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

by Trey Holt

  In the conversation that had occurred just before I left for the locker room that day, I’d heard Lucky telling my mother what could not happen.“He can’t come back here this time,”he’d half-yelled.

  “Where else will he go?” my mother, the saint, asked.

  “How the hell would I know?” Lucky said.“I can’t keep up with him, Mary. God, if there is one in heaven, knows I’ve tried.”

  I had tried to act as if I weren’t hearing the words pass between them. As I passed the princess’s room, she made a face like she had already grown tired of the exchange but was trying as hard as me not to hear anymore of it. I shook my head and passed on up the stairs, where unfortunately their voices followed me.

  “You can’t just tell him he can’t come back.”

  “I didn’t tell him what he couldn’t do,”Lucky had said.“I just told him what I needed him to do…go anywhere but back here. I told him that I didn’t give one shit where he went…just away from me…from us.”

  Silence enveloped the conversation for a moment as I tried to imagine where Percy would go if he weren’t with us. Maybe Wanda Jean’s or Nellie’s for a few days, but they probably wouldn’t put up with him for long…then he’d be back. He was always back.

  “I’ve tried,”Lucky finally said.“You know that, don’t ya? Everybody has to know that.”

  “I know you’ve tried,”my mother told him.“I believe that.”

  “You know, I even tried to keep from putting him in jail. The first time, I let it go…just told him to go home…that that would be a better place for awhile. But he couldn’t even do that. Now he just disappeared and reappeared the next day lookin’in some goddam woman’s window.”

  “It wasn’t just any woman,”my mother said.“You know that.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t…but it wouldn’t have mattered. Anybody else…I’d have to have done the same thing.”

  “I know you would have,”my mother said, either unaware of what he was likely to have done, or believing better of him, as she tended often to do.“But don’t you think it maybe would be best if he went back to the hospital again?”

  There was a long pause before my father spoke again, one in which I imagined him dragging on his cigarette and exhaling two or three times before he answered. As the words came from his mouth, my eyes settled on Percy’s empty bed, across from the one on which I sat.

  “No hospital,”said Lucky.“I told you that before. For him…for me…I can’t do that again.”

  “Not even if it was the best thing for him?”

  “Takin’somebody’s freedom is never the best thing,”he said.“Maybe sometimes it’s the necessary thing…but never the best. And this far in his life, necessity hasn’t worked in his favor.”

  I swear, if that line has run through my head once since that day, it’s traipsed its way across the path of my memory at least a hundred times. I’m not sure I will understand it by the time I breathe my last.

  My mother said no more, but simply resigned herself, I imagined, to the plight she usually suffered. Waiting silently for the repercussions of Lucky’s decisions.

  It’s funny in times like those: it’s the easiest to console yourself by thinking that somehow things are unlikely to work out the worst that you imagine. The worst plausible alternative seems within the realm of the most unlikely occurrences.

  And funnier—or maybe stranger is a more accurate word—than those thoughts was as I moved over the last twenty yards into the end zone, I thought of Mrs. Nedler’s reputation, true or untrue, another thing I’ll never verify. Van, believe him or not, had told me he’d been to see Scoot one afternoon almost evening at work and was walking home past the Academy. As he passed Mrs. Nedler’s house, he had seen her standing in the bay window of the house, all dressed up and as sad as anybody he’d ever seen. He walked a half-block past the house before he turned around, he told us.

  “Anyway,”he went on,“she was still just standing there in this red dress that was cut so you could just see the top of her cleavage…not even enough to really get ya goin’ …but enough to hint at what was down further. And her hair was all done…and her makeup was on…and her lips were shinin’pretty and red. That’s what I remember about the way she looked. She had on this red dress with red lipstick…and you know she’s kind of light complected. And with that off-color kind’a red hair…just the sight of her when I went back made my dick stand up and take notice.”

  “Hey, short fellah,”Tully had saluted Van’s private area.

  Van flipped him off as he kept talking, weaving his tale.“And when I came back by…she had made her way out to the porch and was just standin’there, actin’like she was lookin’at the street. But her look was a million miles away. You know that look, don’t ya? Where somebody’s just starin’out into the middle a’nowhere.”

  Tully nodded, drew on his cigarette and checked himself in the mirror of the car. Smiled.

  “I was almost by the house when she smiled at me and spoke. I can’t tell ya how strange it was. It was like she just stood in that window, dressed up…waitin’for somebody to pass by so she could get their attention. So I decided I’d just walk up and start talkin’to her. I really wasn’t even sure who she was at the time. I thought maybe that was Nedler’s house…but you know how all them houses look alike.”

  The strip of street he was talking about was a street called Everbright, located directly across from the main entrance to the Academy, where coaches and a few administrator’s houses lined up one after another.

  “Well go on with the damn story,”Tully chided him.“Don’t take all day.”

  “He’s just jealous,”Van told me as he tapped my shoulder over the seat.“He’s seen her. He’s just jealous.”

  “No, I just don’t want to listen to the story all day,”Tully said.“I’ve got other shit to do.”

