventually grow accustom to, one that somehow touched a part of my heart no one had reached before. She reached and took my arm and pulled me toward her, patted the space behind her on the jacket then leaned back on me once I had repositioned myself. She took my hands in hers, and laid her head on my chest.

  + + +

  Perhaps when anything happens, or at least anything bad, we always find ourselves secretly posing questions in our silent, aching hearts. What if this had happened differently? Or, Wonder if I’d done that rather than what I did do? What if I had just paid more attention to what was happening? Done nothing. Just noticed more. Not have been so focused on my own interests? Would that have made a difference?

  Percy assured me that things, no matter how they are or seem, work out as they’re supposed to. He once told me that believing that something happened that was not supposed to was the most soul-corrosive thing we could do. Yes, there are things that happen randomly but that does not in and of itself mean that an event is not included in the Planned Nature of Things. Each soul has a destination, he assured me, and that, in the end is what cannot be thwarted. The twists and turns as we get there, these things might well be random, but the end event, the destination, is part of the plan. And believing this is, in the end, what faith really is.

  It is the easiest thing in the world to stand back and scream that every bad thing that happens to us might in fact be of some other power than that we call God. Makes things simpler. And simplicity has its place. But utter simplicity and serenity lies most completely in knowing that all things come from God and all things go to God. As humans, we are constrained by time, bound with it as if someone with rope. Perhaps years after an event occurs we will attribute meaning to that event because we believe we understand the other events brought about by it. As Randomness occurs, as time unfolds and we understand more of the reality of the situation in which we find ourselves, then we allow the effects of what has occurred to be included into The Planned Nature of Things. Beyond all intellectual pursuits and problems, belief, in fact, seems to be the thing that most enables Randomness and our Basic Human Frailty and their effects to be assimilated into what is supposed to happen, or The Planned Nature of Things.

  These things had been his latest ideas, he told me. Given to him, he believed, directly from the hand of God. These had been the things that he had attempted to say the day he stood on the apple and pear table at Earl’s Fruit Stand after Lucky had, at Dr. Guppy’s suggestion, gotten him a job there. The job he lost when he was forced from the table directly across from where Lucky shot craps and drank bootleg whiskey, and threatened with dire consequences, such as being put back in the crazy house. What he did not include, that Lucky would only tell me later, after Percy had in fact been sent there again, was that he had once again stripped down to his underwear to do his talking, something that he had obviously learned would bring people’s attention quickly. The next time it had occurred after the Saturday on top of Mrs. Nedler’s car, Lucky was going to have no more of it. In between his more formal speaking engagements, he had taken to smaller ones, the specifics of which I cannot name, during which people had begun to call Lucky and identify his actions. Lucky would pull out of the driveway in the Ford, not wanting to embarrass himself in the squad car.

  “It’s the same shit as always,”Lucky told me when I tried to explain to him what Percy had told me.“What else can he say? You think he’s gonna say that he’s crazy?”

  I didn’t bother to tell Lucky that he well knew that.

  “In‘45 at least it was just one or two things,”Lucky went on to say, staring out the front door, I was sure, wondering if he had done the right thing.“But now, not only is he talkin’all that crazy stuff about God all the time but he’s runnin’around town naked. Do you know what he told me when I pulled his ass off that table that day? He said that he didn’t enjoy bein’naked out in public any more than anybody else…but that he felt like it was his mission. His suffering so that life could be better for other people. Ain’t that somethin’? I wonder if he thought the same thing when he was fuckin’her? Was that makin’his life or her life, or everybody’s life better?”

  Of course, he did not say these things in front of Jean or my mother. Besides his cussing fits in the kitchen as he passed through headed toward the carport to get the Ford, he told them very little of what was occurring with Percy. Only that he was certain that it was going to come to no good end.

  I, of course, could not answer the question he had asked. It was still hard for me to believe that he actually did what they said he did…that Christine had admitted once her father pressed her hard enough. Nevertheless, as Lucky had not given me a chance to speak my piece as he began talking once more, I wa
s certain that neither had I given one to Percy. I couldn’t have told you what he had said in the last two and half months. I had been much too occupied with my own interests, with the seeming tragic ups and downs of my own existence. The only things I could in good conscience affirm were that he had started and lost a job at Earl’s Fruit Stand, had been seen around town almost naked several times and had slept upstairs with me, as far as I could recall, every night. No more.

  “That was the end for me,”he told me after his two week stint of a job had ended.“I know that Guppy told your father to get me a job there. I don’t doubt that; I don’t doubt that he did it with good intentions..”

  When Percy spoke these words to me, the days had almost reached the zenith of their length. Through the eastern window in front of which he often sat or stood when we talked, I could see only the orangeness that the sun produced at this time of day over his shoulder. He scratched his head and pushed his hair away from his eyes.

  “I even went to almost a year of college. I bet your father never told you that, did he? As a matter of fact, he was mad as hell about it at the time. Do you know why? He was mad, I think, that Mother and Daddy were going to pay for it. The farm had done better and the hard times of the Depression were about over. I had even graduated high school. Your daddy didn’t graduate high school, did you know that? So, naturally, when it was obvious that I had a chance to do better, he didn’t like it. He was workin’at the mill then. Sellin’feed. Before Mr. Oscar Garrett came along. And here his brother was going into Peabody in Nashville to learn to be a teacher. He knew I might be able to do something that in its own small way might change the world a little…and it would be in a way that wasn’t violent. But you know, it wasn’t even a year into those classes that the goddam pig started comin’around. I’ll have you know, I’m not even saying his name these days. And then there was Hitler and Pearl Harbor and it was somehow like Dillard had filled them all in on what I intended to do. It’s hard to believe when one of your own family members sells you out.”