  “Torment your grandfather?” said Van.

  “Just tell us,”I said.

  “Anyway,”he said.“So I went back and started talkin’to her after she’d smiled at me a second time. And she tells me that she’s lived there goin’on two years…and that she still don’t know some of her neighbors. She says that a lot of the women are older than her and they don’t like her because of the way she dresses. She’s out on the porch as she tells me this and motions up and down her body like she wants me to say somethin’about the way she’s dressed. Or at least look at her. So I let my eyes run up and down her. From the top of her head with that hair down past the little cleavage that’s showin’ …all the way down that hourglass and then to them legs and these red high heels she had on. Up close, I could tell that what had looked like a red dress had these real little, almost invisible pink polkadots on it.”

  “He’s doin’this just to torture us,”Tully told me.“We don’t give a shit what she was wearin’.”

  “You would’a if you’d seen her. Anyway, so we start talkin’about football and she tells me how much her husband loves football. And then she tells me that she thinks her husband loves football more than her. Says it’s all that he thinks about night and day and she sure does get lonesome there in that house. She says she wants a baby but he won’t have anything to do with the idea. Sometimes she just stands in the door and watches for people so she’ll have somebody to talk to. As she was tellin’me this stuff, I was lookin’all around, at all them big old oaks and elms that line the street and tryin’to keep from lookin’at her.‘Cause I was already gettin’a little scared that Nedler was gonna happen up any minute.”

  “Not too scared to go back the next time,”said Tully.

  “Yeah, but I was that day. I could just imagine that big, hairy son of a bitch comin’up that part of Everbright that you can see from their house and grabbin’me by the hair and draggin’my ass all the way back to Scoot. You know how he’s liked to rail on my hair anyway.”

  At the time, we were sitting in the parking lot of the Academy, having our morning time bullshit session as we watched cars park a
nd their occupants saunter in through the gate that led to our scheduled day of hell. Paul Chester Jr. And Raymond Collins pulled in. For the most part, they represented the two of the three particular strains of the Academy. The boys that were too poor or lacked the“class”to go to the Academy, who were included and tolerated because of their athletic ability, and the boys in Franklin who were given their place because of the money their family had, either earned or inherited. The third group were boys sent from Nashville whose families were in the latter group.

  “Yeah, I went back,”Van said eying Chester and Collins make their way across the parking lot.“Wouldn’t you have?”

  “Can’t say without seein’her,”said Tully.

  “You would’ve,”Van told Tully, like he knew everything. The same way he told me he knew I’d“show up against Franklin”when he slapped me on the shoulder after I returned that second kickoff for a touchdown.

  As a matter of fact, everybody rolled on me in the end zone, because it was, I guess, fairly unusual for somebody to return two kickoff returns in one game for a touchdown. Proved I wasn’t slow. Told Nedler to go fuck himself, too. Take his wife with him. I’d tried to ignore him when I made my way to the sideline, like he had done with me when we went in at halftime. I had wanted to stand up and scream,“It wasn’t me! It was my crazyass uncle and your crazyass wife! At least she wasn’t like Christine Smithson!”

  The sidelines brought my breath back, allowed me to take it to the bottom of my lungs again. I checked for Lucky over my shoulder, saw that he was present with the look on his face that seemed as if it had taken residence there in the last few days. A sad, kind of lifeless look, that suggested his face might have forgotten how to express itself, his heart. Perhaps this was numbness had already overtaken him and it was not only after he did not return.

  Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so horrible a thing if Percy had not already done what he did with Christine Smithson. In a town like Franklin, even though Lucky had tried to keep it as secret as the fact that he could be mean as hell to his family or shot craps at the filling station, it did not take news long to spread. By the time that the situation had arisen with Percy and Mrs. Nedler, I would assume that at least half of Franklin’s thousand or so inhabitants knew about what he had done with Christine Smithson, not only the first time but now the second. And what had resulted from it.

  I have often wondered what Percy would have said had I been able to speak with him about the second set of episodes after they happened. I wondered if he would have tried initially to explain the situation away like he had done previously, or if he would have admitted his involvement right away. If he would have argued that he still did not know what age she was…or that they were both innocent of wrongdoing and guilty only of loneliness. Or perhaps he would have come up with a new theory that would have made it make sense, or resurrected Walter to blame it on.

  Or would he have simply told me as he had woven through many of his last conversations that love was simply stronger than the powers that kept him in check?

  I will never know.

  As to the last days that he would spend at that house, I can only project my thoughts backward onto history as if it might change or control it, at the same time knowing it can do neither. In the only conversation concerning the matter, the one I heard yelled over the fence by Lucky and Mr. Smithson, they attempted to blame it on one another.

  “She’s been gone for months!” Lucky had hollered, my mother and I near enough to the kitchen window to look out almost immediately.

  “No…he’s the one that was s’posed to be gone!” Mr. Smithson responded.

  “He was gone!” Lucky hollered back, so loud that it shook the window we stood at.

  “For what? A couple of days!?”

  ““None of your goddam business, that’s what! That’s how long he was gone. How’s that?”

  Both men were shaking, trembling like they were perhaps scared of the other…themselves...what could happen. Lucky was in his“civvies”as he called them, a kind of khaki pants that he fished in and a white tee shirt he’d had on when he walked outside.

  “Well, regardless of how long he was gone,”said Mr. Smithson,“you didn’t do what you said.‘Cause he’s back here and he’s been with her again.”

  “How the hell do you know he’s been with her? You ever thought your daughter might jus’be tellin’stories?”

  Mr. Smithson smiled as broad as he could, showing all the teeth he had at once, and rubbed his chin.“You want to see what a liar she is?”

  Lucky did not answer him, but simply stared at him after he finished the question.

  “Come on,”said Mr. Smithson, who, it occurred to me, had been speaking quieter than Lucky. He motioned for him to cross the boundary separating our yard from theirs and Lucky followed him reluctantly.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  No one has ever claimed to know where Percy went for the three days he disappeared. I can only be sure that he did not go to Thompson Station as Lucky had requested, which I thought he might have done in front of Old Man Smithson to say, see, you can’t tell what to hell to do with my own brother. And as we never spoke of where it was that Percy might have been for those few days, neither did we, as a family, ever speak of what my father witnessed when he went with Mr. Smithson to the spot that was neither our property nor theirs. The only information I ever gathered concerning the scene came from Todd Smithson, Christine’s brother that I would later feel as if I had a strange, unspoken connection to, who said that he was sure they were just lying back there together, asleep. He told me they had been doing that for days, and although he had never asked them what else they did, he had in fact helped them find one another again and watched out for them so that they didn’t get caught. That particular day, he had run an errand for his mother and came home surprised to find his father, who had gotten off early from work.

  As Lucky and Mr. Smithson returned from their foray around to the back of the garage, there were no words with them, only two men walking silently, covering the hundred or so feet of space. I would assume whatever they had seen had served the purpose of providing significant enough information that both men accepted something had been occurring that shouldn’t.

  As they strode back across the driveway toward the porch on the side of our house, I wondered how such a thing could have happened. It occurred to me that perhaps they had both been so concerned with concealing the presence of their own family member, that neither had noticed that the other’s had returned. Todd Smithson would later tell me that Christine had been home for a weekend and then had talked her mother into talking her father into a few more days, saying it was lonesome and boring in the country where she’d been sent.

  “She smiled a lot after she was with him and seemed to be sufferin’somethin’awful when Daddy took her back to our relatives’house,”Todd Smithson finished his description of the situation to me the week after everything happened.“I know a lot of people thought your uncle was crazy and that him bein’with my sister wasn’t right…but as far as she told me he always treated her real good. He was kind’a funny…but I’m gonna miss seein’him around here. Sorry to hear about what happened to you, too. You think you’re gonna be all right?”

  I nodded and told him yes. Told him thanks for asking. As he walked the short distance between our houses, I began to consider the one of the many questions that would haunt me. It is a question, I assume, I will never answer.

  Often at night, I would lie awake and wonder if Percy and Christine Smithson had not somehow found each other twice, lonesome strangers living next door, would the situation with Mrs. Nedler have been as big of news? If Lucky had not experienced the situation with Mr. Smithson, surprisingly defending his brother only to be shown the evidence, its tangible nature for him there to see, would he have handled the situation with Nedler different? If all these things had not gathered themselves and spilled over on Percy in the brief period of a few days, would his response ha
ve been different? Or was this simply somewhere he’d been headed for years, the only question being when he’d actually get to his final crazy act? Lastly, had what Lucky wanted for me, and for himself, given Nedler something few people had? Power over him. And had this effected me and the way I tried…what I did?

  I only know that when Christine and Percy emerged from the back of the garage late on that early autumn day, Christine’s clothes were somewhat torn and battered, a condition Todd Smithson attributed to their father in the brief bit we spoke about it later, the same condition Mr. Smithson blamed on Percy, saying he had“been at her…had his dirty fingers all over her.” Even though the place they had been holed up was no further than a hundred feet from the back of either house, it hinted at being a separate world, with the wild greenery unkempt and blurring the edges of the space and blinding anyone who entered from the places bordered by it.

  Lucky did not speak to Percy as he pushed his head down and placed him in the back seat of the squad car, but only checked the door once he had pushed it shut. Outside the car, he watched as Mr. Smithson led Christine back across the yard toward the back door of their house, that for the most part looked enough like ours that an unaccustomed eye would not have noticed the differences. She, as Percy had done into the car, disappeared through the back door of their house without incident or comment.

  As Lucky made his way into our house, he said to me,“Will you go upstairs and get Percy’s things? He doesn’t have that much, does he?”

  “No sir. I mean, yessir, I will…and he doesn’t have much stuff,”I said, picturing the night Lucky had brought him home the last time, his small bag clutched to his chest as he exited the car and entered the house…like it was“his own.” I remembered I had thought that.

  Lucky nodded then turned his attention to my mother.“That Smithson is supposed to be a good Church of Christ man. I mean, I know…I don’t know what the hell I know anymore.”